February 13, 2018 Show with Dr. Dewey Roberts on “Samuel Davies: Apostle to Virginia”

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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 at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 13th day of February 2018, just one day away from the birthday of yours truly, and I am still waiting for the million dollars in cash and unmarked bills to be sent to my studio.

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It still has not arrived, and I guess I should not hold my breath. But anyway, today we have returning to Iron Sharpens Iron as a guest.

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This is his third time on the program, and I have loved every moment of interviewing him. His name is

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Dr. Dewey Roberts, who is an author and he's the pastor of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church of Destin, Florida, and today we are addressing his beautiful 436 -page hardback book,

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Samuel Davies, Apostle to Virginia, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

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Dewey Roberts. Thank you very much, Chris, and it's my honor to be on your program.

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You have a great program, and I thank God for it. I really appreciate it very much, and before we go into the heart of our discussion today in regard to Samuel Davies, why don't you tell our listeners who did not hear you on the show the last two times you were on, tell our listeners something about Cornerstone Presbyterian Church of Destin, Florida.

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This is a congregation that the Lord enabled me to start 22 years ago, or 23 years ago now, and we've been meeting and we have our own building, of course, here in Destin, but we focus on preaching the gospel, which, sadly to say, too many people and too many churches have gotten away from in our time.

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They preach about a lot of other things, but they don't preach the gospel anymore, and we focus on that.

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And your congregation is a member of the PCA, otherwise known as the Presbyterian Church in America denomination, correct?

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That is right, yes, and I've been a PCA minister throughout my entire life as a minister.

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I've been in here in this denomination for 42 years. Well, praise God for that.

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Well, I want to read a quote about the man that we are going to be discussing today,

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Samuel Davies, by someone whom I'm sure is a very readily recognizable name for the vast majority of our listeners in the

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Iron Trip and Zion Radio audience. I'm speaking of Dr. D. Martin Lloyd -Jones. He said of Samuel Davies, The greatest preacher you have ever produced in this country was

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Samuel Davies, the author of the hymn, Great God of Wonders, All the

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Ways, Our Matchless Godlike and Divine, and the man who followed

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Jonathan Edwards as president of Princeton. That's a pretty powerful endorsement by the

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Welshman, Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones, about this son of America, Samuel Davies.

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First of all, out of all the people that have blessed the body of Christ over the last 2 ,000 years, why did you pick

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Samuel Davies for whom to write a biography?

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Well, it was interesting how this all came to pass. I had heard of Samuel Davies when

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I was in seminary. I didn't know a lot about him because there simply wasn't much material out there.

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And then when I went to my first general assembly back in 1976, it was in Greenville, South Carolina, and I had heard about this used

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Christian bookstore, a bookstore of used Christian books, primarily theological, that was south of Greenville.

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Noah's Ark Book Attic was the name of it. So I decided to take a few hours and drive down there and see what they had.

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And I was able to find three volumes of a four -volume set of Samuel Davies sermons.

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And I started reading them, and I thought, wow, this is stuff like I've never heard anybody preach before.

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This is great. And so that whetted my appetite for learning more about him.

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And then, interestingly enough, I mentioned it one time to Ian Murray with the

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Banner of Truth Trust, and he encouraged me to write a biography of Davies, which

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I began preparation on. It took me a long time because there was no biography written of him in his own day, any substantial biography.

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There were smaller biographical notices, but it would be very limited in nature. And so it took an awful lot of research in order to get the details right concerning his life.

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But it's also been a labor of love. Great.

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Well, I am going to now read an endorsement for this book. It's actually From the Forward by a very dear brother in Christ, Jeff Thomas, who

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I had the privilege of interviewing on Iron Truck and Zion Radio, and I hope to have many more opportunities to interview this dear brother in Christ.

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But Jeff Thomas, who is a pastor emeritus of Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, and I learned how to pronounce that from Jeff Thomas because otherwise

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I never would have been able to pronounce it correctly. Reading the life of Samuel Davies is a practical enterprise, not something theoretical or archaeological.

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Remembering him is to honor one who stood fast for the central important truths of the

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Christian religion. His life and opinions can encourage our own generation to believe in God and his glorious grace.

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And I will read one more endorsement by Dr. Michael A. Milton, Professor of Missions and Evangelism at Erskine Theological Seminary.

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Dewey Roberts should be commended for this generous work in bringing forth this great American Presbyterian clergyman back to the vanguard of spiritual giants where Davies belongs.

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For this Samuel Davies, who stirred the spirit of a young Patrick Henry, may well be the one who stirs the spirit of some young person now to serve

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God in a new day. Another powerful endorsement. Well, tell us something about the childhood of Samuel Davies, the religious atmosphere especially of his youth, if any, and how providentially the

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Lord drew him to himself and saved him. If I can just interject something before I go to the question, and I want to give something of an overview to the listeners today on Samuel Davies, because many of them will not have heard of him.

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Sure, very good idea. And as I've looked at it and studied it, this is why

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I think that is so. It's very interesting the way this happened. Up from Samuel Davies' time up until the

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Battle of Cold Harbor during the Civil War, his sermons were the most widely read of anybody in the

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United States, and also very widely read in Great Britain as his sermons were printed over there, and he had been there.

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And then in the Battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia, the church where Davies preached was set on fire and burned down by some cannon fire as the opposing forces were fighting one another.

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And it's very interesting that it seems like that with the burning down of his church, all memory of Davies was lost.

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And I run into even Presbyterian ministers today who tell me, well, who is Samuel Davies?

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And they don't realize that he is the greatest preacher we ever produced, maybe the second -best evangelist of his time behind George Whitefield, and perhaps the second -best theologian of the colonial church behind Jonathan Edwards.

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And I think he is the brewer of the finest lager that America has ever tasted.

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Oh, I'm sorry, that's Samuel Adams. Yeah, he's a man altogether.

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Samuel Davies himself had Welch parents on both sides of his family.

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His heritage was Welch. He was born in this country, and his father was a

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Quaker who came over as a little boy with his parents and fled to this country when

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Quakers were under great persecution in Great Britain. His mother was a

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Baptist. I don't think that that persecution ended in Britain, though. I think some of our heroes who were

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Puritans, unfortunately, had their share in persecuting the Quakers. Yes.

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Well, you know, of course, religious freedom is something that Davies was very interested in.

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I think it goes all the way back to his childhood and the things that he had to face there, and he learned a lot from that.

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But his parents were both fleeing religious persecution because the Baptists also were being persecuted, and so they had to flee also as the act of uniformity, and even in 1662 required conformity to the

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Church of England's Book of Common Worship. And even with the Act of Toleration in 1689 that was passed, that did not give religious freedom to everyone.

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And so there was a great deal of persecution that was taking place in Great Britain. And as you pointed out, there still remained persecution in this country for a number of years after that.

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But Davies was a product of that environment where his parents had gone through persecution.

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And his father had married before he married Davies' mother.

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He had married, and then his first wife passed away within three months. And so then he moved from Pennsylvania, the area of Pennsylvania around Philadelphia, down into what was called then the lower three counties of Pennsylvania, which today are

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Delaware. And that's where he met Davies' mother,

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Martha Thomas. And interestingly, you mentioned Jeffrey Thomas earlier.

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I asked Jeffrey when I saw him at our Russian Pastors Conference last year, I said, Jeffrey, do you think that perhaps you might be kin to Martha Thomas and therefore a relative of Samuel Davies somehow?

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He kind of discounted it, but I think he might be, just some way or another, because he's from Wells, and she was from Wells.

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And so there's probably some relationship there. But then

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Davies' father went over into the Baptist Church, and they continued there for a while.

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Now, Chris, you're not going to like this next part very well. Are you going to insult my reform?

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Well, you know, I said a couple weeks ago when I made a statement about infant baptism, you're not going to like this next part.

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But Davies' mother wanted to give him an education, because she had dedicated him to the

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Lord and to the ministry at birth, and she wanted to see him go in that direction.

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And she wanted him to have an education, whereas his father was a farmer and was basically uneducated.

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He learned to trade, but he didn't have any literacy that he had ever learned.

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And so she started going over to a Presbyterian minister in the

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Welsh tract of Delaware who had an academy, and she wanted to be educated so she could teach her son to read, because she didn't know how to read

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English herself. And in ensuing conversations, the Presbyterian minister talked to her about that.

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Well, the long and the short of it is, the Baptist Church kicked her out of the

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Church because she was conversing with this Presbyterian minister about her son.

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Wow. And so that's how Samuel Davies became the greatest

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Presbyterian minister, as well as the greatest preacher of our country, instead of being the greatest

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Baptist preacher of our country. Well, now he's one of the greatest Baptist pastors in heaven, because we know that all things are made perfect there.

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Yeah, absolutely. Well, then Davies had a problem on trying to get an education.

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So he first had to go to a place up in New Jersey, Hopewell, New Jersey, where there was a

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Quaker minister who was teaching a school for a Presbyterian church up there, which in those days, you didn't have public schools.

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You had these various schools and neighborhoods, and you would have an instructor that would come, the schoolmaster, and he would teach the students.

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And according to his expertise, he would either give them that grammar school or that academy education, etc.

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And so Davies went off from the Welsh track in Pennsylvania up to Hopewell, New Jersey.

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Yes, I am familiar with Hopewell. Yeah, he went up there for two years to study under William Robinson.

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At the time, he was not a believer, but he was very much estranged being away from home, and he felt his estrangement not only from family, but also from the

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Lord. And so he said that he began to once again practice getting down on his knees and praying every night before he went to bed.

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And in the colonial days, they had that kind of prayer that some of us were taught when we were little, similar to, now

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I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the

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Lord my soul to take. That was a very important prayer for youth in colonial days, because many of them didn't make it to adulthood.

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They had childhood diseases that ravaged them and killed them. Cotton Madder lost something like 13 out of 14 of his children through death in their younger days.

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And so it was something that the colonial children felt very deeply.

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Well, he began to pray that. And interestingly enough, the Lord was working on this man who was his teacher,

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William Robinson, who was not at that time a believer, and Davies was not a believer.

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And as well, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, New Jersey was, if he was a believer, he was a very backslidden minister at the time.

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And so there was nothing about the circumstances that seemed to be right, but God was working in his way in the life of Samuel Davies.

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And so he sent Gilbert Tennant and his brother into that area to preach, and William Robinson heard them, and he came to faith in Christ.

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And no doubt, Davies also heard as well. And he always marked his conversion from about the age of 12.

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And so it was a time of a new beginning in his life where he came to faith in Christ and the

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Spirit of God had awakened him and given him a new heart. And so then he knew that he had to prepare for the ministry.

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But his teacher suddenly shut down the school there.

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He gave it all up because William Robinson studied for the ministry and became a great

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Presbyterian minister, though he lived a short life. He only had five years of ministry, but he was great.

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And so Davies had to go back home and try to continue his education at the academy.

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He had gone to a grammar school at Hopewell. That's kind of like primary.

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Then the academy would be more like junior high in high school.

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And so he went to an academy there. I'll stop at this point and see if there are things that you might want to ask me about anything that I've said or any other direction you want me to take.

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Well, I know that the Great Awakening did have impact in Virginia, and I don't know if I'm going too far ahead for your comfort here in the story, but where does

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Samuel Davies come to play, being the apostle to Virginia as he has been nicknamed?

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Tell us something about the Great Awakening. Okay, well, the beginning of the

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Great Awakening, anytime you have a movement of God, it's really hard to be able to settle on a particular date when it began and when it ended.

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And that's the case with the Great Awakening. There were things that were happening before the

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Great Awakening reached its zenith. And if you could tell us something about what that means for our listeners who are unfamiliar with the revivals of history.

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Okay, the Great Awakening, of course, is the second greatest revival of the

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Church in the history of Christianity. The greatest, of course, was the

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Reformation. Then the second greatest was the Great Awakening. And there were various ministers who were used in this, but the work is always the work of the

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Holy Spirit. And when I get to Virginia, I'm going to be able to illustrate that in a particular way, but the work is always the work of the

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Holy Spirit in bringing conversions in large numbers in churches, in communities, in colonies or settlements or countries, and working in a mighty and a powerful way to revive a lot of people and bring them to faith in Christ.

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And so the Great Awakening had many different points where it's kind of like the first eruptions of the

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Awakening. One of those was in an area where Gilbert Tennant was preaching, and the first person there was a

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Dutch Reformed minister named Frelinghuysen, and Gilbert Tennant also got involved in that.

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Then later there was this awakening that took place in Jonathan Edwards' church in Northampton, Massachusetts, and he writes about that.

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That was in 1733, 1734, I think it was in the wintertime, and large numbers of people came to faith in Christ, both young and old.

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And then the Tennant brothers were instrumental in spreading that Great Awakening in New Jersey, and so that's how they got over into Hopewell, where they heard about this minister that was very profligate and wasn't preaching the gospel, so they came into that area to preach the truth.

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And two great leaders, later leaders of the Great Awakening, were raised up through that with William Robinson and then his student,

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Samuel Davies. But the high -water mark of the

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Great Awakening was in 1740, and it came about primarily as the result of one particular sermon that was preached by Gilbert Tennant, and it's called the dangers of an unconverted ministry.

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I tell people, Chris, that I don't know of any minister in the history of the church that has suffered more verbal abuse, even down to this day, for the preaching of any one sermon than Gilbert Tennant has in the preaching of that sermon, because there are still people who write and say,

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Gilbert Tennant should be ashamed for preaching that sermon, etc. Well, in the context, he probably said some things about some of the other ministers in the

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Presbyterian Church that he alluded to them. He didn't call them out by name, but he alluded to them in ways that he probably should not have.

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But his doctrine was nothing other than the doctrine which Christ tells us about in the

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Sermon on the Mount, which everybody always holds up as the most specific sermon ever preached.

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But in that, Christ said, beware of the wolves who come to you in sheep's clothing.

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And Tennant's message was simply that. There are some of these who pretend to be ministers of the

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Gospel, and they're wolves in sheep's clothing, and you have to be aware of them. Now, why is it that you have people in the 21st century still criticizing

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Tennant for that? Are they saying that the men that Tennant was alluding to were innocent of these charges that Tennant was bringing upon them?

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Of course, anonymously. Or what was the reason that they still, or what is the reason that some, and I'm assuming you are speaking of men who would be biblically

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Orthodox, who might be very close to the theological positions you and I hold to, that are still holding grudges against Tennant?

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What is the reason? Well, as one person summed it up,

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I can't think of the name right off the top of my head, but it was in a book by the

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Banner of Truth and Trust on the Great Awakening, but this person, this writer said, he wrote it back in the 1800s, but he said, yes,

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Tennant became angry, he says, but who could have held their tongue better than Tennant? That's the gist of what he said.

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But what people have done is that they've criticized the excesses that Tennant went to, and they've ignored the underlying doctrine.

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Now, what were the actual things that were going on amongst these clergymen that were bothering, or were bothering

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Samuel Davies? Gilbert Tennant. Okay, Tennant was concerned because there were several different things that were happening.

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First of all, they were saying that a person could not know whether or not he was born again of the

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Spirit of God. That was something that was beyond his capacity. They were saying that a person couldn't have no assurance of his salvation.

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They were preaching works involved in salvation, either in total or in part.

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Wow. Were these professedly Reformed men? Were these Presbyterians? Yes, these were

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Presbyterian ministers who were doing this. And I've done the research on this, and I've looked at messages by them, and I've seen this in various letters that they wrote, etc.

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And they were also, they had a philosophy then, and it was predominant throughout

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Europe, throughout Great Britain, throughout the colonies, and that is that their saying was, quote, a converted minister is best, but an unconverted minister can still do good.

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And so they were basically saying it makes no difference whether the minister is converted or not converted. And so Tenet was standing up against that, and he says, the dangers of an unconverted minister.

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And quite frankly, he was right. He was exactly doing the right thing. Oh, of course.

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You know, and he was not the only one who did it during his day, but he's the one that everybody remembers.

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And people in historical writings about the period will many times condemn

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Tenet's sermon. And what they fail to realize is this, Chris, that one sermon was like the cannon fire that lit the

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Great Awakening and made it into a big explosion. After that time, people were reading

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Tenet's sermon as it was published in all of the newspapers up and down the

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East Coast. They were reading this sermon, and they decided, wait a minute, we don't have to stay in our churches if we're not getting the gospel.

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We can leave. We can go out there and hear these revival preachers, and we can listen to them, and we can make a decision for ourselves.

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And the result was that this Great Awakening began to happen all over the eastern seaboard as people left their congregations in large numbers and a real revival began to take place.

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The result of that is, first of all, down to our own day, we still have a principle, you've heard it,

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I've heard it, where someone has said, I've said it myself, you've heard ministers say it.

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If you're going to a church, they would say, and your minister is not preaching the word, if he's not preaching the gospel, then you get up and you leave that church and you go find one that does.

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And it became kind of a motto of Protestant Christianity in this country because of Gilbert Tenet's sermon.

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I don't think anything has had more of a good effect upon Protestant Christianity in America than that particular sermon, therefore.

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Now, before we go to the break, if you could tell us, you said that the first Great Awakening is the second greatest revival in the history of Christianity.

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What would you say was the first or the greatest? Well, it's the Protestant Reformation, which was both a reformation and a revival.

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As there were people being converted, for instance, what a lot of people don't realize is that John Calvin, in preaching his sermons every week, had those transcribed by someone in his congregation, and they were printed up, and they were sent out all over Europe, and people were reading these sermons, and many people were coming to faith in Christ as a result of them.

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So that was a period of great revival as well as a period of reformation. And we have to go to our first break right now, and we'll pick up where we left off.

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If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr. Dewey Roberts regarding Samuel Davies, Apostle to Virginia, our email address is

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ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

30:23

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, and we will grant your request if that is the case.

30:32

But otherwise, please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Don't go away.

30:38

We'll be right back, God willing, with Dr. Dewey Roberts and more of Samuel Davies, Apostle to Virginia.

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37:29

And we are now back to our discussion with Samuel—I was going to say with Samuel Davies.

37:39

That would be great. Our discussion on Samuel Davies, Apostle to Virginia, with Dewey Roberts, who is the author of a book by the same title,

37:52

Samuel Davies, Apostle to Virginia, a gorgeous hardback, 436 pages long, which has received some pretty stellar commendations for his hard work and research into the background and history of this great hero of the faith.

38:13

And before the break, as you probably remember, Dr. Roberts, we were talking a bit about Gilbert Tennant, and we were talking about the

38:24

Great Awakening, and I don't know if you wanted to back up to include any other information about the journey of Samuel Davies prior to that that I may have interrupted, but that's up to you.

38:37

Well, first of all, the early childhood of Davies is very difficult to piece everything together.

38:45

I know it was hard enough just to verify through facts exactly where he went and where he was on certain parts of his early journey, but there's not much information other than a few notices from friends about what he experienced when he was a child.

39:06

Concerning his conversion, he came to faith in Christ at the age of 12, and he did not immediately join with the

39:18

Church because he struggled with the whole matter of the assurance of his salvation, and he was really overwhelmed with a knowledge of his sinfulness, which of course is something that is very good to begin with.

39:32

Robert Murray McShane said that conviction of sin is the best indicator of a small child's true faith in Christ.

39:43

That is, if a person doesn't know he's a sinner, then he will never realize that he needs a

39:49

Savior, and so we have to start with that point. In fact, in our denomination, the very first question of membership is, do you acknowledge yourself to be a sinner in the sight of God, justly deserving

40:02

His displeasure without hope, except in the sovereign mercy of God? And so, if a person doesn't know he's a sinner, he's never going to progress, but Davies was overwhelmed with a sight of what a sinner he was, and so he struggled for a period of time in coming to a persuasion that he truly was a child of God, and he was later at the age of 15 or 16 able to join a church.

40:34

That would have been in about 1739 when he was able to do that.

40:42

During this time, the Great Awakening was moving forward, and George Whitefield had started coming into the colonies and preaching, and he was coming up into the area where Davies lived, and there would be 10 and 12 and 15 thousand people that would go out from these farming communities, which in most instances included almost everybody in the area.

41:07

They would go out to hear Whitefield preach, and while we don't have a record that shows that Davies was in those crowds, we can certainly conjecture that he was, since everybody else was there, and he was wanting to be a minister of the gospel himself.

41:27

And then he, after Gilbert Tennant's sermon, which was at Nottingham Presbyterian Church in Maryland, Davies, the next year, went to a study under Samuel Blair at Faggs Manor Presbyterian Church in Faggs Manor, Pennsylvania, and it's about five or six miles from the

41:59

Maryland border there. And Samuel Blair was starting an academy that was for training up ministers that was going to be something of a replacement of something that had been earlier that was called the

42:16

Log College by Gilbert Tennant's father. It was just a 20 by 20 log building.

42:25

That came up, that college, came up recently in another interview with someone, and I can't remember who that interview was connected with, but I distinctly remember that, the

42:36

Log College. Yeah, and it was located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, supposedly on the main road.

42:43

It would have been called the Kings Highway that went from Philadelphia to New York, and it could be the

42:50

Log College was seen by people who passed by that colonial road, which was really just a dirt road made for horses to carry their riders to their destination.

43:06

But they would pass by that Log College and they would see it, and George Whitfield talks about that Log College being a very plain, simple building, but several useful ministers of the gospel had come out of there.

43:21

One of those was Samuel Blair, who was the guy that really finished Davies off as a minister of the gospel, and he trained him at Bags Manor Presbyterian Church in another

43:36

Log College that was constructed on property that Blair owned. And a couple of years ago,

43:43

I went up there to Bags Manor Presbyterian Church to see that location and to be able to see where Davies had studied.

43:55

And there was a man who was mowing the grass. I already knew that George Whitfield had preached to 12 ,000 people in that area.

44:04

Now, this location, even today, is so remote you would think there wouldn't be 12 ,000 people who could be gathered up if you took two or three or four counties and put them together.

44:17

It's just farmland, houses are few and far between, and yet 12 ,000 people showed up there, and this man came out who was the lawnskeeper and took care of the cemetery that was there.

44:30

He didn't know who I was, but he said, you know, he says, I've been told that George Whitfield preached around here to 12 ,000 people one time.

44:39

He saw me looking at the gravestone of the first pastor there, Samuel Blair, and he made that allusion to Whitfield preaching there.

44:51

And then he began to show me some of the areas that could have been natural amphitheaters for Whitfield to stand and to be able to preach to the people.

45:04

And so it was interesting to survey that land, but that was what was happening at the time of the

45:10

Great Awakening. These people would drive 20 or 30 miles by horse and buggy to be able to get there and hear the preaching of Whitfield.

45:21

So Davies grew up during that period of time when all of these mighty outpourings of the

45:32

Holy Spirit were taking place all across the colony. So then he settled under Blair.

45:41

He finished in 1746. He immediately became known as a powerful and awakening minister, and there were churches in Pennsylvania, in Delaware, in Maryland, and also in Virginia that wanted him to come there.

45:59

His first teacher, William Robinson, had gone down to Virginia by order of the presbytery to preach to some people down there.

46:12

Now, I told you earlier that when I got to Virginia and what took place in the Great Awakening there,

46:17

I bring out this point of Gilbert Tennant's sermon once again. Tennant's sermon was printed by the newspaper in Virginia called the

46:28

Virginia Gazette. There were people in Hanover, Virginia, which is once again a remote farming area.

46:37

They got a hold of the Virginia Gazette, and they read about this. So several of them left their local rector's church on the same day, not conferring with one another, but they just became convinced that the rector of that Anglican church was not preaching the gospel they were going to leave, because that's what

46:59

Tennant's sermon told them to do, to leave if they're not getting the gospel and go find the gospel.

47:06

And so they left. Interestingly enough here,

47:11

Chris, the pastor of that church was Patrick Henry Sr.,

47:19

the uncle of the great American statesman. But he was a man who did not understand the gospel and did not preach it like many of the

47:32

Anglican ministers of that day, and like, in reality, many of the ministers, because the

47:39

Great Awakening began because of the controversy in the presbytery and church between those who believed in the gospel and those who did not.

47:46

And so the various denominations, they were preaching morality sermons about social ills, about anything and everything except the way of salvation.

48:02

And Patrick Henry Sr. was doing that. So these men left the church.

48:08

And so in that instance, the Holy Spirit of God used their reading of the

48:14

Virginia Gazette, without any minister being in the area, to lead them out of the church.

48:19

And one of them was a man named Samuel Morris. And he went out and he built a little building that was called, he was a bricklayer, and it was called the

48:32

Morris Reading Room. And what he would do is that he would gather some people around him.

48:39

He was able to come into some good books, kind of like the books that Columbia, Cumberland Valley Bible books sell.

48:53

Thanks for that plug. Yeah, you know, but they were good

48:58

Puritan Reformed books. And so Samuel Morris would read some of these.

49:04

He would read Luther's commentary on the book of Galatians. He would read some writings of John Flavel or Thomas Watson or other people like that.

49:19

And so there began to be these crowds that would gather around him and they would come to his home and it got to be too small.

49:27

So he built this reading room and then they would come there. And then he had to build some more in different locations because the people couldn't make it all the way in there.

49:36

And there were so many numbers of them up in a different part of the county. They wanted something to be read up there. And so this brickmason began to be kind of like the local reader in all this.

49:48

Well, in Virginia at that time, you didn't leave the Anglican church without being punished for it.

49:56

And so they were cited by the Virginia government for what they were doing and not attending at least once a month at the local church, the local

50:06

Anglican parish church. And the result was that they had to go to Virginia, I mean to the capital of Virginia, Williamsburg, to meet with the governing council.

50:19

It was while they were going there that they realized that they had all been absent on the same day and they had to go on the same day to the general court of Virginia.

50:31

And on their way, they didn't really know what to say. What were they going to tell the court? What was their religious conviction?

50:37

They didn't know. And so one of them ran into a farmhouse where he spent the night with a man.

50:45

And the guy had a copy of the Scottish Confession of Faith on his bookshelf.

50:52

And this man looked at it from Hanover, Virginia. And he said, well, that's exactly what we believe at the

50:59

Morris Reading Room. So the next day he took that Confession of Faith with him to meet with the general council.

51:06

And the governor of Virginia at the time was from Scotland. And so he handed it over to him.

51:13

He said, well, I don't know what we call ourselves, but here it is. This is this book that we, we believe these things.

51:20

And the governor looked at it and said, oh, well, you're Presbyterians. And that was their first knowledge that that's who they were.

51:29

Now, how would this Scottish Confession have differed, if at all, with the

51:35

Westminster Confession? Almost none. You know, the

51:41

Westminster Confession of Faith is more detailed on the same points of theology, but the

51:47

Scottish Confession of Faith was drawn up similarly as a revision of the 39

51:54

Articles of Religion of the Church of England. And so the theological positions are the same.

52:01

So this Scottish Confession would be very similar, just briefer.

52:07

The Scottish Confession is in the Westminster Confession of Faith. And so the doctrine is the same.

52:13

In fact, let's pick right there where you left off, because we have to go to our midway break right now.

52:19

If anybody would like to join us on the air, and we do have several of you waiting patiently or anxiously,

52:25

I don't know, because I'm not sitting there with you, but you're waiting in some fashion, to have your questions asked and answered.

52:33

And we will get to as many of you as time will allow when we return. And if anybody would like to get in line,

52:41

I would do so quickly at chrisarenzen at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

52:48

Please give us your first name, your city and state and country of residence if you live outside the USA. And please only remain anonymous if the question involves a personal or private matter.

52:57

That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Don't go away.

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We'll be right back after this longer break than normal between our two segments that Grace Life Radio in Lake City, Florida requires of us.

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But be patient and write your questions and we'll be back with more of our interview,

53:20

God willing, with Dr. Dewey Roberts on Samuel Davies' Apostle to Virginia.

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01:04:31

Welcome back. This is Chris Sarnes. And before we return to our interview with Dr. Dewey Roberts on the

01:04:38

Apostle to Virginia, Samuel Davies, I have some important announcements to make.

01:04:43

First of all, the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology is going to be held at two locations, neither of them

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Philadelphia, coming up in April. The first is going to be held

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April 13th through the 15th at the First Christian Reform Church of Byron Center, Michigan.

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And then the second one is going to be held April 27th through the 28th at Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

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The theme is the spirit of the age and the age of the spirit. The plenary speakers include

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Daniel Aiken, Richard Gaffin, Daniel Hyde, Conrad Mbewe, and Richard Phillips.

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Workshop speakers include Jonathan Master, David Murray, and Scott Oliphant. If you'd like to register for the spirit of the age, the age of the spirit, which is the

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Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology 2018, then go to AllianceNet .org.

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01:08:55

Now we are back with Dr. Dewey Roberts, and we are continuing our discussion on Samuel Davies' Apostle to Virginia, which is also the title of his phenomenal, gorgeous, breathtaking book, hardcover, 436 pages.

01:09:15

And this is a book that obviously was a labor of love for our guest, Dr. Dewey Roberts.

01:09:20

And before the break, Dr. Roberts, you were discussing the Scottish Confession of Faith, if you want to pick up where you left off.

01:09:29

Well, this man ran into a copy of the Scottish Confession of Faith, and that helped to identify them as Presbyterians.

01:09:39

And then once they became convinced that they were not just objectors to the lack of gospel preaching at their

01:09:51

Anglican congregation, but rather that they were convicted of the

01:09:56

Reformed faith, then they aligned themselves with the Presbyterians, and they got into contact with the branch of the

01:10:05

Presbyterian church, which then was called the New Light Presbyterian branch.

01:10:11

It was the Synod of New York and the Presbyterian of New...excuse me,

01:10:21

I forget the Presbyterian's name just off the top of my head, but at one time it was New Brunswick, but I believe it was a different one.

01:10:28

But nonetheless, they began to send periodically ministers down to Virginia to help the people and to prepare the way for them.

01:10:38

One of those that they sent was a man named William Robinson, who was Davy's first teacher. And when he started to leave, the people had collected...he

01:10:48

was only in Hanover, Virginia for four days. And could you, for sake of those of us who are either foggy or completely ignorant of the differences between the

01:11:01

Old Light and New Light Presbyterians... Yes. The Old Light Presbyterians were people, ministers who said that they agreed with the

01:11:13

Westminster Confession of Faith, but they did not preach the gospels.

01:11:19

They did not...I mean, they did not preach the gospel. They did not preach the doctrines of salvation that are enumerated there.

01:11:27

They were those who did not preach justification by faith, regeneration by the

01:11:33

Spirit, assurance of salvation, and the fact that we are all sinners by nature and we need a

01:11:42

Savior. They were preaching moral sermons for the most part, not all of them, but they basically kicked out of their denomination all these ministers who were a part of the revival.

01:11:55

They kicked them out. They wouldn't let them come and be seated at their Ascended Meeting in 1741, so they had to start a new denomination.

01:12:05

And they were called New Lights. Now, if you could also compare that with, as briefly as possible, the difference between Old School and New School Presbyterians.

01:12:18

My seminary professor, Dr. Morton Smith, always said, and I agree with him, he said that our spiritual heritage is

01:12:25

New Light, Old School. That is, the great controversy between the

01:12:32

Old Lights and the New Lights was having to do not only with the revival, but is what is the nature of true salvation.

01:12:41

And then when the Old School and New School came along, it was more theological in nature, and the

01:12:53

Old School kept to the doctrines of the

01:12:58

Westminster Confession of Faith. Sometimes people get confused because these Old Light ministers would say they believed in the

01:13:05

Confession of Faith, but they didn't preach any of it. The New Light ministers were the ones who were preaching it. So the people who were preaching the doctrines of the

01:13:15

Confession of Faith during the Old School -New School division in the 19th century, 1800s, in 1837, when the split happened, they were the ones, the

01:13:30

Old School, were the ones who were still preaching the doctrines that the

01:13:35

New Light had been preaching. Because the building that I am sitting in right now, the

01:13:43

Old Manse, as it is called fondly around here, is the parsonage of George Norcross, which was erected in the 19th century.

01:13:52

This is where the studio of Iron Trip and Zion Radio is, and the reason why it exists is that the parsonage had to be built for George Norcross, because he was the first pastor of Second Presbyterian Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which broke away from First Presbyterian Church of Carlisle, because Second Presbyterian was an

01:14:12

Old School Presbyterian Church, and First Presbyterian remained as a

01:14:21

New School. And I have a book by George Norcross, and a quote of his, a lengthy quote framed with his photograph on my wall, and it's quite an impressive quote about his warnings against liberalism, the encroachment of liberalism into the church, and his warnings about it.

01:14:44

But anyway, I didn't want to digress there. Well, you know, that's good, because George Norcross would be in the group that I fondly hold to myself as the

01:14:56

Old School Theology. The New School, they were diverting from that, and they allowed theological indifference and theological liberalism to come in.

01:15:11

Whereas the Old Light ministers in the 1700s, they just couldn't care less one way or the other about the matter of the gospel.

01:15:23

You know, they just thought, okay, go out here and give a nice little homily, and everything is fine.

01:15:31

Preach something on the Psalms that is kind of comforting, the Lord is my shepherd, and don't awaken anybody to this sense of their need.

01:15:40

And so that was their philosophy. And of course, the Revival preachers were against that, but they were just as orthodox.

01:15:48

The New Light Presbyterians were just as orthodox concerning the

01:15:53

Westminster Confession of Faith as the Old School Presbyterians were in the 19th century.

01:16:01

And so they have that relationship, one with another. We're New Light, Old School.

01:16:08

That is, we believe in the work of God in reviving us. We believe in the fundamental truths of the

01:16:14

Scripture. And those were the two issues. So that's where that comes from.

01:16:21

But now the Great Awakening was beginning to spread in Virginia before Davies arrived there.

01:16:28

And it was a work of the Holy Spirit, not a work of man. But Davies' teacher,

01:16:38

William Robinson, had gone there, and the people before he left the colony in Hanover, Virginia, they decided to take up a collection of 40 pounds,

01:16:50

British pounds, to give to him. Now, you have to understand that in those days, the salary of a minister for a year would be 100 to 150 pounds.

01:17:00

So that was quite a sum of money they were giving to him for having preached four sermons.

01:17:06

They probably had been collecting all that they were supposed to give to the local parish, and then just decided to give it to this man.

01:17:13

But they did. And when he found out about that, he tried to return the money. They said, no, you keep it.

01:17:19

He says, all right, I'll keep it under this one condition. He says, I know a young man right now whose circumstances are very difficult.

01:17:26

And he said, I will give to him, and perhaps God is going to bring that man to you someday to be your minister.

01:17:33

So when Davies was—he finished up the seminary, Robinson convinced him to go down there and to at least preach for a period of time and kind of try out

01:17:47

Virginia and let the people try him out. So Davies went down and he registered with the

01:17:55

Virginia court as a visiting minister. He got the permission to go and preach. He went there and he preached.

01:18:02

And the people loved him, but he had not yet made the decision to go there as their minister.

01:18:09

He went back home, and when he got back home, his wife gave birth to a child that was stillborn, and she died in the delivery.

01:18:24

So he was bereft of both wife and child there in October of the year.

01:18:31

And so he sunk into a deep depression.

01:18:37

He was sick over the next five or six months. He preached at some places, but he had to be watched carefully during the night, because he had kind of like you've been suffering through,

01:18:48

Chris. He suffered with a sickness that just continued on and on. He had tuberculosis, or at least the beginning stages of tuberculosis.

01:18:57

I don't want you to alarm my listeners. You're referring to, of course, the remnants of the flu that I had when

01:19:04

I returned from Atlanta. We don't have tuberculosis, we pray to God. But he suffered with this sickness, and it just kind of lingered with him.

01:19:16

That's what I was saying about you. You've had this sickness for a few weeks now. But he had beginnings of tuberculosis, and he didn't think that he was going to live long.

01:19:30

He really did not live long in comparison. He did live 13 or so more years, but he didn't think he was going to live very long.

01:19:44

He had all these different churches that wanted to call him in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and even some places north of Pennsylvania.

01:19:57

And he didn't know exactly what he should do about this. And then he got a messenger from Hanover, Virginia, with about 100 people's names signed to it.

01:20:09

And they were begging him to come and be their pastor.

01:20:15

And so what he did was he said he put his life into the hands of the Lord, and he accepted their call and went down there for the purpose of hoping to prepare the way for some more useful minister of the gospel to follow him.

01:20:28

And now, 270 years later,

01:20:35

Virginia is still looking for that more useful minister to come. The work of Samuel Davies is there.

01:20:43

No one more useful than him has ever been found. But immediately when he got there, he began to turn the whole colony upside down with his preaching.

01:20:53

He had seven different meeting places where he had to go and preach the gospel. And that caused great trouble for the

01:21:02

Virginia governing officials because they wanted one minister, one church.

01:21:08

The problem is they wouldn't let any other ministers be ordained in the Presbyterian Church in the area east of the mountains down towards the

01:21:19

Tidewater region. They wanted to restrict it to one minister completely.

01:21:27

So Davies had to supply everybody. And so then they accused him of being nothing but an itinerant.

01:21:34

He wanted more people to help him, but they wouldn't let him. And so then they were, through their own harsh laws, they tried to turn it against him and said, well, you're nothing but an itinerant.

01:21:47

And that wasn't the case. But he continued on laboring.

01:21:53

And he would have, out in the backwoods of Virginia, which at that time was a very remote, unpopulated colony.

01:22:03

The area around the coast was populated. The rest of it was unpopulated.

01:22:09

And yet he would have thousands of people that would gather together wherever he went.

01:22:15

And he preached. And all of them were officially required to be

01:22:23

Anglican. And so once again they tried to use that against Davies. They said, you're turning people away from the

01:22:31

Anglican body to become Presbyterian. Well, it was their law that said, if you're in this colony, you have to go to the

01:22:39

Anglican church. And if you don't go there, you get fined. Unless they had officially licensed another church, which there were very few of those anywhere around.

01:22:53

So he had that that he got involved with very quickly.

01:22:58

Now, there were several different things that he did in his ministry, which

01:23:04

I want to cover before we conclude today. I don't know where we are on time right now.

01:23:10

But I want to, first of all, just kind of give you a snapshot of some of the things that he was involved with.

01:23:19

Yeah, we have seven minutes before our final break, which is going to be brief. And then you have a half hour after that.

01:23:26

Okay. So let me give a snapshot of what his ministry in Virginia and thereafter was.

01:23:32

Great. And then we can look at those things more in detail. I tell people that Samuel Davies is important to us for these reasons.

01:23:43

First, because, as we've said, he was the greatest preacher that this country ever produced.

01:23:49

Secondly, because in the period of the Great Awakening, there was no one who was more successful in spreading the

01:24:02

Great Awakening, particularly to one particular colony than Samuel Davies was in Virginia.

01:24:07

And he could be rightfully considered the second greatest evangelist of the time in which he lived, which is the greatest evangelist was

01:24:20

George Whitfield, and he also happens to be the greatest of all time. So being second to him is no dishonor.

01:24:25

Then he was probably the second greatest theologian of his time, though his circumstances were really not the kind of retiring circumstances that Jonathan Edwards was able to have.

01:24:42

Edwards was pastor of a church. He could do a lot of studying and writing. Davies was involved in active ministry.

01:24:49

He had to go out and ride by horseback hundreds of miles over the Virginia mountains to go to these various settlements.

01:24:57

And so it would take him a lot of effort to fulfill all of his many responsibilities.

01:25:04

And yet, as I'll mention on one thing, he wrote one book that's never been published called

01:25:13

Charity and Truth United, which he wrote it in six weeks. And it's the most amazing book that shows the tremendous theological capabilities he had.

01:25:27

Do you plan on publishing it? You know, I'm really thinking about that very, very strongly, because I think the time has come now that there's renewed interest in Samuel Davies.

01:25:43

But it shows him to be an expert theologian. His sermons do the same thing if people have read those, because one of the things about his sermons is that when he proves a point, he proves it in such a theological and practical way, both of them combined, that when you read what he's written or preached, you just are astounded at the amazing insight that this man had.

01:26:14

And he was a man who only was able to study in a formal education for about seven or eight years, maybe, something like that.

01:26:26

It's hard to know exactly. But yet he was extremely intelligent and well -learned.

01:26:35

But then his work among the African slaves in Virginia was something that was exemplary, and it was something that should have been modeled by more people.

01:26:52

He brought them into full membership in his congregation. In fact, let me, because I don't want you to steal too much of the thunder from our listener in Slovenia, Joe, because he wrote a question about that, and I'll read it to you now.

01:27:08

Dear Brothers Chris and Dewey, please speak about Samuel Davies' relationship to slaves and slavery.

01:27:16

Especially could you explain for us how Davies could have been so concerned about the spiritual condition of slaves and yet own slaves himself?

01:27:26

What was the mindset of that day, which is so different from ours, that led Davies and others to see slavery as a political matter and not a church matter?

01:27:37

Thanks so very much for your faithful service to our Savior. Great question.

01:27:44

First of all, there are indications that it was a matter of contention in Davies' church.

01:27:51

Davies had such a specific spirit about him that he was able to work in situations, even when there was some controversy that came up, but nonetheless he was faithful also.

01:28:04

And yet the pastor who followed Davies at Hanover, Virginia, ended up losing his position because of a controversy that had been raging for a number of years, even under Davies' ministry, and it was about slavery.

01:28:20

So Davies was, I think, trying to push the ball as far down the field as he could on the eventual freedom of slaves from this terrible institution of slavery that is a terrible blight on the history of our nation.

01:28:43

Now do you know if Davies had any affiliation with the Covenanters? Because I know that they were among the very first Christians in the

01:28:51

South to believe in integration, to be opposed to slavery, and a lot of people are unaware of this, that a solidly

01:29:00

Reformed denomination of Christians in the South were very adamantly opposed to slavery.

01:29:09

I think that the Covenanters in the South came after Davies had left the Diocese of Virginia.

01:29:14

They did not. Joe is correct about the fact that there was the fact that Davies had slaves himself, and George Whitfield owned slaves, and many people did.

01:29:34

It's something that we find detestable today. Once again, it's not solely.

01:29:42

Though in this country it is primarily an African -American with European -American issue, the whites and the blacks.

01:29:55

One of the things that made slavery for the blacks worse than the other forms of slavery when people came to this country as indentured servants where they had to serve a period of time is that the

01:30:08

African slaves never were able to gain their freedom. They couldn't work for a period of time and then gain their freedom.

01:30:17

And there were injustices. There were injustices in the way that they were captured by their own people in the colonies.

01:30:24

Right, but obviously there was a development that took place here in America in regard to the freeing of slaves, because I know of very famous individuals who did free their slaves.

01:30:37

Yes, yes there were. What I'm just saying is, as a general rule, people had the slaves, they kept them for life.

01:30:46

When I've read all these things, the whole matter about the slaves being on the ships coming over, and I include some of this stuff in my book, the circumstances they had, how many of them died before they ever got there, they were separated from their wives and their families, put on different plantations.

01:31:05

The whole thing is just horrible in the extreme. And I wish that slavery had never been an institution in our country.

01:31:14

Amen, and we have to go to our final break right now. And by the way, Joe in Slovenia, thank you for providing an

01:31:19

American address where your daughter lives in Georgia, because we are sending you as a gift to you, because of your question today, a free copy of Samuel Davies' Apostle to Virginia, this gorgeous 436 -page hardback by Dr.

01:31:36

Dewey Roberts. And that's going to be mailed to you, compliments of Dr. Dewey Roberts, and compliments of our friends at CVBBS .com,

01:31:45

who is shipping that out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

01:31:51

And tell your daughter to let you know when that arrives. And we are going to be back after this very brief break with more of Dr.

01:32:00

Dewey Roberts and more of our discussion on Samuel Davies' Apostle to Virginia, so don't go away.

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01:37:34

Before we go to any more of our listener questions, Dr. Roberts, would you like to wrap up a thought or conclude in any way?

01:37:45

Yeah, I just want to give, in just a few minutes, some of the great things that Davies did.

01:37:51

Many people in America, we focus so much on the American Revolutionary War that we forget about another war that was fought prior to that that was, in many respects, the most important war our country has ever had.

01:38:09

The French and Indian War? The French and Indian War. And it was important. Winston Churchill said that that was the world's first world war.

01:38:19

And it involved the Spanish, the French, and the British for control of the

01:38:28

American continent. And if the American continent had fallen under the control of either the

01:38:34

French or the Spanish, Roman Catholicism would have been the primary religious view that would have been held here.

01:38:43

And Protestant Christianity would have been persecuted. Well, the colony that was most on the forefront of the battle for the

01:38:54

French and Indian War was Virginia. Because at that time, the borders of Virginia stretched out westward as far as their mines could go.

01:39:05

They didn't know how far the other coast was. And then, after it got past some of the other colonies, it went north and south.

01:39:15

And so Virginia was all the way up into the Pittsburgh area at that time.

01:39:22

And one of Virginia's greatest men ever was, of course,

01:39:30

George Washington. He was involved in that. Washington considered the French and Indian War to be the defining moment of his life.

01:39:38

Now, Samuel Davies was the minister above all others who was primarily responsible for gathering soldiers out of the new militias that were being started.

01:39:52

The Virginia government put forth some money to gather up new militias when the

01:39:59

French and the Indian began to do their raids on the various parts of the colony when they raided the various forts that Virginia possessed in different places.

01:40:12

And so Davies was their greatest man and minister in raising recruits to fight the

01:40:21

French and Indian War. And I say that, therefore, we owe our spiritual freedom here to Samuel Davies.

01:40:29

We owe that to him for what he did in Virginia in contesting the laws of Virginia and getting it, but also in his prominent role in the

01:40:39

French and Indian War. Then, another thing would be that we've all heard of Princeton College, Princeton University.

01:40:48

It was the College of New Jersey in Samuel Davies' time, and he became the fourth president of the

01:40:53

College of New Jersey, succeeding Jonathan Edwards in that position. But what people sometimes overlook is that the

01:41:03

College of New Jersey was on very shaky financial ground in the 1750s.

01:41:09

They had been chartered. They were having difficulty raising any money. The college had basically been run out of the living rooms of the first presidents,

01:41:26

Jonathan Dickinson and Ehrenberg, and they didn't really have a permanent home and a permanent place.

01:41:33

They had to raise money for it. Samuel Davies was primarily responsible for going to Great Britain, spending a year and a half there, raising the financial resources to put the

01:41:44

College of New Jersey on firm footing. And it became the college, and later the seminary that branched off from that in 1812, but it became the college that primarily molded and shaped evangelical

01:41:59

Presbyterian and Reformed theology in this country for almost 200 years, and had a great impact on the nature of true

01:42:09

Christianity in this nation. But Samuel Davies, once again, was behind that in the fundraising that he did.

01:42:18

Well, praise God. You want me to read some of the questions that we have? Yes. Okay, we have

01:42:24

Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says, I know that Samuel Davies, from what you have said, was a preacher of repentance and other things that were being neglected by other

01:42:42

Presbyterians of his day, but is there anything that made Davies stand out in other areas in regard to his preaching and teaching that may have been neglected areas that even those from biblically orthodox backgrounds perhaps were overlooking or neglecting?

01:43:04

Well, I just think that the type of warm -hearted preaching that Davies did, it was not cold, sterile preaching.

01:43:13

It was not simply denouncing a particular truth and doing it in a clinical fashion, but he preached in such a way as to not only inform the mind but to inspire and inflame the heart.

01:43:28

And he believed that preaching was not true preaching that did not do that. So I'm assuming you mean by that that he preached with not only passion but compassion?

01:43:40

He preached with passion and compassion, but he also preached, it wasn't just an intellectual study, it was something where he was...

01:43:49

The thing that as I read Davies' sermons that stands out to me more than anything else is the way that in announcing a truth and then presenting it and proving it, then he would come back to the individual and he would ask, it would seem like a flurry of questions all at once, and he would go around every aspect of that truth and penetrate into the deepest part of the person.

01:44:17

And it had the effect of making the hearers feel like they had been brought face -to -face with God.

01:44:24

And they had to answer those questions, not to Davies but to God, as they were being asked them.

01:44:32

And so that really stood out in his preaching. Well, thank you, Ronald.

01:44:37

You've also won a free copy of Samuel Davies, Apostle to Virginia. So please give us your full mailing address in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, so that cvbbs .com

01:44:46

can ship that out to you. We have B .B.

01:44:55

in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. And B .B. writes, Was Samuel Davies softer in his approach in regard to the heresies of Quakerism, knowing that his family came from that stock?

01:45:13

And when I say, was he softer in his approach, I do not mean that he was sinfully neglectful about exposing their errors, but I mean as far as the harshness with which many

01:45:26

Presbyterians and Reformed Christians did treat Quakers. Great question.

01:45:34

I would say this about Samuel Davies, that as I've studied his life, he combined faithfulness with the right spirit in almost every situation that I've ever examined about him in his life.

01:45:52

And so he knew how to be faithful but to not be harsh, and particularly not unduly harsh, but to be winsome, to be loving, and to bring people in rather than push them away.

01:46:09

And not a lot of people can do that, B .B., and I appreciate that question. But he was a man, and I think that his background, as I've thought about it over the years,

01:46:23

I think that his background with all that he had gone through with his parents having suffered persecution with his mother, excommunicated from a church for talking with the minister of another congregation, and different things like that, it trained him to be that way so that he could say later, for instance, concerning not the

01:46:45

Quakers because there weren't many of those that he faced in Virginia, but concerning the Anglicans, he said that a godly

01:46:52

Anglican would always have more of his love and esteem than a simply formal

01:47:00

Presbyterian. In other words, he was not one who waved the flag of a particular denomination.

01:47:10

He was interested in people being true Christians, and so he did have that tenderness of spirit, is what

01:47:18

I would say. Well, thank you, B .B. You have also won a free copy of Samuel Davies, Apostle to Virginia, so please make sure that we have your full mailing address in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.

01:47:29

We have Christopher in Suffolk County, New York. Christopher says that I know that there was a divide amongst

01:47:41

Presbyterians, at least in the United States, over whether or not Roman Catholic converts should be re -baptized, or whether their

01:47:52

Roman Catholic baptism was sufficient. Do you know where Samuel Davies stood on that issue?

01:47:59

Well, that particular issue was one that came about primarily between James Henley Thornwell and Charles Hodges.

01:48:07

They had a debate on that in the General Assembly in the 19th century, and I forget what year that was, but it was a debate that took place at the

01:48:19

General Assembly. But wasn't Thornwell's position the one that was more widely held to before that debate?

01:48:26

Well, Thornwell said that Roman Catholic baptism was not a valid baptism, that they should be re -baptized.

01:48:32

Hodges took the position that it was a valid baptism. I myself go along with Thornwell on that.

01:48:39

Samuel Davies never, to my knowledge, faced that issue, and it would be speculative on my part to say how he would have dealt with that, because that simply never came up.

01:48:53

Yeah, I actually have Thornwell's book on that, and I agree with Thornwell as well. Well, I'm a Baptist, so obviously

01:48:59

I do, but it's interesting, and it's, in my opinion, refreshing to hear another

01:49:07

Presbyterian voice standing up for Thornwell's position, which would reject a

01:49:12

Roman Catholic baptism. Yes, right. So I have nothing more to add on that.

01:49:19

I don't know what Davies would have thought about that. Well, thank you very much, Christopher, and you have also won a free copy of Samuel Davies' Apostle to Virginia.

01:49:28

Make sure we have your full mailing address in Suffolk County, New York, so we can ship that out to you.

01:49:34

We have John in Bangor, Maine, who says, What do you think is the most crucial thing that we should be aware of in regard to Samuel Davies before the program is over?

01:49:48

I think his defense of religious liberty, you know, because that's an issue that we are facing in our country today as our government is trying to encroach upon our religious liberty in many particular ways.

01:50:02

I have a family in my church that are involved in a program called

01:50:08

FirstLiberty .org, and it's about religious freedom and religious liberty for people of all different backgrounds, and that's something that's vitally important.

01:50:24

I think that that is the one issue. Along with his defense of the gospel, we've got other people who do that, but his particular take and stance on religious freedom, and as he had to contend for that and fight for that, that is the thing that stands out the most to me about Samuel Davies.

01:50:46

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who says,

01:50:52

I know that Pato Baptists and Presbyterians are divided over the issue of whether or not to view their children as a mission field.

01:51:04

Some Presbyterians and Pato Baptists say that we are to view our children, if we are indeed

01:51:11

Christians, as Christian, as covenant children, until they prove otherwise.

01:51:18

Others would view them as a mission field, just as Baptists do, and view them as lost until they prove otherwise by making a credible profession of faith and repentance.

01:51:31

Do you know where Samuel Davies stood on this controversial divide? Well, I know, for instance, that he was against what would be called the

01:51:42

Pato Communion, that is the practice of many people who, as we were speaking a couple weeks ago about the

01:51:49

Federal Audition. Now, did that exist other than the Eastern Orthodox Church? Did anybody else do that in Davies' day?

01:51:57

No, but he was very much, I don't know, but he was, in principle, he was against it because he made it clear that until a person comes to true saving faith, they are not to come to the

01:52:11

Lord's table. He wasn't so much in infant, maybe infant communion was not being practiced anywhere in the

01:52:20

States, but he was saying even to people who had been baptized in infancy, and now they were 10 or 12 or 15 or whatever, that they couldn't come to the

01:52:31

Lord's table until they had first come to faith in Christ. And so he was very clear,

01:52:39

I think, that he would not have agreed with just simply taking our children as being

01:52:48

Christian unless they prove otherwise. And for myself, my wife and I have always believed that with our children and our grandchildren, it's our responsibility to evangelize them just like we would anybody else.

01:53:02

We have to present the gospel to them and let them know about Christ and urge them to repent of their sins and to believe in him.

01:53:10

And I don't think... Well, I know for myself, my understanding and my belief in practice of infant baptism does not impede me in evangelizing them.

01:53:24

I think that that's a part of it. That's part of my responsibility to bring them up and then fear in the obedience to the

01:53:34

Lord. And I would answer it that way. And we have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who says,

01:53:40

I know that many of the great heroes of Presbyterianism pastored faithfully in their churches, but tragically subsequent to their ministries in those churches, years later, those very congregations collapsed under the weight of liberalism and apostasy.

01:54:00

Do you know if any of the churches where Samuel Davies ministered remain faithful to the scriptures even to this day?

01:54:11

Um, I... That's a great question.

01:54:18

First of all, I'm not sure is all I can say. I've been to some of the churches where he was instrumental in starting or helped to insist in starting, whatever.

01:54:31

And some of them I know have gone into...

01:54:37

Well, first of all, they became a part of the Southern Presbyterian Church called the

01:54:43

PCUS. Many of them have remained in that denomination and so they've drifted off into liberalism.

01:54:52

That's regrettably the case that it is in so many instances. John Calvin's church in Geneva, Switzerland is not an evangelical church today.

01:55:04

Dr. D. Martin Lloyd -Jones' congregation in Westminster Chapel is nothing like what it was when he retired from the ministry there 50 years ago.

01:55:17

Yeah, that was just like in the 1970s, right? In 69, I think it was. Okay. Yeah.

01:55:23

But it's nothing like that today, you know. Completely different. And so that kind of thing happens a lot of times.

01:55:32

And sometimes a church remains a great church for a number of years. Other times, things happen that lead it astray.

01:55:42

And it's all of God's blessing. And Chris, I want to say that if you don't have enough books to supply all these questions, don't worry,

01:55:48

I can take care of that for you. Just let me know. Oh, wow, that's great. I really appreciate that.

01:55:54

Yeah, I want everybody to ask a question to get a book. Well, terrific. Let's see here.

01:56:02

We have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says that,

01:56:09

I have heard on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in the past that there remain Reformed people who remarkably despise the legacy of George Whitefield.

01:56:20

Are there such Reformed Christians today who remarkably and unbelievably would do the same or think the same towards Samuel Davies?

01:56:33

Probably. I don't know as a matter of fact, but I do know that there,

01:56:39

I won't mention the name of the individual or where he teaches, but there is,

01:56:46

I know of one professor at a Reformed seminary in our country who wrote recently a very scathing article against the

01:56:58

Great Awakening ministers and George Whitefield and others.

01:57:04

And so there are people who do that. I don't personally understand how someone who is truly a

01:57:11

Christian can be opposed to the Great Awakening. I don't see how they can read what George Whitefield wrote or any more than they could read

01:57:18

McShane or Spurgeon or somebody else and find fault with them. That's certainly not according to my convictions, but there are some who do, and it's to me an indication of a spiritual problem in the hearts of people who would have such sentiments towards these great men of God.

01:57:39

Amen. And we have Christian in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says,

01:57:46

Are there any plans to provide children with a work that they could understand about this great hero of the faith as other publishers have brought into print a children's version or children's versions of the lives of great

01:58:05

Christian heroes? You know, my editor on my book has encouraged me to do that.

01:58:13

That's a great question, and I personally would prefer to be the one who does that myself, and I'm going to work on that to basically simplify it.

01:58:30

I've got all the files already, you know, so I can simplify this, put this into children's language so people can learn about this great man of God because he deserves to be remembered.

01:58:43

That's why I wrote this book. Amen, and we're out of time, and I know that your church website is CornerstonePCADestin .org.

01:58:52

That's D as in David, E, S as in Sam, T as in Thomas, I, N. I know that our listeners can purchase the book

01:58:58

Samuel Davies, Apostle to Virginia from CVBBS .com. CVBBS .com,

01:59:04

if they don't have it in stock, they'll order it. Any final words, very briefly, before we go off the air? Well, I just want to thank you for being able to speak about Samuel Davies.

01:59:14

I consider him to be not only the greatest preacher of our country, but the most neglected great preacher since the time of the

01:59:25

Reformation, probably. Less remembered, and that's why I wrote this book, is to bring back his memory and to do justice to one of our greatest ever ministers.

01:59:37

I want to thank you so much for being our guest today with very little notice, brother, and I look forward to you returning to our program.

01:59:43

I want you all to always remember for the rest of our lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.