G3 Conference Special Episode II: The Banner of Truth Trust | Behold Your God Podcast

All right, welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratia. We're here at the G3 conference in Atlanta in 2019. And today I have a guest with me, Pat Daly, the U .S. director of the Banner of Truth Trust.

And you hear us talking about the Banner of Truth all the time on the podcast. We're talking about books that are published by the Banner of Truth. We're commending them to you. Well, this brother right here is the guy who kind of makes sure that you get those books that we're commending to you.

So I want to spend a few minutes with you. I want to talk about the Banner and then I want to have you commend some books to the people. But first of all, welcome. It's good to be here. Yeah, it's good to be on the podcast.

I've enjoyed watching it online and can't believe I'm actually here. I know. I know it's kind of weird. Yeah. We've, I'll tell you how Pat and I got to know each other. We are, Pat is part of kind of the inner circle of the conference family because, you know, we have to go to a lot of Christian conferences for work.

And it's just really nice when there are some of your best friends are in these different cities and you get to see them and you go places, you get to eat, spend time together, talk about the Lord, encourage one another, ask about the family, etc.

But that's not actually how we met. How we met was in 2013 when we released the Behold Your God study, the first one, Rethinking God Biblically. I wasn't part of the Christian publishing world. I still don't really see myself as being part of the Christian publishing world.

I didn't know how any of it didn't work, didn't know any other Christian publishers and called the Banner of Truth, I think, just cold called. Or maybe I sent a message or... Well, we, I, my first recall, or what I first recall us meeting was you were filming for the Logic on Fire film.

That's where we met. That's where we met. But we talked on the phone before that. That's right. Yeah. Okay. We met in 2015. You brought Ian Murray to me at the, what's the place called? The Galt House in Louisville.

Yeah. That's where we interviewed him the first time for Logic on Fire. But that was just our first, like, first time we met in person. Yes. But I remember calling the Banner and saying, hey, we have this video multimedia Bible study series.

Yes. And we talk about a lot of the guys that are in, that are Banner authors, I guess you could say. And what was cool is I called, it was like a kind of a weird business call and I don't do them, I'm not good at that.

Right. But I called and, you know, yep, this guy Pat Daly answers the phone. And I bet we talked on the phone for two and a half hours because we were talking about, oh, you like McShane? I love McShane.

You know who else I like? I like this. And we wind up talking about Christ and talking about, you know, just the, our common salvation. And that was such an encouragement to me because again, remember I'd never talked to a Christian publisher.

Right. And I don't know, it was just such an encouragement to find out that the people who actually are selling these books and making these books available have the same heart as the men that they're publishing, that there's not a disconnect there, you know?

Yeah. I remember that phone call now. Thanks for bringing it to my memory. I wasn't nearly as significant for you. Apparently not. But no, I was just thinking that you were going to go to them that time when we met.

But I do remember the phone call. And, you know, you talk about you don't view yourself as a traditional publisher. I mean, I don't view myself as a traditional salesman. And I don't know if many people at The Banner of Truth do.

We're just excited about our content. Yeah. We're excited about the privilege of reprinting, recapturing, producing, and promoting the best of Christian literature from the Reformation to the present.

And so when we get talking to men like yourselves who are in similar work, we often just find ourselves talking about the books, the pastors who wrote them, the way it's impacted our lives or impacted the lives of our friends.

And then we, hours go by and we haven't really discussed any kind of sales terms or ways we can actually sell things to customers. And we're blessed to be in that kind of work, I think. Yeah. I think, you know, Banner of Truth, like Media Gratia, are non-profit ministries.

And so we're less burdened by quotas and burdened by this hyper sales mode that you have to be in if you're in a for-profit business and you have the pressure of shareholders who have given you money and expect a return on their investment.

Yeah. So we're not, we don't operate like that. We're, you know, Banner of Truth is governed or overseen by a group of trustees, most of whom are pastors. Yeah. Who love to talk about Banner books. Yeah.

And trustees is just kind of, I learned a fancy British name for board of directors. Yes. And the same thing for us. We have a board of directors, we're a non-profit. They're spiritual men who love the Lord Jesus and they're, I wish they were better at business because, you know, there'd be somebody who, you know, might know more about that on our thing.

But I'm glad that they don't err on the side of being all business because the engine that's under the hood of the Banner of Truth is love to Christ. Yes. And men who are captured by that same thing that captured the writers that you republish and publish today.

Yeah. That's what we hope it is. And that's what we pray that it will be. Yeah. And then we pray that it will continue to be, that we wouldn't be attracted by, you know, if, you know, in our context, we promote, we publish books and then we promote them.

And whenever we choose a title, the reason we want to publish this book is because we believe it's Christ-exalting. We believe it's biblically faithful. And it may not have a big sales audience that we can sell it to, but we want God to help us be faithful to say, that's okay.

We want to promote it because we believe it's good and biblical and helpful. And let's do all that we can to build an audience or to convince an audience that might be apathetic or uninterested. That's okay.

That's what we've taken on as our mission is to produce those kinds of books. And that's how the banner got started, producing and reprinting materials that people had otherwise forgotten. People went to other publishers and said, you know, what about this?

Why don't you reprint this? And people would hear the familiar story of, sorry, there's not really a market for that. And so we were started in that. We've, by God's grace, been able to continue that way.

But we need the prayers of people in your podcasts, prayers of people in the church of Christ that we would continue in that way. And that we wouldn't be attracted by, you know, the financial side of this.

Oh yeah. Vanity fear. And in case there are some trustees watching this podcast, we do work at marketing and sales and promotion. You know, we don't just talk, but that was a good conversation. And I think we both knew that we were talking to like-minded brothers who were excited about the same.

You were off the clock that whole time, I think. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Thursday's at two. I'm off the clock. Yeah. Well, why don't you, just for the sake of people who are listening who may not know, give us a little overview of how the Banner of Truth did get started.

Sure. Late 1950s, Ian Murray is teaching church history at Westminster Chapel in London. And he originally wasn't a church historian, but Martyn Lloyd-Jones encouraged him to do this. And as he was teaching through this, people would come up to him and say, you know, you mentioned McShane or Bonner or J .C. Watt.

Where do I get these books? I would like to read them. And Ian Murray had to sadly tell them, well, it's really difficult to find an affordable, you know, a paperback or hardback copy that you can buy for under, you know, 10 pounds at the time and take, and take home with you.

You have to go to the evangelical library or find these old dusty copies that maybe you could rent or loan. It's hard for mass spreading of these materials. And it was in that context that a wealthy businessman came to him and said, look, what if we, what if we try to, to start this, this Banner of Truth Trust?

They didn't, I don't know if they knew it was going to be called. They initially started with a magazine, but let's see if we can find, get some funding, get behind us and promote these things. So the Banner of Truth started with the publication of a monthly magazine.

Well, I shouldn't say monthly because they just did one issue and they weren't sure if it was going to take off, but there was enough interest, enough people writing them, again, please come up with the second issue that Banner of Truth got started with this monthly magazine.

And then books came after that. The first, I mean, I'm sure there's someone who knows this, but I've been told that, is it Jeremiah Burroughs or not Jeremiah Burroughs, Song of Solomon. Yeah, Burroughs.

Burroughs, yeah. And Thomas Watson's Body of Divinity were the two books that were first published by Banner. Yeah, I've seen copies of the first, you have too, the very first print run of them. Right, that's right.

And they arrived, I believe they were stored in Westminster Chapel and sold there on a Sunday evening. So that's when the books began. From there, it's grown. Obviously we don't just reprint books from the past, but we do...

You don't have to be dead. You don't have to be dead. That's a huge misunderstanding about the Banner. We like it if you're dead. It's easier to work with dead authors. They're much easier with royalties and issues with cover design and stuff like that.

But we do work with some living authors. But if you're going to publish with us, we're going to compare your book to Christian history and say, is this worth doing? We don't just want to get excited about big audience and something big and trending.

Not that that's... It's not always bad. Always bad. They sometimes need a book like that. But we want to try to recapture or reprint or publish the best of the best. I want to get back to what you were saying.

The founding of the Banner of Truth was in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Yeah. 1957. It was 1957. It's hard for me to imagine a time... Here we are in the bookstore of a Christian conference, conservative evangelical conference in Atlanta, Georgia, with almost 5 ,000 people.

There's a massive bookstore all around us. You can read just about any book. It's a significant book from church history. Not that long ago, 1957, you could not do that. I just want you to try to put yourself in how much of the work of the Holy Spirit in Christ's church over the last 2 ,000 years that the church was cut off from.

They had no access to it. There's an illustration that... It's corny, but that a guy goes into a town out west and he goes up to the bar and he orders an ice water. They say, I'm sorry, I can't bring you an ice water.

We don't have ice in this village. The guy who had the recipe for it died, and they don't know how to get it. Well, it was possible before the internet. It was possible before the banner of truth. It was possible before these other publishers who now do this to just...

I don't know. I don't know what John Owen thought about this passage because I can't find it. I don't know. It's gone. It's lost to the microfiche. The fact that we do have access to it now is not only a privilege, but man, it has shaped the culture that we live in now.

It has shaped it. That work that Ian Murray did under Lloyd-Jones' encouragement and with the help of... What was the brother's name? Jack Cullum. Jack Cullum. Yeah. They didn't know that they would shape 2019 in America.

Yeah. Well, we try to be humble, and we recognize that it's the Lord's work. Yeah, absolutely. It's the Lord's blessing, and he has taken a group of men who really would confess... We feel like we don't know what we're doing.

We don't look at ourselves and say we have it together. We think we're just amateurs at this. Whenever I'm speaking to our general editor, he's always reminding me, I don't feel qualified for this role.

Who is qualified for this role? And we recognize it's by the Lord's sovereign blessing that we have been able to help people. The Lord has used many ministries. Absolutely. The Lord has used many churches, the preaching of the gospel, the preaching of sound reform doctrine from the pulpits to bring about what we're enjoying today.

In God's sovereign plan, Banner's played a small part in that, and we're thankful. I was not alive when this work began, and here I am just another person who's inherited these blessings and now has the privilege of being a custodian of sorts and curating these great resources to people who come up to you.

The work that began there continues every day. So here we are at a conference. We're standing in a booth. People come up to you like, I just need a book that could help me understand God's sovereignty.

And this person, maybe they come from a sound church, maybe they don't. You don't know where they're from, and you get to hand them a resource and think, here's A .W. Pink's Sovereignty of God. It's exciting to see them go home looking forward to reading the book and thinking how the Lord could use that biblical teaching to transform their lives.

We get to be a part of that, and it's such a privilege. It is. The larger point that I want to make about that was not... It was that young person watching this, you need to understand that it's not just about reading church history.

It's not just about reading old guys. It's about the fact that the church exists, and the church is going to continue to exist. We have all the promises of God in the church. It's not just about church history is not what happened back then, but we are living in church history, and there is a church future history.

You need to think without some sense of inflated importance, but with a reality that what we do in 2019, not only what you and I do, but what we as Christians do as members of Christ's universal church is writing church history.

It is incredibly humbling, and it's also very serious, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel because we don't have 20 or 30 years for you to go and figure out that the really good idea that you came up with on your own doesn't end well.

Lots of costly mistakes have already been made, and we can learn lessons from those things by reading these guys. We don't have to go figure out a lot of stuff either. In fact, innovation is highly frowned upon in the Christian religion.

This is the faith once and for all handed down to the saints, so that's why we're into this. It's not just because of some weird fascination with old stuff. It's not like you're into antique furniture.

We're into antique books. No, man, not at all. This is life and death for us. This conference is talking a lot about life in the local church and how Christianity is not a solo religion. We have an individual personal relationship, saving relationship with Christ, which is given to us by God, and we repent, and we believe, and yet we're saved into a community of believers so that we can keep each other accountable.

So as I'm understanding this doctrine, I'm not understanding it on my own. There's a pastor, and there's elders, and there's people in my church who help me and ask questions, and we make sure that as we're studying the scriptures, we're being faithful.

In that same way, you can look back at the corridors of church history and say, if we believe in the inheritance of scripture and the perspicuity of scripture, then it should be clearly believed by believers throughout this oldest time period.

If it was true then, it was true 500 years ago. If we're just discovering it now, that should set up our antenna. We should say, wait a second, the question that Luther asked, am I alone wise? Martin Luther was concerned that, look, for hundreds of years, the Roman Catholic Church has taught a justification like this.

Am I alone wise, and I'm the only one who gets it? If Martin Luther, who we would recognize by God's grace as one of the men who's been most used by God, if he's asking that question, how dare we not ask it in any terms of new ideas we might come up with?

I think as we just look back and we see what have other faithful believers believed, that's a helpful guide. It's a secondary, a subordinate guide, because the Word of God alone is our standard, but Christianity didn't start yesterday.

That's exactly right. We weren't born into a vacuum, and we are living in a blessed time where we have access, and the Lord has been so good to us, and so we should be thankful to Him. It also comes with, not that it comes with a curse, but there's a warning to be said that there's so many books published, so many.

Obviously, I work with a publisher who does a lot of historical books, not wholly historical, but it's a big part of what we do, so I value historical books. I want to promote historical books, but when you're looking at all the plethora of publishers and all the titles, thousands of titles are coming out every year, well, I think we should ask ourselves, is this book really worth my time?

I mean, that's what we're trying to ask at Banner. Is this really worth publishing? It could be good. It might even be really good, but is it excellent? Is it great? Our time on this earth is so short.

Yeah, there's no time to read good books. You have to read the best books. I've never spoken to an older person who said, oh yeah, it just takes forever. They're always saying, it's just over. It's just a flash.

It's just a drop in the bucket, and so I want to use the time that I have to read the very best, and so I ask my pastor. I talk with brothers or sisters who I really respect in the faith and ask what books have really helped them, and I start there, and that doesn't mean it always ends up being a Banner book.

I'm not saying that. There's lots of great books published by…. I mean, Banner Truth's only been around for 60 years, so obviously we've inherited this from brothers who have served faithfully in the past as well, but to ask those kinds of questions so you make sure you're putting in the right, the best food you can get, the best spiritual food so you can be as spiritually fit as God wants us to be.

Well, what I want to say to the people listening is to recognize that we live in a blessed time where good books are available. Make use of the time that you've been born in. Read the best of the old guys, and then let's build on those shoulders going forward, you know?

Yeah, as I say this, you know, I'm preaching it to myself because I just think of all the time that I have, all the time that I have with my phone on me, hanging out with friends, time I have in transit, you know, how am I using that time?

Am I making time to regularly be in God's Word, first and foremost? But, you know, is my heart more looking forward to that new Netflix series, or studying what God's done in the past, or studying theology more deeply?

I think these conferences like this and other conferences around are helpful because we feel this conviction of, Lord, these men who are speaking and preaching and teaching, they're able, they're well-read, they're talking about books that I know I should read, but I just have put it off.

But I think these events can be a time for us to examine, how are we using our time? And as you're sitting there listening or reading, and you've gone about your day, or maybe you're at the end of your day, or you're starting your day, you know, how will you use this day for the Lord?

I think we all need to examine our hearts, and repent if we've been lazy, or cold, or just not interested in the Lord's work, and ask Him to renew that. And certainly good books can help you, but the Word of God should be our priority.

Banner of Truth’s Origin and Early Publishing Vision

Yeah, absolutely. Well, speaking of good books, tell me a couple titles that you're excited about that The Banner of Truth has either already released or right on the horizon. Sure, maybe we'll start with what we've just released most recently.

We came out with a one-volume reprint of The Letters of John Calvin, which is a selection of Calvin's tracts and letters, which is a larger, I believe, six, maybe seven-volume set. Now here's an example.

So I'm excited about this book, not because it's new and exciting, because obviously it was written about, you know, 500 years ago, and The Banner produced a paperback version of this, I think in the 80s, that kind of, you know, kind of, I just, I guess I never got around to it, to reading it, but we've reissued this classic in a beautiful, I should run over to my table and grab it, beautiful, small, cloth-bound version.

You know, Kevin Young talks about how he's re-read his so many times it's falling apart. This book's exciting, not because it's new, because it's not, but because it shows you John Calvin as he really was.

You know, Calvin's one of the most caricatured theologians, and a lot of people, as they push against Calvinism, if maybe they came from an Arminian or a just a non-denominational background, they've heard Calvinism used in a pejorative way.

Right, it's bad. He's cold, clinical. Yeah, all right, let's show the people what it looks like. Wow, it's really beautiful. Wow, you guys are really good at CG. Thank you. So, let me hold it while I talk about it, then I'll show you how just how pretty it is.

Now, is the prettiness of the book why we should be excited about the book? No, but we are book lovers at Banner, and we know that people who read our books love books. We do like to produce them in the best quality possible.

Why do we do that? Because we believe that this book, and many others like it, is not just going to be relevant for today, but from 50 years from now, 100 years from now, if the Lord would tarry even longer.

So, we want to produce it in a way that it could last that long, that you can buy it, read it, underline it with pencil only, please. No pen or highlighter. That's liberty of the conscience, and then pass it on to your children.

I've known many pastors who, near the end of their lives, are either donating it back to us to give books away to people, or they're passing it on to their kids. We produce books, we try to produce books in a way that will enable you to do that.

Yeah. And so, you know, the highest quality cloth, stitched, highest quality paper, that it won't, you know, as the sun hits it and chemicals react, it won't kind of fall apart. So, that's why we care about nice books, not solely for just having nice things.

Here we go. Letters of Calvin. Why is this exciting? Because it shows you Calvin as he really was. He was a pastor. We know Calvin as this towering theologian and preacher, but he was a pastor of souls and people in his congregation.

And there's letters to people in his church, there's letters to kings encouraging him to read about the Reformation and understand it. There's letters to Luther, Melanchthon, some letters to these missionaries or these martyr men who are soon to be martyrs in France before they die.

You know, what pastor do we know today who's writing to kings defending the Reformation? This is an amazing time in God's history and a book like this enables you to go back in time and see that, you know, he wasn't just a great mind.

I mean, if you read his sermons and read his theology, you won't just think he's a great mind anyways, but it really is maybe the best way to dispel that caricature and say, here's a man who's a pastor who loved souls and who labored for God's glory and to serve God's people.

So yeah, it's an exciting book. It helps me to think about what the Lord's done in the past. Look at that nice, a nice stamp. Pretty. Yeah. One thing I like about it is, you know, Banner has always cared about the quality of the materials and it looks like you guys are caring about the aesthetics on this thing too.

It's really pretty. Yeah. Well, as you can hear, the conference is going on all around us and we need to get back to it, but we just wanted to take some time out to make sure that we kept on track with the podcast, even while we're out on the road.

And we're going to take advantage of introducing you, you know, putting a face with a name, a person with a publisher. And thanks, thanks Pat. Thanks for taking a few minutes. It's been a privilege. Thanks brother.

All right. We'll be back next week in John's office with another episode of the Behold Your God podcast.