July 24, 2017 Show with Mika Edmondson on “Martin Luther King, Jr.: An Open & Honest Evaluation of His Life, Legacy & Theology”

Opening Banter and Program Introduction

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 24th day of July 2017, and it is my honor and privilege to have on the program for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Micah Edmondson.

He has earned his Ph .D. in systematic theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, and he's the author of The Power of Unearned Suffering, the Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Theodicy.

He is also pastor of New City Fellowship Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and today we are going to be addressing Martin Luther King Jr., an open and honest evaluation of his life, legacy, and theology, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron,.

Dr. Micah Edmondson. Thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate the opportunity. It's my honor to participate, and I hope that a conversation... Amen. And in studio with me is my co-host,.

The Rev. Buzz Taylor. And hello once again. Good to be here. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question today, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA, and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter that you are asking about.

And again, it's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Well, Dr. Micah, as I typically do when I interview people, especially for the very first time, I like to have them give a summary of their own testimony of salvation, about how and what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, you were raised in, what providential circumstances the Sovereign Lord brought about in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you, and then how you came to be a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church denomination.

All right. Thank you so much, brother. Well, I like to begin by simply saying, as we all are, His righteousness, I thank the Lord, and kind of had enough, even kind of community, and I had enough sort of, I'm not going to, I'll come after this, I'm, uh, that we might necessarily, we might have in our church, I live my life.

Amen. Well, how did you, uh, discover and embrace the doctrines of Reformed theology? Oh boy, that's so, uh, you know, it's amazing because, um, although I did not grow up, if you hang around that Bible long enough, right, uh, hard enough, because if you look at it long enough and proclaim, even if you don't, so I came to faith, I kind of already, I actually, because that was the kind of, so I kind of had that already in my background from theology.

I had a degree in physics, so I ended up, uh, when I got to band, anything, because I needed, I needed a, uh, intellectually, it was interesting because, um, so I was there, radio, and, uh, I have, you know, this, I know this is somehow in their soul, giving out this and that, but he was pointing it to the, he also, and he's from, but I got to get more, you know, I mean, you all appear self-conscious, so in a self-conscious way.

Well, I'm glad that.

You threw in one Reformed Baptist, Charles Spurgeon, in the, in your, accidents will happen. Yeah, my Presbyterian co-host, uh, says foolish things so often that I have to keep this mic down. That's all right, man, that's all right.

But even he, even he knows that he loves, uh, Charles Spurgeon privately, anyway.

When I graduated from Vandermystic Baptist, and, um, there's a guy named Elder D .J. Ward. Yes, I saw D .J. Ward preach on several occasions at the Bunyan Conference in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Oh, of Reformed theology was that it would be led with grace.

I learned Reformed theology as a grace theology, as a comfort and hope theology, as a theology of biblical exposition, and so that sort of set, so that kind of, that kind of, that helped to determine my sort of approach to it.

I always knew it as a grace theology, and so, you know, so that kind of, you know, again, that sort of set the trajectory for me. I ended up at Mount Gilead for a few years. My wife, she was actually at that time, had entered a doctorate, and when she needed to finish that program through from Nashville to Louisville, Kentucky, and then we stayed there for about a year, and then from Louisville, Kentucky, and I wanted to pursue a doctorate in systematic theology.

That's kind of how we got... Now, were you trying to really, really, really stand out.

By becoming ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church?

Right. When we got to Grand Rapids, I could hear the gospel, and that's what I attempted to do. When I got enriched, it was the beginning of the end of my baptism, and I began to look at what the Westminster Confession was, and Pastor Dale's new baptism.

So that kind of, you know, that's how I ended it. And I totally, when I told him that boy, he was like,.

Well, here I was worried about talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and now I find out I should have been worried about baptism discussions. That's quite all right. I love my Reformed Baptist beliefs, but I am very charitable and.

Inviting others on that disagree with me. And in fact, one thing I'd like to, in.

Retort to my co-host Reverend Buzz's disparaging remark about Charles Spurgeon, one of my dearest friends since the late 1980s, Pastor Bill Shishko of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Franklin Square, who is now retired from pastoral ministry and is a domestic missionary with Reformation Metro New York.

But anyway, he, around the dinner table with his wife and children, and I was there, I was invited to spend the weekend there not long ago when I was visiting New York, my homeland, and every night his, Pastor Bill, along with his wife and children, after the meal is finished, at the table they have a Charles Spurgeon devotional, and they call it a, they specifically call him Pastor Spurgeon.

And so this is just to heap the salt into your now gaping wounds. I have morning and evening, does that count?

Morning and evening, yes. Let me tell you what, I got a morning and evening app on my phone right now.

There you go. I drew the line before that. And Kevin Smith, I want to urge everybody to look up a sermon that he gave, a really powerful sermon on Election Day at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I'm assuming that if you just googled Kevin Smith sermon at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Election Day, you would come up with that, unless you know of a more direct link, Dr. Micah, but that was a really powerful message that he gave.

And I remember during one of our private discussions, he was the individual who gave you the book Glory Road, and as I mentioned to you in my old show in New York, I interviewed each and every one of those authors for the book Glory Road.

Yeah. And I'm assuming he was the one that was a member of D .J. Ward's church that introduced you to D .J. Ward's.

Preaching? Well, see, okay, so I got to know him. Any sermon you get from him, he taught history and homiletics for a time.

And speaking of powerful sermons, how do our listeners, other than just looking up your name on YouTube, how do our listeners get a hold of your phenomenal series on Galatians? I've only heard one of the messages, and that was phenomenal, so I'm assuming the rest of it's phenomenal, but that was really a powerful sermon that you preached in that series on Galatians.

How can our.

Most easily listen to those? Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

Great. Well, we're going to go to our first break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Dr. Micah Edmondson, our email address is chrizarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, city, and state, and country of residence if you live outside the USA, and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter, and when we return, we will begin our journey into how Dr. Edmondson began to research the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and what drove him to his decision to write his doctoral dissertation on Dr. King, and we'll be taking your questions.

We already have a number of people waiting to have your questions asked and answered, but please be patient as we allow the next segment to be dominated by Dr. Edmondson explaining his study of the life of Dr. King and his doctoral dissertation on that subject, and specifically the theodicy involved in Dr. King's life.

The theodicy, when we use that term, we're speaking of the defending the goodness of God in the midst of a world filled with suffering and sin and evil, and so therefore you're going to be hearing about how he, Dr. Edmondson, is applying that issue to the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and we are going to try to be as open and honest in both the pros and the cons in this issue.

Too often when there are heroes involved in a discussion, they are either idolized or vilified, and we're going to try our best to let the facts speak for themselves, and we look forward to hearing from you and your questions for Dr. Edmondson at some point after we return from these messages from our sponsors, so don't go away.

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That we were discussing earlier with Dr. Micah Edmondson and my co-host Reverend Buzz Taylor, Pastor Bill Shishko, formerly the pastor of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Franklin Square, Long Island, New York, and now domestic missionary for Reformation Metro New York, a ministry of the Orthodox Presbyterian denomination.

Today, if you've just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is Dr. Micah Edmondson, who earned his PhD in systematic theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. He's the author of The Power of Unearned Suffering, The Roots and Implications of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Theodicy, and that is Dr. Micah Edmondson's doctoral dissertation in print, and he is a pastor at New City Fellowship Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Our topic of discussion today is Martin Luther King Jr. An Open and Honest Evaluation of His Life, Legacy, and Theology, and if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

I wanted to pick up now Dr. Edmondson on your interest in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that was so strong that it led you to want to write your dissertation on the subject of his life, specifically about the theodicy involving his life, and it's a no-brainer that a young African-American man would be interested in Dr. King.

In fact, I would say that in the 21st century, regardless of one's race, folks across the board are interested in some level in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and in fact, he is revered as a hero, an American hero, by many across the spectrum of not only race and ethnicity, but even political perspectives.

You have, in this day and age, conservatives often quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes it's because they are involved in the pro-life movement, and they bring up Dr. King when he made statements that reveal his belief in the sanctity of life even before birth and so on.

But what was it that really captured your mind and led you forward to a deeper.

Investigation? Thank you for asking, brother. Well, actually, the dissertation on Dr. King. While in the doctoral program at Calvin, it was my intention to do a dissertation on a guy named James, considered to be kind of the father of black liberation theology.

How do you spell the last name? Cone, C-O-N-E. James Cone. And so, a book in 1969 called Black Theology and Black Power, and it was really a theological articulation of the Black Power movement, and it was my intention to write a dissertation on Cone's theology of the Atonement.

I was going to do that dissertation, and I began to do some research, and I began to reach out, and I actually reached out to James Cone, and he actually responded, and I told him what I was planning on doing, and he said, hey, I'm glad that you would like to do a dissertation on this, but actually, you may want to finish, you may want to wait till I finish my book on this, because I'm actually writing a book on this very topic.

And the book is, deals very heavily, as the title may suggest, with, and as an African-American, you know, I mean, this is a deeply, for anybody to read through these accounts, subject matter is too much on Dr. King.

And when he said that, I thought, here's a guy with some monument on the National Mall, what could there possibly be left or right about his life, you know? I mean, you know, I mean, it's just like, what hasn't been talked about, you know, I mean, everything's been talked about Dr. King, I mean, what, is there any, you know, not been uncovered yet about this guy, you know?

And so, and I began to go and look, you know, and much to my surprise, there was a whole lot of stuff that nobody's talked about in terms of Dr. King's life, because most people treat Dr. King as just a, you know, a historical figure, an activist.

Very few people were treating him as theologian, right? And so, as I looked at him, so my degree is in systematic theology, and so I looked at him to do a dissertation in systematic theology, and as I looked at engaged King as theologian, there was a huge, just areas of his theology that nobody treated, and I found his theodicy, and his theodicy, his approach to the problem of evil and suffering, and how suffering can be engaged to the glory of God.

That theme was really at the heart of what he was doing in the Civil Rights Movement, and nobody had written a, nobody had done a book-length study on it. In fact, nobody had even done a, really, there been a single article written by a guy named Rufus, and I've got something I can do, and then...

And one of the things that's interesting about this.

Is that, I'm assuming by this time, you are already, for lack of a better term, a conservative Christian theologically. I have a close friend, now retired from ministry, but he is an evangelical within a very liberal denomination, the United Methodist Church, and when I would use terms like conservative and liberal, he would say, Chris, you're not using appropriate terms when it comes to religion.

You should say it's either biblical or heretical. Don't use the word conservative and liberal. Those are political terms. Now, I'm not sure I agree with my friend Dr. Dick Williamson on that, but for lack of a better term, you are, at this point, are you not a theological conservative, or what most would view as a theological conservative, and yet you chose a figure from history.

Not necessarily known for theological conservatism? Right, so, yes, so at this point, so I think of myself as, so as I went into, I really didn't know much about him. I knew, certainly I, his labors, so as I began, was that I, so a lot of times when people, they look at him as if he sort of socialized.

You're right, like, you know, like, he's just this guy, you know what I mean? This is the best for the African-American community and Church. I mean, you gotta think about what kind of faith you would hope, and you think, what kind of faith must be recognized for the glory of God?

And that's not to say God can bring paradigmatic revelation of leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps, right? And that is actually, the Greek word is hupogrammon, which actually means a writing copy.

People in the ancient world would use, sort of, when they, you know, if you have small children, they have to take over a dot-to-dot that gives you the, and it teaches you, for those who don't know how to write, how to write.

He actually, this crucifixion of the spiritual life deeply, did my Lord deliver Daniel, right? Did my Lord deliver Daniel, did my Lord deliver Daniel, did my Lord deliver Daniel, and why not every man?

African-Americans, with the contradictions of life, and say, hey, God delivered Daniel, God delivered Daniel, God was able to do it, why not every man, right? So God can deliver me too, right? They're wrestling with the contradictions of life, they're wrestling with theodical questions, and so, you know, other ones like, there's a balm in Gilead to heal the fisticked soul, there's a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.

Those kinds of, that kind of musical, theodical tradition, and the prayer tradition within the black church community, and the preaching tradition within the black church, it's with theodical themes, and not just that, that has been the majority report within the community, and King inherited this legacy, and so when he articulates, engaged the communal suffering, you see that it's engaged our suffering, what Christ did when he was reviled through violence, and but King realized that that's not true.

Yeah, Joseph. Oh, okay. He had John Mark responding with acquiescence, but Jesus showed the third way, right? Jesus does not. King recognized this, he recognized that Christ has given us, he's revealed to us a way to engage our suffering, and what he did was said he simply in the church began to engage it.

So I think a lot of people, when they look at it, they have no idea.

Martin Luther King Jr. as a Theologian of Suffering

Yeah, in fact, we're gonna pick up right where you left off when we return from our midway break, which is a longer break than normal, so we can accommodate Grace Life Radio 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, who requires a 12-minute gap between our two segments.

So anybody else who would like to join us on the air, we still have a list of several people waiting to have their questions asked and answered, and we will get to each and every one of you that time allows us to, and we thank you for waiting this long, but we will eventually get to as many as possible.

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Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull. Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastor's Study, because everyone needs a pastor. Welcome back.

This is Chris Sarnes, and for those of you who just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with a little less than an hour to go is Dr. Micah Edmondson, who earned his Ph .D. in Systematic Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, and he's the author of The Power of Unearned Suffering, The Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Theodicy.

He's also a pastor at New City Fellowship Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. We have been discussing and will continue to discuss Martin Luther King Jr., an open, honest evaluation of his life, legacy, and theology.

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They urged me, and have continued to urge me, to make public appeals to you, the listener, to donate whenever possible to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and also to advertise with us, if you have a business, a corporation, a professional practice, a church or a parachurch ministry, or a special event that you want to promote, as long as whatever it is you're advertising is compatible with the theological makeup of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

The website is ironsharpensironradio .com. Click on support, you will receive or you will see a mailing address, where you can make a check made payable to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for any amount, and mail it to that address that you see when you click support.

And if you want to advertise, just send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com and put advertising in the subject line. And I have to say, I've been very blessed by the answer to prayer, because for the last four or five days, every day, I'm getting somebody emailing me questions about advertising with us.

So I'm very delighted about that. And for those of you who have contributed financially to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. And I know that some of you are even regularly now donating to us.

And always remember, never, ever, ever siphon money out of your regular giving to your local church where you are a member. And if you're not a member of a local Bible-believing church, you'd better correct that very quickly.

But if you are a member of a church and you're giving to that church regularly, please never siphon money out of that giving. And never take food off of your family's dinner table if you're struggling to make ends meet.

Providing for your church and providing for your family are two commands of God. Providing for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is not a command of God. But if you are blessed above and beyond your ability to fulfill your obligations in providing for your church and home, please consider Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

If the show blesses you, if it's a part of your regular habit of life, if it has benefited you in any way, then a donation of any amount would be greatly appreciated. We are now back to our discussion with Dr. Micah Edmondson on Martin Luther King, Jr., An Open and Honest Evaluation of His Life, Legacy, and Theology.