July 3, 2023 Show with Ian Turner on “John Owen’s ‘The Nature & Causes of Apostasy from the Gospel'”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of Founding Father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is

Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this third day of July, Independence Day Eve, 2023.

I'm thrilled to have on the program for the very first time the brand new pastor at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I have the honor and privilege of being a member.

As many of you may know who listen to this program or who are familiar with Grace Baptist Church, our beloved pastor for the last six years,

John Miller, accepted a call to Redeemer Baptist Church in Macon, Georgia, and that left an opening for our intern,

Ian Turner, to join the pastoral staff there alongside of Simon O'Maney, who many of you have heard as a guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in the past.

And Ian Turner is former editorial teaching assistant to Dr.

Joel R. Beeke, who has also been a guest on this program many times, at Puritan Reform Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

And today, Ian is going to be addressing John Owens' The Nature and Causes of Apostasy from the

Gospel. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Ian Turner.

It's a pleasure. Good to be on. Amen. Well, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I am a member and where you are now one of the pastors.

Yes. At Grace Baptist, our mission is to glorify God in the preaching of the gospel, in biblical worship, and in evangelizing sinners and in building up the saints who are members here.

So it's a place where our members get shepherded with the word, ministry of the word of God and the sacraments, and where the gospel is proclaimed and where we're encouraged to reach our community.

So that's a little bit about Grace Baptist. And it is a confessional

Reformed Baptist church adhering to the 1689 London Baptist Confession.

Oh, that's all I meant when I said biblical. And the church owns and operates a

Christian school. That's right. That's right. We enjoy a good school community right now.

What are the grades? From K to 8. From K to 8. Well, if anybody wants more information about Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, if you have any interest in visiting there, even though you know that I am a member, you could go to gracebaptistcarlisle .org.

Carlisle is spelled C -A -R -L -I -S -L -E. gracebaptistcarlisle .org.

I don't know if you hear this, Ian, especially with phone operators for companies or whatever, when you're speaking to a stranger on the phone.

A lot of people have a hard time pronouncing Carlisle for some reason. That's right. Carlisle is what

I hear a lot. So that's gracebaptistcarlisle .org.

Why don't you tell us something also about Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

We've had Dr. Joel Beeky on this program many times. In fact, you may not be aware of this, but I was the very first person to get

Dr. Beeky on the radio back in the 1990s when I was an account executive at WMCA Radio, which is an affiliate of the largest

Christian radio network in the world, Salem Media. Excellent. WMCA was the station

I worked for, and I actually created a program called

The Voice of Sovereign Grace. It was a nightly program, Monday through Friday, featuring five different pastors whose sermons were aired in an edited form each night of the week, and Dr.

Joel Beeky was one of the very first pastors to take me up on my invitation to him to host

The Voice of Sovereign Grace, one of those nights, and that was in the days when he was not nearly as globally known as he is now.

He had actually, when I first began speaking with him about radio, he was in a denomination, the

Netherlands Reformed Church, that forbade radio, and they believed it was an

Arminian invention to use radio, so as soon as he left the

Netherlands Reformed Church and was a part of the formation of the Heritage Reformed Churches, he took me up on the opportunity to be on the radio.

So I will forever have my heart knit to that dear brother, and look forward to many more opportunities to labor with him for the kingdom in some way involving the media.

But tell us about that wonderful seminary, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. That's right.

After the Netherlands denomination departure, HRC, the

Heritage Reformed Congregations, began a Puritan seminary in 1995.

I think the first classes were in August of 1995 under the leadership of Dr. Beeky as president.

In 1998, the Free Reformed Churches of North America, FRC and A, and HRC partnered.

Gerald M. Bilkes was appointed as professor of OT and NT, and the first graduating class,

I believe, was early 2000s, around 2004, and their new building was erected around that time.

Yeah, they have grown tremendously, and they keep growing. There's just a very dedicated community.

They had the addition of Dr. David Murray as professor for a while there.

Oh, yeah. I know David Murray very well, and he has been a guest in this program, and I remember very vividly how lovingly and graciously he reached out to me after the passing of my precious wife over a decade ago, and he gave me his book on depression.

That's right. That's right. And excuse me, I made a little bit of a mistake. The first graduating class was 2004.

Anyway, Dr. Murray, Dr. Vendutaward became professor of church history. Dr. Barrett joined the faculty as professor of Old Testament in 2012.

Dr. Kelderman, appointed dean of students, and my doctoral supervisor in the

Old Testament program that I just finished, Dr. Timmer, joined several years ago.

Just a phenomenal faculty, and of course, I'm remiss to not have mentioned many others, but Dr.

Adrian Neely right now, he was director of the PhD program. Dr. Timmer is currently that, but he's in the administration still, and Dr.

Adrian Neely has also had a huge hand in just giving Puritan international reach.

So we have partnerships with institutions across North America and internationally.

I say we because I'm an alumni, but it's just a phenomenal growth.

There are students in our classrooms from Africa, Brazil, East Asia, all around the world.

It's just a great community. The emphasis of Puritan is head, heart, hands, so academically rigorous, but a focus on personal piety and Christian character, without which your academic rigor is as powerful as a wet noodle.

So really a blessed community, and anyone who's familiar with it would have high hopes for its future.

Well, one of the things I love about Dr. Beakey is that although he is himself personally a

Pato Baptist, he has a great respect and love for Reformed Baptists.

And in fact, the very fact that you were his editorial teaching assistant and you were a

Reformed Baptist speaks volumes. And he just a day or two ago told me with great enthusiasm,

I know you'll be happy to know that in my systematic theology, I had a Reformed Baptist write a chapter on the

Credo Baptist position. So I was happy to hear about that.

Oh, that's right. And even before me, Paul Smalley, his main editorial assistant is an elder at, last

I heard, Elder at Grace Emanuel Reformed Baptist in Grand Rapids. So that's always been a great partnership between Reformed Baptists and Puritan Seminary.

Well, if anybody wants to know more about Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, go to PRTS .edu,

PRTS for Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, PRTS .edu.

Well, we have a tradition here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Ian. Before we enter into our discussion on John Owen's The Nature of Apostasy, I would like you to give a summary of your salvation testimony, as we do with all first time guests on the program.

They give a description of the kind of religious atmosphere, if any, in which they were raised, and the kinds of providential circumstances our sovereign

Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and save them. So we'd like to hear your story.

Oh, it would be my pleasure. Thank you. You could say that I was from a family, a troubled, troubled family, a lot of kind of domestic type brokenness, a family with divorce in it and with addictions on the parents' side and different things like that.

But, you know, we had a relatively happy, happy childhood from the child's perspective.

Grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. Some listeners might know of Oak Park as where Ernest Hemingway's house is and where Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect's home is.

And so it's kind of a tourist area. It's right on the west, west, western end of Chicagoland.

Even though my home was broken, my parents were nominal Christians. So I say that because they took us to church, but home life did not reflect church doctrine.

First Baptist Church of Oak Park was our main church home. And on weekends, I was with my dad.

It was Armitage Baptist Church in Chicago. And I say those names of those churches in case any listeners ever are familiar with or find themselves there.

So from, yeah, early childhood, this was kind of normal life for anyone who's grown up in a divorced home.

It's just your life is kind of split in two. But on both sides, there was just sort of nominal church going.

Teenage years and junior high and high school were definitely a descent into some moral darkness and friend groups that, you know, they say bad company corrupts good character.

When I was in those years, definitely fell away from sort of the outward moralistic upbringing

I had going to church. There's definitely a decline.

I could say that I still had a fear of God. God protected me providentially from, I think, blaspheming

Him in direct ways that others were doing. But I still was, I would describe my life as decadent, lost.

A head full of surface -level Bible knowledge from going to church, but a life not committed to it whatsoever.

Later in my teenage years, around 16, 17, you know, by that time

I'd seen a lot of things, seen things that, you know, 40 -year -olds shouldn't see and do. God really grabbed a hold of my heart during that time.

I was a dropout from high school and was working in my father's video store that he owned one day when somebody invited me to one -on -one

Bible study. This was a person involved in campus ministry. They reached out to me.

A few weeks later, the Lord was convicting my heart through ways that it's really hard to explain now, but I could probably say it was more conviction of sin, knowing that the only way forward, in the words of the book of Hebrews, was fire and judgment.

If I kept going the way I was going, and yet I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop sinning, and so God was convicting my heart that I was on my way to hell, and that propelled me to go to the

Bible study I was invited to. Three months after studying one -on -one Bible study in Genesis, I sensed that the

Lord Jesus came into my life. One instrumental resource around that time, my

Bible teacher gave me a tract called My Heart, Christ's Home. It was written by a

Presbyterian, but it simulated, it kind of illustrated what conversion looks like by Jesus Christ knocking on your door, coming in your house, cleaning out the different rooms, telling you that, you know, if you want

Him in your heart, this has to go, that has to go, different things like that. You know, in my 17 -year -old mind, it was extremely meaningful, and it was describing what

I was experiencing. Christ was becoming the Lord in my life.

So, summer of 2002, that was, when Christ came into my life, and since then, the rest is history.

I got involved in campus ministry pretty early on, met my wife about five years after that.

We got married in 2008. She's from the same campus ministry, but from the Philippines, so halfway around the world.

But the Lord has been good. He definitely restores the years that the locusts have eaten in terms of living in darkness and coming to His light.

And my wife and I have two children, Christian, who's 10, Joanna, who's 7, and they have been a blessing to us.

And we've tried to raise them in ways where, you know, what they hear at church is also, by God's grace, modeled at home, although not always perfectly, and our prayers are always for them.

And yeah, so that is a high -level summary of what could easily be a three -hour story around a campfire or something like that.

Well, it should be of enormous encouragement to Christian parents, and I know quite a number of them, who are heartbroken to see their children leave the faith of their youth, the faith of their upbringing, become prodigal sons and daughters, as it were, and they fear that these children are most certainly destined to perish in their sins and be lost eternally or damned eternally, for a more accurate description.

And your story, I believe, should give them hope that where there is life, there is hope.

And while Jesus is alive, especially, there is hope. And you turned out to be a remarkable young man and now a pastor.

Now, what were some of the circumstances that led to you realizing that God had placed a call upon your life to enter into pastoral ministry?

Oh, thank you, yeah. Since, I would say, when

God got a hold of my life, obviously, you know, when I was in campus ministry with this group, University Bible Fellowship, as a 17 -year -old new convert,

I was not a college student, I was a high school dropout. But, you know, within a decade,

I'd graduated with a bachelor's in English and gone on to study linguistics at the graduate school level.

And then when the doctrines of grace came into my life, and I really do believe, you know, when your eyes are open to the doctrines of grace, that is

God's sovereign, you know, not a work of conversion necessarily, but God's sovereign goodness to you, to see his role in salvation, that salvation is of the

Lord. Around 2012, 2011, when that happened, my heart was moved to go to seminary and see whether I am called.

There was a desire to discern whether this stirring to serve

God's people as a pastor is genuine. So, 2012 to around 2018 was when

I was working on my MDiv. I started at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. I remember my first course with D .A.

Carson, Biblical Theology, transformed the way I read my Bible, and transferred to Reform Baptist Seminary, which is how

I met men like Bob Gonzalez and Bob Self, and the circle that our churches generally are associated with.

In a course, when I began an Old Testament doctorate at Puritan, I met

John Miller. We struck up a friendship. I was in the middle of doctoral work in 2019 -2020 when he invited me to come for an internship, because he had known my desire for more mentoring and direct discipleship.

And within a year and a half, I was able to actually go forward and do that.

Coming to Carlyle, the question was always open. Is the Lord calling me to more academic ministry?

Because at the time, I was enjoying my job with Dr. Beeke as an editorial assistant. I loved the work editing book manuscripts and articles and doing research for that, and my heart was there.

But also, at the same time, the Lord was pushing me providentially to keep preaching for my church, doing pulpit supply, teaching

Sunday school, things like that. And since 2002 -2003, I had never not taught the

Bible or been preaching or something. So it seemed like the more that I got interested in academics, the more the

Lord pushed me toward pastoral teaching, preaching -type ministry in the church. And so the internship, in my mind, really was an opportunity to discern, is

God calling me to serve the church or the academy? And there's no rigid division between those two things.

There are such things as pastor -scholars or scholar -pastors. But by the end of my first year, around halfway, the elders of Grace Baptist asked if I'd be open to a second year that would be more pointed to assessing whether I'd be a good fit as a third man.

So John's opportunity to go to Georgia was not an opening for me to come to Grace Baptist. There was always an intention of having a third pastor.

And those talks began in 2022 in November. And the process, interview with the elders and ordination and those things, just went very positively.

And by January of this year,

I was certain that the Lord was calling me into a pastoral direction and gave me the conviction that serving

God's people in this way and myself being developed in pastoral ministry was

God's will for me. So, you know, just to give you a snapshot of May of this year, late

April, I had my ordination exams. May 5th, I graduated with my doctorate in Old Testament.

May 21st, I had my ordination service. Like, everything was happening within three weeks to a month.

And so just kind of getting back into normal life right now, thankful for God's grace.

But it's just a testament. You know, when I was defending my doctoral dissertation on May 5th with the group of scholars that were peppering me with questions about my dissertation,

I had to answer one of the questions. Listen, I was a high school dropout.

Everything you're hearing and seeing today is God's work. So I'm almost a third -person bystander watching what

God's been doing in my life, if I could put it that way. Amen. And what is the theme of your doctoral dissertation?

The theme of my doctoral dissertation is Hosea 12, 13, and 14.

And what I'm asking is, is Hosea coherent?

A lot of higher critical scholars of that stripe have denied the coherence of Hosea, said it's fragmented, corrupt, hardly makes sense.

It seems like just random lines falling on the page. But the problem is a lot of these scholars don't define coherence.

So I take a linguistic framework that defines coherence really rigorously and apply that framework to a very close reading of Hosea 12, 13, and 14, and I conclude that Hosea is coherent.

We can trust the text, and we can believe it and be pointed to Christ through it.

And so I just thank Puritan for the opportunity of doing a PhD -level study that combines linguistics and the

Hebrew Bible. Now before we go to the break, the first commercial break, I just want to announce at the request of Dr.

Joel Beeky that Reformation Heritage Books is offering a pre -publication sale on Volume 14 of the updated complete works of John Owen, which

Volume 14 is on the very theme that we are addressing today, apostasy from the gospel.

And this is being published by Crossway, but Reformation Heritage Books will obviously be including it in their own inventory since it has been edited by Dr.

Joel Beeky. But can you tell us something about this pre -publication sale? Oh, yes.

Crossway very generously is giving Reformation Heritage Books three weeks exclusive sale, and RHB, of course, has it marked down like they usually do with such exclusives, so just go to heritagebooks .org

and search for apostasy from the gospel, yeah, Volume 14. And it's probably going to be available toward the end of this month, but a few weeks before the

August 15th release date. Oh, I'm seeing the sale now. It's less than 50 % off.

That's right. It's $15 .99, and it's regularly going to be retailing for $40.

It's $24. You say $15 .99, yeah? Oh, I see. You save.

I'm sorry. I read it wrong. You save $15 .99. That's right. Okay, great.

And if anybody wants a direct link to that very page at heritagebooks .org

with this offer, if you email me at chrisarnson at gmail .com, I'll send you the exact link so it's not difficult for you.

But if you're not going to do that, heritagebooks .org, and you can even type in John Owen into the search engine so you'll remember that easily,

John Owen, and this will be one of the things that comes up. Well, we're going to our first commercial break, and if anybody has a question for Ian Turner, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Ian Turner after these messages from our sponsors. ♪♪♪

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Go to royaldiadem .com and mention Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Ian Turner.

He is one of two pastors alongside of Simon O'Maney at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

We are addressing John Owens, The Nature and Causes of Apostasy from the Gospel. Our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

chrisarnzen at gmail .com if you have a question. Now, Ian, if you could, it would be wise for you, first and foremost, to explain to our listener, our listeners, plural, who this great man of God from the 17th century,

John Owen, was. This great English nonconformist who is highly regarded by Christians spanning the denominational spectrum who view him as a great hero of the faith.

So if you could tell us about this great man of God, John Owen. Definitely.

John Owen was one of the most influential Puritans, those who were pursuing the further

Reformation of England, roughly from the time of Queen Elizabeth until the time of the late 1680s when

Puritanism was in decline. John Owen, you could say a lot of things about him and the bio can go at great length, but one of his great passions was obviously the

Gospel of Christ, but a lifelong student of the Book of Hebrews, actually.

And one of the greatest, one of the great doctrines central to his heart and faith and teaching was the priesthood of Christ.

And hopefully later we can talk about reasons why, but John Owen began his studies at Oxford in 1628, around the time when

Arminianism was starting to creep back into Oxford through Archbishop Laud.

And by the early 1640s, one of his earliest works against Arminianism came out.

And that was his first sort of shot over the bow, literarily, in Puritan England.

Of course, another well -known part of John Owen's life is that he served under Oliver Cromwell during the

Commonwealth period when

Charles I was executed and there was a military rule in England for some time.

So it's a very high -level summary of who

John Owen is. Now, there were nonconformists that paid a heavy price from the hands of the

Church of England and even were banished. Did anything of that level befall

John Owen, knowing that he was also a nonconformist? John Owen certainly suffered much during the time of the splintering of alliances under the

Commonwealth. So before the restoration of the monarchy and during the time of the

Commonwealth, 1649 to 1660, Owen played a leading part. He was a subscriber to the

Solemn League and Covenant, which was the basis of unity for Scottish and English Presbyterians and other groups.

But by the early mid -1600s, where you had,

I like to call it 3 Ds, you had disease, destruction, and defeat. You had disease, the

Great Plague of 1665 of London. You had destruction, the Great Fire of London in 1666.

And you had the defeat of the English at the hands of the Dutch in 1667. Around that time, a few years earlier, you had the

Great Ejection. In 1662, St. Bartholomew's Day, where 2 ,000 ministers were expelled from their churches.

So John Owen wrote The Nature of Apostasy during a time when he described the

Church as a ship in a storm. Reformed pastors and theologians like him thought that all of the gains of Puritanism were being lost and that Roman Catholicism and Arminianism were back on the rise.

So that's a good question because it gives some of the context of Nature of Apostasy, which was written in 1676, by the way.

So about 10 years after all these defeat, disease, destruction, and ejection of Puritan ministers was taking place.

So the years after 1660 was not kind for Puritans in England.

Now, before we even get into the nature and causes of apostasy, I think we should have a definition of what apostasy is because I believe

I have heard apostasy misused by Christians who are ignorant of the actual definition of that word, and some will call a person an apostate even if they never were at all at any time professing the true doctrines of the true biblical

Christian faith. If somebody was raised a Mormon or raised a

Roman Catholic, sometimes people will call them an apostate, but isn't apostasy when somebody actually abandons the true faith?

Well, certainly it would be hard to call someone an apostate if they never professed

Christianity. So I haven't heard many people use apostasy in that way, but apostasy would be understood most people understand apostasy as what

John Owen calls total apostasy, which is you profess the faith and now you have completely renounced the doctrines of the gospel, you stand against it, you're hardened toward it, and you're not repenting.

But John Owen's work, Nature of Apostasy, and I might be getting ahead of our interview, actually is unique because he teaches total apostasy, but he also teaches the concept of partial apostasy, and he charges all of Christendom as being guilty of partial apostasy.

Oh, great. That's one of the great values of this work and why it's still a great read.

Yeah, the reason I was saying some people I have heard with my own ears misuse it is that there are people who think they are

Christians, like Mormons will say they're Christians, and even liberal mainline congregants or ministers who never believed in the genuine pillars of Christianity.

They may have even been raised believing that Jesus Christ is not truly

God or that homosexuality is a permissible activity, even celebratory, and that the murder of unborn children is completely acceptable, and all these kinds of things.

They may have been raised in one of these very leftist denominations. Now, the denominations were apostates because many of them had their origins in great men of God like John Wesley, although we have our differences, obviously, over Calvinism, which

John Wesley rejected vociferously. But you have people who or denominations, even some of the

Presbyterian denominations that are now apostate had their origins in truth.

So they were, but the individuals who were never truly believers in the pillars of the

Christian faith. Oh, the name for that is heretics. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, so apostasy needs to be dealt with very carefully, and I would urge listeners to be very careful who they read and listen to about apostasy because as John Owen makes clear in his first two chapters,

Hebrews 6, 4 -6, which the entire book is an expansion of his Hebrews commentary on.

So basically, John Owen stopped his Hebrews commentary at Hebrews 6, 4 -6 and wrote this book because there are so many issues and ways of mishandling and misinterpreting apostasy.

I'll just read it. Hebrews 6, 4 -6, For it is impossible in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the

Holy Spirit and have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age of come and then have fallen away to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the

Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. So chapter 1 of 13 of this book is

Owen's exposition of that paragraph. And chapter 2 is his detailing the errors in church history of the nature and causes of apostasy.

So one, if you would permit me, church historical controversy over apostasy was the issue of the lapsi, a group of people called the lapsi after the

Decian persecution. So when the Roman Emperor Decius, 201 -251, made an edict requiring everyone in the empire to sacrifice to the idols or face torture, some

Christians refused to do it and they became victims of torture and persecution, ending in martyrdom.

But other Christians, the lapsi, as they were called, offered the sacrifice to idols, saved their lives, and when the persecution all calmed down, when the church was back in business, there was a big controversy of how to handle these

Christians who fell away during the persecution called the lapsi, those who sacrificed to idols.

And so this controversy caused a schism in the church at Carthage over whether or not to readmit them back into church membership.

Should we require the lapsi to do certain things, like certain acts of penance before they come back?

Should we reject them completely so Novatius of Carthage held that the lapsi should all be welcomed back without any penance.

Another of the same name, a similar name, Novatian of Rome, said no, none of them are welcome back.

Cyprian, St. Cyprian, 200 -258 CE, he was a bishop of Carthage, he said, he held a mediating position, he said they can return after public penance, and they can only be baptized at the time of their death.

I'm sorry, they could only take communion again at the time of their death. So Cyprian was a mediating, but even in the 200s

AD, we have a controversy about apostasy, so Owen traces that history, this is no new question or struggle, and even today, how do we treat the lapsi, right?

How do we treat those who, in our minds, sinned, the unforgivable sin, and they're seeking readmittance, and there's hardliners, like a

Novatian of Rome, and there's those who we would think are too lenient, like Novatus of Carthage, and then there are some who take a mediating position, like Cyprian, but this is a very relevant issue, even today, and it's rooted in church history, and how we handle passages like Hebrews 6, 4 -6.

Well, we are going to be getting much more deeply involved in this subject when we return from our midway break.

Please be patient with us, folks. The midway break is typically a little longer than the other breaks in the show, because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida, who airs this program twice a day, once in morning drive and once in the evening, in a rerun format from the previous day, they require a longer break in the middle because the

FCC requires of them to localize Iron Trip and Zion Radio geographically to Lake City, Florida, and they do that with their own public service announcements and other local things that they air in the middle of the show.

We, on the other hand, simultaneously air our globally heard commercials during this live broadcast, so we ask of you to use this time wisely.

Please, number one, write down as much of the contact information as you possibly can, provided by as many of our advertisers as you possibly can, so that you can more frequently and successfully respond to our advertisers.

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Write down the information, the contact information, for our advertisers, and simply thank them for sponsoring

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But also, use this time, obviously, to send in questions to Ian Turner at chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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And if you have a personal and private question, we would allow you to remain anonymous. But if it's a general question, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Ian Turner after these messages from our sponsors. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.

I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnson of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the

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Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland who wants you to know about a guest on the show he really loves hearing interviewed,

Dr. Joe Moorcraft. I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland.

Going back to 2005, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is

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Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards and Dr.

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.com and the NASB is my Bible of choice. Here's a great way for your church to help keep

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air. Pastors, are your pew Bibles tattered and falling apart?

Consider restocking your pews with the NASB. And tell the publishers you heard about them from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Go to nasbible .com. That's nasbible .com to place your order.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said, Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read.

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One of the titles that they feature at solid -ground -books .com is Biblical Theology, the

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So go to solid -ground -books .com, purchase generously, and always mention that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Before I return to Ian Turner, who's our guest today, we just have a couple of very important announcements to make.

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Also, folks, do not forget to mark on your calendar September 15th, 16th and 17th.

That is a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And those are the dates that my dear friend of many years,

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for updates on this three -day event, September 15th, 16th and 17th in Lancaster.

That's Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Lancaster. Finally, if you are not a member of a

Christ -honoring, biblically faithful, theologically solid, doctrinally sound church like Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, well,

I have extensive lists of biblically faithful churches spanning the globe and I've helped many people in our audience all over the world find churches, sometimes within just a couple of minutes from where they live.

In fact, I introduced two of our listeners in Australia who were searching for a church, who contacted me to a church plant that Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has been involved in in Perth, Australia, pastored by Alan Beardmore.

One of those audience members of Ironsharpensironradio has joined that church and I hope that the other has visited by now.

But wherever you live, if you're without a good, solid church home, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com

and put I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Ian Turner. He is one of two pastors at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

We are discussing John Owen's The Nature and Causes of Apostasy from the Gospel. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give his first name at least. City and state and country of residence. Before I go to any of our audience questions that have already come in,

Ian, we have defined apostasy. Perhaps you could provide for us some of the causes of apostasy, according to John Owen.

Definitely. Before giving some of the causes, I forgot also to give the threefold nature of apostasy.

So, in his treatise, apostasy is from the doctrine of the gospel, the holiness of the gospel, and the worship of the gospel.

So, three possible areas where apostasy can begin, and they're intermingled.

So, falling away in gospel holiness can lead to falling away in gospel doctrine, or vice versa, or allowing unbiblical worship styles to prevail in one's church can lead to partial apostasy in holiness, and then to doctrine.

So, the gospel doctrine, holiness, worship triad shapes

Owen's understanding of apostasy. You can apostatize totally or partially, starting in one of those three areas.

But over half the treatise is devoted to, guess which one of those? Apostasy from gospel doctrine.

So, that is the chief area where Owen is focusing on.

And so, moving on to the causes of why people apostatize from these three areas.

Yeah, in terms of the causes, very early on in the book, Owen asks, is it bemoaning the decline of gospel faithfulness and the decline of the influence of the

Reformation and Puritanism in churches in his day? He asks, is it the decline in people's holiness and morality that is rampant that's led to a decline in reformed doctrine and biblical truth?

Or is it a decline in biblical truth and doctrine that's led to this rampant immorality that's been on the rise in, you know, 1670s, 1660s

England? And it's really a both -and. And the three -fold truth, holiness, worship, shape of apostasy, any one of those things can be an entry point in the cause.

But negligence of our hearts in terms of the holiness area, negligence, trying to adapt our worship in our churches to the tastes and methods and ways of the world in our worship can lead to loosening up our morality or even neglect of gospel doctrine, neglect of keeping the truth as we've received it from Christ and the apostles.

And so, any one of those areas can be a cause, and that's why Owen is over and over again is counseling readers to take heed if they think they stand lest they fall.

Well, we have an anonymous listener who has a question for you. The listener says,

I'm remaining anonymous so as not to offend unnecessarily my very dear friends who are

Presbyterian. But I was wondering if the belief in infant baptism has created a nominal

Christianity that has led many of the denominations that were once historically faithful into apostasy because of the fact that children are raised thinking they are already truly saved and not treated as a mission field.

That's an excellent question, I think, because one of the things that I greatly admire about the aforementioned

Dr. Joel Beakey, even though he is a Pato Baptist, he agrees with Baptists that children are to be viewed as a mission field.

And there are some Pato Baptists who approach their children in that way, and there are some who are vehemently opposed to that.

They will insist that their children are of the elect until they prove themselves to be false converts later on in life and totally abandon the faith.

And even saying that, it's got to be a real, truly

Christian and biblically faithful church to even view the kids as apostate and false converts under those circumstances.

So does the listener make sense? And did John Owen, being a

Pato Baptist himself, also view children as a mission field rather than automatically presume that they are of the elect?

Yeah, there's a lot in that question that I have questions about, but off the bat

I would say that if there were Baptists in Owen's day who are also falling into nominalism and sliding out of the

Reformation into Arminianism and Socinianism, then I don't think it would be exactly an issue with the

Presbyterian model of church government, per se. But there's plenty of Baptists who fall into nominalism as well, and certainly

I could see how an unhealthy practice of Presbyterian polity could lead to spiritually damaging outcomes, like the listener here who asked this question describes, definitely.

But there are Presbyterian churches who do treat their children as a mission field, and I think you'd really have to take it case -by -case, church -by -church, than making denominationally broad statements like that.

But that's all I'm going to say about that at this point. Yeah, and I understand what you mean by Baptists becoming nominal, especially,

I would say, and this is something that isn't my thought originally.

This is something that comes from the lips of pastors in the Bible Belt. But unfortunately, when in the

Bible Belt there is such a prevalence of churches that call themselves Christian, and you have people raised for generations in the faith where they are told from infancy, as they are growing up, even in Baptist churches, that they are

Christians because their daddy was a preacher, their granddaddy was a preacher, and their great -great -granddaddy was a preacher, and all that.

That's right. And in some of these Baptist churches, and the Southern Baptist Church is notorious for this, and this comes from Southern Baptist pastors that I know, a teenager or a 12 -year -old may automatically be baptized just because of the fact they say, well, it's time for our son or daughter to be baptized.

And you'll have a 12 - or 13 -year -old who is spiritually lifeless being baptized when they never should have been plunged into those waters.

And they're really treating baptism just as a paedo -baptist would, because they're not insisting upon a credible profession of repentance and faith.

That's right. That's right. So, yeah, the listener does ask an important question.

I would trace a lot of the causes back to the heart, as you're implying in your excellent analysis there.

By the way, Anonymous, if you give me, obviously off -air through an email, your full name and mailing address, you have won a free copy of a book by Sinclair Ferguson, John Owen, on the

Christian life, Compliments of Banner of Truth. Their website is banneroftruth .org. And we will have

CVBBS .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, ship that out to you at no charge to you or to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

If you're a first -time questioner also, you will, in addition to that book by Sinclair Ferguson, you'll get a

New American Standard Bible for free as well. So make sure you give us your full name and mailing address and let us know if you're a first -time questioner.

We have Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says,

How would the Arminians of Owen's day been wrong on apostasy other than the fact that I know that Arminians, even today, if they are truly full -blown five -point

Arminian, will believe that a true Christian who apostatizes loses their salvation, whereas the

Reformed believe that person was never saved to begin with. He was only a professor of Christianity.

So what was the problem with the Arminians back in Owen's day in regard to this topic?

Well, yeah, the problem with the Arminians in Owen's day was centered on the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.

So the Arminians would deny the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints and say that salvation, one who truly possessed salvation, could finally lose it.

And much of Owen's energy and literary output was aimed at the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints specifically.

So that's the answer to your question, what was the issue with Arminianism in Owen's day? It was the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.

Of course, as you know, Jacob Arminius published the

Five Points of the Remonstrant in 1610. Arminianism was condemned eight to nine years later by the

Canons of Dort. And by the 1630s,

Arminianism was creeping into Puritan Reformation England, and that even caused

Owen to leave Oxford because of the Arminian influence growing at Oxford.

So his first work is Display of Arminianism, 1643.

And I think it's important to back up a little bit and profile

Owen and his theological interest. Arguably, his theological interest was the priesthood of Christ, because Owen perceived that that doctrine, the priesthood of Christ, was under attack by the three most powerful enemies of the day,

Roman Catholicism, Arminianism, and Socinianism, which is basically the precursor to Unitarianism, they deny the deity of Christ.

So Carl Truman very cogently explains these three enemies and why it relates to the priesthood of Christ in Owen's view.

So for Owen, the priesthood of Christ becomes a three -front battlefield because the

Roman Catholics undermine Christ's once -for -all priestly sacrifice by their insistence upon the

Mass and on the intermediary role of the human priesthood. The Arminians undermine the effectiveness of Christ's priestly work through their understanding of a universal atonement and their semi -Pelagian notion of free will, which means

Christ's priesthood establishes salvation only as a possibility, not as an actuality.

And the Socinians undermine Christ's priesthood by denying that Christ is very

God of very God, and thus they reconfigure Christ's priesthood as a little more than a moral example for us to follow.

So when we single out Arminianism, it's really Arminianism, Roman Catholicism, and Socinianism that Owen is going after by majoring on the priesthood of Christ, and that is all throughout the nature of apostasy, pointing readers back to Christ's sufficiency and calling us out of complacent lethargy and negligence in our spiritual walk in doctrine and holiness and in worship.

But to answer the reader's question, the issue in Owen's day with Arminianism was the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.

They denied it. Owen defended it. By the way, thank you,

Ronald, in Eastern Suffolk County. You have also won the book by Sinclair Ferguson.

John Owen on The Christian Life. Make sure we have your mailing address so that we can have

CVBBS .com ship that out to you. And we once again thank BannerofTruth .org

for providing us a limited number of these books. We have

Christian from Amityville, Long Island, New York, which is my hometown where I was born and raised.

And Christian wants to know, using Owen's knowledge of why apostasy occurs, how do we apply that to what happened to the major Ivy League schools that were once Puritan in their emphasis and now are totally apostate, teaching abhorrent things, and even at least one of them has an atheist for a chaplain?

Do you know anything about the history of how Yale and Harvard and Princeton and any of the other primary schools that began with a

Puritan root and now they're just totally— there may be a remnant of believers there, but they are primarily totally apostate, as the listener said.

When John Owen goes after the Socinians, specifically, he's going after a form of rationalism that really is the precursor to the

Enlightenment in Europe in the late 1600s and early 1700s, beginning with Descartes and Baruch Spinoza and going onward to German higher criticism of the

Bible, Julius Wellhausen, all those things. By the time we get to Harvard and Yale and Ivy League schools, you have this sort of separation of religious knowledge from scientific knowledge and Enlightenment -style denial of the sufficiency of scripture and things like that.

So I would put the decline of Ivy League schools on the timeline of the ravages of the

Enlightenment, really, on the West. And in John Owen's day, of course, the

Enlightenment hasn't happened yet, but it has its precursor in Socinianism.

Socinianism arose in the 16th century. It was based on a rationalistic reading of the

Bible. It raised questions about the divinity of Christ and depended on the human mind and historical details rather than the testimony of the

Spirit in their reading of the Bible. And that led them to denying the Trinity, denying the divinity of Christ.

And so John Owen, when he attacks Socinianism, he attacks their view of the human mind. He attacks their view that you can be rational apart from the aid of the

Holy Spirit and in the context of scripture. And it's excellent.

I mean, it's relevant, his attacks on, his polemics against Socinianism in this book, but basically what you get in Socinianism is what leads to the

Enlightenment and the decline of Ivy League schools and the so -called higher and destructive biblical criticisms that are born in Europe.

So short answer to the question is, Owen is dealing with a lot of these precursors to the

Enlightenment that destroy biblical authority in his defense of biblical

Christianity against Socinianism. And it really centers on errors concerning the human mind.

Is there such a thing as unaided human reason? Can our unaided human reason arrive at truth?

And Owen says no. He exposes the pride of Enlightenment -style rationalism, although the

Enlightenment didn't happen yet. The spiritual bankruptcy of the kind of view that our human mind can arrive at any truth apart from the aid of the

Spirit and scripture. And so I think that's sort of around the way answering of that question.

Thank you, Christian, and make sure we have your full mailing address in Amityville, New York, because you have also won a free copy of the book by Sinclair Ferguson, John Owen on the

Christian Life. And CVBBS .com will ship that out to you, and we thank

BannerofTruth .org for providing us with a limited number of copies. We have

Arnie in Perry County, Long Island, New York. And Arnie says, I have often heard various guests on Chris Arnson's show,

Iron Sharpens Iron, who have said that one of the greatest values of confessionalism is that a church's adherence to a confession is a guardrail against apostasy, because a church has to either abandon the confession before entering into apostasy officially as a church, or they have to make it clear that they are merely giving the confession lip service and teaching something contrary to what the confession says.

Do you also share this view of the value of confessions? Certainly, I share a general view.

I can't vouch for what various guests have said, but my view on confessions is that they are ministerial, not magisterial.

In short, they minister, they help, but they do not have a magisterial or end -all, be -all inspired.

They don't share the same role that scripture does. So they're helpful, but if anyone thinks that adherence or faithfulness to a confession keeps the heart, and that if you are confessionally precise, then therefore you are immune from apostasy, there's other conversations that need to be had.

When Owen directs us in Chapter 13, the final chapter of The Nature of Apostasy, how to escape its power, he gives five directives, and none of them are brush up on your confession.

The first is labor for a sense of God's glory and our duty in the matter of apostasy. The second is keep watch over your heart to guard against dangers and neglect of duty.

The third is refuse merely to rest in your outward privileges in the church. The fourth is be aware of the infection of national vices.

And the final and fifth one is avoid the errors of Christians who alienate others from the gospel.

He might be talking about Roman Catholics there, but none of those are brush up on your confessional knowledge.

Although confessions are ministerial, they're not magisterial. They're helpful, but they're not the synonym for biblical faithfulness.

Right. And I guess to somehow reflect an agreement with the listener who is remembering some of my guests, at least in partiality, is that, like, for instance, when you have a church like the

PCUSA, and you have a church like the mainline

Anglican Church and the Episcopalian Church, the Episcopal Church USA, there had to come a moment in their history when they were fiddling with or dumbing down or diluting their various confessions.

Like the PCUSA was founded on the Westminster Confession too, but they obviously reached a point when they were starting to reword it and then initially make it non -essential as a requirement for being

Presbyterian. And the same thing with the Anglicans and the Episcopalians with the 39

Articles, and the same thing with the Congregationalists with the Savoy Declaration. The confessions were spelling out what historically the church has always believed to be essential truths in summary form.

And it should be a red light and an alarm to anyone in any denomination or fellowship, or even as an independent congregation like a

Reformed Baptist Church, if something is going on so weird that is drifting too far from the history of what your

Founding Fathers believed, not that they are infallible or inerrant like the

Scriptures, but there should be at least an alarm that should be listened to carefully, and it has to be examined why this is occurring.

Wouldn't you think that makes sense? Absolutely. Absolutely. That alarm can't merely be the force of powerful personalities in one's denomination, or the alarm of those who are loud disputers for fidelity to a document.

That alarm has to come from the Word and the Spirit, and then it's going to be effective. So my point is yes, but it's got to be from God.

Oh yeah, of course. I mean, you can have a person who believes intellectually everything in the 1689

London Baptist Confession and be lost as lost can be. I mean, having a head knowledge, even an accurate head knowledge, even a meticulously accurate head knowledge, doesn't mean that your heart is beating with new life from the

Holy Spirit. That's why we can apostatize either from doctrine, from holiness, or from worship.

That's right. And we have to go to our final break right now. If you have a question, please send it in as soon as you can before we run out of time.

ChrisArnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Ian Turner after these messages from our sponsors.

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We're now back with my guest today, Ian Turner, one of two pastors at Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

We have been discussing John Owens, The Nature and Causes of Apostasy from the Gospel. And before I go to any listener question,

I really want to make sure that you give at least a summary of the main things that you intended to say today before we run out of time and you don't have time to say them.

So if you could give us a really great summary of the emphasis that Owen had on this very important issue.

Oh, thank you. I was hoping to be able to at least foreground what

Owen emphasizes here. Yes, the distinction between total and partial apostasy, it strikes the conscience.

It makes one ask, you know, where am I in my faith? So in one way, Owen is definitely afflicting the comfortable.

But what I wanted to say was that Owen's pastoral heart shines through this volume in that he also comforts the afflicted.

Those who have been through rough times in their battle with sanctification, those who have fallen into gross sin and who are wondering, can

I return to God? Owen is continuously refuting various ways that churches and theologians have misused and misapplied

Hebrews 6, 4 to 6 to the hurt of Christians who simply are trying to return to God.

He clearly and unequivocally says that if you are repentant, you are recoverable.

If you are repentant, you are not an apostate. If you are coming to Christ, if you're repenting from your sin, if you are seeking cleansing by the blood of Jesus Christ, you know, pursuing a way back to God, you are not a total apostate.

So Hebrews 6, 4 to 6, he repeatedly says throughout this volume, is not referring to those whose consciences are prompting them to seek repentance.

So anyone, pastors, ministers, those who are involved in Christian counseling or discipleship, we should be careful, as Owen is, in applying both the warnings, but also the comforts of scripture to people in various spiritual conditions.

This is where I wanted to emphasize here, I'm surprised no one asked, honestly, this is where my, the greatest value of this volume is,

Hebrews 6, 4 to 6 is not talking about those who were truly saved. So, you know, especially at the end of chapter 12,

Owen's pastoral heart is going out to those who really want to pursue holiness, but they're finding that some habitual particular sin is thwarting them at every turn.

He encourages them to seek counsel from an able spiritual mentor or guide in their life.

He encourages us to violently and suddenly execute resolves against even the first motion of the sin we're struggling with, without parley or debate, he says.

You know, gouging out the eye, cutting off the right hand, and he encourages us to be devoted to constant private prayer against the power of whatever sin is entangling us.

So, yes, Owen's a theologian, but he has a pastoral heart, and it shines throughout the volume, especially with those who are struggling in sin, wondering if they can return to God.

If you are seeking repentance, you are not an apostate, regardless of how those who are mishandling

Hebrews 6, 4 to 6 tell you otherwise. So, yeah, keep the heart, keep close to Christ.

There is hope. As long as you are alive, come to the Lord Jesus Christ today.

That's really the emphasis that I wanted to leave listeners with.

Amen, and that goes hand in hand with a common misconception about the unpardonable sin.

There are people who are truly repentant believers who are terrified that they have somehow committed the unpardonable sin.

It doesn't matter what their mental and spiritual condition is at this moment.

They may be broken with a true heart of repentance and yet still be terrified that they're damned because they've committed this sin and there's nothing they can do about it.

But that's not the case. If they were truly repentant and terrified over this, isn't that a sign that they never violated that sin to begin with?

That's right. That's right. Yeah, and that shines all the way through this treatise and through scripture.

The only unpardonable sin is a final rejection of Christ without ever repenting.

That's the unpardonable sin, refusing to repent. So, yeah, it's a very encouraging read and it's very relevant, especially in our day when we see, you know, religious leaders and evangelical personalities defecting from the faith.

You know, the time is critical now for Christians everywhere to engage in careful study of apostasy and its nature and its causes so that we can fight its influence upon our doctrine, upon our progress in holiness, personal holiness, and in our worship practices.

Amen. And we're out of time. And don't forget about the offer from HeritageBooks .org,

HeritageBooks .org, where you can get $15 .99 off of the retail price of $40 from the apostasy from the

Gospel, Volume 14 of John Owen. And that's HeritageBooks .org.

Get that at the discount while that is still available. We want to thank you so much,

Ian, for being such a wonderful guest. I want to remind our listeners that the website for Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle is gracebaptistcarlisle .org,

gracebaptistcarlisle .org. I look forward to your return to the program, Ian, if you are so willing and if God, of course, is willing, first and foremost.

We thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write. I hope you have a safe, happy, and healthy Independence Day celebration tomorrow.

And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater