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 George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next 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.

Grace Baptist Church, Puritan Reformed Seminary, and Ian Turner’s Background

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.

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.

That was in the days when he was not nearly as globally known as he is now. 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. Beecke 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. The first graduating class, I believe, was early 2000s, around 2004.

Their new building was erected around that time. 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 on this program. I remember very vividly how lovingly and graciously he reached out to me after the passing of my precious wife over a decade ago.

He gave me his book on depression.

That's right. That's right. Excuse me, I made a little bit of a mistake. The first graduating class was 2004. Anyway, Dr. Murray, Dr. Van Doodewaard became professor of church history. Dr. Barrett joined the faculty as professor of Old Testament in 2012.

Dr. Kelderman was appointed dean of students. My doctoral supervisor in the Old Testament program that I just finished, Dr. Timmer, joined several years ago. Just a phenomenal faculty. 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. Beeky 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 are 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, go to rts .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 saved 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 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 we had a relatively happy childhood from the child's perspective. I 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.

So it's kind of a tourist area. It's right on the 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 it 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, what 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.

You know, 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, 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 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.

Call to Pastoral Ministry and Seminary Training

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, you know, 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 I was, 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 Carlisle, the question was always open. Is the Lord calling me to more academic ministry? 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.

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 on the 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.

John Owen, Apostasy, and the Historical Context of His Treatise

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'm sorry, I read it wrong. You say $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.

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.

John Owen, the Puritans, and the Priesthood of Christ

Definitely. Yeah, 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 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, you know, Owen played a leading part.

He was a subscriber to the Solemn League and Covenant, which was, you know, 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 three 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.

You know, around that time, few years earlier, that 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. You know, 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 a 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, but, you know, 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, you know, people who are 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 has, 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 to 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 to 6, and wrote this book, because there are so many issues and ways of mishandling and misinterpreting apostasy, where this, I'll just read it.