August 10, 2016 Show with George Grant on “Thomas Chalmers: A Voice of Biblically-Shaped Sanity from the Past in a World Gone Mad”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 10th day of August 2016.

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I'm so delighted to have back on the program Dr. George Grant, who is pastor of Parish Presbyterian Church, founder of New College Franklin and president of the

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King's Meadows Study Center and founder of Franklin Classical School in Tennessee.

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Today we're discussing Thomas Chalmers, a voice of biblically shaped sanity from the past in a world gone mad.

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And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to the program, Dr. George Grant. It is so great to be with you again,

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Chris. Bless you. And I know that my former co -host, who will be visiting

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Iron Sharpens Iron on occasion, but he was called back to work after medical leave, the

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Reverend Buzz Taylor. And I know that he is probably weeping somewhere uncontrollably because he could not be here today because Dr.

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Grant is one of his modern day heroes. But a shout out to you,

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Reverend Buzz Taylor, wherever you are. And I hope that you are blessed by at least the recording of the program.

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And we look forward to you returning whenever you can during your busy work schedule.

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And I thank you for all the months that you served on this program every day as my co -host on Iron Sharpens Iron.

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And as I said, I hope that you can come back soon, at least for an occasional visit.

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But before we go into the subject at hand of Thomas Chalmers and his being a voice of biblically shaped sanity from the past in a world gone mad,

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I want to know something more about the Parish Presbyterian Church. You've already explained these things on your last visit, but there are new listeners to Iron Sharpens Iron, I'm discovering almost every day, it seems.

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And I would like you to let our listeners know something about the church and the college that you founded and the

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King's Meadows Study Center. Well, thanks. Yeah, the church is actually a church plant of the

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Presbyterian Church in America. It's the second church plant we've done in Franklin. And we are on the east side of the beautiful old

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Civil War town of Franklin, Tennessee. It was established by old

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Reverend Revolutionary War veterans in the beautiful hills of Middle Tennessee. It's a great place to live, and it's a great place for the work of the ministry.

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My wife and I have been here for more than 20 years, and we've just really loved this place and have made it our home and are delighted to have been able to start schools and be involved in a lot of community efforts over the course of those years.

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The church itself is a fairly typical

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Presbyterian Church in America congregation. We're not trying to do anything new.

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We're attempting to be faithful to what the scriptures call us to and to speak boldly and prophetically into our culture.

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And that means that we've got to be involved in a lot of different things. So the church has helped spawn a number of different educational and outreach ministries.

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Some of those that you mentioned, King's Meadows Study Center, our K -12 classical school,

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Franklin Classical School. We worked with another local church,

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Cornerstone Presbyterian, which is a church plant of ours, to establish New College Franklin, which is a four -year classical liberal arts college.

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And we've got lots of other things that we've been involved in. We have something called the

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Franklin Resolves to help businessmen understand the issues of the day from a biblical perspective.

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We've got something called Clapham Forum, which is an opportunity to host events for local community folks to learn about what's driving the headlines of our day, again, from a biblical perspective.

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So just a great place and a great time to be involved in all of this work.

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And I want to repeat our email address for those of you who would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr.

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Grant. It's chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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And please include your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. And you may remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable, but please only do so if for some reason you find the need to remain anonymous.

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Perhaps you're bringing up something that your church disagrees with or something that makes you feel uncomfortable identifying yourself.

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But other than that, please let us know at least your first name and where you are from. And our subject today is

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Thomas Chalmers and how his biblically shaped voice of sanity is much needed in our world today, a world gone mad.

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I know that Thomas Chalmers was a great and is a great hero from the 19th century, a hero of the

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Christian faith, the first moderator of the Free Church of Scotland after the disruption, and the man who was at the center of a recovery that brought the churches in Scotland from mediocrity, indifference, and unbelief to new conditions of spiritual vitality.

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But if you could let us know something more about this man and why you wanted to discuss his legacy today and why we need to learn from much of what he believed today.

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Well, Thomas is one of my great heroes, Chris. I have been collecting all of his works, and they're hard to find despite the fact that there are more than 100 works that he wrote during his lifetime.

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So I've been collecting them over the last 20 years or so, and I am continually amazed at both his brilliance, his genius, his wide -ranging interest in the application of the

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Christian worldview, but also his incredible relevance to the issues that we face today.

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It's almost unconscionable that he is practically a Christian, and that he is practically a forgotten figure.

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As late as just before World War I, the great historian William Beveridge was able to say,

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Thomas Chalmers, as all the world knows, was born in the Fifeshire town of Amster in the year 1780.

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Well, that sentence is full of irony today because, of course, all the world doesn't know any of that, and wouldn't know why it would be important to know any of that.

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Again, a great biographer of our own time,

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Ian Murray, has said, there is not any difficulty in explaining the indifference of the modern secular mind to Chalmers, and neither is it surprising that churchmen of a liberal persuasion should lack enthusiasm for his memory.

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But what is more problematical is the question of why evangelical

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Christianity itself should not have made so little of him for these many years.

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And I share that dismay of Ian Murray's, that Chalmers is a man who is a

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Christian who has really fallen out of memory for most evangelical

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Christians, and even Chalmers' own tribe, the

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Reformed world. He's just a forgotten figure. And so I think it's really important for us to talk about it, and why, as you say, his biblically shaped thinking is so important for a world gone mad, a world like our own world today.

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Well, it's no mystery why the broadly evangelical world of the 21st century might not know who he is, but why on earth are people who love the

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Reformed faith, who typically are also very much in tune with history, who are typically known as voracious readers, and who are among those who want desperately to learn from the past, the great minds that have lived before us as opposed to today, where everybody's looking for some fresh new voice or thought, which usually means that it's not in the pages of the scriptures.

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Right. But why is it that we, of all people, largely do not know who

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Thomas Chalmers is or his legacy that he has left? Well, Chalmers' great friend and co -laborer,

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William Wilberforce, said that he thought that future generations might find

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Chalmers difficult simply because he is so profound. Sometimes reading

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Chalmers is not easy reading. Part of that is that Chalmers was a man in the pre -Victorian days, and so wrote with that sort of florid, pre -Victorian style.

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Part of it is he was conversant and published on a wide range of subjects, everything from astronomy and chemistry to church dogmatics and history to the problems of the banking system and economics, all the way across the board to devotional literature.

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So that might be a part of the problem, but I think part of it is that his vision for the growth of the church and for the advance of the gospel in modern times is so counterintuitive to the modern mindset that I think many moderns have just dismissed it.

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That's amazing that he, since he had basically an interest and a command of such a vast spectrum of subjects that he would be left behind and not return to often as a source of information today when there are so many things, so many areas in life where the

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Christian faith is being challenged, it's being mocked, it's being rejected, it's being ignored because of the fact that they think, the society around us think, that we do not have the true answers to nearly anything unless, of course, somebody is in desperate need of help and Christians are very often the first people they turn to even if they despise what they believe.

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And of course, there is very good reason why a lot of the lost world laugh at Christianity because there are a lot of major figures in Christianity today who are among the most popular writers and televangelists and radio hosts who unconsciously are making fools of themselves.

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Right, right. Well, you know, the thing is, Chalmers was addressing the problems of emerging industrialism, of urban crowding, of a new kind of poverty, urban poverty, multi -generational unemployment, and his answers run very contrary to the kinds of answers that we moderns tend to pose.

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And the result is that oftentimes his model is that we moderns tend to pose is dismissed.

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It was oftentimes dismissed in his own day by those who were pushing forward the progressive agenda of late 19th and early 20th century progress, and it's still very much a kind of unpopular model.

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Chalmers believed that there were biblical answers to the problems that faced modern world, and that the way forward was to remember the pathways, the old paths, as J .C.

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Ryle called them, of the past, and to walk in those surefire pathways.

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He was an advocate of church planting. He was an advocate of churches equipping and training the poor for productivity.

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He was an advocate of entrepreneurial activity to overcome the obstacles of the corporatization and centralization of the economy.

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He believed in biblical fidelity and thus was an ardent apologist.

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But the other thing was that he foresaw the day of the intrusions of the messianic state on the function of the church, and stood very boldly, along with his friend

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William Wilberforce, against wickedness in high places.

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And it made him profoundly politically incorrect.

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Would he have been, I don't know if they even used the term, libertarian back then, but if you were to describe him today, if he were alive, would he have leaned more in that direction, a very small government and so on, as a result of these views he had?

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He did advocate small representative government. He was, like most good

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Britons of his day, he was very loyal to the monarchy, but he had a number of very, very public battles with politicians in both of the major parties that Britain had at the time, the

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Whigs and the Tories, and would often argue that the greatest enemies of the church were the conservatives who were concentrating power in their own hands and in the hands of the rich against the common people.

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And so he was very much an advocate of taxation reform, of the emancipation of lands, of what

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G .K. Chesterton a generation later would call distributivism, putting much more of the economy in local and widely decentralized hands rather than centralized in London or in Edinburgh.

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So very much foreshadowed sort of the counterintuitive conservatism of libertarianism.

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But, of course, he was a very ardent advocate of biblical moral ethics, and he was very much an advocate of religious ethics as well.

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And so, would not be like some of our libertarians today, who would argue that not only in the economic and political realm, but also in the moral realm, no rules apply.

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Right. I just recently interviewed a Christian libertarian who stated that those who believe in a woman's so -called freedom to have an abortion is absurd because one of the libertarians' concepts of the role of the government, one of the very few roles that the government is supposed to have, according to libertarians, is the protection of life, and therefore they should not be letting the most defenseless among us be easily murdered by anyone.

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Right. And that would have been Tolmer's view as well. He was a strong advocate of the care of the needy and the poor and the despised.

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He was a great champion for the poor and devised ways for the poor to be lifted out of poverty without government assistance.

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And that was a part of his great vision. He was also a strong advocate of missions and helped to start the modern missions movement, as we know it, starting the

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British Bible Societies and creating funding plans for the planting of churches and the sending of missionaries and the printing of Bibles.

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He was quite extraordinary in that regard. Was he influenced at all by William Carey then, who is known as the father of modern day missions?

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Well, they were to some degree contemporaries. And so the

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Baptist movement there in England that eventually sent

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Carey to India was very well connected to Charles Merson. They were kind of on parallel paths and wound up being allies in those early days and the launch of what became the greatest missions movement that the church has ever known during the

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Victorian age. Now, you brought up something very important about Chalmers' compassion for the poor and his genius involved in coming up with strategies to help the poor to not just be fed and clothed but to provide for themselves a living and so on.

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There is obviously, as you know, a division amongst those who profess to be

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Christian today. You have a lot of people who lean towards voting for liberal political candidates, even if they are pro -life and vehemently opposed to abortion and other things like that, but they really think that the conservatives' model for government is not compassionate and not even concerned with the needs of the poor.

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They view that as un -Christlike. Then you have on the other side of the divide the more conservative views of those who vote more

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Republican or even Libertarian who say that is not the job of the government to be involved in rescuing the poor out of their poverty.

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That is to be in the hands of benevolent citizens and the church should be involved in that.

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Then, of course, you have people who will say, yes, I like that idea too, but the church isn't doing it adequately and we need help, etc.

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I'm getting evicted from my house tomorrow. What am I going to do? Nobody is helping me.

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So that kind of thing. How was Chalmers' a voice of sanity in that regard?

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Chalmers would have recognized that dilemma immediately because it was the same sort of Whigs that were sort of the radical progressives, the reformers, who wanted more and more government intrusion for the sake of compassion.

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To be sure, the origin of the Whig movement grew up out of the work of people like Wilberforce and Shaftesbury and others.

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Then there were the Tories, who were really the voice of the landholders and the earliest of the industrialists.

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There really wasn't much of a voice for ordinary people anywhere. Chalmers recognized that neither the

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Tories nor the Whigs had a really biblical answer for the cure of the poor. He also recognizes the church was not doing its job.

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Part of his reform was to demonstrate that the old parish model of caring for one another in neighborhoods, having a mechanism by which accountability and responsibility, along with equipping and training, could take place through the means of the local church.

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He wanted to demonstrate that that model, which worked well in the countryside, in small towns and villages, could actually work in big cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh.

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He created a model to do just that, utilizing the old catechesis model of Richard Baxter, the

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Puritan. He showed that by going from house to house and caring for the poor, equipping them, starting training schools to teach women how to sew, men how to labor in marketable trades, that you could actually end the cycle of poverty and thus not have to lean on either the big government compassion promises of the left or the monopolistic, corporatistic models of greed on the right -hand side of the political spectrum, with the

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Tories. So Thomas really said, in a sense, a pox on both your houses.

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The model that politics has foisted upon us is not biblical on either side of the aisle.

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And what we've got to do is we've got to restore, starting with the church, these models of care and cultural transformation that makes the intrusion of the state actually unwanted and irrelevant.

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And we have a listener, CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, who wants to know, was

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Thomas Chalmers affected by Darwinianism? Since I know they are both 19th century figures, and I know that individuals like B .B.

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Warfield, who were very sound otherwise, were somewhat influenced by that unbiblical ideology.

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Well, I believe the Origin of the Species was written before, or should I say after,

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Chalmers died, so I don't know. Right. Almost 20 years. Almost 20 years after Chalmers died,

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Origin of the Species was published. And so, yeah,

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Chalmers was a part of that whole, sort of, Scottish rationalistic enlightenment as, you know, it was inescapable.

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Everyone was affected by that in that day. But one of the things that is very clear from his writing is that he believed that modern science, when exercising genuine humility, will always confirm what the

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Bible says. And that what Moses wrote in Pentateuch is to be taken as genuine history.

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And a lot of people don't know, and I don't know why conservatives, especially those in the pro -life movement, don't hammer this every time there is a public debate on the issue of evolution, or even when politicians are asked routinely, do you believe in evolution or creation?

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And they're usually mocked, like Chris Matthews loves to mock and laughs hysterically whenever a political candidate says that he does not believe in evolution.

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I don't know why they don't bring up the original title of that book by Darwin, which is

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The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the

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Struggle for Life. And that is a very easily verifiable documented fact, and that whole theory comes out of pure racism.

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And it's amazing that conservatives don't really hammer that fact over and over again in public when they have media exposure.

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I'm just puzzled by it. Yeah. Chalmers was very familiar with Thomas Malthus, and Malthus was a pre -Darwin thinker focused largely on the population issue.

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He posited that population was growing exponentially whereas natural resources were growing only arithmetically, and therefore he believed that within a very short period of time, a generation or two at most, the world was facing a population bomb.

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And therefore he advocated the elimination of large numbers of what eventually people like Margaret Sanger would call the human weeds.

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So he was kind of the father of the modern eugenics and population movements and helped give a lot of the philosophical grounding for organizations like Planned Parenthood.

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Well, Thomas Chalmers was very well aware of Malthus' writings and actually met

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Malthus at one point during a lecture in New York in the city of Edinburgh, and was appalled by the obvious application of these ideas.

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Darwin, of course, picked up on Malthus' ideas, used them in his postulation of his theory, and so even though Darwinian thought precedes or antedates

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Chalmers, we can already see that Chalmers is anticipating some of these arguments and is already battling against them.

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And we have to go to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com, and we will get to those who are already waiting to have their questions asked and answered as soon as we can when we come back from the break.

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So don't go away. We're going to be right back with Dr. George Grant and our discussion on Thomas Chalmers.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arns and your host of Iron Sharpens Iron. And our guest today for the full two hours with 90 minutes to go is

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Dr. George Grant. We are discussing Thomas Chalmers, a great 19th century voice that needs to be heard today in a world gone mad.

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And before I return to that topic and to the listeners who are waiting to have their questions asked,

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I do want to remind you that the G3 Conference is going to be held this

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January 19th through the 21st in Atlanta, Georgia, and they are going to be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the

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Protestant Reformation. And by God's good grace, I am going to be there, of course,

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God willing, unless there is some other plan that God has that I'm unaware of. But I will be there.

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I'm scheduled to be there. I'm planning to be there. And I will have a table there to record some programs for Iron Sharpens Iron.

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And I hope that I meet many of you who listen to this program regularly at this conference,

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January 19th through the 21st, 2017. Some of the speakers include Paul Washer, Stephen J.

35:42

Lawson, D .A. Carson, Voti Baucom, my dear friend of nearly 30 years,

35:47

Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, Tim Chalies, one of the most powerful preachers

35:53

I've ever heard in my entire life, my friend Dr. Conrad M. Bayway of Kabwatha Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa, Phil Johnson of Grace to You Ministries, and quite a number of other speakers, and also

36:09

Todd Friel, who's going to be on the program, God willing. This Monday, Todd Friel is going to be discussing his book on stress and a biblical remedy for stress.

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So we hope you join us for that. But for more details on this conference, go to G3conference .com.

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That's G and the number 3, conference .com. And if you register for the conference, please tell them that you heard about it from Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

36:43

So we would really appreciate that very much. And now we are going to go to another one of our listeners, this one in a place where I would really hope that our listener

36:56

Jeff in Clinton Township, Michigan gathers a group of concerned citizens to change the name of that city's

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Clinton Township and just bothers me every time I see the name Clinton in the name of that city.

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But Jeff in Clinton Township, Michigan, he asks, and of course you already addressed some of what he asks

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Dr. Grant, but he says, being an enlightened church leader, did Chalmers impose the science of his day upon the

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Holy Scriptures? But then he also follows up with a question, did he have any dealings with the

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English preacher Octavius Winslow? Well, everybody, regardless of what age we come from, all of us wind up imposing some of our own time upon our understanding of the world.

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It's just a part of being in a day in time.

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It's one of the reasons why C .S. Lewis often would recommend, most famously in his introduction to Athanasius' On the

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Incarnation, that we read old books, that we read books outside of our time.

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He makes the argument that even our opponents, ideological and theological opponents in our own day, have certain assumptions that are just native to the times.

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So it would be foolish for anybody to say, oh, no, no, no, Chalmers or anybody else was free from the assumptions of their day.

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I will say this, I'm oftentimes surprised by how ardently

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Chalmers would argue that the geologists and the astronomers and the physicists and the chemists of his day that he had close dealings with exercise a level of humility, something that's often absent from modern science.

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But he urged them to exercise humility, knowing that science, our understanding of the natural world, is very fluid, and what we think we know with an absolute certainty in one age is scoffed at in the next age.

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So Chalmers was very, very good about that.

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In terms of the second question about Octavius Winslow, I actually do not find in any of Chalmers' correspondence any contact with Winslow.

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I'm not even sure the dates of when their lives, where they overlapped, but I have not found any correspondence.

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Well, we thank you very much, Jeff, in Clinton Township, and please keep spreading the word in Michigan and beyond about Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and it's always good to hear from you.

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One of the things that you just mentioned about people who unconsciously import contemporary thoughts into their reading of Scripture, don't you think it's very important for Christians to always remind themselves about their own fallibility, and that we all have our traditions?

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We very often view the Church of Rome and other more ceremonial religious organizations that they are just heaped with the traditions of men, but we forget that we have our own traditions, and even we unconsciously at times impose those traditions upon our hermeneutics and our exegesis of the

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Bible. Yes, and then there are these unquestioned sort of realities that our day and our time assumes to be true, and those unquestioned presuppositions become a part of our grid for thinking, which is one of the reasons why we really have to, as Christians, constantly go back to our own assumptions and evaluate them through the lens of Scripture, because we pick up by osmosis so much from our own culture unconsciously, and so it's our tradition, it's our background, it's the day and age in which we live, it's the malaise of the moment, so as Christians, part of the great task of sanctification is really bringing every thought captive to Christ and to His Lordship.

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By the way, Octavius Winslow lived nearly thirty years beyond Thomas Chalmers, just to let our listeners know.

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Yeah, I was thinking that Winslow was born sometime, what, around 1808 or 1809, and I think he died in 1878 or 79, so probably he was a very young man when

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Chalmers died, still early in his ministry. Amen.

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We have a listener, Arnie, in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who says,

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I keep hearing that the American political arena needs to return to or adopt an atmosphere of politeness and civility that we seem to have lost, but my problem with that idea is, how can you be polite and civil when you are discussing the brutal murder of unborn children?

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Well, the answer to that is that you don't resort to name -calling, you don't resort to crass or coarse language.

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It is possible to be boldly prophetic, like a Jeremiah or an

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Amos, and name names and names of people who have sinned, but always maintaining the structure of biblical virtue.

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And so, it's really important for us to love our enemies, and so we should pray for them, we should be broken -hearted over their errors, but we should be unflinching in the declaration of what sin is, and we need to be bold and prophetic in naming it and identifying it, but that can be done with Christian virtue.

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It is not necessary to resort to the kind of tomfoolery that we see in the political arena today, where buffoonish and crass name -calling and mocking and sarcasm become the rule of the day.

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You must be watching different television sets than I'm watching, because I don't know what you're talking about.

44:39

Obviously, in ad hominem, when you're personally attacking somebody like a junior high school student, you are revealing that you don't really have facts to back up what you believe, or you don't know those facts.

44:55

Unfortunately, ad hominem and glittering generality and a whole host of other logical errors are the ways that political discourse is undertaken in our day, and that's not something that is becoming of a

45:15

Christian, and we've got to lead the way in reshaping the tone as well as the terms of the debate.

45:23

But that does not mean that we shy away at all from the very, very, just the brazen disregard for truth and for the sanctity of life that exists in our day.

45:41

We can boldly prophesy, we can boldly proclaim the truth, without having to descend into the gutter.

45:51

We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who says, forgive me if I missed something because I didn't hear the program from the beginning, but can you tell us something about the background and upbringing of Thomas Chalmers that eventually shaped him to the man he became?

46:13

That's a great question, and we have not actually talked much at all about his younger years.

46:19

He was born in Fifeshire, which is that part of Scotland that is where St.

46:27

Andrews is. It's a part of that peninsula just to the east of Edinburgh, and his father was the heir of a long line of faithful Calvinists, godly, faithful catechizing members of the

46:48

Church of Scotland, and raised his very large family with the vision of being a

46:59

Christian. He was a man of biblical fidelity. Chalmers was the sixth of fourteen children.

47:05

He had eight brothers and five sisters. He was prodigious in his knowledge and learning, so much so that at the age of three, he went to the parish school to learn the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

47:29

By the time he was eleven years old, he was able to sufficiently master language, literary, and philosophical skills that he was recommended to advance his studies at the

47:43

University of St. Andrews at the age of eleven. So he was obviously a prodigious mind right from the start, seething with curiosity and curiosity, but he was unregenerate.

47:58

He did not come to know Christ until years after he was already a pastor.

48:06

He actually was ordained a couple of years early by Church of Scotland standards at the age of nineteen.

48:18

He was obviously quite brilliant, but as he would later confess, he was infected with the spirit of what was then called moderatism, or what today we would call liberalism.

48:33

So he was basically a moralist, and he believed that the object of a

48:40

Christian life was to live a good and moral life. Well, through a series of family crises that included the death of two siblings and his own long and protracted illness, he came to grips with the truth of the

48:58

Gospel, and that truth would transform him forever.

49:04

He had long had the aspiration to become a great mathematician, but after his conversion he said that he had come to realize that he had failed to learn the most basic lesson of mathematics, which is the lesson of proportion.

49:24

He thought too little of eternity and too much of temporality, and thus had lost sight of the whole of the truth of it.

49:36

So he was converted, and it instantly transformed his preaching, obviously, his other outside interests and activities, and focused on caring for the flock, and in short order became renowned for his powerful preaching and his broad -ranging vision.

50:03

And one advantage really that he had in not coming to Christ early was that he read so widely of secular literature that when he spoke he didn't sound like the average preacher.

50:20

He had a wide -ranging knowledge of science and politics and economics, and that informed his preaching and made him intensely practical, and caused ordinary people to really see the applicability of the

50:39

Christian worldview to every area of life. So while he certainly bemoaned those lost years when he thought that Christianity was a matter of do this and live, when he came to Christ and realized that it was all of grace and none of him, he bemoaned those early years, and yet God used those early years to make his mind what it was.

51:10

Well, I know that you were a founder of a classical Christian school. That sounds very much like the model of classical education, that well -rounded concept of educating people from the areas of life that Christians are exposed to, and even require, that are in the secular realm, in addition to that which is from the

51:34

Scriptures. Yes. And that was the model for all

51:39

Christian education, really, up until, say, the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th.

51:47

And so really and truly, classical Christian education is what

51:52

Cambridge and Oxford and St. Andrews and the

51:58

University of Edinburgh and Harvard and Princeton, that's what they all were.

52:04

And all of the, you know, the Boston Latin School and all of the others that fed into those institutions were also rooted in that old classical tradition that goes all the way back to the time of Augustine, actually.

52:19

Yeah, it's fascinating to learn that he was already a minister when he became, by God's mercy, a born -again believer in Christ, reminds me of Abraham Kuyper, who

52:33

I believe was led to Christ by an elderly woman in the church, wasn't he? Yes.

52:39

It's a very similar story. It's, by the way, one of the reasons why Abraham Kuyper loved

52:47

Talmuth so much, and really relied on so many of the models that Talmuth created for his own work there in the

52:56

Netherlands. We have Christopher in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says, if Thomas Chalmers needs to be heard today and discovered by many who are ignorant of him, and your guest,

53:15

George Grant, is such a prolific writer, why doesn't he write books about Thomas Chalmers?

53:22

That is a wonderful question, and it's a question that a number of people have asked me for years, and the answer is,

53:32

I am working on a number of Chalmers projects. I will say this, until my books do come out, and I have one, by the way, that is ready to send to a publisher, but until then, one of your sponsors actually has published two of Chalmers' books, and two of my favorite of his books.

54:02

Solid Ground has published two books of devotional readings called

54:07

Sabbath Scripture Readings, one on the New Testament, one on the Old Testament, by Chalmers, and you can go to the

54:18

Solid Ground books website and find them there, and you'll be able to read directly from Chalmers' books.

54:28

But I am working on several books. I'm working on one called Keystones, which was the model that Chalmers used to disciple men.

54:41

One of the things that's quite remarkable about him, and you can read this story in a wonderful book entitled

54:49

The St. Andrews Seven, published by Banner of Truth, right there in Carlisle.

54:57

The St. Andrews Seven were men that Chalmers discipled, and he used a particular method that involved

55:06

Scripture memory, and a particular kind of Scripture memory that enabled students to have a full grasp, not only of the wide range of Biblical theology, but also a survey of the whole

55:21

Bible. It was a really remarkable system. Anyway, I've got a book about that discipling method.

55:28

I've got a short book about his vision for the Church called Parish Life, and I hope to have that out in the next year, and then he's got a quick survey of his life as well.

55:42

But the big thing is I've been working for quite some time on a big biography entitled

55:50

A Wider Diameter of Light, and that big biography is probably still years away, but I am steadily working away on it.

56:01

Is Christopher in Suffolk County, New York, on your payroll or something? Or is he a prophet?

56:07

He is not, but I'm glad he asked the question. Yeah, and for those of you listening who want to know more about these solid, ground

56:16

Christian books, publications by Thomas Chalmers, their website is solid -ground -books .com,

56:24

solid -ground -books .com, and I happen to have an inside person there that may be very interested in publishing some things by you,

56:38

Dr. Grant, so let me know if you... Wonderful! Let's talk about it. I've deliberately not decided on a publisher for these projects because I'm not looking for a traditional publishing deal.

56:54

I've done that for years and years, and one of the great frustrations, I think, of our day is that, like politics and so many other things, the publishing model is kind of broken, and so I'm going to make sure that this is done right.

57:14

Great. We have, let's see here, we have

57:19

B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who writes, some of the things that divide even we who are

57:30

Reformed Christians today that seem to be causing a lot of strife and conflict amongst our fellow

57:38

Calvinists are the issues of theonomy, the federal vision, and theistic evolution.

57:47

Was there any counterpart of those ideologies in Chalmers' day, and how did he address them, and what is your guest's view on all three of those issues?

58:02

That's a great question, and I think it's a very relevant question. St. Clair Ferguson has actually just recently written a wonderful book entitled

58:15

The Whole Christ, which deals with something called the Marrow Controversy.

58:21

The Marrow Controversy was a theological battle within the

58:27

Church of Scotland that took place in the generation prior to Chalmers.

58:33

And essentially, what the Marrow Controversy was about was that there were basically two schools of thought within the

58:47

Church of Scotland on the questions of redemption. One was rather antinomian or anti -law, and the other was very legalistic.

59:01

And what the Marrow men, which included Thomas Boston and a few others, including the

59:10

Erskine brothers, Ralph Erskine and Ebenezer Erskine, what they advocated was that the

59:16

Gospel was neither antinomian nor was it legalistic.

59:22

It actually undercut both of those views.

59:29

Chalmers inherited that sort of backdrop. So when he was unregenerate, he would have fallen into that sort of legalistic, moralistic view, even though he was what we might call sort of a liberal at the time.

59:44

It was still very, very moralistic and structural, ideological almost.

59:52

And when he came to Christ, he actually saw the beauty of the

59:57

Gospel, the free offer of grace, and the transforming work of grace to cause the believer to desire to walk in the ways of the

01:00:07

Lord, to walk in the ways of the Lord by the power of the Spirit and by the power of grace, not in a sort of pull -yourself -up -by -your -own -bootstraps sort of way, or in an ideological attachment to the law as a means of justification.

01:00:31

So, jumping forward 200 years to our current controversies,

01:00:37

I think that the federal vision guys, many of whom are my friends, would say that in Reformed circles, we talk a lot about the

01:00:51

Covenant, but we don't actually talk much about what the Covenant is or what it does.

01:00:59

They tried to answer that question. I believe that they answered the question in a very

01:01:05

Lutheran sort of fashion, and thus missed the mark.

01:01:11

I do not share that view. In the same way, I think that the theonomists, and many of my friends are also theonomists, many of my friends are anti -theonomists and anti -federal vision guys, what the theonomists said was that the law of God is clearly expounded in the

01:01:36

Scriptures. Why is it that modern Christians do not walk in the ways of God's law?

01:01:45

And what the Merrill men would say was that while God's law established clearly the character and nature of God's own attributes and His own person, the cross of Jesus Christ becomes a pivot point which changes everything.

01:02:10

And therefore, you can't simply transpose all Old Testament law because the cross of Christ changes not just ceremonial law, but actually becomes the transforming element for all of us.

01:02:27

I would say that my views closely follow that of the

01:02:33

Merrill men, people like Thomas Boston, the Erskines, Sinclair Ferguson, R .C.

01:02:40

Sproul. Those are sort of the, I think, the steadying influences of the

01:02:49

Reformed world in our day. I deeply respect guys from other views and other traditions, but I think the

01:02:58

Merrill men grasped the heart of the Gospel that enabled them to steer between the twin traps of legalism on the one hand and antinomianism on the other.

01:03:12

And I want to pick up on some of those thoughts when we return from our break. And if you'd like to join us on the air with questions of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:03:23

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, city, and state and country of residence if you live outside of the

01:03:33

USA. I'm hoping to hear from some of our Scottish and Australian listeners today. We seem to have been getting a number of them lately.

01:03:41

So if you're listening, please shoot us an email. We already have a couple of people waiting, so we will get to you,

01:03:48

God willing, as quickly as possible after this station break. And don't go away. We're going to be right back with Dr.

01:03:55

George Grant and the importance of Thomas Chalmers and his biblical worldview in our day and age of madness.

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.

01:07:16

If you just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron, our guest today for the full two hours is

01:07:21

Dr. George Grant. We've already been with him an hour and have one more hour to go. And we are discussing

01:07:27

Thomas Chalmers, a 19th century hero of the faith that needs to be discovered by many who are ignorant of his existence due to the gifts of discernment and biblical wisdom that our

01:07:43

Lord bestowed upon this man of faith. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

01:07:52

Before I go on to a couple more listener questions, I just wanted you to further address or address an issue that was brought up by our listener

01:08:02

Bebe. The third of the things dividing Christians today, or should

01:08:07

I say even more specifically Calvinists today, is the issue of theistic evolution. And my dear friend, who you may have known,

01:08:18

I don't know if you knew Dr. Robert J. Cameron. He was a beloved brother and friend of mine,

01:08:26

African American pastor who started with the Reformed Episcopal Church, then was in the

01:08:32

PCA for a number of years, and then finally became a member of the OPC until he went home to glory from colon cancer

01:08:42

I believe it was. But he was greatly disturbed by the rise of theistic evolution within the

01:08:54

PCA, which was his denomination and is yours. And we have that wonderful book that you mentioned by Sinclair Ferguson, who's one of my modern day heroes, but the foreword is by Tim Keller, who's very known and outspoken for believing in theistic evolution.

01:09:11

How do you respond to that issue in the realm of not only Chalmers, he already addressed it really with Chalmers, and the fact that he was really, prior to the writing of the

01:09:23

Origin of the Species, but there was still influence there that existed in Chalmers' day, and of course today.

01:09:32

Yeah, and Chalmers actually interacted a great deal. Because he was a scientist, and because he was interested in the intersection of science and Christian faith, he oftentimes addressed those kinds of questions.

01:09:51

And there are a couple of things to acknowledge. We've already said he was, prior to the time of a formal, structured argument for evolution, so he wouldn't have interacted with that.

01:10:09

But there already were people who were attempting to sort of hedge the bets of a biblical perspective when it came to geology or other things.

01:10:23

And Chalmers was very careful, again, to push scientists towards humility, and also to constantly argue for the historicity of Moses' account.

01:10:39

There is a half a sentence in one of his lectures that some modern, young Earth creationists have latched onto as evidence that Chalmers believed in what's called the

01:10:54

Gap Theory. Truth is, Chalmers did not hold to the Gap Theory, did not expound it.

01:11:01

What he said was, Genesis chapter 1, verse 2, does not give us clarity about chronology.

01:11:15

And that's all he said. So he's not positing a Gap Theory there.

01:11:21

He's simply arguing, once again, until we get to the days of creation, we don't have a cosmological clock that is ticking, per se.

01:11:33

And so he tried to say, look, but before everybody gets on their ideological high horse, let's look at the evidence and let's look at the scripture.

01:11:46

So he was not an advocate for compromise when it came to biblical truth, and he did hold to the historicity of the

01:11:56

Genesis 1 account. Now, as far as your view of that issue of theistic evolution existing today, even amongst our brethren in Christ who share our soteriology and even some of our denominations, how do you react to that?

01:12:16

I've just been involved in the filming of a wonderful new multi -part film called

01:12:23

Genesis as History, and the thesis, Yom, means 24 -hour day.

01:12:31

If you wouldn't mind doing something, I apologize for making you do it, but we very temporarily went off the air, and we're back on the air.

01:12:41

Somebody didn't like something that one of us said, maybe sabotaged the technology here.

01:12:49

But no, we're back on the air, and we missed about 30 seconds of what you said. So I'm just going to backtrack, and I'm going to ask you again, what is your view of the issue of theistic evolution existing today?

01:13:04

Even among those who would be our brothers in theologically reformed circles, those who are

01:13:13

Presbyterian, and perhaps even some who are Calvinistic Baptists, which would be my specific group of folks that I'm a part of, and because we have some big names that are adopting theistic evolution, like Tim Keller and others.

01:13:32

So how do you respond to that? Is this as dangerous and as heretical as some of our other reformed brethren claim it is?

01:13:42

Like I was just mentioning earlier, my friend Dr. Robert J. Cameron, who was a reformed

01:13:48

Episcopalian, then became PCA, then became OPC, and he went home to the glory.

01:13:54

But that was of great concern to him. He thought that that was one of the very dangerous paths that his fellow

01:14:02

Presbyterians were treading on. Yeah, I would make the argument that there is not a lot of short -term danger, there is immense long -term danger.

01:14:15

And what I mean by that is, I think it's possible for someone to take a theistic evolutionary view and not be heretical and apostate themselves.

01:14:27

But once you accept those presuppositions and those ideas, they inevitably lead down the road to apostasy and heresy.

01:14:37

So what I would say is, I think there are good people who are simply in error, from my perspective, about Genesis 1 -11, and they have attempted to baptize onto the

01:14:58

Bible their own experiences, observations, or imaginations.

01:15:04

John Calvin makes it very clear, we are purblind, and we have to have the

01:15:11

Scriptures as the lens by which we read everything. And so what

01:15:18

I would say is that instead of reading the Bible through the lens of our experiences, observations, and imaginations, we need to read our experiences, observations, and imaginations through the lens of the

01:15:31

Scriptures, the exact opposite. So, while I have respect for men like Tim Keller, I appreciate and have benefited greatly from his works through the years,

01:15:46

I find his attachment to movements like Biologos, which is very, very disturbing.

01:15:54

Yeah, I've been hearing some of that, about that movement and so on. In fact, one of my previous guests had addressed that as a very serious issue.

01:16:06

Now going, I don't want to derail our subject, but I do want to just revisit for just briefly the

01:16:14

Feral Vision idea. I too, just like you do, have friends that are theonomists,

01:16:23

I have friends that are Federal Visionists, I have friends that are both, and I have friends that are theonomists who despise

01:16:31

Federal Vision as a great heresy. In fact, one of my friends, John Otis, wrote about that in a very massive work, about 500 pages or so, against the

01:16:42

Federal Vision. And what those who oppose it seem to be continually saying is that it is not only similar to Lutheranism, which would not be that big of a problem, but more dangerous is that it's very similar to Rome and its understanding of soteriology.

01:17:03

And I have to admit that I had a guest on who is a friend of mine, who I believe is a mutual friend of yours, and I'm not going to mention his name because he's not here to better articulate what he was saying, but years ago when

01:17:16

I had a debate on the air with this brother, who is a Federal Visionist, he was, when he was defining what he believed,

01:17:25

I even said to him on air that I had a difficult time distinguishing his understanding of justification from the

01:17:33

Council of Trent. So if you could, and of course I know that I can't broad brush because not everybody who says that they adhere to Federal Vision is a cookie cutter of the other person, but if you could just comment on that before we return to the discussion.

01:17:49

Yeah, I think that, again, kind of going back to our discussion about the

01:17:54

Merrow men earlier, I think that they anticipated the problems that might arise from that kind of Federal Vision.

01:18:05

I appreciate the fact that you pointed out that not everybody who holds to the Federal Vision are as face or doodle as perhaps that brother is.

01:18:18

I do think that there is a possibility to greatly damage the doctrine of justification if you follow the ideas of the

01:18:31

Federal Vision all the way home. I have to confess to you, Chris, I've read a lot about the

01:18:38

Federal Vision and the more I read about it, the more confused I am on what it is that everybody is saying.

01:18:45

I am with you on that completely. So I have dear friends who say that they hold to Federal Vision who, when

01:18:55

I press them, they sound just downright Puritan, and others that when

01:19:01

I push too hard it just really does sound like Cardinal Newman all over again.

01:19:10

But what I would say about myself is that I find myself very much in the

01:19:17

Westminsterian tradition. I am very, very ardent and have been a happy, delighted supporter of the ideas of the

01:19:29

Westminster Confession of Faith and virtually all of the other forms of Reformed unity, from the

01:19:36

Belgic and the Dort across to the Second Helvetic, etc.

01:19:44

The sort of stepson of the Westminster Standards, the London Confession, is likewise.

01:19:53

It was the standard of one of my, if not my, chief theological hero,

01:19:59

Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It's the standard by which

01:20:04

I attempt to filter all new ideas through. Well, praise

01:20:10

God for that. I'm very happy with that answer and I can now mop the sweat off my brow.

01:20:17

Well, I hope there wasn't a need for the sweat in the first place. I'm just kidding.

01:20:23

Well, you know the Internet. It can be a wealth of information and it can also be a sewer of lies.

01:20:30

So the Internet has a lot of nonsense on it. We do have, and I'm thankful that someone heard my call, calling all

01:20:42

Scotsmen to join to respond to our show today with a question.

01:20:48

And we do have from Kenross, Scotland, a listener Murray, who actually is a

01:20:55

Brit who lives in Scotland. And Murray asks, could your guest

01:21:02

Dr. George Grant say a little about the territorial community building projects of Chalmers, particularly the success of Westport, and whether any of these principles could be effectively used today?

01:21:19

Well, that's a great question. It's the subject of one of the books that I mentioned that I'm working on.

01:21:25

What our brother is talking about is the parish model of ministry.

01:21:30

The idea of the parish model is that every church is in a community and should reach out and minister primarily to that community.

01:21:42

So, for instance, here at our church, I don't consider myself the pastor just of this congregation.

01:21:50

I'm responsible to know every shop owner, to walk the community, to know the community, and to be available to minister to folks throughout the community.

01:22:03

The idea of the parish model is that churches need to be local.

01:22:09

Churches need to be genuine covenant communities where people know each other.

01:22:16

People in those congregations need to be advocates for their local community to solve local problems, whether those problems are directly related to spiritual things or not.

01:22:33

Because of the doctrine of the Lordship of Christ, everything falls under the purview of good, healthy theology.

01:22:42

So the parish model was intended to go into communities that needed real transformation and undertake whatever it takes to bring about that transformation.

01:22:58

The Westport congregation was a church plant by Thomas late in his life in one of the worst areas of Edinburgh, terribly underserved, very, very poor, ridden with crime, and essentially what

01:23:19

Thomas was seeking to do was to clean out the gutters, so to speak. And it was remarkably successful, as several of his earlier experiments had been, and has been a great inspiration to many who have attempted to recover that parish model for the modern day.

01:23:42

And that's really the next part of the answer to the question, and that is that if this was a

01:23:52

Biblical model to begin with, then of course it can be very applicable and very powerfully effective in our own day.

01:24:04

That was essentially the big project of Chalmers' life, was to demonstrate that this

01:24:11

Biblical model of local covenant communities reaching out and transforming their neighborhoods was still a model that could shape modern urban centers for the good of the kingdom.

01:24:30

And it's something that we're attempting here in Franklin, Tennessee, and there are a host of other places around the country and around the world where I know real beautiful projects of renewal are taking place with this conscious model in mind.

01:24:52

And we do have a listener in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York, Tyler, who asks, is

01:24:59

George Grant familiar with the ministry and work of Edward Payson? I am familiar with the work of Edward Payson, and am also familiar with a number of works that have sprung up because of his ministry, including the great classic

01:25:22

Stepping Heaven work by Elizabeth Prentice. So yes,

01:25:27

I am familiar with Payson, and actually went, and last time

01:25:32

I was in New England, visited his church, and so, yes.

01:25:39

And Elizabeth Prentice is the author of that wonderful hymn, More Love to Thee, O Christ, as well.

01:25:47

Well, thank you very much, Tyler, for that great question. And we have another listener.

01:25:56

We have Joseph in Augusta, Maine, who asks, is

01:26:02

Joseph Grant familiar with the how was Chalmers' attitude towards Arminians of his day, and do you think that we who are

01:26:11

Calvinists in the 21st century could tone down our rhetoric a bit, not that we would be in any way compromising doctrinal truth, but there seems to be too much severity and sectarianism and even nastiness when we deal with people who disagree with us on the doctrines of grace?

01:26:35

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that Chalmers would have delighted to answer this question.

01:26:44

Chalmers was someone who built bridges constantly, and believed that the doctrines of grace could speak for themselves.

01:26:55

And so as he interacted with people like William Wilberforce, who was initially not particularly

01:27:01

Reformed, having been raised in sort of the broadly

01:27:06

Anglican tradition, because of his friendship with Chalmers was really brought to a much more

01:27:16

Reformed perspective. Chalmers was also an advocate for the franchise for Roman Catholics, who were not allowed to vote during his day, but he believed that instead of being afraid of Roman Catholics, that the boldness of the proclamation in love of the doctrines of grace could, in the end, win them over.

01:27:43

And so he reached across all boundaries. And we mentioned earlier his interaction with English Baptists, who sent out men like William Carey, and his influence on them,

01:28:03

Andrew Fuller and the others. So he loved the beauty of the diverse kingdom, while at the same time being a strong, strong advocate of his views that he would not compromise on, but he also wouldn't sacrifice human relationships over mere rhetorical period.

01:28:33

Right, yeah, there seems to be, although I know exactly what our listener in Augusta, Maine, is talking about, there seems to be far more prevalent today those who want peace at any price, and who would even be upset that you would think that theology and doctrine really matter, and when they say things like that, they're really ignorant of the fact that they are talking about and promoting a theology and doctrine.

01:29:02

It's just bad. Right, right. It's like those who are opposed to creeds and confessions.

01:29:08

They say, I don't believe in any creed but the Bible. Well, that's a creed. Exactly. We have to go to our final break, so if you'd like to join us, we have a half hour to go, and we do have a couple of people waiting for their questions to be answered.

01:29:26

So we look forward to getting more of you, if we can squeeze you in over the next half hour, to send in your questions.

01:29:34

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com, and by the way,

01:29:40

Joseph in Augusta, Maine, you're a very first -time questioner ever on Iron Sharpens Iron, so you're going to get a free

01:29:48

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01:30:01

Bible that I'm sure you'll enjoy. You need to send us, though, your full mailing address, and we look forward to getting that and shipping that out to you.

01:30:10

And by the way, all of our winners who ever win books by our guests who are authors or Bibles, they are always shipped to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, cvbbs .com.

01:30:29

That's C -V as in Cumberland Valley, B -B -S for BibleBookService .com.

01:30:34

And we thank Todd and Patty Jennings, my dear friends over at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, for alleviating the cost of shipping from Iron Sharpens Iron when we send out

01:30:47

Bibles and books to our listeners who win them. But we'll be right back after this final break, so don't go away.

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01:34:12

This is Chris Arnzen, and if you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes and the next half hour to come approximately, our guest has been and will continue to be

01:34:22

Dr. George Grant, and we have been discussing the life and legacy of Thomas Chalmers, a 19th century minister in the

01:34:33

Free Church of Scotland who needs to be heard probably more than ever before today in our day and age of madness, and we have been taking calls from our listeners, and we hope that you can join them with questions of your own.

01:34:49

We've got about 25 minutes left or so, and our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

01:34:58

One question I overlooked from Tyler in Mastic Beach, who wrote earlier, was in regards to Thomas Chalmers, is there any book you would recommend for introductory reading?

01:35:13

I really like the Banner of Truth book entitled the

01:35:19

St. Andrew's Seven. That's a great glimpse. It's not just about Chalmers, but it captures the whole gist of his ministry and the impact over the next generation of his ministry.

01:35:34

So that's a great place to start. Also, Ian Murray's wonderful book entitled

01:35:42

Scottish Christian History has one chapter on Chalmers.

01:35:49

The whole book is wonderful, but that chapter is gold. So that is also available.

01:35:56

The only books by Chalmers that are available are the two volumes of Sabbath Scripture readings that are available from Solid Ground Christian Books, and then the letters of Thomas Chalmers published by Banner of Truth.

01:36:16

Well I hope you wrote that down, Tyler, and thanks again for contributing to the program.

01:36:22

One of the issues that started to rise in the 19th century of Britain was feminism.

01:36:33

And obviously, it was in its infancy then, but there was much abuse by men of women, really unspeakable levels of abuse that took place.

01:36:52

And of course, the Bible, although I do not in any way, shape, or form subscribe to an egalitarian understanding of gender roles, the

01:37:03

Bible would never compel men to treat women like property or animals, and it seems that that was a tendency with many who were, even if they professed to be

01:37:17

Christian, were obviously not being obedient to the Scriptures in this regard. What would Thomas Chalmers' view of what was happening around him in the rise of women's rights and so on, or at least the demand for them?

01:37:30

Well, a couple of obvious things first. Chalmers was married to a remarkable, gifted, powerful, godly woman.

01:37:41

Grace was his life partner, and they had a genuine love relationship throughout their lives.

01:37:49

And that obviously shapes a man, and shapes a man's thinking about women and their calling and their gifts.

01:37:57

Chalmers also had five daughters, and that, living in a household filled with women, very clearly shaped his views.

01:38:10

He held to a very Biblical understanding of men's and women's roles in church and society, but he was a strong advocate, as you might expect, being a partner with Wilberforce in the battle against slavery.

01:38:28

He was also an advocate for child labor laws, and he was an enforcer of the

01:38:40

Church of Scotland's standards for godly husbands and the care of the women in their households.

01:38:48

And so, this is obviously prior to any feminist movement, or even women's emancipation movements or franchise movements, but I think what we would have found was a gentle, godly,

01:39:04

Biblical understanding on Chalmers' part. Well, praise God for that.

01:39:11

And do you see that there is a dangerous slide today, even amongst many in our

01:39:21

Reformed circles, into egalitarianism? And what are your views on even things such as a female diaconate?

01:39:34

Yeah, you know, I think what we could probably safely say, Chris, is that we're in danger of sliding in every direction.

01:39:43

The modern church is Paul Simon's famous song, Slip Slide and Away.

01:39:50

And we're slip sliding away in every conceivable direction. So you have some who are sliding into egalitarianism, and then on the opposite side you have an overreaction to a kind of hyper -patriarchalism.

01:40:09

And every other error under the sun can be found in the modern church.

01:40:16

And the reason, of course, is that we're simply not teaching the Bible. Our folks don't know what the

01:40:23

Bible teaches, and we have not applied the Spirit's remedies to Satan's devices.

01:40:32

And so the result is that we're prone to every conceivable error.

01:40:39

I do hold to a

01:40:44

Westminsterian approach to offices of ministry, and so while I recognize the important role of people like Phoebe in the

01:40:58

New Testament, Priscilla in the New Testament, I think it's really important to distinguish between the distinctive offices that are ordainable offices, and so I would not hold to an ordainable diaconate.

01:41:19

But that doesn't diminish a woman's role in the life of the

01:41:24

Body of Christ. It actually frees a woman to fulfill her calling based upon her peculiar gifts and the

01:41:35

Spirit's working in and through her. My favorite author on these subjects is

01:41:44

Susan Hunt, and her first book, now her most recent republished book, the 25th anniversary edition of Spiritual Mothering, which deals with the whole

01:42:03

Titus 2 model of ministry. It's just come out from Crossway. I was privileged to write the foreword.

01:42:11

It's a fabulous book, and I would encourage every pastor and every

01:42:19

Christian who's wrestling with these issues of gender roles to get this book and plow through it.

01:42:30

It's beautiful, it's practical, it's biblical, it's substantive, and it's brand new.

01:42:38

Great. Well, that gives me another occasion to plug Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

01:42:44

There you go. Cvbbs .com, C -V for Cumberland Valley, bbs .com, and I'm sure

01:42:51

Todd and Patty Jennings have that book available, as I know that they have an enormous selection of Crossway titles there, and are always being replenished with new ones.

01:43:03

So I highly recommend that you go to cvbbs .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

01:43:11

To your knowledge, did Chalmers, other than his conversion, which happened when he was already a pastor, as you had already mentioned, other than that, did he go through any radical transformations of theological understanding in the subsequent years to his conversion?

01:43:32

You know, when he was first converted, he was coming out of what was called the moderate school, what we today would call liberalism, and so there was a very rapid transformation right there at the beginning of his ministry.

01:43:52

Having already grown up in a Christian home, gone to a

01:43:58

Christian university, been trained in theology, he was already very conversant in a lot of theological categories, and a lot of the

01:44:11

Bible. But what happened in that first couple of years after his conversion was he set into motion a series of habits that he would live with for the rest of his life, where he literally immersed himself primarily in the

01:44:28

Scriptures. He had a crash program where he was immersive in the

01:44:35

Scriptures, and that became a lifelong habit. And so from the point of conversion on, the thing that I noticed the most from his journals and his writing as he aged was he was gentled by the grace of God.

01:44:54

But he did not change theological positions. He was actually in a really good theological place right from the start.

01:45:02

Now, when you said he was very involved in trying to secure the freedom and the right to vote for Roman Catholics, would that have spilled over into any kind of an ecumenical desire with them?

01:45:22

That is one thing that troubles me today, is that there is a disregard for the stark contrast from or between Trent and Geneva, if you will, or from the

01:45:36

Judaizers and from the Gospel of Grace expounded by the

01:45:43

Apostle Paul. Would he have been tempted in that area at all, do you see, from his life, or was that strictly a cobelligerent idea that he had?

01:45:54

Yeah, I would actually characterize it a little differently. He wasn't that active in fighting for the franchise.

01:46:04

It's just that it was very surprising that the chief spokesman for Evangelical and Reformed Scottish theology of that day, when the political issue arose and the campaign for the franchise for Roman Catholics arose,

01:46:21

Chalmers, unlike most of his friends, did not oppose it and spoke openly, saying, what are we afraid of?

01:46:30

But while he was very, very much a bridge builder in reaching out, particularly to some of the splintering factions of, say, the

01:46:43

Erskineite Presbyterians, what became the ARP, as well as the

01:46:50

Reformed Baptists and the broader Evangelicals of England, he reached out to those folks, but they were almost all within the

01:47:00

Puritan covenantal tradition. So while he was a big bridge builder, he actually did not have much contact at all with any

01:47:12

Roman Catholics. And you've mentioned the ARP. I have friends in the

01:47:18

ARP, and in fact, when Sinclair Ferguson was still pastoring in the

01:47:24

United States, he was a member of the ARP, pastored an ARP church. What would be unique about them?

01:47:31

That's the denomination that was the outgrowth of the Marrow controversy.

01:47:38

Those were the ARP actually began when a single church under Ebenezer Erskine broke away from the

01:47:52

Church of Scotland because of Gospel conscience issues in the generation prior to Chalmers.

01:48:02

And the Erskineites, as they are sometimes called, were just really ardent

01:48:09

Evangelical Gospel men from an ongoing Reformed perspective, and eventually had a pretty strong movement in the

01:48:22

Americas. And that's where the ARP comes from, the Associate Reformed Presbyterians.

01:48:29

And so if you think about Sinclair Ferguson or R .C.

01:48:35

Sproul or perhaps somebody like a

01:48:40

Derek Thomas, that's sort of the brand of Presbyterianism that the

01:48:47

ARP is. Okay. Now, obviously, if Chalmers was a part of the

01:48:54

Free Church of Scotland, he was no doubt an exclusive psalm singer and a cappella, strictly a cappella on top of that.

01:49:03

Did he have more of a charitable view towards those who disagreed with him and used hymnody?

01:49:13

Or was he somebody who believed that that was a hill to die on in any sense?

01:49:21

Yeah, you know, some of those traditions in the Free Church came after Chalmers' time. Chalmers was in the

01:49:26

Church of Scotland all the way up until the last seven years of his life.

01:49:33

And in those last years, he was involved in a battle that came to be known as the

01:49:38

Disruption, largely for theological integrity and the independence of the

01:49:44

Church from the state. And so some of those traditions came afterwards.

01:49:52

The psalm singing was very much a part of the Scottish tradition from the time of the

01:49:58

Reformation. So Chalmers would have been a psalm singer, and psalm singing was an important part of the life of the

01:50:07

Church. But he was not opposed to hymn singing. We know a good bit about his gospel crusades and speaking events that he did when he was in England and when he was with his

01:50:23

Baptist friends. In addition to that, I actually have found in one of my antiquarian books a little flyer advertising an event where Chalmers spoke.

01:50:38

And there was a little Highland hymnody band that actually played for the crowd prior to Chalmers coming to speak.

01:50:50

So it wasn't a worship service, but it indicates that he looked upon the beauty of music a little more charitably than some of the free

01:51:03

Church men who came after. Wow, that's fascinating. Well, you have certainly proven yourself to be the go -to man about Thomas Chalmers, that's for sure.

01:51:14

And I want to make sure that before we go to any other listener with a question that we give you the floor to, for at least five or six minutes, unburden your heart to really summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today about Thomas Chalmers, his legacy, and what we need to remember about him today when it seems that the world has entirely gone mad.

01:51:43

Well, thank you. I love Chalmers, clearly. I love his heart, his spirit, his intellect, his wide -ranging vision.

01:51:53

Most of all, I love his love for the Church. He believed that the

01:52:01

Church was Plan A, and there was no Plan B, and that if the transformation of the world was to take place, it would take place in God's good providence through the agency of an effectual, dynamic,

01:52:21

Spirit -filled Church. And so, if I would say anything, it would be, oh

01:52:27

Lord, please let us recover this vision. If not by the hand of Chalmers, then by some other means, bring us back to this kind of gospel sanity.

01:52:46

Amen. Where would, since you brought up some issues that reflect on this, another issue of division today, where would

01:52:55

Chalmers have been on eschatology? I know that there were folks like Spurgeon, who is your hero, who was a historic premillennialist, so obviously that did exist then, unlike full -blown dispensationalism, but was he charitable in that view, and what was his own view?

01:53:19

Yeah, he was a little bit like, I think, what we could say John Calvin was, and that was that he was fascinated by eschatology, but altogether uncertain, given all of the battle lines that were around him at the time.

01:53:41

A number of his disciples, including people like the

01:53:50

Bonar brothers, the famous hymn writers, the Bonars were fascinated by the idea of Israel and the return of Zionism and so forth, and so they were sort of, you know, proto -dispensationalists in a sense.

01:54:14

So there were some of his followers who kind of went down that path, there were others who had a much more evangelistic intention in the restoration of the

01:54:29

Jewish peoples, and Chalmers himself was interested in those things, but did not take a hard -line view.

01:54:39

His perspective probably could be characterized as an optimistic amillennialist.

01:54:47

Yeah, that's pretty much the camp that I'm in right now anyway, I'm not dug in very deeply with it, but that's the way

01:54:55

I would basically describe my views. We have Christian in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says, forgive me if you've already mentioned this, but who were

01:55:08

Thomas Chalmers' heroes of the faith or great influences upon his own way of thinking?

01:55:16

That's a great question. His first really great hero was

01:55:21

John Newton. He at first hated Newton, but it was

01:55:27

Newton's writings that his brother asked him to read while his brother was on his deathbed, and so he read the sermons of Newton, and those became very instrumental in his conversion.

01:55:47

When he was a young man still a college student, he first became acquainted with Jonathan Edwards, and was deeply affected by Jonathan Edwards, as much by Jonathan Edwards' breadth and depth as by his spiritual fervor.

01:56:06

And so after his conversion, he went back to Jonathan Edwards and was deeply, deeply affected by Edwards.

01:56:16

He loved very, very much Wilberforce, and so Wilberforce was one of his great heroes.

01:56:26

And then eventually he became a real strong advocate of people like Samuel Rutherford and John Knox and all of the other great

01:56:38

Scottish heroes of the Reformation. Now why on earth did he hate John Newton at one point before falling in love with his work?

01:56:48

When he was not yet a believer. Oh, okay. When he was still an unbeliever,

01:56:55

I thought he was a believer of course, he was a pastor, but he thought that they were far too spiritualized and not practical enough, the sermons that he was reading.

01:57:09

And so he didn't like them, but afterwards he realized, oh, it's the Gospel. Well, I've got to tell you brother, the time flew by real fast.

01:57:23

I definitely want to have you back on the program as soon as possible. I know

01:57:28

I can count on you to carry two hours very easily due to the mind that God has given you.

01:57:35

If you wouldn't mind staying on the air for a minute or so after we go off the air, I mean stay on the phone,

01:57:40

I mean, for a minute or so after we go off the air just so I could open up my calendar if that's alright with you so we could reschedule.

01:57:46

Sure. And I want to make sure that our listeners know your websites. I know that Parish Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee's website is parishprez .org.

01:57:58

That's parishprez .org. The King's Meadow Study Center can be found at kingsmeadow .com,

01:58:05

kingsmeadow .com. I also don't want our listeners to forget about the

01:58:12

G3 Conference that I will be attending, and I hope that you join me in attending this

01:58:19

January 19th through the 21st in Atlanta, Georgia.

01:58:25

And there's going to be a whole roster of phenomenal men of God who are gifted at proclaiming and preaching and teaching

01:58:33

His Word. I hope you really can join me to be in the audience at that wonderful event in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

01:58:44

Protestant Reformation. And you can go to their website for more details at g3conference .com.

01:58:51

That's G, the number three, conference .com. And I want to thank everybody who listened to our program today, and especially those who wrote in.

01:59:06

And I'll squeeze in our listener in Scotland, Ken Ross Scotland Murray.

01:59:13

He wants me to read a quote by Chalmers. Oh, let me abide in Christ and in Him have nourishment and strength.

01:59:23

Quicken me, O Lord, and let me so keep Thy words as to have the love of the

01:59:28

Father and the Son. If that was his main concern from which all his good works flowed, shouldn't it also be ours today?

01:59:40

Well, that's a wonderful quote, and I would agree with you wholeheartedly,

01:59:46

Murray and Ken Ross Scotland. I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

01:59:52

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions the next time on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.