April 11, 2022 Show with Dr. Joe Morecraft on “An Assessment of the Church in the 20th & 21st Century” (Part 2)

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Monday on this 11th day of April 2022 and I am so thrilled to have on the program a returning guest.

In fact, he was just on last week on the 8th of April, Friday the 8th, and we are having him return to give part two of an assessment of the church in the 20th and 21st century.

I'm speaking about Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III, author and pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia.

It's my honor and privilege to have you back so soon, Dr. Moorcraft. It's a joy and privilege to be with you too.

And as we did last Friday, in case there are any listeners discovering you for the first time, tell our listeners about Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia.

Yes, sir. We founded this little church about seven years ago, and it's in a county seat just north of Atlanta.

It's a bedroom county, Forsyth County. And we're small, but our influence far exceeds our numbers.

We have 60, 50, 60 on Sunday coming from all over the place and from all kinds of backgrounds.

They are committed to the Great Commission and to the historic Reformed faith.

They are people who are friendly. I think that's one of the primary traits of a

Reformed church, is to be friendly so that people feel like they're accepted there.

And our people are friendly people, and they are loving people, and they are generous people.

And many of them come out of a lost pagan background. Some of them come from other churches, but we praise the

Lord for them, and we look forward to the future with them. And of course, tell our listeners about your magnum opus, your commentaries on the larger

Westminster Catechism. Yes, sir. They're called Authentic Christianity, an Exposition of the

Theology and Ethics of the Westminster Larger Catechism. The England was in the midst of a civil war in the late 1640s.

The King of England was a tyrant and saw himself as the head of church and state.

And he saw himself not only above the law, but he was the law, and his will was law.

But there was also a great reformation going on in England at the time, and his opponents were in control of Parliament.

We call them the Puritans. And they realized that if there's going to be any unity in England, it has to start with spiritual unity.

So they commissioned a group of about 120 preachers from all over England to write a confession of faith and catechisms that would express the historic

Christian faith and the religion and worldview of the

Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. That would be the basis of unity in England.

So they produced several documents. They produced a book of church order on church government.

They produced a book of worship, public worship and private worship.

But their main productions are the Westminster Confession of Faith, 33 chapters explaining the various doctrines of the scripture, the shorter catechism, which was meant to train children, and the larger catechism, which was a more exhaustive understanding and explanation of the basic doctrines of the

Word of God. There have been many, many commentaries on the

Westminster Confession, many commentaries on the shorter catechism. But as far as I know, there have only been three commentaries on the larger catechism.

One was written in the 1600s and the, excuse me, one was written in the early 1700s by a man named

Ridgely, about 1400 pages. One was written by Johannes Voss in the middle part of the 20th century.

And so I felt this great desire to write a more comprehensive commentary on it for my children and grandchildren primarily.

And if anybody else got it, that was all the better. But it's eight volumes, the last volume being a series of indices that makes the whole set very user -friendly.

And God has blessed us. We have sold all kinds of copies of it.

And you can get it at westminstercommentary .com or comprehensivechristianity .com.

And I just want to quickly read again, as I did last Friday, Dr. Joseph A. Piper's commendation for this eight -volume commentary series.

He is president of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and he writes, Every Christian who is serious about the

Reformed faith and the Westminster standards should have and use this set. It is much more than an exposition of the larger catechism.

It is a thoroughly researched work that utilizes biblical exegesis as well as historical and systematic theology.

And that is quite a profound commendation from such a man of high caliber as Dr.

Joseph A. Piper, Jr. It's very humbling. Well, we are, as I said already, entering into Part 2 of a discussion we began on Friday, which is your assessment of the

Church in the 20th and 21st century. And I know that you want to begin this part of the discussion with two men.

One, I believe you may have briefly mentioned Warfield, B .B. Warfield, last Friday, but you want to get into more of a thorough assessment of his contribution to the

Church, and also Dr. J. Gresham Machen, who was one of the leaders of the fundamentalist movement during the fundamentalist modernist controversy in the early 20th century, when the denominations that had biblical roots began falling like dominoes to the corruptions and heresies and apostasies of left -wing ideology.

And Dr. Machen was used of God to form the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church denomination and also the Westminster Theological Seminary of Philadelphia.

But if you could, give us your assessment of these men and others. You just did it.

I don't have anything else to say. Well, you said—I don't know if you got into how reading

B .B. Warfield helped you survive college or seminary to some extent.

Yes, sir. Last week, you remember, we talked about the 20th century, at least the first three quarters of it were very depressing in that the

Reformed faith was on the run, that the Church in the early part of the 20th century was broken and compromised.

And then in the last part of the 20th century and on into the 21st century, there has been a wonderful revival of the

Reformed faith and of Reformed churches. And we talked about last week some of the great instruments that God used in that revival.

Three of the instruments were in the early part of the century, and they died before the revival took place.

They were three great men, all of them taught at Princeton Seminary. And they were the great

Benjamin Warfield, who's one of the giants in the history of Christian scholarship, and there was

Cornelius Van Til, one of the most important men in the history of the Church, and then the great and very popular

J. Gresham Machen. Each one of them has a wonderful story to tell of how did they influence the revival years after they were dead.

Their books were still being published. Van Til was still alive. Machen died in the 30s, but Machen and Warfield's books were still being published, and they were still being bought, and they were still being read.

I went to a liberal seminary and graduated from it in 1969, and one of the ways that I survived the liberalism was by reading

Warfield every day. So I would go to class, all of which were boring.

I would go to class, and sometimes I'd skip class and stay in my room to read Warfield. And I would read

Warfield literally every day. And Warfield—I had a professor of systematic theology who was a liberal, and he boasted—now here is a professor of systematic theology at a major Christian seminary, and he boasted that he'd never read a page of Benjamin Warfield.

Wow. But so Warfield did—I'm not the only person, but many of my friends and many people who

I don't know were influenced by Warfield's books, his understanding of inerrancy, his understanding of prophecies in St.

Paul, his volumes were magnificent, and I recommend to this very day people continue to read them.

And I know that it doesn't meet my need, my recommendation. People will still be reading

Warfield for years to come. He was quite a man. He was an old man.

And in the twelve months of 1920 and 1921, I think were the most tragic twelve months maybe in the twentieth century, because in those twelve months, the last half of 1920 and the early part of 1921, three men died—Benjamin

Warfield, Herman Babbitt, and Abraham Kuyper. And those were the three great giants of the church in that era.

Machen was a young man, and he was on the faculty while Warfield was an old man.

And Machen saw through—saw what was going on clearly in the Northern Presbyterian Church, and so he asked

Benjamin Warfield, he said, Don't you think we need to split the

Northern Presbyterian Church? And old, tired Warfield said,

Gresham, you can't split Roddenwood. So, I reckon, the amazing thing about Machen was he died young.

The amazing thing about him is he was loved. I mean, he was a strict

Calvinist. His books are still available. He's got a great book on the virgin birth, the best book on the virgin birth.

A great book on Christianity and liberalism. On and on.

And I would recommend his books, all of them, to anybody. You see J. Gresham Machen's name on a book?

Buy it. But God took him out of his life early.

And the thing about it was, he was a gentleman. He was a Christian gentleman. Not in a secular sense of the word, but in a godly sense of the word.

So, when he died, syndicated columnists all over the country would write obituaries.

Men that were not even Christians, who hated his theology, would write obituaries, praising him as a man.

And that's what we must have in our day. We can be praised for our intellect, and we can be praised for our theology, but as I preached last

Sunday morning, a Calvinist without love is the ugliest thing in the world. And so we need to pray that God would raise up not only scholars and preachers, but in the biblical sense of the word, men who are real gentlemen like J.

Gresham Machen. I was in south Chile, way down in southern

Chile, at a preacher's conference out in the country at a place called

Lake Villarica. And it was owned and operated by this very, very old

Presbyterian preacher. This was back in the 1990s. And it was owned by an old

Presbyterian preacher who jumped on me because I dare read out of the

New American Standard Version and not the King James Version. But he was a great man, and I just smiled at him.

But I said, brother so -and -so, when were you back in the states on furlough?

Now this was in the 1990s. When were you back in the states on furlough? And he said, for the funeral of my dear friend

Gresham Machen. Praise God. And then the third man was a man about the same age as Machen, probably, named

Cornelius Van Til. Cornelius Van Til was Dutch. And the reason

I say he's one of the most important men in the history of the Christian church is not because he was a famous preacher, although here's a man who's one of the most brilliant scholars in any institution who during the week would go and street preach on Wall Street.

Wow. By the way, I do want to just briefly interrupt you to say something about Machen.

You were talking about how beloved he was. A world -renowned atheist who was a contemporary of Machen, H .L.

Mencken, perhaps you've heard that name, he wrote a glowing obituary of J.

Gresham Machen, even though he disagreed with Machen, since Mencken was an atheist, but he still thought that Machen was a man of great integrity, and scholarship, and brilliance, and he viewed

Machen as being of the cream of the crop of what he witnessed in Christianity.

And I had the privilege of doing the voiceover for H .L.

Mencken's obituary of Machen for Jason Wallace, who is the pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah, which is an

Orthodox Presbyterian congregation. And if anybody wants to hear that recording, you can find out more about the documentaries that Jason Wallace produces, really high -level, professionally done documentaries.

You can go to GospelUtah .org, which is the website of Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah.

But I'm sorry I interrupted you. No, I'm glad to know that, because I have read that obituary of H .L.

Mencken. So, Machen was left there at Princeton, Warfields died, and Machen is defrocked.

He was defrocked from the Northern Presbyterian Church without a trial, he wasn't even present when they defrocked him.

And they defrocked him because he'd started a missionary society. Because the missionaries in the

Northern Presbyterian Church were, by and large, extremely liberal, like Pearl Bucks. And so he would send missionaries out by his own independent mission board that were reformed all over the world.

And then he also started a seminary, because Princeton was not reliable anymore. And so he started the

Old Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, which in those days had the greatest

Christian scholars alive. I couldn't recommend Westminster today, it's changed greatly since those days.

But it was a great seminary, and the faculty members of that seminary,

I have books, I'd recommend books, commentaries of various books of the Bible.

And then he had a role in the formation of a new denomination.

But that new denomination had a split because of a man named

Carl MacIntyre. Carl MacIntyre was a great preacher, a powerful preacher in terms of gifts and abilities.

But he was not as strictly reformed as J. Gresham Machen.

He was more fundamentalistic, that is, he was more narrow in his approach, dealing more with anti -communism than with other things.

And he believed in an absolute prohibition of alcohol, I believe. That is true. And so there was a split in that new church, which

I think was the work of God. And so Machen began the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which is a small denomination,

I'm guessing 20 ,000 people or something. But it's still in existence, and it is one of the instruments

God has used through the years to preserve the historic Reformed faith and to advance the

Reformed faith. Today, Westminster Seminary has fallen far short of what it was then, though there are some good people there.

And God used that seminary through the years. So three of the men that were used in the revival of the

Reformed churches in the late 20th century, two of those three died in their early years.

The third one was Cornelius Vantill. And Vantill is hard to read.

He is a scholar, and he's a great scholar. I tell people the best book on Vantill was written by Monson when he wrote a book on all of Vantill's theology, philosophy, and apologetics.

But the reason Vantill, the great contribution that he made, that we should thank

God for, even if we've never read a book of his, is for the first time in 1 ,400 years, excuse me, first time in 1 ,900 years, that there was somebody that saved the

Christian church from the natural law theory. The great problem the church has always had, the greatest one, its greatest enemy is not

Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. Its greatest enemy from the start is synthesis.

S -Y -N -T -H -E -S -I -S, synthesis. That is the attempt to express and understand

Christianity in terms of Greek philosophy. Now, somebody could do a great

Bible study, and that's always been the enemy of the church. You go back when the sons of God married the daughters of men, you've got synthesis with the line of Seth and the line of Cain intermarried, and accelerated evil in the world, brought on the flood, etc.

You've got Baalism and the worship of Jehovah. So synthesis has always been a threat.

It's always been a temptation, and it is to this very day. But in the history of the church for over 20 centuries, it has expressed itself in the attempt to combine

Christianity and Greek philosophy or Hellenism.

In the early church, they tried to do it with a good intention. They wanted to express

Christianity in terms of Greek philosophy so as to reach more people in the

Roman Empire for Christ. But it was one of the greatest mistakes they ever made. And so as a result of that synthesis, they developed this natural law theory that says that reason can discover

God's laws in nature. And so we see that even in our

Declaration of Independence. And it's always been there, an attempt to find laws outside the scriptures and theology outside the scriptures in nature by the use of reason.

And Mantill taught the church how to escape that, how to avoid that problem.

He emphasized the sufficiency of scripture. He emphasized the self -authenticating nature of the

Word of God, that it did not need any support, that the Word of God did not need any support from philosophy or logic or anything, that it stood upon its own feet, that God bore witness to the divine authority of the

Word of God in the life of Jesus Christ, in the words of scripture, and in the power of the

Holy Spirit, bearing witness with our spirit that it is the Word of God. So we have a lot to thank

Mantill for, so that we understand the human mind.

It's not neutral. It's not looking for laws of God to obey anyway. It's trying to run as fast as it can away from Him.

And he rebuted the whole natural law theory and had us return to the sufficiency of the

Word of God. In fact, he said something like this. He said, The Word of God is defiantly authoritative on everything about which it speaks, and it speaks about everything.

So Mantill is hard to read. Mantill had a great influence on Rush Dooney, had a great influence on Bonson, and these men were able to explain in a clearer fashion the great emphases of Cornelius Mantill.

Now would you say that one of the key contributions Mantill had to these men, and many others, even my dear friend

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and others who identify themselves as presuppositionalists when it comes to apologetics, would that be one of the key areas?

Yes. He would call them, show them how to be consistent with their presuppositions.

Everybody presupposes things. Nobody is objective. Everybody presupposes things.

They have basic commitments and basic understandings about life. All unbelievers do, even though they don't profess to do it, don't realize they do it, unbelievers do it.

They assimilate certain assumptions from their culture or their background or their education that they assume to be true, and then they evaluate everything in the light of those assumptions they've never proved to be true.

In other words, all unbelievers, and Mantill brought this out, all unbelievers who have their system of thought and worldview based upon faith, that it's not just Christianity that bases its worldview on faith, but all pagan, anti -Christian worldviews base their understanding of life on blind faith.

That is, a faith that rests on sand and not on a solid rock of the self -authenticating

Word of God. There was a man that I knew, a brilliant man. He lived to be very old and sharp until he died.

He taught at one of the major New England universities in the 30s and 40s, and out of all the other faculty members, he was the only one that was not a communist.

He was Ludwig von Mises' best friend in his old days. And I led this man's son to Christ, and he never forgave me for it.

Because even though this guy was brilliant, he hated Christ. And he wrote books on the constitutional relationship of management and labor that are some of the best books on the subject available.

But he hated Christ, and to let you know that he hated Christ, he was blasphemed for no other reason than letting you know that he hated

Christ. So he and I were talking one time, and he said,

Joe, you Christians are such wimps. He said, whenever you come to some intellectual problem, you take it on faith.

And he said it just like that. You take it on faith. He said, I take nothing on faith.

If I can't reason out something, it's not true. I said, well,

Dr. So -and -so, what is your reason for having so much confidence in your ability to reason?

He looked at me, and he said, well, Joe, there's just some things you have to take on faith.

In other words, that's the depth of his philosophy. They just assume without any reasons whatsoever that what they say, what they believe, is objective and is correct.

And Van Til is the one that showed that the emperor has no clothes. And we have to go to our first break right now.

If you have a question for Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III on his assessment of the church in the 20th and 21st century, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com

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Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is

Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III. We have entered into part two of a discussion we began last

Friday, an assessment of the church in the 20th and 21st century. And if you have a question for Dr.

Moorcraft, send it to chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

I've got a couple of listener emails. First, we have Cindy in Findlay, Ohio, who doesn't have a question.

She just wants to say, Oh, I love listening to this man. And we have

Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, who wants to ask you, You mentioned

Cornelius Vantill and presuppositionalism. I wonder if you could, in brief summary, compare and contrast presuppositionalism to classic or evidential apologetics.

Well, I would love to do that, but we have to get off the subject of our time together. There's people that can do it far better than I can do it.

Okay. And one is particularly Greg Bonson. Well, Greg Bonson's in heaven, so...

Oh, yeah. He has a book on Vantill in which he does that.

That is a very good question, but I think we better stick to the subject today.

Sure. Okay. Well, thanks for the question anyway, Bobby, and keep listening to Iron Troupe and Zion Radio.

From my experience, just very briefly, it seems that those who adhere to evidential apologetics, when you're talking about the

Arminians who do, because there are reformed people. R .C. Sproul was not a presuppositionalist.

John Gerstner was not. But many of the Arminians seem to have a presupposition that if you explain the

Gospel and the Scriptures correctly, you can win anyone to Christ, whereas we know that only the elect will respond to it.

And they seem to rely more heavily on producing evidences to convince people, whereas the presuppositionalists, according to Romans 1, which presuppositionalists seem to emphasize, believes that men already know instinctively, because God has put it upon their hearts, that they already know the law and they know that they are violating it.

Is that somewhat accurate? I would put it this way. You have to be born again in order to bow to the authority of the

Word of God. Amen. Because until you're born again, you are suppressing the truth of unrighteousness.

You are doing your dead -level best to deceive yourself into believing that God is not there and that you're not accountable to Him and that He has not spoken.

Great. Well, pick up where you left off. We had just gone through some of your heroes of the 20th century, which included

B .B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen and Cornelius Van Till. Where would you like to go into your assessment of the 20th and 21st century from here?

Well, I think the most important instrument that God has used to bring about the revival of the

Reformed faith in the late 20th and early 21st century is the recovery of expository preaching.

Now, let me tell you what I mean by expository preaching. A preacher takes a text from the

Scripture, a paragraph of verses, and then studies them, studies the grammar, the relationship of the words in that paragraph, studies them in relationship to the context, the verses coming before and after in the historical context, and then applying what that text says, explaining what that text says, and then applying it to the lives of the people that are in the room.

Preaches it with power and with passion, faithfulness to the text, a love for the people he's preaching to, and he does that paragraph by paragraph, book by book.

Like, for instance, he starts with John 1, preaches through the Gospel of John, goes to another book, takes the first paragraph, preaches on it, and goes all the way through the book.

That's the kind of preaching that created the Christian West. You go back to the

Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, and the great instrument that converted northern

Europe and gave birth to New England was that kind of preaching, where the preacher would take a text, study the grammar, the relationship of the words, in the light of the context, preach what that text says, and it applies to the congregation, and just goes from one book to another.

That's the preaching, the God kind of preaching God used. Now, the interesting thing to me is over the past 200 years, preaching changed.

And I'm even talking among our preaching heroes. You don't see in some of these great preachers in the 18th and 19th century, you don't see them so much preaching through books of the

Bible as you do taking some text as it relates to some issue or some concern on its heart and preaches it.

So preaching declined. There were some powerful preachers and God used them, but the kind of preaching that gave birth to the

Christian West disappeared, not completely. On up into the 20th century, the 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, and what a preacher would preach on was more determined by his opinion as to what the critical need of the hour was and what the need of the congregation was.

And so the texts were almost chosen at random. And I can remember in my early days, very early days before I was ordained, when

I preached like that, things that I thought were so important and so critical,

I realized months later were trivial. And so preaching declined.

In fact, in the early part, I asked a Reformed historian and scholar back in the late 20th century, a man

I respected, I said, would you please tell me who the great Reformed preachers were in the 1920s and 30s and 40s.

And he named great authors or great seminary professors.

I said, I want to know who the preachers were. And he had to struggle to name them.

There were a few, but he had to struggle to name them. The Reformed faith was not seriously preached.

And when it was, it wasn't accepted. Arthur Pink, for instance, the great Reformed Baptist. Arthur Pink preached in England.

Nobody would come to hear him preach. Thought he was a failure. Came to the United States. Nobody would come to hear him preach.

Thought he was a failure. So he goes to Australia to preach. Nobody came to hear him preach.

And so he secluded himself to an island on the western side of Scotland as a recluse, considering himself as a failure.

But his books set young men on fire like me and brought me out of Arminianism into the light of Calvinism in the late 20th century.

The Sovereignty of God, this great book. So with the formation of Westminster Seminary, Old Westminster, and the founding of Reformed Seminary, the old

Reformed Seminary, and the influence of some great preachers like Al Martin, who

I think was the greatest, most gifted preacher, Reformed preacher of the late 20th century.

I'm amazed every time I hear, well, not amazed, I shouldn't say that, but it's interesting that so many

Presbyterians such as yourself would say that Al Martin, who is a

Reformed Baptist, was the greatest preacher of the 20th century, or at least among them.

Yes, he was. And so there were several, and reading the older Puritan, 16th, 17th century writers.

Lloyd -Jones, for instance, his preaching impacted people.

We talked last week about George Calhoun's cassette tapes of what great preachers there were in those days.

And so young men like me were greatly influenced by the homiletics, the old homiletics of Reformed Seminary, Westminster Seminary, and the great preachers, the ones that were living at the time and the ones that have lived in history.

And so we first learned to be expository from many of these men by preaching verse by verse, or I prefer paragraph by paragraph.

You know, the characteristic trait of a paragraph, it contains a single thought.

And so I think preaching paragraph by paragraph is even more effective than preaching verse by verse.

But the point is, then after studying history, particularly the history of the

Reformation, and I saw that they preached through books. That's the only way

I preach. I think one of the things that,

I say the only way I preach election Sunday, I always preach an election sermon.

But one of the things that has injured book by book expository preaching is the liturgical calendar of the church.

So many churches that don't pay any attention to the regular principle of worship,

Episcopal and some pristine churches, et cetera, some Methodist churches. I believe that liturgically, every

Sunday of the year we should preach on a particular theme. Easter, Good Friday, Lent, Christmas, whatever.

And so the church paid more attention to the liturgical calendar than it did to expository preaching.

And it's always an intimidation. Next Sunday is allegedly Easter. I have one more text to preach on in 1

John. One more text. And that's the concluding verse that brings everything to its sharp point.

Now, am I just going to continue to preach on 1 John next Sunday, or am

I going to stop and interrupt my sermons on 1 John to preach an

Easter sermon? I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to complete the study of the

Epistle of John. And we have to go now to our midway break.

And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Dr. Moorcraft, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please keep in mind, this is the longer break in the middle of the show because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show because the

FCC requires of them to localize Iron Trump and Zion Radio to Lake City, Florida, geographically with their own public service announcements and other local things while we simultaneously air our globally heard commercials.

So please use this time wisely. Write down questions for Dr. Moorcraft and submit them to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

But also write down the information provided by as many of our advertisers as you can so that you can more frequently and successfully respond to them, either by patronizing them or by at least saying thank you for sponsoring

Iron Trump and Zion Radio. But if you have a question for Dr. Moorcraft, send it in to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. We'll be right back after these messages.

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Hello, my name is Anthony Uvinio and I'm one of the pastors at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Quorum, New York and also the host of the reformrookie .com

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Again, I'm Pastor Anthony Invinio and thanks for listening. As host of Iron Sharpens Iron radio

I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations. A church I've been strongly recommending as far back as the 1980s is

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Tell Pastor Dunn that you heard about Grace Covenant Baptist Church on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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Hi, this is John Sampson, pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona.

Taking a moment of your day to talk about Chris Arnzen and the Iron Sharpens Iron podcast. I consider

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I believe this podcast needs to be heard far and wide. This is a day of great spiritual compromise and yet God has raised

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I'm pleased to do so and would like to ask you to prayerfully consider joining me in supporting

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This is Pastor Bill Sousa of Grace Church at Franklin here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support

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Lord Jesus Christ. And of course, the end for which we strive is the glory of God.

If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some

Lord's Day in worshiping our God and Savior. Please feel free to contact me if you have more questions about Grace Church at Franklin.

Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org. That's gracechurchatfranklin .org.

This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our

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Anchored in Truth is in partnership with 36 church clients, as well as radio stations, theological seminaries, and various programs for unreached people groups.

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One such faithful advertiser who really believes in what Chris Hansen is doing is

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Dan is the president and founder of the Historical Bible Society. Their mission?

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Always mentioning that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Before I return to my conversation with Dr.

Joseph C. Moorcraft III, which is part two of a discussion we began last

Friday, on his assessment of the church in the 20th and 21st century, we just have some important announcements to make.

First of all, I want to thank publicly Daniel P.

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I want to thank him not only for doing such a superb job last

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click Support, then click Click to Donate Now. Also, if you are not a member of a Bible -believing church, no matter where on the planet

Earth you live, I have extensive lists spanning the globe, and I have helped people in all parts of the world find churches that are

Christ -honoring, doctrinally sound, biblically faithful churches. Sometimes within minutes of their own homes.

So I might be able to help you, too. Just send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com,

and put in the subject line, I need a church. Last but not least, make a note on your calendar that tomorrow on Ironsharpensironradio, I am thrilled to announce that we are having a first -time guest,

Matthew J. Trujillo, and he is going to be speaking on his book, The Doctrine of the

Lesser Magistrates, A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a

Refutation or Appeudiation of Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government.

He is going to be on our program for the first hour, and for the second hour, we are also pleased to have another first -time guest,

Matthew Kennitzer. I hope I'm not mispronouncing his name too badly.

But he is the pastor of St. John's Reformed Church of Freidensburg, Pennsylvania, which is going to be hosting a conference coming up this

June featuring Matt Trujillo on The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates, his book.

So please make sure you write that down on your calendar and tune in tomorrow. And also, if you have a question for Dr.

Joseph C. Moorcraft III, send it in now to chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

This is part two of a discussion we began last Friday on an assessment of the church in the 20th and 21st century.

Dr. Moorcraft, if you could pick up where you left off. First of all, let me say you're here because we're going to love

Trujillo. Trujillo is the John Knox of the 21st century as it relates to politics and civil government to tyranny.

So I'm glad you have him. He's great. Well, he will be thrilled to hear that you, a man of your caliber, called him the

John Knox of the 21st century. Wish I had a nickname that was something even close to that.

Yeah, well, what I'd like to do now is talk about some of the great men who have recovered preaching and who are not only models, but if you're anywhere near where these men preach, it's to go to them, go to them, listen to them.

Preachers, if you have any preachers that are listening, listen to them. There's great books on preaching, too.

I'll say this for any preachers listening. Great books that I highly recommend to you.

The one that had the big impact on me was by a man named

Pierre Marcel, a French Calvinist. I think the name was

The Primacy of Preaching, but it was a great book. It had a great impact on me. And then also

Martin Lloyd -Jones' book, Preachers and Preaching, or Preaching and Preachers, or the other,

I can't remember, is another great book. The first book on preaching that had an impact on me when

I was a teenager was The Soul Winter by Charles Spurgeon.

Robert L. Dabney wrote a great book on homiletics, that is, how to form a sermon, how to preach, hermeneutics, all that.

Originally it was called Sacred Rhetoric. I think it's now called

Evangelical Preaching. But it is one of the most important books in my library as it pertains to preaching.

I have something that's nowhere near the caliber of these men, but I have about 20 -25 hours of lectures on sermonaudio .com

called The Reconstruction of Preaching. And it's on how to preach, how to develop a sermon, how to preach it, how to be expository.

It includes hermeneutics, that is, how to interpret the text. So, all of these are easily available.

And I would recommend also, Spurgeon has a book called Lectures to My Students. That's a great book as well.

So, in the late 20th century, first part of the 21st century,

God raised up preachers not overly famous.

Now, many of the allegedly famous Calvinist preachers are more celebrities than preachers.

So, I'm not going to talk about any of the big celebrity preachers because their sermons, whereas they may say some good things, are not really culture -changing sermons in terms of the 16th century and the creation of the

Christian West. But there are some great men who

God has used and who I love to listen to on Sunday, or I love to listen to them even more than reading their sermons.

And two men are what I think are the two most important black preachers of the late 20th century and early 21st century.

And that is Walter Bowie and Bodie Bauckham. Now, Bodie Bauckham is pretty well known today, but most people don't know

Walter Bowie. B -O -W -I -E. Yes, I am familiar with him, thankfully. He was a great, great man, preacher.

I knew him very well. He's not living now. He lived with Rush Dooney for a while and learned everything he could from Rush Dooney.

And he was a powerful preacher. You know, the

Bible talks about teaching and preaching and distinguishes the two. And it's not always easy to distinguish them because preaching does involve teaching.

But I think the distinctive description of preaching is power and passion.

Faithfulness to the scripture communicated authoritatively with power and passion.

And that was Walter Bowie. He preached like a southern black preacher, like a machine gun, poetic.

But the content was all great. And one of his primary ministries, he was a member of the

National Baptist Church, which is a black Baptist denomination. Very, very liberal denomination.

Oh, very liberal, of course. And what he would do was train young black preachers how to preach the truth and wean them off of whatever they were getting at their liberal seminaries, fundamentalism, liberalism, whatever they were getting from Jesse Jackson, that he would wean them off of all of these people and lead them into the

Reformed faith and show them how to preach the Reformed faith. And I had lunch with Walter Bowie one time with one of his students, a big black man who had been a fundamentalist preacher for most of his life,

Arminian and all that, and now was Reformed and preaching the Reformed faith because God used

Walter Bowie in his life. So he hadn't been to school much. All the education that this man had was from Walter Bowie informally.

And so we were all three eating lunch one time and I said, Sir, you've been both.

You've been a fundamentalist and now you're a Reformed preacher. How would you distinguish the two?

How would you distinguish Arminianism from Calvinism? And he said,

Well, in Arminianism you have to make one decision for Jesus to be a Christian. In Calvinism you have to make every decision for Jesus to be a

Christian. So I thought that would preach. I've used that many times.

And he preached at our church. Whenever we would have rush duty in Monson and those people back in those days, old days,

I would have Walter Bowie come and preach because he was so powerful and so faithful to the

Word of God. I don't think that he wrote anything, but you can go to sermonaudio .com

and you can find his sermons. By Walter Bowie. The other, he and I would preach at conferences together.

And I would always look forward to that so that I could sit at his feet. By the way, I think it was George Calhoun that first introduced me to Walter Bowie.

I'm sure that's the case because they were good friends. That's exactly right. Both of them were very

Southern. Mount Olive Tape Library. Yes, sir. And the other great black preacher today is

Bodie Bauckham. And Bodie Bauckham, his daughter was in my daughter's wedding, is also a great preacher in form and content.

And he has a lot of things on YouTube. And is one of our greatest defenders of the faith against critical race theory, social justice, cultural

Marxism, Black Lives Matter. Listen to those on YouTube.

Go to YouTube, look up Bodie Bauckham, and then sit down and listen two or three times, particularly to his sermons on critical race theory and social justice and all of those various issues that are so critical today.

There's nobody better than him on those issues, regardless of what color their skin is. There's nobody better.

Yes, I mean, he's wonderful. And one time he and I were preaching together in Cincinnati at one of Scott Brown's conferences.

It was a big conference on the sufficiency of scripture. And Bodie Bauckham had preached on something, how the scripture is sufficient for family.

And I had just finished preaching on the sufficiency of scripture for worship. And I sat down after I finished preaching on the front row to rest, and I sensed this large presence behind me.

And all of a sudden, this big black face comes around and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

And he says, Brother Moorcraft, if you were only a Baptist, your theology would be perfect.

So he has a book that I think everybody should read, too. It's very readable. Oh, what is the name?

Fault Lines. Ma 'am? Fault Lines. Fault Lines. Oh, yeah, that's his latest book.

Oh, listen, read that and memorize it. It will help you understand what's going on in this world today, and it'll show you how to answer it.

Fault Lines, F -A -U -L -T -L -I -N -E -S. So Votibachum is a powerful preacher.

We have enough lecturers. We need preachers. John Wesley said,

Give me 100 faithful preachers, and I'll change the world. I don't think it was far from wrong, because it's not the lecturing of the cross, it's the power of God into salvation.

It's the preaching of the cross. And, in fact, I'm going to send you a book that is about that very thing that you may not have even heard of.

My dear friend who's still alive on this earth, Gabe Grossi, wrote a book with the title

Preaching with Biblical Passion, and he basically has written a book on homiletics and includes these streams of the best within the major denominations from the

Reformation that would include the Presbyterians, the

Congregationalists, the Lutherans, and the Reformed Baptists. And it is a remarkable book, virtually unknown book, and I'm going to make sure

I mail you a copy of that. What's his name? Gabe Grossi, G -R -O -S -S -I.

I will look forward to that. And then there are, I'm trying to get

Bill Potter, who we had on your show, to write a biographical sketch of all the

Reformed Baptist preachers in the Shenandoah Valley. They are unique.

There's a large crowd of them. They pastor small churches. They're largely past middle -aged.

They were all followers, so to speak, of Mr. Sprinkle, the great

Reformed Baptist preacher. Lloyd Sprinkle. Yes, who started

Sprinkle Publications and produced so many books. He's another one of my, really, of my heroes because he was so faithful and so humble.

And people might misunderstand the name of Sprinkle Publications. He was a Baptist who believed in immersion.

Sprinkle was his name. I asked him one time, I said, how in the world could a man with a name like Sprinkle be a

Baptist preacher? And he said to me, without cracking a smile, he said,

I've been told that before. So there are a lot of great and completely unheard of men.

Some of the best preachers in America haven't been heard of beyond their congregation. And yet I would sit at their feet gladly and listen to them.

I'm trying to think right now of some more. I have a brother who pastors a little church with 15 people.

That would be Wayne Rogers, wouldn't it? Yes, sir. Judy Rogers' husband. And sometimes on Sunday I listen to him.

He's a far more faithful preacher week after week than some of these celebrity preachers that you see on television all the time.

He preached at the church where I was a member on Long Island, New York, a number of years ago, and Judy provided a concert.

Is that right? Grace Reform Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick, New York. And who was the preacher?

Back then it would have been Mike Gaydosh, and it would have been

Scott Syracuse, and John Herringer, I believe. Now it's Bob Carson, Doug Totter, and a new man that they just appointed.

There is a young preacher that was in our church since he was a teenager.

And I think he was the first graduate of Monson Theological Seminary when it existed.

And he is one of the best preachers I know. Their church every

Sunday is packed. They have two or three services. They're packed. They don't want to start another church because everybody loves each other so much in that church, but they're just packed.

His name is Chris Striegel. Go ahead. S -T -R -E -V -E -L.

He's about 40, early 40s. Yes, that is my friend John Otis' pastor. Yes, sir.

That is exactly right. And John Otis is another good preacher. I enjoy listening to John Otis preach.

He's a painter, P -A -I -N -T -E -R. A house painter. Yes, sir. But he is a powerful, powerful preacher.

And there's people like that all over the country, faithfully, in their own little churches and spheres of influence, preaching the word of God.

And I quote this passage because I live by it both in my ministry and in watching these other men.

And that is, not many mighty, not many noble. God has chosen the weak and the base to confound the high and the mighty.

Amen. And that's the nature of the men that God's using all over this country. They know how to preach, and they know what to preach.

And so Jesus preaches through them. You know, in Romans 10 it says,

Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. How shall you call upon him in whom you've not believed?

And how shall you believe in him whom you've not heard?

In other words, it doesn't say about whom you've heard. Whom you've not heard. You've got to hear

Jesus' voice in order to believe. And then it says, And how can you hear him without a preacher?

So the great thing about preaching is that you humble every preacher out there.

It is the instrument of God through which Christ preaches. And what Christ preaches happens.

Whenever Christ preached something in the Bible, it happened. When he preached repentance, people repented.

When he preached peace, there was peace that came. When he preached the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God came.

And what Jesus preaches happens. And so when people go to church on Sunday, to faithful Reformed churches, the thing they should say more than anything else,

I'm coming here today not to hear my favorite preacher, some human being. I'm coming here because I want

Jesus to preach to me. Amen. I want him to preach to me through this frail and feeble and weak

Christian. My words cannot convince anybody of anybody.

My words cannot save sinners or improve Christians. But when

Christ preaches through me, things really happen. That actually reminds me of a story about someone who went to hear two very popular preachers in London, England in the 19th century.

One was Charles Spurgeon, and one was a man whose name I can't remember. Joseph Parker. Okay.

And the eyewitness to both men preaching said that Joseph Parker was a great preacher, but Charles Spurgeon preaches a great

Christ. Yes, sir. That's exactly correct. And so only

Christ can change a heart. And preachers can never forget that. And only Christ can change a culture.

And so we've got to quit talking about receive Jesus as your personal Savior. He's the

Savior of the world. We must preach a cosmic Christ, a Christ that changes men and cultures, and he does it primarily through the faithful, passionate preaching of the

Word of God by one that is sent by Christ to preach. You know, in fact, that's a very important point, because post -millennialists have been slandered and maligned by those who are either dispensationalists or historic premill or even amill.

I happen to be optimistic amill. But they have been maligned with a false accusation that you folks who are in the post -mill camp believe in a transformation of the world through human effort rather than by Christ's transforming power.

That's true. And all Puritan post -millennialism in the United States was secularized so that you still had the humanists talking about the advancement of culture and civilization, but they took

Christ out of it. They said, well, culture is going to improve by education, by the control of society, by socialist government, etc.

And so the liberals were post -millennial without Christ. They believed in progress.

And there's only progress downward without Christ. And so the one thing—I'll tell you the books since you brought this up.

The books that changed my mind on this subject were the books on preaching.

When I realized the importance of preaching and the promises of preaching and the fact that Christ preaches through preaching, it changed my eschatology.

And then I also—books like Eschatology of Victory by a man named

K .I .K. Marcellus. Yes, it goes through Matthew 24 and Revelation 20.

A great book by Ian Murray called The Puritan Hope, which is on the eschatology of the

English Puritans. And believe it or not, I don't know if you are aware of this, Ian Murray is an amillennialist.

Oh, really? Yeah. Well, I know a lot of amillennialists that are really post -millennialists, the way they preach.

One of those men was D. James Kennedy. Yeah, you're right. I think he was the most important television preacher.

And he was preaching and somebody said to me, Are you aware that D. James Kennedy is an amillennialist?

I said, I don't care as long as he preaches like a post -millennialist. He was greatly beloved of post -millennialists and theonomists and reconstructionists.

I know that. I'll tell you who else preached like a post -millennialist was Charles Haddon Spurgeon. In fact, you read some of his expositions of the

Psalms that post -millennialists love, and you would think he was a post -millennialist.

Although he professed to be a historical premillennialist, he preached like a post -millennialist because he read the

Puritans all the time. And so this victory orientation is one of the things that, up to theology and to preaching, victory is not just an appendix attached at the end of Reformed theology.

Whatever a person calls himself, the victory of Christ is woven into the warp and woof of all of Reformed theology.

It's always there. How can a sovereign God ever lose? I preached last Sunday on how faith is the victory that overcomes the world.

And so as long as Christians have this defeatism, this pessimism, whether it's eschatological or whatever it is, as long as they're defeatists, like somebody said one time, if you believe in defeat, you will not be disappointed.

And so there has been this revival of victory orientation.

We talked about that last week with Rush Studi, etc., and people reading the Puritans again.

But I think the greatest instrument that God has used, I know it's in my own life,

I see it, in what influenced me and what God has used in my life to influence other people, is the passionate, faithful, expository preaching of the

Word of God. Amen. Confident, not in your own preaching, but confident in the preaching of Christ through you.

Amen. And that's what all these men, their names won't be, a lot of them won't be in history books, that are some of the great instruments of God in our culture.

Their names won't be in history books. Amen. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you about something that is one of my greatest concerns about the church in the 20th and 21st centuries.

And this would even include men that I greatly admire, who I have had on my radio program, whose books

I devour and enjoy and promote. But there is a growing tendency that disturbs me amongst solidly

Reformed men towards religious ecumenism with Rome.

And it disturbs me deeply. I am baffled by it because you have men that seem, in their writings and their sermons and teachings, to clearly understand the

Gospel, but who put the Gospel on a lower rung of importance when it comes to an understanding of the

Godhead or the nature of God, and they will exalt these Roman Catholic theologians and scholars, primarily of yesteryear, but even have ecumenical relations with Roman Catholics today.

Now, I recognize that there are Roman Catholics who will be in heaven because they actually believe, contrary to the dogma of their own religion, they believe in the true

Gospel. But these men that I'm referring to who are

Reformed will put the seal of approval on Roman Catholics who do not believe in the biblical

Gospel and actually uphold the Council of Trent's understanding of the

Gospel. I was wondering if you share my deep concern over this. Well, that concern has been mine as well.

And it's the underlying motive of the two movements, one called the New Perspective on Paul, another called

Federal Vision. And that is to narrow the gap between Rome and Geneva, to narrow the gap between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

And I guarantee you that if that gap has been narrowed, it's not

Rome that has moved. And so I have been greatly disappointed like you in some of these

Calvinists, who you would thought know better. And so they try to restate things so as to make it as close to the way

Roman Catholicism would say it as possible without going all the way.

But the average John Doe could not distinguish the difference. Like, for instance, justification by faith in Christ alone.

The Roman Catholic Church believes, as the Council of Trent teaches, that we're justified by faith in Christ.

But they hate that word alone. Because justification then is you believe in Christ in order to receive the grace to merit salvation.

Because even from what we know, the Judaizers believed in justification by faith in Christ, but they also hated the word alone.

Yeah. And you see, some of these modern

Calvinists, although I think some of them have repented of it, have said is we're justified by faith, and faith in Greek means faithfulness.

We're justified by faithfulness. Well, first of all, faith does not mean faithfulness.

And if we're justified by faithfulness to God, that's the same thing as saying we're justified by works.

That we are justified by faith alone, and without anything else.

I mean, the Westminster Confession, the 1689 Confession are great on this. But not by faith that remains alone.

You remember in Romans 3, it says, we're justified by faith alone apart from the works of the law.

And then James chapter 2 says, that faith without work is dead.

And they don't contradict each other. They're just all saying we're justified by faith alone.

And James is saying, but not by faith that remains alone. It's a faith that shows itself in love and obedience to God.

I'm preaching on 1 John. And the point of 1 John is, how can you be certain that you're really a believer?

And you can be certain as you give yourself these tests. Three tests in John.

Number one, do you believe the right things about Jesus? Number two, are you obeying the law of God and being righteous, but not perfectly?

And number three, do you love the brethren with a selfless, sacrificial love? So it has been disturbing.

There was a man that influenced some young men called, his name was Shepherd, Norman Shepherd.

Westminster Theological Seminary faculty member. He taught at Westminster after it changed.

And he held views that you couldn't distinguish. They were nuanced.

And they wouldn't say them exactly like Rome would say them, but they said them close enough that I think they betrayed the

Reformed faith. So there is a healthy ecumenism where anybody that loves the

Lord Jesus Christ and believes his word, we can have some measure of fellowship with. But there is an unhealthy ecumenism where we disregard doctrine, unless all get together and love each other, one big denomination, and forget doctrinal distinctions.

And you do that, you betray the gospel. So that movement has reached, at least in some circles, its high water mark.

And in the South particularly. In fact, I'll tell you a great story about how the

Reformed faith is influenced by people that are not famous. There was one preacher in the

South who announced to his elders, he was a pastor of a small little church, and the elders were just ordinary businessmen.

And he announced to them, in so many words, that he no longer believed in the doctrine as it has been historically held, of justification by faith in Christ alone, apart from the works of the law.

He said, and there's other things that go with it. I have a different view of the covenant, baptism, etc.

And so he said, but it's just too deep to explain to you all.

In other words, it was condescending, this high intellectual preacher. So at that point, one of the businessmen elders, who was an insurance salesman, reached in his briefcase and pulled out a 50 -page book review that he had just written on the book the preacher had just referred to.

And so the reason the Federal Vision Movement in the South died was because of godly

Southern Presbyterian and Baptist elders who had never been to seminary, but they did see something different.

Like one elder who was a farmer told me about a preacher friend of his and ours who became

Federal Vision. And he said, I don't know what brother so -and -so's preacher, but I know it's not right.

By the way, we have to go to our final break right now. It's been a lot briefer than the last one. So if you'd like to join us, send in your email immediately to chrisarnsen at gmail dot com.

We'll be right back after these messages. Getting a driver's license, running a cash register, flipping burgers, passing sixth grade.

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Moore perhaps I just wanted to let you know that Jason Wallace who I mentioned earlier on in the program pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna Utah extends his greetings to you and he said he wants our listeners to know if they want to hear that eulogy that I recorded in my voice of the notorious and renowned

H. L. Mencken an atheist who had a high regard nonetheless for J.

Gresham Machen go to YouTube and type into the search engine the unexpected orthodoxy of an atheist.

That's good. And also the YouTube channel for Jason Wallace and his documentaries is

Ancient Paths TV or actually Ancient Paths TV and that's all one word.

But if you could conclude Dr. Moorecraft with whatever you want most etched in our hearts and minds regarding this topic and we can have you back soon

God willing for part three. Well let me very quickly mention some more names just very quickly because they're out there and in case people are listening in those towns in Nebraska there's a young man named

Phil Kaiser has he been on your show? Yes, Phil's been on a couple of times at least. Phil Kaiser's great.

He has written dozens of little paperback books on all the critical issues that anybody can read.

Then you have Gary Wagner out in California and that's such a dry and weary land.

Then you have a man in Texas by the name of Marcus Servin who is a great man.

You have another man called oh his name slipped me.

But also you had on your show recently Paul Abbott. That's right. And Paul Abbott's a great street preacher and he preaches at abortion clinics.

Peter Bringee is another. But we could go on. In fact, the people that you have on your show are signs of the revival of the

Reformed faith. You couldn't have a radio show like this back in 1950. Right. It wouldn't be anybody did

Mike. Well we were out of time and I'd love to have you back for part three. I want to repeat your website heritagepresbyterianchurch .com

heritagepresbyterianchurch .com and don't forget about comprehensivechristianity .com comprehensivechristianity .com

and westminstercommentary .com westminstercommentary .com Thank you so much Dr. Moorcraft.

Thank you everybody who listened. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater