June 19, 2020 Show with Os Guiness on “Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion” AND Gary DeMar on “Greg L. Bahnsen’s Book: ‘Against All Opposition: Defending the Christian Worldview'”

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

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in 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 chapter 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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

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

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Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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

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Earth, who are listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday. On this 19th day of June, Juneteenth as it is known, the anniversary of the emancipation or the freedom of American slaves, and this is 2020, and we've got a packed two hours on today's program.

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The second hour, starting a little bit after 5 o 'clock p .m. Eastern time, we're going to be joined by a revisiting guest,

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Gary DeMar, one of my favorite guests to interview. He is founder and president of American Vision, actually he's not the founder, but he is the president of American Vision, and he's going to be discussing a new book that he has brought back into print by the late

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Greg Bonson, Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview. These are lectures that have been transcribed and brought into print in a book form that Dr.

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Bonson gave quite a number of years ago, prior to 1995 sometime. So I'm looking forward to talking to Gary about that, but I am absolutely thrilled for the first hour to be interviewing somebody that I've wanted to interview for years, and I finally have the opportunity by God's providence.

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This is our first time together with Oz Guinness, world -renowned Christian author and social critic, and we're going to be addressing his book, which is considered his magnum opus,

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Fool's Talk, Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the first time ever to Iron Chopper and Zion Radio, Oz Guinness.

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Thank you, Chris, a real delight to be with you. I'm going to give our listeners our email address right away if they want to join us on the air with a question.

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

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As always, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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USA. Oz, we have a tradition here on Iron Chopper and Zion Radio, whenever we have a first -time guest, we like to get a brief summary of their testimony of salvation.

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I understand that that varies widely, not that the gospel is different for different people or that Jesus saves people differently, but the background stories are different, and sometimes you have somebody who's raised in a

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Christian home, and when they reach adulthood, they can't even remember a time when they didn't love and follow the

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Lord. Then you have others who have more of a stark contrast in their life, where they may have been an enemy, perhaps even a scandalous sinner, for a great many years, and then the

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Lord rescues them out of that, being a more day and night, or night and day, stark contrast in their lives.

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Can you tell us something about your own upbringing, the religious upbringing of your youth, if any, and how either you came to be saved or how you came to take very, very seriously the things of the

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Lord? Well, thank you, Chris. You can tell from my surname, I come from a prominent

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Irish family. That's right. And my grandfather was one of the first Western doctors who went to China as a missionary.

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It happened that both my parents were born in China, and I and my two brothers were born in China during World War II, and we lived in an area where, on the one hand, you had the

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Japanese army, 17 million killed in their invasion, and we were caught in a deadly famine in which 5 million died in three months, including my two brothers.

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Wow. My mother, who was a surgeon, could do nothing, no food, no medicine. Then we moved to Nanking, which was the capital of China in those days.

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So I remember, as a boy, the climax of the Chinese Revolution. So I have a missionary background, strong, loving, and full of faith.

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But when the Chinese arrested us, the communists, my parents, after two years of house arrest, were allowed to send me back to England.

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So I went to a typical English boarding school with long, long thousands of miles from my parents.

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So clearly they loved me and prayed for me, but I had no particular Christian influence immediately in my life.

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And my own journey to faith was actually partly through a friend and partly intellectual.

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I read the great atheists like Nietzsche and Sartre, and my hero is Albert Camus, and on the other side, people like Pascal and G .K.

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Chesterton, and then C .S. Lewis. And I came to faith in my last year at school, but I have to say it was actually something else that made a far greater impact, although, of course, my conversion was more important.

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I was a student in London in the 60s. Drug, sex, rock and roll, free speech movement, films of Fellini, Antonioni, all that.

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The Christians we had gave us rich, deep blocks of faith and theology, but nothing about the culture.

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And then I came across a little man with Swiss knickers and a goatee called Francis Schaeffer, and he connected all the dots.

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And when I went out to L 'Abri at a time of real frustration, I realized that to think

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Christianly under the Lordship of Jesus, you can think about anything and everything and be free to do so.

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And so that actually, in a practical way, made a huge difference in my life and just as much as my conversion a few years earlier.

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Well, praise God, and what were the providential circumstances in your life that made you realize,

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I'm going to spend my entire life focused on Christian ministry, on evangelism, on teaching, on writing.

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When was it that you knew this was your life? Well, it was growth, and I would say trial and error.

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And the significant thing was, Chris, I came to faith in 1960. And talking to the great

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John Stott many years later, who was a friend, we both agreed that in that time, in English evangelicalism, if you were all out for Jesus, you had three options.

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Ministry, mission field, or evangelism. That was it. Everyone else was kind of second class.

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And it wasn't actually stated explicitly, but it was sort of understood. And you still have that in parts of this country.

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And my parents were missionaries. I knew that wasn't for me. I actually tried to be an evangelist with comic results.

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That's another story. And so I went down to a church in the south of England, thinking, well, maybe the

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Lord's called me to that. And after nine months, I was frustrated out of my mind. I loved the people, and I liked what

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I was doing. But one day, I had an old 40 -year -old car you had to crank with a handle.

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Only one place you could take it to look after it. And I talked to the gas attendant for 20 minutes, and I realized he was the first non -Christian

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I'd spoken to in weeks, because the church was a womb -to -tomb subculture.

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And it sort of made me realize my frustration. Then someone gave me a Xerox copy, not in print, a

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William Perkins 16th century book on calling. And I realized the

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Reformation and the Scripture had a completely different idea. And that was the beginning of my liberation and discovery of what my calling is.

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Well, praise God for that. And the body of Christ is all the better for it, since we have been so blessed by you and the legacy of your work.

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And I'm going to read a commendation written by the late

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Ravi Zacharias for the book that we are addressing today, your magnum opus, as I mentioned before,

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Fool's Talk, Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion. And Ravi Zacharias, who has been beloved by many for many years, and as many of you know, he has very recently gone home to be with the

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Lord he so loved and faithfully served for eternity. And he says,

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In a battle of ideas, unlike a battle between nations, the goal is not to vanquish the opponents, but to win them.

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Making that challenge even more difficult is the oftentimes what we win them with is what we win them to.

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The art and science of dialoguing and debate must bring together the message and the method in concert.

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No one does this better than my colleague Oz Guinness. For years I have benefited from his incisive thinking and carefully studied presentations.

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Here he wisely observes that our urgent need today is to reunite evangelism and apologetics, and make sure that our best arguments are directed toward winning people and not just winning arguments.

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I am thrilled to see his unique thinking on these crucial subjects coextensive with a lifetime of doing apologetics.

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It is a must -read for anyone interested in engaging the skeptic or seeker. Few thinkers today rise to the level that Oz does, even as he plumbs the depth of vital issues in defense of the historic

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Christian faith. Well, with a powerful commendation like that from a powerful brother in Christ like Ravi, anybody listening should definitely get a hold of this book.

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Now, it's got a very interesting title, obviously, Fool's Talk, and immediately what comes to mind are verses like Proverbs 26, 24, where we are told,

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Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest ye be like him yourself. And then in the very next verse we read,

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Answer a fool according to his folly, lest ye be wise in his own eyes. And then, of course, in 1

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Corinthians 1, 21, we read that,

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For since the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom, did not come to know

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God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

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So I'm wondering, are any of those verses, do they have anything to do with the title of this book?

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Well, Corinthians certainly does, because in my thinking, there are three fools in the

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Bible, three types of fools. The first one doesn't help us at all. You could call it the fool proper, the person who really, an idiot, because he lacks the fear of the

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Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, and makes all sorts of mistakes. You have a lot of that in Proverbs and the

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Old Testament. The second fool in Scripture, helps us, but doesn't go the whole way.

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It's what you might call the fool bearer. The person who's prepared to be treated and seen as a fool for Christ's sake.

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That's 1 Corinthians 4. They're not actually fools. Paul wasn't really a fool, but he was prepared to be seen as one out of faithfulness.

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And, of course, the supreme fool bearer is our Lord, who was made a mock king, both by the

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Hebrew soldiers and by the Roman soldiers, you know, with the crown of thorns and so on.

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But the one I'm interested in is the fool maker. You have the idea of the jester, the person who's prepared to be seen as a fool, treated as a fool, to use that position to bounce back and make points to the high and mighty.

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And that, of course, is the incarnation too. I think that's the wonderful symbol and dynamism of a good apologetic.

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I mean, there's far too much apologetics. It's very prosaic, you know, and doesn't try and subvert people and their thinking.

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And we need to do that today because private life has become infinitely more diverse with the explosion of religions and public life has become infinitely more secular and very hostile to faith.

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So the old apologetics are slightly teasing but a thousand and one reasons why

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Jesus rose from the dead. It's still very important for anyone who's open, interested, and needy, but most people are not open, not interested, and not needy.

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And we have to raise questions to get them to ask questions and then we finally have answers.

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So we've got to rethink apologetics and make it more biblical and faithful and not the sort of 19th century version which is too simple and prosaic.

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Now briefly, for the sake especially of our listeners who are either new believers or perhaps they're not believers at all,

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I do have listeners on occasion who contact me who are atheists and Muslim and members of other world religions and cults and so on, but can you please define apologetics?

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People may immediately think that people are apologizing in the classic sense that we use that term today.

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Like, I am sorry that I'm a Christian but let me tell you about what I mean by that. No, it has nothing to do with that at all.

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It comes from the old Greek word apologia which means a defense, a lawyer's defense in a court case.

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But it's not only an offense, it's also prosecution. In 1

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Peter 3 .15 Peter says, be always ready to give a reason for the hope that's within you.

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Defend your faith, present your faith persuasively. That word reason in the

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English is actually apologia in the Greek. So that's apologetics, being able to give a persuasive case for the

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Christian faith. And the subtitle, also interesting, especially a key word here, recovering the art of Christian persuasion.

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Obviously, you believe that this art had either been lost or greatly diminished in the minds and lives of not only those in ministry but in the activities and lives of lay people.

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Why do you think that that occurred and what were we, Christians, replacing this art with?

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Well, put it this way, Chris, when people are open, interested, and needy, you can speak simply and straightforwardly.

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But whenever people are not open, not interested, and not needy, you have to be more persuasive, subversive, roundabout, indirect, raise questions rather than statements, and so on.

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So you take something like a Sunday sermon. A Sunday sermon assumes that the great majority of people in the church are just ready to listen to God's Word as it's preached.

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And so preaching doesn't have to be that persuasive and indirect and subversive.

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But as we move out, talk, say, to atheists or Muslims or people who think that Christians are immediately bigots or whatever, you can't be simple and straightforward in that situation.

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You have to be roundabout. So when our Lord, for example, when He's asked tricky questions,

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He doesn't answer them. He asks even trickier ones back because there's nothing more subversive than a question.

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And good apologetics starts with loving and listening, but one of the first things we should say is a question.

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And we begin by asking questions to find out where a person's heart is. That's one of the key ideas, to try and discern the treasure of the heart.

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What makes a person tick? What do they really love supremely? You have to ask questions to get down to that.

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You know, there's too much talk today in apologetics about worldviews as if someone is an atheist or a relativist or whatever, and they're a card -carrying version of it.

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No one's a card -carrying version of anything. They may believe certain things, but they've got a story.

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And that story, if you know it, then you get down to what really matters to them, the treasure of their heart.

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So you first ask questions to get to the treasure of their heart, then you ask questions to challenge them further.

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We do have a question from a listener in Queens, New York. We have

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Johnny in Queens, New York, and he begins by citing that passage, one of the passages

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I began with earlier. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

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Proverbs 26, 5. Our modern culture seems to be characterized by emotionally charged post -modern relativism.

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Everyone is entitled to their own brand of truth, as long as your version does not impose upon mine.

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How should a believer answer a fool and engage in a meaningful, persuasive discussion in areas of religion, politics, and the likes, without being foolish like him?

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Oh my goodness, you need a long answer to that one great question. We're not only in a post -modern era, no truth.

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So you have a combination of relativism, many different truths, but a combination of that and emotivism.

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For many people, it's what they feel is what matters. Rousseau says, what I feel is good is good.

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What I feel is bad is bad. Well, relativism and emotivism are absolutely disastrous, but they make it difficult to communicate in the old way.

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And then you add things like, say, Twitter and the social media, where you have a whole mob ready to misunderstand and to distort.

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It's extremely difficult. But I would say today, remember that the first we can count on the fact, you just say,

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Christian, you're immediately categorized as a bigot, or phobic, or whatever. You want to find out what they believe, and then take the example of the prophet

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Elijah. He's got 850 false prophets against him.

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He's a little outnumbered. The people are sitting on the fence. They're not with him. And the royal court, the powers, are dead against him.

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What does he do? He does not say, come back to God. He says, if Baal is

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God, follow Baal. Now, that's actually quite extraordinary. Of course, he can say that knowing

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Baal is not God. So the fastest way for them to see that is to try and see if Baal will answer their prayers, and he can't, and then he shows that the

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Lord is God, and so on. But the lesson there, when you find out what it makes a person take, the treasure of their heart, then focus on that, and then press them out to see if they can be true to what it is they believe.

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You don't say it for them. You raise questions to push them out. If Baal is God, follow

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Baal. If you believe in X, Y, or Z, where will it lead? That's good apologetics.

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We've got to be question -askers so that we're probing and pushing and not always known for simplistic answers.

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The straightforward answer to a skeptic will simply be like water off a duck's back and get nowhere.

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You've got to subvert their thinking. Great question. Yes, and by the way,

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Johnny, make sure we have your full mailing address in Queens, New York, because you have just won a free copy of Fool's Talk, compliments of InterVarsity Press, and also compliments of the

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Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who will actually be shipping it to you at no charge to you or to us.

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You know, I'm old enough that I remember what was typically called liberalism for quite a number of decades in my life, where liberals wanted really everybody to have an equal say in the public arena, and that it was wicked and harsh and mean to judge anyone.

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It seems that we have something quite different right now. We have real dogmatic leftist orthodoxy, if you will.

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We wouldn't call it orthodox, but they would believe that their beliefs are not to be challenged, and the beliefs of Christians and even one might say

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Jews and others who uphold the inerrant scriptures in high regard.

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We are the ones that are heretics. We are the ones that are to be banished from the public arena and be silenced and to lose our careers and to lose our places on school boards and politics and so on.

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There's really a different approach with those types of folks than the old -fashioned liberal would be challenged.

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Am I right? Absolutely. Both theological liberalism, revisionism, and political liberalism are deeply in trouble.

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They've gone nowhere. But you're raising a very important point, I think, Chris. Apologetics and evangelism are one, but I think evangelism, apologetics, and what the scriptures see as prophetic, you know, addressing the issues of our day, are all actually overlapping.

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Now, when you look at America now, obviously the country is as deeply divided as at any moment since just before the

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Civil War. But why? Some people say it's the President. Some people say it's the social media.

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Some people say it's the Coastals against the Outlanders. Some people say it's the Nationalists against the globalists.

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All of those have something to do with it. I think the deepest answer is the difference between those who understand

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America and freedom from the perspective of 1776, the

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American Revolution, which of course was decisively biblical through the

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Reformation, and those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of ideas coming from the

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French Revolution. Now, the French Revolution, as you know, lasted only 10 years in France.

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And then came Napoleon's dictatorship. He said the revolution is over. But the ideas flowing out.

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So you have in America today the third of the great streams that have flown out. We can ignore the other two.

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And it's called cultural Marxism. And you know, I first came to this country in 68.

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A hundred cities were on fire. Martin Luther King, later

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Bobby Kennedy, both assassinated. But the radicals knew they wouldn't win in the streets.

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They had to win through what they called the Long March through the institutions. In other words, win the colleges and universities.

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Win the press and the media. Win the world of Hollywood and entertainment. The ideas world.

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The cultural gatekeepers. And then you win America. That's 50 years ago. And you look at it today.

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They have won. So Antifa and Black Lives Matter may be the radical face of that.

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But you've got ideas that are culturally Marxist right across the board. And that's what we're really up against today in a very powerful way.

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So I think our apologetics and evangelism has to be equally adept in prophetic understanding with a small p.

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In other words, we can't say, thus says the Lord. But we're bringing to bear a

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Christian thinking, Christian worldview, on the issues of our time. And we're up against very radical things.

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So a lot of Christians I know around here, and I live in Washington, they mention the word justice, they'll salute.

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They don't start to ask is this evil, which is evil? Should we respond in a biblical, prophetic way?

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Addressing it? Confession? Repentance? Forgiveness? Reconciliation? And so on?

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Or in a Marxist left wing way, which is using power and division and categories like race and sex and so on?

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The American Revolution is on its last legs because it's not being defended by people who understand it.

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And you almost need American apologists today, as well as Christian apologists. But that's not my point.

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We're talking about Christian apologists. And we do have a listener,

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Susan Margaret, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. She says, according to the parable of the sower, also known as the parable of the soils, that some plant some water, and it is

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God who gives the increase. If it is true that God gives the increase, why is it necessary for us to persuade anyone?

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Well, always in Scripture you have a wonderful partnership between the sovereignty of God and the significance of God's people made in His image.

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And just as you can't distinguish, say, what's divine and what's human in Jesus, and certainly not the mystery of how they're related, so we can't fully explain how

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God's sovereignty and our significance work. And you know, the Hyper -Calvinists go one way and the

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Hyper -Arminians the other way, and it becomes a fruitless argument. And you see in Scripture that both are real, and we need to count on both of them.

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In other words, we are called always to do our part. Now, I would say as apologists we're very much very junior partners under the

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Lord. So the great apologist is the Holy Spirit. He's the one whose word and spirit and power convicts and convinces.

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But we don't just sit back and pray and watch. We're there to witness to all that our

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Lord has done for us, and by His grace so often our feeble witnesses helps and counts.

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It's certainly not up to us. So I personally don't believe in the theistic proofs.

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I don't believe you can prove God. I think that's an insult to the

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God who is Yahweh, the God of Sinai, and so on. We witness to Him with powerful arguments, and we destroy strongholds, that's apologetics, of ideas that help people resist

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God, but we can never prove God, and it's never all up to us.

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We need the Holy Spirit. We're merely junior partners working with the

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Holy Spirit. And, by the way, Susan Margaret, you've also won a free copy of Fool's Talk, compliments of InterVarsity Press, and Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

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so please make sure we have your full mailing address so you can have this book shipped out to you in a timely fashion.

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We're going to our first break right now. If anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question for Oz Guinness, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com

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chrisarnson at gmail .com Always give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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

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We'll be right back with Oz Guinness right after these messages, so please do not go away. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.

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

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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.

35:11

Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org. This is

35:19

Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our Sovereign Lord, God, Savior, and King Jesus Christ, today and always.

35:35

Welcome back. If you just tuned in, our guest today is Oz Guinness, and we are discussing his magnum opus,

35:42

Fool's Talk, if you'd like to join us on the air. But the question for Oz, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

35:50

And we do have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who asks,

35:55

It seems inevitable every single time I have a discussion on important matters with an unbeliever that if this person is vociferous enough and gets angry enough,

36:06

I start to follow in my own anger. How do I constantly remind myself your wonderful words that we are not supposed to be winning arguments but winning souls?

36:20

Great question, because a lot of things are incredibly frustrating today, so I understand what you're saying.

36:26

We've got to remember that the ultimate persuader, as I said earlier, is the Holy Spirit. It's not up to us.

36:34

And our prime witness is not winning the argument, it's witnessing by loving the person and then just sharing what our

36:44

Lord has done for us. He's called us to be witnesses. That's first and foremost about who he is and what the

36:51

Lord has done to us. And so how people respond, that's up to them. In other words, we should have a very strong sense of people's responsibility.

37:01

It's not our responsibility to persuade them. We've got to do the very best job we can, loving them, putting the best case and all that.

37:10

But at the end of the day, and sometimes it reduces you to tears because people can be so close and still turn away, it isn't up to us.

37:20

So the idea that we're kind of the great white hope in boxing, we've got to knock out all comers, answer every question and be persuasive, that's a terrible myth.

37:30

In other words, at the end of the day, if you think like that, you begin to think that the faith is no more certain than our defense of the faith.

37:41

And that's a terrible misunderstanding. We can really blow it badly by not loving someone or arguing extremely badly or saying something very stupid, but of course our trust is in the

37:54

Lord and he's true even if we're not so good at defending him. So we've got to get out of the way of thinking it's all up to us and if we do it well, they'll come to faith.

38:05

And if we don't, they won't, and that's our responsibility, we've got to do our best.

38:12

But what really matters is what the Holy Spirit is doing. We have, oh by the way,

38:18

Arnie, you also won a free copy of Full Stalk, please get us your mailing address in Perry County, Pennsylvania, so that CVBBS .com

38:27

can ship it out to you. And thanks again to IVP Publishing and to Varsity Press for being so generous with these books.

38:36

We have CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says, isn't there a real danger when we are having a dispute, theologically, with somebody who does not know

38:50

Christ or is even an enemy of Christ, that we can have sometimes, according to our personality, a tendency to be too nice?

39:02

Well, maybe, if by being, in other words, there's a difference between loving and being nice.

39:08

Right. And our Lord was incredibly loving, but he talked about people as whitewashed sepulchres, and you see the prophets were people who denounced what was evil and outrageous and hypocritical and so on.

39:23

So no, our ideal is never to be nice, but to be as loving as we can, and of course we know our own hearts, and one trouble is that we rationalize, say we're getting angry with someone, we can rationalize that as sort of righteous anger, so we've got to be very careful.

39:42

So certainly never just nice, always loving, but beware of your own heart.

39:48

Some people have short fuses. Some people are naturally a little controlling and authoritarian and so on, so know yourself when you witness, and watch how we act when people don't warm to what you're saying.

40:04

But always be careful of rationalizing something, but never nice. Now, do you think sometimes how we distinguish being loving and nice is the manner with which we speak truth to those with whom we disagree?

40:25

It could have an entirely different impact on the person, and even the audience perhaps watching if there are people sitting around, or if this is even a formal public debate.

40:37

We can say some very startling and very serious statements of warning and calls to repentance and so on to people, but if we have a tone of voice and a manner about us that reveals that we are truly saying these things because we love the person, rather than shouting at the top of our lungs with veins popping out of our forehead and our neck, and I'm not saying that that's never appropriate either, but isn't the manner a very important thing?

41:17

Oh, absolutely, and love wins through. If you say something haltingly or maybe not the best way, if you're really loving someone, it will win through.

41:27

One helpful thing that I try and think of, a lot of people you hear remarkable stories of great evangelists, it might be

41:33

Ravi or Becky Pippitt or someone like that, and they sit on the plane and have a ten -minute talk and they've led three people to faith.

41:42

You know, most of us, I always think to myself, if you think of the journey to faith from zero to a hundred, the first thing is, you meet someone, where are they?

41:56

If they're at ninety -seven, well, they're just ripe to be brought to a hundred, to the Lord. But say they've been stuck.

42:04

Say, I remember talking to a person who was an ex -Baptist, grown up in a Baptist family, where his father was a deacon, and he'd abused, domestic abuse.

42:15

He'd abused his mother, his wife, the boy's mother. And every time you mention

42:22

God, authority, Father, you just see the resistance growing. He'd been stuck, let's say he was at thirteen.

42:30

Well, if the whole hour is just getting him from thirteen to fourteen, it's worth it.

42:37

You can only take someone as far as the time you have with them, and the depth of the quality of the relationship will allow.

42:45

That's all we're asked to do. The Lord has many witnesses, and we may take them so far, but intrigue them.

42:52

The trouble with a person who wants to blurt it all out and get them the whole way, is often they just leave people as burnt over ground.

43:01

They feel good about themselves because they blurted out the whole gospel, but actually the person's been put off and not really helped.

43:10

And then the next Christian he meets, well, he thinks back of the bad way we did it. So we've got to find out where people are, and try and get them as far as we can in the time we have.

43:23

Excellent. We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who asks,

43:31

Is there not a real danger, in spite of the vital need for apologetics, something that I personally love with a passion, to make sure that our love for inactivity and apologetics does not become something that is merely academic, stale, and cold, where we wind up merely judging other people for not having the intelligence that we have, and our main goal winds up either just to expose those who are our opponents as fools, or to, as you said before, people who only just want to win arguments.

44:09

Isn't there a danger of taking this beautiful thing known as apologetics and turning it into something harmful?

44:17

Absolutely. Quick answer to what you're saying. But every part of our calling as followers of Jesus has a shadow side, or a temptation side, and a sin that's often involved with it.

44:30

One of the things, actually my best book beyond this one, is The Call. You can see that the downside of calling is people have such a personal sense of destiny that they become egotistic.

44:46

I always tell the story, I tell it in the book, Winston Churchill had a

44:51

Presbyterian in his cabinet with an immense sense of Presbyterian reformed sense of calling, all power to him.

44:58

But it made the man incredibly priggish and full of himself. And Churchill couldn't stand him.

45:05

And one day after he'd been, you know, sort of pronouncing to the wall, he left the cabinet room and Churchill said,

45:11

There, but for the grace of God, goes God. Now that's an appalling distortion of the good side of calling.

45:23

Calling can become conceit. And in the same way, that capacity, the ability, the love to try and persuade someone becomes idolatrous in all sorts of directions.

45:35

And we trust in the power of the mind and so on. And we need to, if we love apologetics, as I do and you obviously do, we need to think of the good side and also be aware of the bad side and maybe particular drawbacks that we individually might be drawn towards.

45:57

Thank you, R .J. Make sure we have your full mailing address because you also have one, a free copy of Fool's Talk. And when you sit...

46:04

How many do you have, Chris? I have five to give away. And I think that most of them are gone now.

46:11

You used the word appalling before. It just reminded me of another quote that I always laugh when

46:18

I think of it. And unless I'm remembering incorrectly, it was President Harry S.

46:23

Truman who said of Norman Vincent Peale, I find Paul appealing and Peale appalling.

46:32

Yeah, that's right. It was actually Adlai Stevenson. Oh, okay. See, I got to stop saying it was

46:37

Harry S. Truman. Thanks for correcting me on that. Adlai Stevenson, it was quite a word. And let's see.

46:47

I want you to have definitely five minutes of uninterrupted time soon to summarize this book for our listeners because I know that you could only be on for an hour today and we have to go to our midway break at 54 minutes after the hour.

47:04

So I'm going to take one more listener and then have you summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

47:15

We have John in Bangor, Maine who has a question. And John in Bangor, Maine says,

47:21

Who are your heroes of apologetics? Hmm. A great question.

47:28

I am a great admirer of St. Augustine. And then you move down the centuries.

47:35

The next one for me would be Blaise Pascal and his book Pensee, which is the most extraordinary book.

47:43

You know, all the medieval apologists were Aristotelian and following Thomas Aquinas and giving massive arguments that were proofs for God.

47:53

And Pascal didn't think any of those worked. And his approach, they're only pensées, thoughts or jottings.

48:00

It's as if he had little notes for the design of an incredible cathedral. And he died at 39 and never lived to complete it.

48:09

I love his work. I mentioned earlier G .K. Chesterton and, of course,

48:15

C .S. Lewis. Those four would be my favorites. I knew

48:20

Malcolm Muggeridge when I was at Oxford and always loved his impish approach to apologetics.

48:26

And he was an ardent atheist for quite a long time, wasn't he? Oh, absolutely. And Cain, you know,

48:33

I've written a book, it's not published yet, called Signals of Transcendence. And it's eight stories of the ways people had experiences which punctured what they used to believe and pointed beyond it so they became seekers.

48:50

Lewis is surprised by joy. And Muggeridge is one of those. So people like that.

48:58

Great. Well, Oz, if you could now just summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners before you have to leave us after the first hour so that our listeners can have what's most important to you remembered most vividly.

49:14

Well, Chris, let me widen it because we really are in a most extraordinary moment. You know, if you take this triple crisis, the pandemic, natural disaster, the

49:25

George Floyd murder, moral and political disaster, and then the economic disaster caused by both of those, you can see

49:33

America's reeling. And I hope when we get out from the pandemic, we'll see a new interest in the ultimate questions.

49:42

What's life about? And so on, which causes an invitation to apologetics. But when you see that, you can see our entire world as an extraordinary point.

49:54

America, the deepest crisis since the Civil War. The West becoming a cut flower civilization and living off the whiff of an empty bottle.

50:05

The whole global world with the threat of China. Then you look at singularity and what's coming in the future.

50:11

This is a moment for Christians to get off the back foot and to realize the gospel is not just the good news.

50:20

It's the best news ever. And the whole future of humanity depends on our articulating the great truths of the gospel and the whole

50:31

Bible, human dignity, freedom, justice, words, truth, all these great things.

50:37

There's never been a moment when the Bible and the gospel is more relevant than it is now.

50:45

So we got to move off the back foot with tremendous courage, tremendous confidence. And as I always remind people,

50:52

God is greater than all. So God can be trusted in all situations.

50:59

So have faith in God. Have no fear.

51:05

And by God's grace, go out and play your part. Praise God. Thank you so much,

51:11

Os Guinness, for being such an outstanding guest as I knew you would be. I look forward to many interviews to come.

51:17

Should you be willing, and more importantly, should God be willing. And when I get you a recording of our interview,

51:24

I'll give you a calendar for future dates if you'd like to choose some for other interviews.

51:30

Thank you, Chris. And I want to remind our listeners that IVP Publications and Cumberland Valley Bible Book Services were those who were gracious enough to make these books available to us.

51:46

IVP for donating the books to begin with and CVBBS .com for shipping them out.

51:53

Well, God bless you, dear Brother Oz, and I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thank you so much.

51:59

God bless you too and all your listeners. Thank you. And don't go away, folks, because we are going to be interviewing in the minutes ahead, probably about 12 minutes or so.

52:11

We are being joined by Gary DeMar, somebody who is no stranger to the

52:17

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio audience. And Gary is going to be discussing a book that he has brought into print, which was the transcripts of lectures given by Greg L.

52:33

Bonson. Some call him the father of apologetics or even the grandfather of apologetics.

52:40

And one of the masters, to be sure. And this book is now under the title,

52:47

Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview. So please be patient with this longer than normal break.

52:53

We have to have this longer break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show because they have to, in order to fulfill

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FCC regulations, they have to air public service announcements and other things that localize this show to Lake City, Florida, while we, on the other hand, air globally heard commercials.

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So please use this time wisely. Try to write down as much of the information provided by our advertisers as you can so you can more frequently and successfully patronize our advertisers and therefore keeping them happy and hopefully keeping them around as our advertisers for a long time so that we can remain on the air because we depend on the finances that come through their advertising to exist.

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But also send in questions to our guest, Gary DeMar, founder and president of American Vision.

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And the email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Gary DeMar right after these messages from our sponsors.

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01:10:38

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01:10:51

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01:11:00

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01:11:09

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01:14:31

That's also the email address where you could send in a question to Gary DeMar, who is our guest for the second hour.

01:14:37

Gary DeMar, who is the president of American Vision, author of numerous books, and he has recently brought back into print, or should

01:14:47

I say brought into print for the first time, I should say, the book by Greg L. Bonson, Against All Opposition, Defending the

01:14:54

Christian Worldview, which are actually the transcripts of lectures given by Dr.

01:15:01

Bonson. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trump and Zion Radio, Gary DeMar.

01:15:08

Well, thanks for having me back. You had Oz Guinness on the first hour, is that right? That's right.

01:15:15

I became a Christian in 1973, and after reading Mere Christianity and I think one other book, one of the next books

01:15:24

I read was The Dust of Death by Oz Guinness. And it was one of the best books

01:15:31

I had ever read. It's a little out of date because it was written against the backdrop of the 1960s and early 1970s, but I still have the original copy of that and the underlining of words that I didn't know what they meant back then.

01:15:45

Wow. I had no idea of the connection when I had you both placed back to back like this.

01:15:51

Well, I'll make sure I tell him that. And Gary, Greg Bonson is a giant in the minds of many.

01:16:02

Of course, he is unknown to many as well, especially those who are not theologically reformed, and even more so to those who are not familiar with theonomy or Christian reconstruction.

01:16:14

But the thing that's interesting about Dr. Bonson is that he is a greatly beloved figure amongst many, even those that are outside of theonomy and Christian reconstruction, who appreciate the gift of apologetics that he has given to the

01:16:35

Church and those who are able to observe him from the past, before he went home to be with the

01:16:42

Lord, through his writings and videos and audio recordings and so on.

01:16:47

Tell our listeners about Greg Bonson. Well, I was a seminary student in the 1970s, and Greg had come in as a very young Ph .D.

01:16:58

student. He was a graduate of, I think, Westmont College, and then he had earned two degrees at Westminster Theological Seminary, and then he was working on a

01:17:09

Ph .D. which he received, I think, when he was maybe 28 or 29.

01:17:17

And he taught apologetics and ethics and maybe a couple of other courses.

01:17:23

I think he may have taught a course on eschatology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. And so I got to know

01:17:30

Greg then. We were only a few years apart in age, I think maybe about three or possibly four years apart in age.

01:17:38

And then after leaving RTS under circumstances that are too lengthy to get into, in fact, it's one of the reasons why

01:17:49

I'm in the Atlanta area, is that seminary was supposed to start here in the Atlanta area.

01:17:55

And at the very, I mean, just at the last second, the whole thing just blew up.

01:18:02

But my wife and I came here anyway, and that's where we've been since 1979.

01:18:09

And then Greg returned to California where he pastored a church and taught at a local

01:18:14

Christian school and then had kind of the Bonson School of,

01:18:22

I don't know if it was the Bonson Theological Seminary, but it was related to all the work that he had done throughout the years.

01:18:29

And Greg was really most known by people outside our circle because of his apologetic methodology.

01:18:39

He had done some very rigorous debates with some high -profile people.

01:18:46

Probably the most famous one has been described as the Great Debate, and that was with Gordon Stein.

01:18:54

Unfortunately, it's only in audio, but there are... He was an atheist, right? Pardon?

01:19:00

He was an atheist, correct? Yeah, yeah, Gordon Stein was an atheist. And Gordon Stein really didn't know what he was getting himself into.

01:19:09

A lot of atheists, they say, oh, this guy, he's a pastor somewhere, he's taught in a Christian school, and now he teaches at a seminary.

01:19:15

But Greg was... Well, he's one of the smartest people I ever came across in terms of knowing philosophy and the philosophers and all the arguments related to that.

01:19:26

There was probably no one better in the Christian community in the late 20th century than Greg Monson.

01:19:34

He could write at very high academic standards, and at the same time, he could write for high school and college students.

01:19:40

And that's what this book is, Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview, which is based on lectures that he gave at one of our life preparation conferences in the 1990s.

01:19:53

We transcribed it, as you mentioned, and then published it in this book as a volume. The next volume is the third year that he spoke for us.

01:20:00

That would have been in 1993, and that will be out sometime this year. Then Greg tragically died in 1995.

01:20:09

He was having a heart valve replaced. It was actually the third time he had had that valve replaced.

01:20:17

And each time you do that, the risks go up. And he knew that there was a good possibility that he was not going to survive that, and he did not.

01:20:28

He went into a coma and never came out of it. And I remember the day we had gotten the news that he had died, and, you know, we were just all devastated by it because he was really the standard bearer when it came to apologetics.

01:20:44

He was really just coming into his own about that time. So it was a very tragic time.

01:20:51

But he left a lot of disciples behind. I mean, I know you had Joe Morecraft on for a number of times, and Joe, in fact, the seminary that Greg was going to be running was going to be under Council on Presbyterian Church.

01:21:09

And you've got other guys across the country who are devotees of Greg, and you can see a lot of that on Facebook and a lot of publications related to his apologetic methodology.

01:21:23

Yes, I am just thankful that I had the opportunity to meet him before he entered into eternity in the early 90s when

01:21:34

I visited Messiah's congregation in Brooklyn, New York, where Pastor Steve Schlissel is the pastor.

01:21:44

And they were the Church of the Week. I used to work for WMCA Radio, a prominent station in New York City that is an affiliate of the

01:21:52

Salem Media Group, the largest Christian radio network in the world. And we had a thing called

01:21:59

Church of the Week, and Messiah's congregation at my choosing at the time was the Church of the

01:22:04

Week, and I went to the congregation as we always did with the Church of the Week, and there to record the sermon.

01:22:12

And Greg Bonson was the speaker that Sunday, and I remember him clearly preaching on the

01:22:20

Ascension. And I was a relatively new believer at the time, and I don't think

01:22:26

I had ever heard an entire sermon on the Ascension, and it was powerful. And Steve gave me the privilege of interviewing

01:22:34

Dr. Bonson in his study, in Steve's study. And as I've said on this program, one of the most horrific nightmares of my life was losing that tape.

01:22:45

Oh, I was just going to ask you, do you still have it? No, I don't. A tear runs down my cheek every time

01:22:53

I think about it. Oh, it's just... Greg has about,

01:22:59

I think there are about 1 ,600 audio presentations and video presentations available at Covenant Media Foundation.

01:23:15

And so he left a really great legacy of audio and video behind.

01:23:22

And, of course, he's published a number of books, Unapologetics, Always Ready, and this one, and then we'll have another one.

01:23:29

Then we published a book that was lost. The manuscript was lost for many years on presuppositional apologetics, and we finally got a copy of it, and we published it.

01:23:41

And we're hoping that we're going to be publishing much, much more of Greg's material.

01:23:48

Because Greg was a great speaker, and as a result, there's not a whole lot of editing that we have to do in order to make

01:23:54

Greg sound better in print. Yeah, so it seems like I'm not the only one that loses important things about Greg Bowens.

01:24:05

Well, yeah, it was after his death. Because the book had already been typeset, and that was in the day of typesetting.

01:24:17

It was done the old -fashioned way. People today, when they hear about typesetting and so forth, they have no idea what that means.

01:24:24

Today it's so much easier to typeset a book, and I can typeset a book in a day and make corrections and send a

01:24:29

PDF off to a printer and have a book in a couple of weeks. But still, even back in the 1980s and 1990s, it was an arduous task.

01:24:40

And this book apparently had been stuck in a drawer, and I guess it had fallen behind the drawer, so when someone closed the drawer, it was stuck back there.

01:24:50

But someone found it, and then we published it as Presuppositional Apologetics Stated and Defended.

01:25:00

Now, it's out of print at the moment, but it will be back in print in a paperback edition in the next month or so.

01:25:07

Great. Well, what specifically was Dr. Bonson lecturing on to these students that provided these transcripts that you were so impressed by, so blessed by, that you said, this has got to become a book?

01:25:27

Well, he spoke in 1991, and we published a book called Pushing the

01:25:32

Antithesis, which was the first part of his apologetic lectures. And then in 1992, he did another series of lectures, kind of a continuation.

01:25:43

And then in 1993, he did another series. And like I had mentioned before,

01:25:51

Greg could be as academic as necessary, depending on the audience.

01:25:57

But at the same time, he was so good at just dealing with apologetics at a fundamental, basic level that a high school student and a college student could understand.

01:26:08

And just a few months ago, we were offering the audio tapes, well, actually

01:26:13

CDs, and I decided, you know, I think I'll listen to these again, just for fun.

01:26:19

And I just thought these things are terrific. It's basic apologetics. It's the foundational principles of presuppositional apologetics.

01:26:28

They explain the difference there. You know, there's kind of a classical apologetic mode, and there's evidential apologetics, like Evidence that Demands a

01:26:37

Vernon. You've got a couple of big, thick books, and you learn all the evidences about Christianity, and you supply your opponent with, you know, wheelbarrows full of evidences, and hopefully all those evidences pile up enough that he finally gives up, and then he accepts

01:26:53

Jesus as his Savior and Lord. Yeah, just to shut you up. What's that?

01:27:00

Just to shut you up. Yeah, no more, please. No more, no more. I'm convinced, I'm convinced.

01:27:07

And people are convinced by evidences. I don't want to dismiss that. And the classical approach, you know, the cosmological argument and arguments related to that where reason is the foundation, you don't begin with the assumption that God exists.

01:27:23

There's more of a probability argument and so forth and so on. But presuppositional apologetics is different.

01:27:29

It begins with the operating presupposition that God exists. You don't argue to that point.

01:27:35

You argue from that point. And people say, wait a minute. I mean, don't you have to prove it first?

01:27:41

And Greg would say, well, what is the basis of your proof? What are you going to use to prove that God is the starting point?

01:27:49

You probably say, well, somebody, you know, with reason. Well, then what are you going to prove that reason is the basis to prove that God exists?

01:27:58

And so it becomes a whole series of, you know, turtles all the way down. You just keep going down and say, what's the next thing that you have to do in order to make that case?

01:28:09

Well, presuppositional apologetics begins with the operating presupposition where the Bible begins with the operating presupposition.

01:28:14

Romans 1? No, Genesis 1. In the beginning, God created the earth.

01:28:21

And, you know, it's interesting that the Bible doesn't go about trying to prove God's existence. It assumes it because without that operating assumption, you can't make sense of anything else.

01:28:34

Like, why is reason reasonable? Reason isn't a physical thing, so you can't, you know, because people just say, where's

01:28:40

God? You know, where's the evidences for God? And, you know, the only thing that exists are physical things.

01:28:46

That was one of the highlights of the debate that Greg did with Gordon Stein, that how can you believe in an invisible

01:28:53

God? And, you know, Greg came back and said, you know, and Gordon Stein asked, well, besides God, what else is invisible?

01:29:02

And throughout the whole night, you know, Stein's trying to use reason and logic, and Greg was using reason and logic, too.

01:29:08

So when Gordon Stein asked, well, is there something else besides God that's invisible? And Greg said, the laws of logic.

01:29:16

And if you listen to the debate, you will see the crowd just break out in laughter because it was, and if you listen to that section of the debate, you can hear

01:29:28

Greg playing chess, intellectual chess, with Gordon Stein.

01:29:36

And to this day, I don't understand why Gordon Stein didn't see it coming because the laws of logic are invisible.

01:29:44

You can name the laws of logic like you can name God, but no one has ever been able to demonstrate physically, where here is a conglomeration of the laws of logic.

01:29:57

They don't exist in that form. And so what is the basis, what is the foundation for those things? And so you begin with God, and you can substantiate reason on the basis of the existence of God.

01:30:09

You can substantiate the laws of logic based on the existence of God. On morality, why is anything right or wrong in a universe of evolutionary assumptions and the survival of the fittest?

01:30:22

There's no basis for morality in such a world. So presuppositional apologetics is,

01:30:28

I think, the most biblical approach, and also the easiest to understand and to get to, because you don't have to know every single argument within the

01:30:40

Christian faith, because what you're dealing with here are the assumptions that a person is using to evaluate the evidences that you are presenting.

01:30:50

And someone says, well, you know, people don't rise from the dead. Well, you could begin with God, who created man out of the dust of the ground, and God created the world out of things not seen.

01:31:02

It's very easy to explain the existence of the resurrection of the dead and the resurrection of Jesus.

01:31:08

You see, they don't have any presuppositions. Now, they could say, well, dead men could rise from the dead by chance, but then you could say, well, then

01:31:15

God could exist by chance. You know, odd things happen in the world. So the unbeliever actually lives within the context of a

01:31:22

Christian worldview, but at the same time rejecting the operating assumptions of that worldview, and then using them against the

01:31:30

Christian worldview. And the presuppositional model is the basis for all apologetic methodologies.

01:31:38

Yeah, the reason I brought up Romans 1 is because it seems that that is a crucial chapter of Scripture for presuppositionalists because of what you just said before, that we don't have a duty to prove

01:31:53

God exists. Men already know that He does, but they suppress the truth. Right, yeah, exactly, they do.

01:31:59

They do suppress the truth. Well, you tell an atheist that, and they just go absolutely berserk. But they live within the context of a

01:32:08

Christian worldview. I mean, Richard Dawkins, who's the, you know, he's one of the new atheists, you know, today.

01:32:14

He basically said that we really still do need Christianity because of its moral component, because he knows, as he said,

01:32:24

DNA neither knows nor cares. We dance to its music. And there is no either good or evil within your

01:32:33

DNA. You can't put DNA under a microscope and come up with anything that says, oh, the bell shall not murder.

01:32:41

And I don't know if you've ever seen the film that Darren Doan did called

01:32:46

Collision, between Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens. There's an interview,

01:32:53

Christopher Hitchens is in, I think it's in the taxi cab, and Darren has a camera on him, and the question comes up about, you know, if he could, if you could eradicate all of Christianity from the world, would you do it?

01:33:12

And Christopher Hitchens paused and said no, he wouldn't, because I think at that point he understood all the implications of what that would mean.

01:33:24

On what basis, on what basis do you derive your moral principles for living?

01:33:34

So if you haven't seen that film, Collision, I was one of the producers of that, and actually David Hagopian was also one of the producers of it, and he was the moderator of the

01:33:45

Ponsenstein debate. And you can hear him on that debate telling the audience to be quiet, you know, to stop this laughter and so forth, after Greg said, well, the laws of logic are also invisible, because you don't really, you don't do that in a debate.

01:34:02

So we've come full circle. Greg's material, even though he died in 1995, you know, 25 years ago,

01:34:09

Greg is more popular today than he was in the 80s and the 90s.

01:34:14

Yeah, he died just two months after my mom, same year. Yeah.

01:34:20

Let's see, we do have a question for you from Johnny in Queens, New York.

01:34:29

And let me see, I have to find the question, I just had it in front of me. Well, we'll go to an anonymous listener until I find

01:34:37

Johnny's question for you. Oh, here it is, I'm sorry. Thank you,

01:34:43

Gary, for your work with American Vision and providing a dose of sanity in your daily articles.

01:34:50

Dr. Greg Ponsen has effectively utilized the transcendental argument for the existence of God as demonstrated in his historic debate with atheist

01:35:01

Gordon Stein. The antithesis between theistic worldview and the agnostic atheistic worldview is pretty clear, but how would such a methodology be employed successfully with comparative religions and counterfeit

01:35:18

Christian cults? That's a very good question, and I would suggest that you get the book against all opposition, because Greg actually deals with those.

01:35:28

And he walks you through a strategy, like, for example, with Islam.

01:35:34

Islam is the big one, because it has a particular book that it's using that it's a rival to the

01:35:43

Bible, the Old and New Testament. And I won't go through the whole argument. And in the second volume, Greg devotes an entire chapter just to Islam.

01:35:53

It's one of the longest chapters in the book where he deals with it as well. And Greg, this is just the beginning of this argument, but it's the essential beginning of this argument.

01:36:03

If you read the Koran, you will find that in the Koran, the Koran actually gives validity to the

01:36:11

Bible, both the Old and New Testament, because they believe Abraham is part of the

01:36:17

Koranic truth, and they believe Jesus is. Now, obviously they reinterpret much of the

01:36:24

New Testament with all that. So the thing of it is, if the Koran itself testifies that the

01:36:31

Bible is the authoritative word of God, and then Jesus is who he says he is in the

01:36:36

Bible, which would then preclude Muhammad being a future prophet in the way that Jesus was a prophet, therefore we have a contradiction.

01:36:46

And that's one of the comparisons you have to do here.

01:36:51

Are there contradictions between the biblical revelation and the new revelation?

01:36:58

And Greg goes through a number of things as well, where the contradictions are in the Bible. At first they say the

01:37:04

Bible is the authoritative word of God, and yet they change things. For example, it wasn't Jesus who died on the cross, it was actually

01:37:10

Satan who died on the cross. So now we've got a contradiction between two books.

01:37:17

And since the Bible is a prelude to the Koran, according to Islam, you have to go with the earlier revelation rather than a later revelation to try to change some things.

01:37:28

So Greg goes through this whole process. There is a whole chapter in there on Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, and Islam against all opposition, depending on the

01:37:39

Christian worldview. And then the next volume, which will be out sometime this year, is an entire chapter devoted to Islam.

01:37:49

Great. Well, thanks a lot, Johnny. And you have won a free copy of the book we are addressing, that are the transcriptions of lectures by Greg L.

01:38:03

Bonson in a book form called Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview. We're going to our final break.

01:38:09

I think it's going to be a brief one. If you have any questions, please send them in immediately. We know we already have a few of you waiting, so please be patient with us.

01:38:17

But we'll get to as many of you as possible. But in the event that you can squeeze a question in before we go off the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:38:28

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. God willing, we're going to be right back with Gary DeMar right after these messages from our sponsor.

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01:42:49

In Psalm 139 verse 14, the psalmist offers praise to the Lord like this, I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made and wondrous are your works that my soul knows very well.

01:43:01

He saw God's goodness and mercy, kindness, and the beauty in what

01:43:06

God has designed and he has erupted into praise. In any crisis or problem, brothers and sisters, our only fallback position is to trust

01:43:16

God's design. And once we do, there is nothing for us to do but to erupt in praise to him.

01:43:23

When the whole world is searching for a solution, God in his infinite mercy has given us what we need to address this illness, which can be very serious.

01:43:32

Such is the beauty of his design. Knowing that design, how can we not erupt in praise to our great

01:43:39

God like the psalmist did? May God bless you and give all of us wisdom to see greater things in his design.

01:43:46

Thank you. Welcome back, this is Chris Arnson and our guest today is

01:43:53

Gary DeMar for the second half of the show. We're just about 15 minutes away from the conclusion.

01:43:58

If you have a question, please send it in immediately to chrisarnson at gmail .com We are discussing

01:44:04

Greg L. Bonson's book Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview and we do have an anonymous listener,

01:44:12

Gary. The anonymous listener says, I am reasonably familiar with the teachings of Greg L.

01:44:21

Bonson and have heard him on a number of occasions on audio and video, including a debate with,

01:44:29

I believe it was Jerry Matitek's world -renowned convert from Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism.

01:44:36

One of the problems that I have with friends and acquaintances of mine who claim to uphold the legacy of Greg Bonson is that they are making the insinuation that Dr.

01:44:51

Bonson was far more warm and accepting of Roman Catholicism than I believe he truly was.

01:44:58

It seems to me very clear he believed that the Church of Rome has a different gospel and is a false church.

01:45:04

What can you say about this conflict that I'm going through? I'm not really sure just exactly what the conflict is and if it's an opinion about...

01:45:13

I think what he means is, or she, I don't know which one, but that this person's friends who claim to be upholding

01:45:22

Bonson are saying something different about his view of Roman Catholicism than this person seems to know from experience.

01:45:31

Well, I don't know what to say about that because I don't know what the friends have actually said or what this anonymous himself is saying.

01:45:45

Knowing Greg, and I haven't really heard the debate with Matitek, so I really...

01:45:52

That was a radio debate, as I recall. I remember hearing that years ago. I mean, knowing

01:45:58

Greg on his theological beliefs, and I was raised Roman Catholic, and I know what I believe about Roman Catholicism, and I mean,

01:46:06

I'm certainly friends with some Roman Catholics, but when it came down to specific doctrines,

01:46:12

I'm sure Greg would not at all agree with many of the fundamental propositions of the

01:46:20

Roman Catholic Church. So, I mean, I've had debates with Roman Catholics, and I'm sure

01:46:27

Greg would probably take a very similar position. I mean, they don't...

01:46:33

Well, anyway, that's as far as I... I just don't know any more or know what to say about that because I don't know all the...

01:46:39

I don't know what was said by either side on this particular topic. I can say, having some familiarity with kind of a similar situation,

01:46:49

I have heard people say that Greg would have accepted Roman Catholics, and I'm speaking of those faithful to the

01:46:58

Council of Trent, because I believe that there are many saved Roman Catholics because they believe in the true gospel in spite of the fact that their church teaches a false one.

01:47:08

But I have heard people say that the differences that Trent has with Reformational Christians are minimal on the gospel, and therefore

01:47:17

Greg would have viewed them as brothers and sisters, where everything that I've even heard about Greg before his entering glory, he had a much more strict stance in opposition to Rome.

01:47:32

Yeah, like I said, I don't know enough to comment on that. Okay. He doesn't deal with Roman Catholicism.

01:47:41

In the three years that he did these lectures, he really didn't deal with Roman Catholicism. There may be a series that he's done on Roman Catholicism.

01:47:51

There probably is one out there. And if the debate is still available online, I'll try to see if I can find it and listen to it and see what actually took place.

01:48:03

And we have Michael in Pearland, Texas, who has a question for you.

01:48:10

Michael asks, Was hyperpreterism at all prevalent when

01:48:18

Greg was alive, and what would his response been to that view of eschatology?

01:48:24

It was not, and I don't know what it would have been. It wasn't in the 90s, and I don't know.

01:48:34

Actually, I never really sat down and spoke to Greg about eschatology.

01:48:40

I know he has a lengthy article in one of the journals of Christian Reconstruction on the

01:48:47

Millennium where he deals with postmillennialism. And I know he did a series of Sunday school classes on Revelation that were done at St.

01:48:59

Paul Presbyterian Church in Clinton, Mississippi. My guess is that he would be against hyperpreterism or full preterism or whatever name you want to give it.

01:49:11

That would be my suspicion. And by the way, our last two questioners, you will also receive a free copy of the book that we are addressing

01:49:22

Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview. And I'm going to slip one more question in here before I let you perhaps have some uninterrupted time focusing on this book.

01:49:34

But we have Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, who has a question.

01:49:40

And he asks, Who were Greg Bonson's heroes that you are aware of? I don't know.

01:49:49

I don't know anybody ever talking about heroes in the theological. I mean, people they respect, of course, have been

01:49:56

Cornelius Mantill. But as heroes,

01:50:02

I really don't know. I really couldn't tell you. Okay. Well, you have also won,

01:50:10

Bobby, a free copy of the book. Now I want you, since we only had about 45 minutes to address this,

01:50:17

I want you to make sure that you have at least five minutes uninterrupted to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners regarding this topic today.

01:50:27

Well, we're at a time where young Christians don't know how to argue very well.

01:50:33

It's amazing to me. I've run across Christians making some of the most unbelievable arguments.

01:50:41

They don't understand the operating assumptions of an opposing worldview very well. They don't understand the implications of unbelieving thought very well.

01:50:51

They can't extend it out over, you know, four or five, six implications if that particular stance were taken.

01:51:00

I'm just always amazed that I'll just post something very simple on Facebook, and all the comments

01:51:07

I get, like, Wow, that was really great. And I'm thinking, I mean, you should be able to think that way, too.

01:51:13

This isn't that difficult. When you read something in a news article or listen to something, you always have to ask the question, on what basis are they making that determination?

01:51:25

For example, this latest Supreme Court decision on the homosexuality and transgenderism that the

01:51:33

Supreme Court came up with, you can't hire or fire somebody because the assumption by the six justices of the

01:51:42

Supreme Court is that homosexuality and transgenderism are actually sexual expressions, like male, female, and you have homosexual, and then you have transgenders.

01:52:02

And that's not, we won't even bring in the other 58 genders that Facebook says there are.

01:52:09

And so the operating assumption here is that homosexuality is a different sexual, not expression, not orientation, but actually sexual identity, similar to male and female.

01:52:28

And transgenderism is in that same category. And that's their operating assumption.

01:52:35

And the question is, based on what? On what basis can you say that? And see, what's happened with the

01:52:40

Supreme Court and many people thinking about it, there is no longer any foundation for any factuality.

01:52:46

If you identify as something, unless you identify as a Christian or you identify as a conservative, but if you identify as something, then you are that thing.

01:52:59

And yet at the same time, the people who are making those types of claims also say it's all about science.

01:53:08

And yet anybody who's had a class in biology knows that two men having sex together, in whatever way they want to do it, will never produce an offspring.

01:53:19

You have to have a male and a female to accomplish this.

01:53:27

That's an empirical bit of evidence that cannot be refuted by an ideology that starts with the premise that there are more than just two sexes.

01:53:42

And here are these brilliant men in law school and so forth and so on, and they're arguing in the

01:53:48

Supreme Court, just making this assumption. And what we have to do is to go back and refute the assumption.

01:53:56

There's no sense in dealing with any of the other arguments. You've got to bear down on the assumptions that they're doing and force them.

01:54:03

You have to push the antithesis. Force them to live consistently with those operating assumptions. And they can't do it.

01:54:10

And, unfortunately, a lot of the lawyers trying to defend the Constitution or defend the idea that you should be able to get to fire somebody, not because they identify as homosexual or identify as transgender.

01:54:28

You should be able to fire them because of the behavior that they're engaged in that's immoral, just like you should be able to fire somebody who's committing adultery or fire somebody who's fornicating, or in here you've got somebody who's literally mutilating their body and claiming to be a different sex.

01:54:50

You know, five, ten years ago, that would have just been, well, of course you should be able to fire people for that.

01:54:56

And what we're finding in our culture today is people can be fired for holding a different opinion about, say,

01:55:03

Black Lives Matter. That's okay. You can fire somebody on the basis of someone holding a different opinion on Black Lives Matter, but you can't fire somebody who is engaged in immoral sexual activity or who actually believes that they're a woman when they're really a man and they're cutting off appendages based upon that belief.

01:55:27

So what presuppositionalism does and what Greg has done so well, and these weren't so much arguments back then, although Greg probably wrote one of the most definitive books on homosexuality that Baker Bookhouse published way before this was ever an argument and legal argument as well.

01:55:46

You've got to get down to the basic operating assumptions of somebody's case before you can argue beyond that.

01:55:55

If you don't settle that at first, you're going to go around in circles. I wonder if you can fire somebody for not getting a haircut these days.

01:56:02

Well, yeah. I mean, think about it. If somebody smokes, they may not get hired if they smoke because it raises insurance rates and so forth and so on.

01:56:13

And I don't think anybody would ever protest what the lawyer would say. No, you can't fire someone who's an alcoholic and drinking all the time.

01:56:23

You can't fire somebody. It's the behavior that's being dealt with, not the fact that somebody identifies as a homosexual or someone identifies as a transgender.

01:56:32

It's the behavior that we disagree on and we shouldn't be forced to hire people that we disagree on moral issues.

01:56:42

And look, that's not necessarily a religious argument. Everybody ought to have that freedom.

01:56:48

Not just Christians should have that freedom to do that, because I'm telling you they're going to start going after churches because there will be people who will put a job notice out there.

01:56:58

They'll come to your church. They may get the job, and they'll come out later on and say, oh, this is my husband or this is my wife.

01:57:05

You find out they're homosexual, and I guarantee you that church will be sued. So churches right now better get on the stick in determining what they're going to do when the law starts coming after them, because I guarantee you homosexual movement, transgender movement will be coming after Christians and their businesses and their churches.

01:57:24

Well, I think that our listeners should not be under the wrong assumption that since these lectures were for students, that these are somehow dumbed -down presentations that you have brought into print.

01:57:36

I can't even imagine Dr. Bonson dumbing anything down. No, no. These were smart students.

01:57:45

Every speaker we had was a top, top -level speaker, and some of it was probably over the head of some high school students.

01:57:52

But we never would have published this if it had just been Greg. And Greg couldn't have done it because he said he shouldn't do it.

01:58:00

He lifted them up beyond their intellectual ability for the very purpose of strengthening them.

01:58:06

And this book is beautifully typeset. We picked a great type font and spacing and so forth. We've got block quotations.

01:58:12

We've got a glossary in it, study questions. So it's subheads and so forth.

01:58:19

So it's a very well -crafted book in the printing industry, and it's a great cover as well.

01:58:25

You make a great gift for students when they go back, if they ever go back to college in September.

01:58:33

Well, now you are reminded why I love to have you on for two hours rather than just one, because we're out of time now.

01:58:38

But, folks, if you want more information on Against All Opposition, Defending the

01:58:45

Christian Worldview, and more information about Gary DeMar, go to AmericanVision .org,

01:58:50

AmericanVision .org. Thank you so much, Gary. I look forward to you returning to Iron Sherpa's Iron. Thank you.

01:58:57

I appreciate it. And I want everybody to remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

01:59:02

Savior than you are a sinner. Have a blessed, safe, and happy weekend, and Christ -honoring