October 4, 2017 Show with Bryan Wolfmueller on “Has American Christianity Failed?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday. On this fourth day of October 2017, and it's my delight to have for the very first time on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio someone who came highly recommended to me by both

Chris Rosebrough of Pirate Christian Radio and also another fellow

Lutheran pastor, Matt Richard, who is the pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Gwinner, South Dakota, I believe it is.

But I am so delighted to have on the program Pastor Brian Wolfmuller, and he is going to be discussing a brand new book that he has written,

Has American Christianity Failed?, published by Concordia Publishing House. Pastor Brian Wolfmuller is not only the pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Aurora, Colorado and a co -host of the world's most famous Lutheran theological game show,

I'm wondering if it's the only Lutheran theological game show, Table Talk Radio, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Brian Wolfmuller.

Thank you Chris, great to be here. Great. Was I correct on where our friend

Pastor Matt Richard is the pastor? Yeah, he's in Gwinner, South Dakota. So I was right about South Dakota.

It just slipped my mind that the state that he was in. Well, as I normally do with first -time guests,

I'd like to hear about something in regard to your background.

Everybody has a different story, even though there's one gospel and one Lord Jesus Christ who saved us, we who are born again, we who are

Christians. The Lord providentially uses many different circumstances to bring that about.

Some folks are raised in Christian homes and they can't even remember when they weren't a

Christian. They can't even remember not loving Jesus and singing praise to him and praying to him. And you have others like me who have more of a stark contrast in our testimonies from darkness to light, things that we can vividly remember because perhaps we had decades of living in rebellion and so on before we came to Christ.

But tell us something about the religion of your youth and when you came to realize that you did need a

Savior named Jesus Christ, and also about how you eventually realized that you had been receiving a call from God into the ministry.

Sure. Well, I was raised in a liberal Lutheran church, although fairly faithful congregations, when you look and compare it.

But early on in high school, there's a couple of moments where I made the explicit decision not to stop believing in God, but probably more rather to say things like this to God, if this is how you're going to treat me, then

I've had enough, you know, I'm going to do my own thing. And I really chased after my own desires, my own whims, what

I understood to be good until probably halfway through high school, and I ran into at our church, had a youth group, and the youth pastor there, even though it was a liberal

Lutheran church, was an evangelical, born again, and really charismatic, and I had a very helpful conversation with him at that point where the

Lord granted me the gift of repentance again, as he loves to do, and called me into the church, and at that point started to develop a deep love for the

Scriptures. And I suppose I grew into that in the American Christianity, American evangelicalism.

We were involved in a Southern Baptist church, a non -denominational church.

We were going to Calvary Chapel. On into college, I was involved with Campus Crusade, InterVarsity, and the

Navigators, and involved in a number of non -denominational churches, and was studying the Scriptures and chasing after the

Lord's words there. But a discontent with the teaching of kind of your typical

Bible church began to come along, and it led me, and then

I started dating, and then was engaged and at last married to my wife, Carrie, her as well.

We went on a two -year theological odyssey, chasing down all the different churches, trying to figure out where we could find, you know, what

St. Paul calls the simplicity of Christ. And so we were comparing and listening to, visiting all the different churches, talking to the pastors, looking at their statements of faith, going to different adult classes, until we finally ended up, really at the same time, on the conclusion that the

Lutheran church taught the gospel in its simplicity, was the church that held to the Scriptures without mixing in man's doctrine.

And at the same time also, I conceived a desire to go and be a pastor and serve in the church.

I was studying mechanical engineering at the time, and I'd always would wait, I would, I made something of an oath in my youth that I would read the

Bible before I went to sleep every day. And so I was up late, late, working on some physics problems, and I was looking over there at my

Bible, wanting to open and study the Bible, instead of study this physics stuff, and I realized, hey, some people have studying the

Bible for their school, and some people have studying the Bible for their job.

I'm just doing the wrong thing. So I went in the next day, switched to literature, and really from that point on, kind of headed towards seminary and towards the pastoral ministry.

Well, now tell us something about, specifically, Hope Lutheran Church of Aurora, Colorado.

It's a beautiful little congregation of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, in Aurora, Colorado, which is the eastern suburb of Denver, just right up there next to Denver.

It's a, you know, for the Lutherans, it's a medium -sized congregation, small on the big scheme of things, but full of people who love the

Lord's Word, and love to study the Bible, and love to hear it preached in its clarity, and to hear law and gospel.

Such a beautiful congregation. I've been the pastor there for 12 years. For the past three and a half years,

I've been served alongside with Pastor Brian Flamming. We work together to serve the people there, and it's a great place to be.

Your listeners are always welcome. If they come to Aurora, Colorado, they are required to stop in and visit. And I understand that you, as you just said, that you are, your congregation is in the

Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. If you could tell us something about that Synod, and contrast it with the more dominant denomination in America, that many of us would call apostate, and that would be the

Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Right, yes. So that's the church of my birth, and the church of my family, but this is the problem, they're not evangelical, they're not

Lutheran. I don't think they like being in America. So the

ELCA is kind of a misnomer, but you know, there's this divide that arose in the church in the mid -19th century, the liberal and fundamentalist controversy, and these mainline denominations, and most of them just went liberal, and so the

ELCA, the biggest Lutheran church body, did that. They're just a liberal church, and now they're tripping over themselves to find new biblical doctrines to deny.

Of course, all the capitulations about human sexuality and marriage, that's kind of old.

They have all the doctrines that the stories of the scriptures are myths and allegories to teach, but they're not historical truth.

So that's been happening in the ELCA for a long time, and it's one of the, I mean,

I don't know what to do about it, Chris, if you have ideas, but it's, you know, people hear Lutheran, and they think, oh, someone that doesn't believe the

Bible. So whenever anyone asks, what's the Missouri Synod? I said, we're the Lutherans that believe the Bible still. That's probably the best description of it.

Now, your friend Chris Rosebro is in a different synod, but apparently it has a fellowship with the

Missouri Synod, the American Association of Lutheran Churches. Yes, that's right, that's right. And so that is, so there are a bunch of Lutheran churches,

I mean, there's dozens of different Lutheran denominations, but you have that kind of divide, the liberal divide and the conservative divide, and most of the little congregations or the little churches are on the conservative side of things and would confess the scriptures and believe them, including

Chris Rosebro. And I understand that the Wisconsin Synod might be even further to the right of the

Missouri Synod, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing. I don't know, what's your views on the

Wisconsin Synod? Oh, they're great. I think we'll get together again. We used to have fellowship with one another, and I think we will.

Again, they do have some different, you know, we're divided over a couple of questions about the ministry, if there is a level of fellowship in prayer together, and some things like this.

But the little, in the big scheme of things, I think those are kind of smaller theological points.

And really, when you look at the big picture, which is to claim the simplicity of Christ as the

Lutherans, you know, have been doing for the last 500 years, we are really partners with these guys in that.

Well, I want to remind my listeners that I, Chris Arnzen, a thoroughgoing five -point

Calvinist, am not considering converting to Lutheranism. I've been having so many Lutherans on lately that I think some of my listeners might be worried that I'm going to be...

Look, we have like an hour and a half left on the interview. But I think that there should be more healthy dialogue and friendship and fellowship between those who are theologically reformed and those of you who are

Lutheran. And it's interesting, there are... I have a couple of friendships with Lutherans that it's interesting when the theological issues came up of Calvinism, they got quite heated.

And not that I got a mean spirit on my end, but there were some pretty heavy...

What's the term I'm looking for? Aggressively opposing views.

Let me put it that way. Well, here's the great thing about you guys who are Calvinists is that you still care about doctrine, you know?

I mean, look around, the Lord has spoken in the Word, and as soon as the

Lord speaks, it means we have to have a love for theology and a love for words, and specific words.

And when we look around the Church in general, I mean, you have Catholics on the one side, Orthodox hanging out over there, and you have the kind of general mass of American Christian over there, and they, whenever you start talking about theology and having a specifically articulated doctrine, they get mad at you.

So when you want to love theology just as a general sort of thing, I think the Lutherans and the Catholics are like the last two left that are even interested in that.

So I think you're right, we got to keep encouraging each other in that. I think you meant the Lutherans and the Calvinists, you said

Catholics. Oh yeah, I mix them up sometimes. No, you're right, I'm sorry, the Calvinists. The Lutherans, the

Calvinists. I mean, this is it. I mean, the Reformed tradition that we're talking about, we need to encourage each other, because sometimes we feel like strangers when we say, hey, we love the doctrine, we love theology, and the rest of the

Christians look at us like we're nuts. And so it's good that we can encourage each other that way. Amen.

And before we go into the topic at hand, you've got to tell us about TableTalk Radio. I couldn't help but chuckle about the world's most famous Lutheran theological game show.

Tell me about that. There were some guys down in Australia at the seminary there who started doing their own

Lutheran theological game show, so we were the world's second best for a couple of months. But then they quit, so now we're the best again, since nobody else is doing it.

Evan Gageline is pastor in Oregon, and he and I have been partners in this radio show for probably six or seven years now.

It's a weekly podcast, and we play games. For example, we play a game called

Law and or Gospel, where we read a Bible passage and we say, is it a passage of law or is it a passage of gospel?

Or we play Name That Theologian, and we'll read a quote from a theologian, ancient or modern, and we'll try to see if we can guess who it is or what tradition it comes from.

Oh, cool. We play Ten Commandments in the News, where we listen to a news story and we say, hey, what ten commandments are at play there?

And a number of other games like this. So the rules are endeavor to teach discernment, and in the playing of the game, we just, you know, mostly have fun with it, give each other fake points, and really have a great time with that.

And do people win anything? No. Table Talk radio points are, we say, like the

Baptist Doctrine of the Lord's Supper. Very symbolic. By the way,

I do have to tell you, though, we got to be careful about stereotypes, because Richard Barcellos, who is a well -known

Reformed Baptist, he wrote a book not long ago on baptism, and he is taking what he believes is a more confessional approach to baptism.

And when I say confessional, I'm speaking of the 1689 London Baptist Confession, which is nearly identical to the

Westminster Confession. And so he believes that the baptism is a means of grace and that there is something more significant going on in regard to baptism than solely and strictly a symbolic meal or a memorial.

And apparently, there is some differences of opinion, even on Zwingli. Usually, the memorial view is referred to as Zwinglian, but I've heard from some scholars that they believe that Zwingli was not strictly a memorialist either.

But that's for another time. I was just last week, I was in Marburg Castle where Luther and Zwingli debated at the

Marburg Colloquy 1518, and that colloquy had, I think there was 18 points of doctrine that the

Lutherans and the Zwinglians wrote down together, and even the last article about the

Lord's Supper, they could agree on until the question, is it the body and the blood? So Zwingli even agreed that the

Lord's Supper was a means of grace, conferred God's blessing, and so forth. So I'm very interested.

I'm going to look up that name. That's probably causing a big fuss amongst the kind of more

Reformed Baptist groups, I would imagine. Actually, no, not yet. I haven't heard of anything that would reflect what you just mentioned.

By the way, if you want to look up that book, you could go to rbap .net, and that stands for Reformed Baptist Academic Press, rbap .net,

and you can look for Richard Barcellos, B -A -R -C -E -L -L -O -S, is the author of the book, and right now

I can't seem to find the title of it, but perhaps later on I'll chime in with that, because that's not our topic of discussion today.

But you might be surprised some of the things that many Reformed Baptists believe that are not necessarily typical amongst your mainstream

Baptists. Of course, as you may already know, being a Calvinist and a Baptist, although that used to be the majority in this day and age, we who are

Reformed Baptists are a tiny minority globally, a growing minority. I'm proud of you guys, because you're right, you know,

John Smith was a Calvinist, and the origins of the Baptist Church were in the Calvinist tradition, but everything is so revivalized.

That's one of the marks of American Christianity, is that, especially in the Second Great Awakening and Charles Finney, so much of our

American Christianity was defined that we don't even recognize it. We don't, you know,

Finney's fingerprints are all over everything, and we don't even, we're not even able to kind of recognize that that's a strange thing in the history of the

Church. By the way, I just found it, it's The Lord's Supper as a Means of Grace, More Than a

Memory, by Richard Barcellos, and that's at rbap .net.

That's great. And so we are going to be discussing, as I already mentioned, has

American Christianity failed? If you could define what you mean by American Christianity, because there is quite a spectrum, and some might even have a knee -jerk reaction to a title like that, because they know of the theological climate in Europe, where Christianity in many places is almost non -existent, so one might wonder why is there being an insinuation that American Christianity may be inferior to what is going on around the world, but if you could please define

American Christianity. Yeah, absolutely, and I mentioned before I was just in Europe, and I mean that place is so godless, so we can talk about European Christianity as well.

By the way, I forgot to mention something very important about that. My friend, I don't know if you know Dr. James R. White of Alphalan and Megan Ministries, he's one of my closest friends, he's a

Reformed Baptist theologian. He just preached in Martin Luther's pulpit last week at the

Wittenberg, the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Yeah, I heard about that, that's great. I think

I was there in June, and then I was there last week, so I just missed him, and I haven't been able to preach in that pulpit yet either, so I'm a little bit envious.

But anyway, I'm sorry I interrupted you. Well, that's okay. So let's take a, I'll give a definition of American Christianity, and this is just my own thinking on this as a way to kind of grab a hold of what

I'm talking about. I identify four theological streams, you know, kind of a fountain, like at the

Garden of Eden there was a fountain and four rivers flowed out of it, that there's four theological streams that define

American Christianity, and they're often unnoticed because they're so ubiquitous. I mean, they're absolutely everywhere.

And I call, I identify those four streams as Revivalism, Pietism, Mysticism, and Enthusiasm.

So again, Revivalism, Pietism, Mysticism, and Enthusiasm, and I'll try to briefly just define each one of them.

That Revivalism says that my Christianity begins with me. It emphasizes the decision, my decision for Jesus.

It talks about the free will of the unbeliever to make a choice. And again, this comes, you know, we identify it theologically with Arminianism against Calvinism, the free will of theologians, but probably it comes from the

Revival, where Charles Finney says that, you know, the Apostles had baptism, but we have new measures.

We have the anxious bench, which is the precursor to the altar call and the sinner's prayer.

So how do I know I'm a Christian? According to the back of my Gideon Bible, I know I'm a Christian because I made the decision for Christ.

That's Revivalism. And it's unique in the history of Christianity, that's number one. The next one is

Pietism. Tell me if you want to talk more, kind of quickly define each one. Yeah, quickly define each one, and then we can revisit each of them.

Yeah, sure. So Pietism would be the idea, if Revivalism gets me in by my choice, then

Pietism keeps me in by my goodness. So the Pietist would emphasize growth in morality over theological consideration.

Pietism is a movement that started in the 19th century, or maybe even earlier in the

Lutheran Church, and it put the emphasis on personal faith and a growth in good works.

So it diminishes the role of the sacraments and the role of the pastor and so forth in the

Christian life, and really puts the emphasis on getting better all the time. I'm doing better and better every day.

I know that I'm a Christian because I'm doing more good works, or I think that I'm not because I'm doing less.

Mysticism looks for comfort in the internal experience of God's presence. The mystic sees

Christianity in terms of being near or far from God, and so it's really the mystical worship of...contemporary

worship is basically a mysticism, that where we go to have an experience of the divine presence, that I feel

God on the inside, or that I'm listening to God on the inside. And all of these are outgrowths of what

Luther identified as an Enthusiasm. That's a capital E Enthusiasm. It's a theological, technical term, which basically means that I'm looking to hear from God inside rather than outside.

So God's Word is not in my ears, God's Word is in my heart. That sometimes just to have the quiet time where we go to listen for God and try to get insight, you know, the individual insight from the

Holy Spirit, or all of the charismatic movements where you have a prophetic speaking, that's all

Enthusiasm. A departure from the sufficiency of the external Word, and looking for more words from God.

So those four things, Revivalism, Pietism, Mysticism, and Enthusiasm, I think are definitional of the religious flavor or smell of American Christianity.

Now there must be some kind of a big mistake, because I was under the understanding that I was going to be interviewing a

Lutheran today. It sounds to me like you're a Calvinist. Well you know what, we're going to be on the same page when it comes to what we disagree with,

I'm pretty sure about that. Yes, well even seemingly, and I also had these similarities in my discussions with Chris Roseborough and Matt Richard, because of the fact that Luther and Calvin did agree on the bondage of the will.

It seems that many of the more conservative Lutherans have retained that, whereas there are others that seem to still be in the rut that Melanchthon took them into centuries ago after Luther's death.

It would seem that Melanchthon, correct me if I'm wrong, steered the ship back toward Rome, not completely, but after Luther's death he seemed to want to offer an olive branch in some way by muddying the waters about the bondage of the will, and making the human will a lot more capable of things that not only

Luther denied, but that those scriptures denied. Am I right on that? Yes, it's a bit of a murky water to figure out what

Melanchthon was up to, because I think he was purposely unclear on a couple of things.

So he was extending the olive branch to Rome with the freedom of the will, he was extending the olive branch to the

Zwinglians or the Calvinists on the Lord's Supper, he was trying to figure out if he could change the language to be more expansive.

And I talk about this in the book, this history, and I think it's pretty important because, so for Luther, what converts an unbeliever to a believer?

And the answer for Luther, and I'm convinced this is the answer of the scripture, the answer is the Holy Spirit working through the

Word. Amen. The Holy Spirit working through the Word converts the unbeliever, and it in fact converts the will.

So the will is not the tool of conversion, but rather the object of conversion. It's our will that is converted when the

Holy Spirit does his work. Yes. Now, Melanchthon comes along and he adds in a place for the will, so the three parts of conversion are then the

Spirit and the Word and the will, and that is where he concedes. And I think modern

Christianity goes along with Melanchthon with the addition of the will, but then it removes the

Word. So now a conversion is an act of the Spirit and the will, and the

Word doesn't even need to be a part of it. It's actually people saying, hey, if you feel the

Holy Spirit tugging in your heart, raise your hand, say this prayer, walk the aisle. I always want to say during the altar call, well what if I know that I'm a sinner and that I believe that Jesus died for me and I never believed it until right now, but I just don't feel anything moving in my heart.

Can I come down there and be a Christian? But these guys are so convinced that it's the Holy Spirit who works inside, apart from the

Word, that conversion now is the will and the

Spirit, and so we have a totally different view of how we become Christians in American Christianity than the

Bible does. Yes, it is quite disturbing, and it seems that there may be a connection, even though you have them distinguished as two different elements.

Revivalism and enthusiasm, aren't they somehow connected? Well, enthusiasm, in fact, revivalism, pietism, and mysticism are all just different aspects of enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm encompasses them all, and in fact, I think in one of the most brilliant theological statements outside of the

Scripture, Martin Luther, in the Small -Called Articles, these princes were gathering together in Small -Called to protect the

Lutherans so they wouldn't be killed by the Catholics, and they formed the Small -Called League, and they said, we want to have some theology, so Luther wrote the

Small -Called Articles for them, and in there he says that every heresy is enthusiasm.

From the Pope to Muhammad to Adam and Eve in the garden, every error was enthusiasm, a departure from the external word and a looking to hear the internal word, to somehow have the

Word of God through my reason or through my experiences or through my heart rather than through my ears. Amen.

Would you say that a part of this American Christianity, a part of this heresy that removes the word from the equation, it's really what is being offered to men, women, and children by evangelists and preachers and pastors and even just average

Christians when they witness to their friends and family and loved ones, is they're merely saying, add

Jesus Christ to your life, and all these things that are bothering you in life will be more easy to cope with.

And of course, then you might have the more extreme version, like the Word of Faith Pentecostals, who will give false hope that these things will be eliminated from people's lives if they have a strong enough faith.

But it really very rarely has anything to do with repentance from sin.

The threat of hell seems to be absent when you hear pastors on television and radio.

There seems to be no concept of the death of Christ being a propitiatory sacrifice, that he actually took upon himself the wrath of the

Father on Calvary. These things are very often absent, where this is merely being offered, the gospel, a so -called gospel, is being offered that is really just medicine to make life easier for you.

Am I off base here? No, no, you're 100 % right, and that is so antithetical to the

Scriptures and to the biblical doctrine and to Jesus himself, who says, in this world you will have trouble.

Take up your cross and follow me, not take up your lazy boy and follow me. So it is one of the fundamental errors of American Christianity, that the idea that being a

Christian makes your life better. I mean, it's crazy, and it sets people up for extreme disappointment.

You know, I heard these kind of evangelism talks, and that's how it was like a sales pitch for Jesus, and it was like this, try

Jesus, and it'll make your life better. There's like a 30 -day guarantee, you know, 30 -day money -back guarantee, commit your life to Jesus, and if you don't see great improvement in your life in 30 days, then you can give him up and try whatever other false god you want.

That is insane. It's absolutely insane, because I mean, if Christianity is anything, it is that we say, well,

God is God, so he will be God on his own terms. And if we start making promises for God that he hasn't made, then what are we except for,

I mean, false prophets in the fullest sense of the term? We are damning ourselves and the people who hear us.

When we start to promise, God never promised a good life. He promised eternal life. God never promised ease.

He promised that he would be with us in the midst of trouble. God never promised that we were going to be rich and happy.

He promised that we're going to be resurrected on the last day to live before him forever. And chances are pretty good that if we're faithful to Christ, that things are going to get worse.

I mean, when we're baptized, the pastor says, I mark you with the sign of the cross on the forehead and upon the heart to mark you as one redeemed by Christ the crucified.

And when you're marked like that, it's a target for the devil, and he knows just precisely where to aim all of his fiery darts.

I mean, to be a friend of Christ is to be an enemy of the world and the flesh and the devil, and that's probably going to make life harder.

But in the end, it doesn't matter. It's the Lord who's pleased with us because of the death of Jesus. So all of this

American Christianity that tries to kind of, because it sees the will as free but open to manipulation, that's the inheritance of revivalism.

That my will is free to choose Christ, but it's also open to manipulation. It makes the preacher into a salesman trying to move you to make some sort of choice or decision.

And this is the last thing Jesus needs. He doesn't need salesmen. He needs apostles. He doesn't need, you know, people that try to woo other people to his cause.

He needs preachers who will stand up and preach the word. We're going to our first break right now.

If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Pastor Brian Wolf Mueller regarding his book,

Has American Christianity Failed?, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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

USA, and only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

So please, at least, first name, city and state, and country of residence. Don't go away. God willing, we will be right back after these messages with Pastor Brian Wolf Mueller and Has American Christianity Failed?

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In addition to being fed for free, and in addition to being fed spiritually by Pastor Bill Shishko for free, you're also getting those free books.

There's no charge for anything. This was a tradition that began with my late wife in the 1990s that I continued after she went home to be with the

Lord for eternity. And she made it very clear that she never wanted anybody selling anything at these luncheons, never to be an alternative—an ulterior,

I should say, motive. And this is just a way of my saying thanks to all of you who are in ministry for what you do for the kingdom of God.

And so please mark your calendar down for Thursday, October 26, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. for the

Iron Shepherd's Iron Radio Pastor's Luncheon. If you would like to register, please send me an email as soon as you can at chrisarnson at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com, and put Pastor's Luncheon in the subject line.

And that's also the email address that you can send a question for our guest today, Brian Wolfmuller, regarding his book,

Has American Christianity Failed? published by Concordia Publishing House. And the email address again is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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

USA. Pastor Wolfmuller, we have a question from Joe all the in Slovenia.

And Joe says, Please ask Pastor Wolfmuller to give us his assessment of how we got here with a failing

American Christianity. What is the timeline of people and events that gave us an aberrant

American Christianity that teaches the centrality of the individual, my will, my experience, my decision, my heart, my work, my dedication?

Also, what does he see as the solution to get us out of this mess and back to a robust Reformation faith?

That's Joe from Slovenia. That's a great question. Hey, but before I get at that question, Chris, I just published,

I'm working on publishing some Luther's stuff for everybody, for everyone. And it is

Freedom of the Christian. And I'd love to send you 100 copies to hand out to these pastors at the luncheon. Oh, yeah,

I would love that. Please do that. I'll give you my address after the show. Yeah, that's perfect. Now, if we track along with Luther, the origins of all these things is the

Garden of Eden. Now, that might not be helpful at first glance, but I think it is to recognize that error, you know, is not new.

Nothing under the sun is new. I mean, the devil, he's the master of a thousand arts, but at some point he just is doing the same thing over and over.

So he's always doing this. He's always trying to bend us back in on ourselves and to twist us away from the

Lord's Word, and he has allies in it. Now, I think, and I don't know if you're going to like this necessarily,

Chris, but at least I gave you some books now so that I can say something like this. But I think one of the dangerous sources is

John Calvin, who makes a distinction between the internal call and the external call.

You know, he says there's two species of calling. The one is external and the one is internal. The external is the preaching of the gospel that goes forth to all people.

The internal is the work of the Holy Spirit that happens only in the elect. And that distinction between the internal and the external call from Calvin, it pushes away a trust in the external word.

And I don't think it did for Calvin. I think it took a couple of generations for that fruit to manifest itself, but it has manifested itself.

So that people now are, you know, they want to know, am I a Christian? And so where do they look for security?

The sacraments, you know, the Lord's gift of baptism and the Lord's supper have been gutted of all their promises.

And so the only place I have to look is either in my experiences or in my works. I can be confident because I made a decision.

I can be confident because I see myself growing in good works or something like this. So we're looking for assurance in places where the

Lord hasn't promised assurance. So I think that that, I mean,

I have difficulty not seeing that the seed planted by Calvin, and it grew, it expanded a thousand -fold in the second

Great Awakening, which with Charles Finney and the new measures that happened there, which, and that's really what we define as Methodism, that there's a method to bring people to Christianity, that there's a method that the

Christian follows to grow in good works. And that has defined these different things in American Christianity.

I think the way back is to recover the doctrine of the efficacy of the

Scriptures. And we all say that the Scriptures are inspired, inerrant, and infallible, that the

Scriptures are clear for all that we need to know about doctrine in life. We even want to say as Reformation Christians that the

Scriptures are sufficient, that we don't need another word from God. God has given us all that we need in the

Scriptures, but this attribute of the efficacy of the Word, that the Holy Spirit actually does work in the

Word to give us the forgiveness of sins, is the way that we can have this confidence now that the

Lord loves me. I mean, how do I know that the Lord loves me? I know that the Lord loves me because He's the one who said,

I baptize you in my name. He's the one that said, this is my body and blood. He's the one that said, I forgive you all your sins.

He's the one that said, I was dead on the cross for you. I'm raised from the dead for you. I'm sitting at the right hand of the

Father interceding for you. I will come back for you and speak a word and you'll be raised from the dead. To have this, to have the confidence that when the

Lord gives us promises that those words are true, this is what it means to be a Christian, and this is where the

Holy Spirit is pushing all of us, that we have this absolute and unwavering confidence, faith in His promises of forgiveness of sins and life everlasting.

Well, a couple of things. I'm sure that you realize that Charles Finney was not a

Calvinist of any kind. In fact, he was really Pelagian. Not only did he not believe that any kind of provenient grace was required, as the

Roman Catholics and the Wesleyans believe, he didn't believe that there was any work of the

Spirit needed to regenerate a heart. He was really a monergist in the bad sense.

You have Calvinists on the one end that are monergists in the good sense, because we believe that God deserves 100 % of the praise, honor, and glory for our salvation, whereas Finney was a monergist in believing that God didn't even need to interrupt anything that was going on in the will of a man, that he really, in essence, was saving himself.

He didn't even believe in the substitutionary atonement of anything like that. You're 100 % right about that, and it might be a little bit cheap to draw a connection between the two.

If you wanted to argue against it, I might concede the point. When we start to smell

Finney and his, you're right, it's Pelagian and it's pagan.

It lacks the blood of Christ. It's really demonic. When we start to see how his fingerprints are on so much of our

American Christianity, then I think we start to be able to—and not just American Christianity, it's all over the world—then we start to be able to read the

Scriptures in a fuller way, to see them more clearly. Now, going back to, just to give a counterpoint about the main problem is that people are doubting and not trusting the efficacy of the

Scriptures. Well, the Calvinists that I know and love and read and so on, and benefit from their preaching, would believe that with certainty that these

Scriptures are efficacious and powerful because they actually accomplish exactly what they were designed to do.

They draw the elect out from darkness and bring them into eternal life, just as the death of Christ actually accomplishes what

Christ intended. It saves everyone for whom he died. But, going back to a flip side of the coin, how do you respond to the one that might say, well, if you're charging the

Calvinist looking at his life as some kind of a litmus test of whether or not he has the

Holy Spirit, whether he is actually regenerate, you know, seeing if he is actually loving

Christ and mourning over his sin, and although not ever achieving sinlessness, repenting of that sin and so on.

The flip side of the coin, if you want to look at a problem in American Christianity, wouldn't you say that a very enormous element of the problem of American Christianity is that you have people that think that some kind of a one -time experience in their life—it might be baptism or it might be an altar call—has settled the issue, and they have nothing to fear.

They live carefree lives thinking that they're on their way to heaven when there's no evidence of life in them.

They are spiritually dead, just as they were before they were baptized or before they went forward for an altar call or before they repeated some kind of a prayer to invite

Jesus into their heart or something. Isn't nominalism and dead Christianity, Christianity in name only, a very serious and dangerous element of this false

American Christianity? Yes, 100 % yes. And in some ways, at the anniversary of the

Reformation, this is a great opportunity for us to talk about that, because when people look back at, like the indulgence controversy 500 years ago when

Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door in Woodford, and people say that everyone back then was obsessed with how to find

God's grace. They were so anxious about the wrath of God. But that's not true.

In fact, when Luther writes the 95 Theses, he's writing the 95 Theses because nobody's worried about God's wrath.

I mean, they think that by buying a little indulgence paper, they can rescue themselves from purgatory, certainly from hell, that it was easy to be a

Christian, that nobody was afraid of God, that by doing this thing, you could make yourself safe.

And so Luther is railing against that. He says, the first Thesis is, when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ says, repent, he willed that the whole life of the

Christian would be a life of repentance. This is not a one -time thing, or like a, you know, you put the coin in the machine, or you buy the piece of paper, or you make the decision, or you, you know, you go, you get married in the church, or whatever it is, these things that people trusted.

I must be safe from the fires of hell because I did this little one thing. That's no different. That's no different than an indulgence.

It's no different than this kind of lazy medieval piety that has no fear of God and can't hear the thundering of God's wrath preached in the law.

It's a proud, hard -hearted worship of a God of your own creating, because as soon as God isn't full of wrath over your sin, even for the

Christian to have the fear of God as the defining thing in their life, if you don't, if you don't have that, then you, you're, you're, you stand there breaking the

First Commandment. When Luther taught the kids the First Commandment, you know, in the small catechism, what is the First Commandment? We should have no other

God. He says, what does this mean? We should fear love and trust in God above all things, so that the

First Commandment requires us to fear God's wrath. Now, once we fear God's wrath, he shows us his son

Jesus and shows us how the wrath of God was poured out on his son in this atoning sacrifice, so that his wrath is for his son and not for us.

And then when we finally fear nothing but God, he says, look, don't be afraid. I love you.

I forgive you all your sins. But if we don't start with that fear of God, then, then we are really in trouble.

And, and American Christianity, this is one of the marks of American Christianity that runs all the way through it, Catholic, liberal, even evangelical.

There's no fear of God. Everyone assumes that God is just a nice guy. Like, you know, that God is in a sweater vest and, and he just, you know, or God is like the, is like our grandma who always wishes we would call, and is sitting at home waiting for us to call him.

Some sort of needy God up in heaven who just is just dying for us to make a decision for him and dedicate our life to him and call him our friend, and then he'll really be proud of us.

I mean, this is an absurd idol, and it's not God at all. So I'm 100 % with you on that.

Yeah, that kind of a God not only diminishes his sovereignty and his power and his self -sufficiency, but it also unconsciously,

I'm sure that most of our Arminian friends are unconsciously doing this, other than the open theists who claim that they are consistent

Arminians, but they are diminishing God's omniscience when they have a picture of a

God wringing his hands in heaven, hoping, pacing back and forth that people are going to come to him because he so desires everyone without exception to come to him that he is anxious about this.

This is really a, this is really a grotesque distortion of who

God really is. That's right. But we always, you know, here's Calvin, oh man, I'm going to quote

Calvin now. I really wish

Luther would have said this, but alas, you know, he did not. But Calvin said, remember, I mean this most famous of his quotes, that the human heart is an idol factory.

Yes, amen. So we're always trying to build God in our own image, of our own fallen image, and it's just absurd.

This kind of idolatry is precisely what the scriptures are standing against.

I mean, when God talks, that's what the Bible is, God talking, and he's going to say, hey, look, I'm going to decide, I'm going to decide who

I am for you, and I'm going to decide who you are, by the way, and I'm also going to create the whole world.

And to be a Christian, again, I think we've mentioned this before, but this is the program of the reformation.

To be a Christian is to say, okay, we're going to let God decide for himself who he is and what he's going to do.

So when God decides, hey, you shall have no other gods, we don't get to decide it differently.

When God says, honor your father and mother, you can't decide that you're not going to, that's not your option.

And when God decides that he is going to be your brother and take upon your flesh and your blood and also your sin, and go to the cross to endure

God's wrath, so that you can live with him forever, then we say, okay, well, we're going to let God be God like he wants to do it, and rejoice in that.

We have to go to our first break, actually, it's our second break, our midway break right now. And by the way,

I think I forgot to tell Joe in Slovenia that you have won a free copy of Has American Christianity Failed by Brian Wolfmuller.

And this is compliments of Concordia Publishing House, and also compliments of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

cvbbs .com, who will actually be shipping that book out to you at no charge to you or to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

So we thank you, Joe, for giving us an American address where your daughter lives in Georgia, where we could ship this book that you've just won.

If anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Chris Arnzen, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Don't go away, God willing, we will be right back right after these messages from our sponsors. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune into A Visit to the

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Welcome back. This is Chris Sarnes, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with just a little less than an hour to go is

Brian Wolfmuller, pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Aurora, Colorado, which is a congregation in the

Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. He is co -host of the world's most famous Lutheran theological game show,

Table Talk Radio, and today we are addressing his book, Has American Christianity Failed?,

and that is published by Concordia Publishing House. Before we return to our discussion, I just have a couple of important announcements to make in regard to special events that are coming up that our sponsors are orchestrating.

First of all, the aforementioned Iron Sharper than Zion Pastor's Luncheon is being held on Thursday, October 26th, from 11 a .m.

to 2 p .m. at the Carlisle Fire and Rescue Banquet Hall. This is open to all men in ministry leadership, whether you are a pastor, an elder, and I happen to believe those are the same office, deacon, parachurch leader, any kind of a male leader in the church or parachurch is welcome to attend this free luncheon.

It's free from beginning to end and this is going to feature, as I said earlier, the host of a visit to the pastor's study,

Pastor Bill Shishko, regional home missionary for Reformation Metro New York, a ministry of the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church denomination. And, as I said earlier, there is going to be a ton of free books donated by major publishers all over the

United States and the UK. And now I hear that we're also getting some from our guest, Brian Wolfmuller, who's been kind enough to donate some books,

I believe, by Martin Luther. And so if you want to register for that free pastor's luncheon on Thursday, October 26, just send me an email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com, and just put pastor's luncheon in the subject line.

Then, coming up in November from the 17th through the 18th, the

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their annual Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology, and that features guest speakers such as Kent Hughes, Peter Jones, Tom Nettles, Dennis Cahill, and Scott Oliphant.

This will be held at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania. The theme, this is a theme that is not unknown to our guest,

Brian Wolfmuller, For Still Our Ancient Foe is the theme. That is obviously a line from Martin Luther's classic hymn,

A Mighty Fortress, referring to Satan. And if you would like to register for that conference, go to alliancenet .org,

alliancenet .org. And then, last but not least, the G3 Conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia, and the theme of this coming

January's G3 Conference is Knowing God, A Biblical Understanding of Discipleship, and speakers include

Stephen Lawson, Votie Balcom, Phil Johnson, Keith Getty, H .B. Charles Jr., Tim Challies, Josh Bice, James White, Tom Askell, Anthony Mathenia, Michael Kruger, David Miller, Paul Tripp, Todd Friel, Derek Thomas, Martha Peace, and Justin Peters.

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If you register for any of these events, please let those organizations who are running those events know that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

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As I try to remember every day to say, please never ever ever siphon money out of the giving that you are accustomed to to your local church.

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Well, now we are finally back to our discussion with Brian Wolfmuller on the theme,

Has American Christianity Failed? And we have a number of listeners who have been patiently waiting for their questions to be asked and answered.

I'm going to go to the bi -locational Susan in Scottsville, Kentucky and on Long Island, New York.

Susan asks or says, American Christianity is unique for its inherent democratization, the result of the

Second Great Awakening and the birth of countless new denominations and perspectives on Christian doctrine during the 19th century.

Do you think this individualistic and egalitarian American mindset, born on a rugged frontier, has created the type of Christianity in America that has lost common ground?

Can you hear me, Chris? I lost you for a second there. Oh, I hear you completely. Okay, good. I got you now.

That's a great question. And I don't know what comes first. I'm tempted to think that part of the rugged individualism of the

American spirit is the result of the theology that was defining the Church at the time.

So I'm tempted to run the chicken and the egg the other direction. But I think that there is a relationship there.

You know, again, perhaps to kind of key in on the thing that Susan mentioned, the frontier spirit and the rugged individualism that defines, at least that used to define, the

American spirit also does the same thing with Christianity. So what is

Christianity? Well, it's me and Jesus. In fact, the chief metaphor that's used with American Christianity to define

Christianity is the idea of the relationship. It's a solo endeavor.

It's me and Jesus. And there's very little place for the Church, there's very little place for having a common confession, there's very little place for having a, you know, a share in God's grace and so forth.

It's all this, it's kind of me and Jesus, and Jesus is the boyfriend who is too nervous.

He's asked us out and he's waiting to see what our response is going to be. And everything gets subsumed into this picture of the relationship.

I mean, I think the more I pay attention, the more this is the kind of the defining narrative or defining picture that most people have for theology.

In the Middle Ages, it was the bank. You know, the Pope had the keys and he could dispense some merit for you and you could pay off God to get into heaven.

The Reformation rightly recognized that the better picture, the biblical picture, is that of a court, and we stand condemned by Moses and by the devil himself, and the

Lord Jesus is our advocate, who presents as evidence for our salvation his blood in the courtroom of God, and we are declared to be righteous.

That's the doctrine of justification, the article upon which the Church stands or falls. But we put everything in terms of the relationship, and it's like a high school dating relationship, so that now my piety is defined as a quiet time, talking to God, because after all, if you don't talk with God, then you don't deepen the relationship.

Worship is defined as a time to be intimate and close to God, because that's important for the relationship.

And everything is brought into that picture. So I don't know which came first, this kind of rugged individualism and romanticism, theologically or in the

American spirit, but I do think that there's an equivalency there. Now don't you think that in many cases in life, there are things that are commendable and good and valuable, that when not being used as religious or theological ground on which to base your relationship with God, are very helpful in life?

Like for instance, the individualistic mindset born on a rugged frontier, as she calls it, that in many sense is what happened here, the ground in America from which great progress in invention and progress in science and medicine and all these things came about very often because people had the opportunity finally to excel in areas of life that they were unable to under different forms of government overseas.

And you have, you know, the old adage, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.

That's a very commendable mindset if you're talking about someone not relying on the government or handouts, etc.

But when you start to use those same ideas, when it comes to your relationship with God, they're heretical.

Obviously, as we were mentioning before, Pelagianism is the idea of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps to heaven.

In fact, I remember hearing a Mormon president give a speech where he basically used that same phrase as the very slogan of the

Mormon religion, that we are to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps to achieve

Godhood, the deity. That's crazy. I mean, there's a quote from 2nd

Nephi, which is the only verse I remember from the Book of Mormon because it's so, but I think it's all you need to know. It says, by grace you are saved through faith.

So far, so good. But then it says, after all you can do. So you've got to do everything that's in you, and then

God makes up the gap. You know, it's this gap theory. No, no, you're 100 % right. It's good for a man to work.

If a man doesn't work, he shouldn't eat. But Paul also says, to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies them godly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.

So that God has given us, here's how the Lutherans distinguish it. I think this is helpful.

And you have to tell me if Calvin would have the same distinction. He said that there's a freedom towards the things below us, and there's a bondage of the will towards the things above us.

So I cannot choose to love God, but I can choose to love my neighbor. I can't choose to serve

God. It's impossible for me to choose to believe in God, but I can go and bless my neighbor. So where my freedom comes in is in this life of creativity and love as we live in this world, and that's where we rejoice in using our will and being very active in love and service for the neighbor.

But when it comes to God, we come not as workers and doers, but as believers, so that His righteousness, righteousness before man is earned, but righteousness that endures before God in eternity comes only as a gift through Christ Jesus.

Yes, well Calvinists would say that according to, and this isn't the only place, but Romans 8 .8

is a perfect place to look where Paul says that those who are in the flesh cannot please

God. It's interesting that a fundamentalist who believes in the inerrancy of scripture will read that and somehow still believes that a dead sinner can please

God by summoning up a faith out from his own heart, his dead lifeless heart, that will be pleasing to God and will actually save him, whereas a

Reformed Christian will say no, even the faith itself is a gift of God and only a regenerate heart can produce that.

Now when it comes to the realm of even things that the unregenerate do, I think that's all a part of common grace.

I know that some of my Calvinist brethren don't even like that term, but you have God restraining the evil hearts of men.

You have God even making this world a better place for His children by restraining the evil and the unelect around us, by giving them, by moving them to do good things.

There have been many times where I'm sure you and members of your congregation have been helped in surprising and amazing ways and in urgent ways and desperately needed ways by those who are not even

Christians. Right. So yeah, I don't know if that makes any sense.

Yeah, I don't know, 100 % sense. We're on the same page. And so what's amazing is that in most American Christianity, that's been reversed.

I mean, according to the Bible, I'm not free when it comes to the things of God, but I am free when it comes to the things of life on earth.

I can choose who I would like to marry, if she'll also choose to marry me. I can choose where to go to school, what to do for work, what kind of car to drive, what color socks to wear.

That's all a matter of my freedom. But what I'm not free to do is to fear, love, and trust in God, serve Him, to believe in Him when

I'm dying, and so forth. But American Christianity has reversed that and said, no, you're free to choose.

You're free to make a decision for God, but you're not free to decide who you're going to marry. You've got to go through all these mystical exercises to figure out what

God's secret will is. So they've reversed, they've bound the will where it is not bound, and they've freed the will where it should not be freed.

It's flipped it completely on its head. I've got to pray and fast to figure out what color socks to wear.

I mean, something is really wrong there. Or, of course, you have people with a real,

I don't think it can be described in any other way than a false piety, a self -righteous piety that tries to masquerade as some kind of humility and masquerade as a dependence on God.

Like, for instance, I'll give you a perfect example. I'm an advertising salesman. I've been one since the 1980s, and there was a client that claimed to be

Christian that owed thousands of dollars for an ad campaign that he had purchased.

And every time I would ask him for an update on when he was going to be able to pay that debt, he would say, waiting on the

Lord, brother. I'm waiting on the Lord. You know, I'm a thief.

Yeah, right. And when people say that they have to pray about things that, no, you don't have to pray about it if God's commanded you to do something.

There's no need for prayer on a decision in regard to that. Yeah. I mean, it is ironic that when people say,

I want to become all things to all people, they happen to become exactly the thing that they wanted to be. Yeah, right.

Well, thank you so much, Susan, in Scottsville, Kentucky, and Long Island, New York. Give us a mailing address on your location of choice, because we are going to be mailing you,

Has American Christianity Failed? Compliments of Concordia Publishing House and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com.

We'll be mailing that out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And thanks for contributing such a wonderful question, insightful question to our program.

We have Gary in South Point, Hawaii, and he says,

I'm assuming the answer to your book's question to be, yes, American Christianity has failed, but Lutheran Christianity succeeds.

What would you suggest to alert the other denominations that their non -Lutheran beliefs are wrong?

Now, even before you say anything, just to quell the hearts of those listening that might be angry by you defending something uniquely

Lutheran, I believe that if you believe something to be true, you believe it wholeheartedly to be true, there is nothing wrong with trying to convince others to believe in what you believe.

I mean, that's, I think, the heart of the Christian faith is that if we see false religions surrounding us, we are not one among equals in regard to our faith.

We have the only true faith, the Christian faith. But anyway, if you could answer Gary in South Point, Hawaii's question.

Yeah, sure, and maybe not directly, because I, you know, there's a reason why I don't define

American Christianity as, you know, Southern Baptists, or Calvary Chapel, or Joel Osteen, but rather define it according to these theological trends, because these theological trends make it into every single denomination, including the

Lutheran Church, and in a major way I'm writing this book also for the

Lutherans, saying, hey, as you are tempted away from the clarity of Scripture and the simplicity of Christ, you are losing the gift of comfort that Jesus intends for His Church to have in His doctrine.

And so every house has problems, including the

Lutheran Church, and in some ways I wanted to define American Christianity in this way so that we could also see this in ourselves.

I mean, we talked about enthusiasm, and I quoted Luther how this looking for God's Word apart from the external

Word is the root of every error. He said, Luther said, this clings to us all.

This enthusiasm is the natural inclination of our flesh. Our sinful flesh has a default theology, and it's a self -centered, works -based theology, every single one of us, born of Adam.

And it'll cling to us until the Lord rescues us from the sinful flesh by giving us the gift of death.

And so this call to the clarity of the

Scriptures and the simplicity of Christ is, I hope, to be heard for all people.

Now, there is some apologetic for the Lutheran doctrine in the book, and hopefully that'll stand on its own.

But to make this argument, and this is, I hope, the argument, is that the reason why we argue for the doctrine, for the truth of the

Lord's Word, is not only because it's true. I mean, that would be enough. If it was true, that would be enough to argue for it.

But also because the truth of the Gospel and the proper distinction between law and Gospel delivers to sinners extreme comfort, the most blessed comfort of all.

So that, like St. Paul says, that by the comfort of the Holy Scriptures, we might have hope.

So that I'm convinced that the confession of the Lutheran Church delivers the

Scriptures in its simplicity and delivers with it that great hope. But I'll let the interested reader kind of track that down.

It's a great... I mean, Chris, it's great to hear you contending for the truth, just, you know, to know that you're out there and know that we're on the same team on this thing, fighting against a theological apathy that has taken the

Church, and to go back to open our Bibles and to put our nose into the

Scriptures and to know that the Holy Spirit is there in that mean of grace, that mechanism or tool of grace to bless us.

This is what all of us need to hear. Amen. And of course, you keep repeating law and grace, and it seems that for quite a while Christianity has been marked by lawlessness, and people seem to think that that is some kind of an improvement because it's all about love, mercy, forgiveness, and kindness, and compassion, and all of those things that we think are definitely wonderful things.

All of us love those, do love those attributes in God.

But when you remove law, when you remove the fact that man must be driven to a point of hopelessness without God, he must realize he cannot obey the law and must turn to Christ as his only hope for forgiveness and salvation.

Isn't this missing element of law a very dangerous thing to remove from a gospel presentation because of the fact that people don't even understand what's so amazing about grace, they don't understand what's so absolutely joyful, and I can't even find words to describe exuberance that the heart that has been forgiven feels.

You don't really know that unless you know that there are laws that you have broken and that you are deserving of hell.

Am I right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Here's an illustration. You imagine that you and I are walking through the woods, and we come across a hole in the ground, and we're trying to figure out how deep it is, and you know, we're throwing rocks down there and trying to measure, and we can't figure out the depth of this hole until finally, ah,

Chris, I know just how deep it is, and I tell you. You say, well, how'd you figure it out? And I figured it out because I went, and I looked, and I saw the pile of dirt that came out of the hole, and I said, it's a mountain that's there, and now

I know how deep it is. I mean, when we see what it takes for God to win for us eternal life in the suffering and death of Jesus, then we realize how bad we are.

I mean, that is precisely what we deserve, the abandonment of, the smiting of God on the

Son of God, the abandonment when Jesus says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That forsaken, that is what we deserve because of our sin, and we think, oh no, we're not that bad.

I mean, maybe I made a few mistakes, but God's a nice guy. He'll overlook it. No, he cannot overlook it.

He must die for it. You know, so if we diminish our own sinfulness and God's wrath over sin, if we diminish

God's holiness, then we don't have the gospel. We don't have the forgiveness. We don't have the atonement.

It's like, oh, a couple years ago, this guy, this nut came, went into the movie theater and shot up a bunch of people in Aurora, just down the street from where we live.

Oh, that's where that was. Yeah, yeah, and it's, I mean, the place where the guy lived is probably two blocks from the church, and you know,

I should imagine, you know, we're watching the trial unfold, and can you imagine if, so this guy here, how do you plead?

He says, I plead guilty. I did that. The judge says, oh God, I'm glad you plead guilty. What do you think you deserve? He says, oh yeah, probably.

I mean, that was really bad what I did, shooting up all those people. I probably deserve, oh, at least 20 or 30 hours of community service.

And we're like, wait a minute. What, you do not understand how bad you are. Now, that's how most

American Christians are. You're like, yeah, have you sinned? Yeah, yeah, you know, I probably made some mistakes. I probably did something. Well, what do you deserve?

I mean, certainly that we don't think we deserve eternity in hell. I mean, that seems pretty extreme. Maybe just a slap on the wrist from God.

No, no, that, if you think that your sins have only deserved a slap on the wrist, then you have missed the gospel.

You've missed the holiness of God. You've missed the severity of your sin. You've missed how deep you have fallen.

You've missed how offensive you are to God, and how you have become his enemy.

And if you miss how bad you are, then you miss how deep and how high and how profound the love of Christ is.

And this is a very dangerous, but I think kind of common theological predicament.

Amen. Well, we're going to our final break right now. It's going to be briefer than the last one. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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

USA. If you intend to send in a question, I would do so quickly because we are rapidly running out of time. That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away, God willing, we'll be right back right after these messages with Pastor Brian Wolfmuller.

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I'm sorry, to our guests. And we are back now to our final portion of today's program with Brian Wolfmuller, pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Aurora, Colorado, host of Table Talk Radio, and author of Has American Christianity Failed?

If you'd like to send us an email with a question, now is the time to do it because we are rapidly running out of time.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. We have

RJ in White Plains, New York, who says, you mentioned mysticism earlier.

Would you say that there are many charismatic and Pentecostal movements in our day that are guilty of this, where they combine a secret knowledge perhaps of Gnosticism with some kind of a private and personal relationship and communication with God that completely cuts them out of the rest of the body of Christ in an unbiblical way?

Yes, absolutely. And I think there's kind of a hard mysticism and a soft mysticism. The Pentecostals are the hard mystics.

I mean, they're just plain old mystics. They deny the sufficiency of Scripture because they say that we're getting a new word from God.

And then it's one of the definitions of the Gnostics, that you have the leaders there who have the secret knowledge, and then you have to follow their secret knowledge.

So I remember one time one of these mystics was talking to me, and they said, I have a couple stories.

But one said, Jesus is going to punish your church. How do you know that? I said, well, Jesus told me.

And I said, well, could next time Jesus talks to you, could you tell him to talk to me too?

Because you get to trust Jesus, but I have to trust you. I met this guy one time, he said he was an apostle.

He was at the McDonald's in Reno, Nevada, and he was an apostle and also a night shop owner. And he said, oh, you're a pastor, you're below the list, you know, the

Ephesians 4 list. God gave some to the apostles and some prophets and evangelists and pastors and teachers, so you're way down there on the list.

And I said, well, could you show me a miracle to prove that you have a direct call from God? That's true. He gives direct calls.

He also gives a gift of miracles. He says, no, I don't have a miracle, but I have a word from the Lord from you. And I said, oh, yeah, what's that?

And he says, God says you should believe in his apostles. Convenient, you know, because they become the authority, not the scriptures.

And anyone who would say that you have to listen to them is a false prophet.

The true prophets that are in the church today, the true pastors, are always pointing to the Word, to the

Word, the Word, the Word. The Word says it. So you and I are not asking people to trust and believe us.

We're pointing to the Word. And if we don't point to the Word and to the truth of the scriptures, then we're useless.

We're worse than useless. We become enemies of God and his Word and his church. So that's profound in the charismatic church.

But there's also a soft mysticism which says that all the spiritual activity happens in the sphere of my own heart.

So it's all about I'm feeling led by God, and God is teaching me in the heart.

And I walk in the garden alone. Yeah, that's all mysticism. It's a soft mysticism, but it's a dangerous mysticism, because it's, again, that comes from the conviction that the scriptures are not sufficient, and I have to get another word in the heart.

No, dear friends, the scriptures are enough. Jesus loves you so much that he cannot let you go without telling you everything you need to know about him and yourself and eternal life.

And he's done it in the Word. And anyone who would diminish that with spiritual practices or anything else is an enemy of the gospel.

And I'm assuming that you may agree with me that we do have to be somewhat careful when we talk about Pentecostals and Charismatics as if they were monolithic, because there is a wide spectrum of them.

And although I am a very hardcore cessationist, I do have friends who are Charismatic, who believe that the gifts, the signed gifts, are possible, but they are not on a lunatic fringe of any kind.

Some of them are very theologically sound in many other ways. Yeah, I think that's right. And there's some serious,

I mean, we can rejoice when people are serious about their theology. That's good. I think the modern phenomenon of Pentecostalism, though, in some ways completely has missed the biblical doctrine of the office of the ministry, and the distinction between the direct call of God and the indirect call of God.

But that's maybe a longer conversation. We have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says,

I heard a guest on your Iron Sharpens Iron radio program some time ago who said that one of the dangers of mysticism is that those involved in it open their minds and empty it, rather than fill their minds with truth.

Does your current guest today agree with that assessment? Oh yeah, 100%.

I mean, without question. This idea, even when we talk about meditation, you know, the biblical idea of meditation is hearing the

Lord's Word. You're putting God's Word into your mind and into your heart, and even into your mouth, you know.

You're Luther says that we meditate on the scripture like a cow chews the grass in the field.

We just, we chew on it, we swallow it, we spit it back up, and we chew on it some more. It's very, you know, word -centered.

This idea of Eastern meditation and Eastern mysticism, where we empty ourselves, is just dangerous.

I mean, even if there was no devil, which of course the devil was always trying to get after us, and there was no world, even our own sinful flesh is not to be trusted with silence, you know.

Our flesh can come up with enough wicked ideas on its own. So we're always filling our minds with the

Lord's Word to fight against the world, and the flesh, and the devil. By the way, I think I forgot to tell RJ and our last listener,

BB, that you have both received a free copy of Has American Christianity Failed?

by Brian Wolfmuller. So please make sure we have your mailing addresses, and we'll have

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service ship those out to you. The whole thing about mysticism,

I think, also very often accompanies people being driven by a religion that is really appealing to little more than the physical senses.

And, you know, people who are so desperate for a religious experience, they want to feel the goosebumps, and they want to be brought to a place of mental numbness, where they could just feel as if they are truly in a state of worship at that point, which is a very dangerous thing because of the reality of not only blasphemous and heretical things that could enter into one's mind and heart, but actual genuine and real demonic presence.

In fact, I don't know if you know Robert Bennett, who is a Missouri Synod Lutheran. We had him on the program speaking about the demonic realm, which is something that seems to be very rarely spoken of in both your and my circles of Lutheranism and Calvinism.

That's something that seems to be avoided at all costs. But would you agree with that? The danger of wanting so desperately for something to feel religious, that they are entering into a very heretical, mystical experience.

Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, I mean, just with the demon stuff, I judge someone's preaching and teaching how biblically minded they are by how often they mention the devil.

Now, that's not the only test that you want to have, of course, but it's one of the marks of our secular age that we never talk about our old evil foe.

You can't read a page of Luther without reading about the devil, who stands in opposition to everything that the Lord does, and we need to think about that.

But I think even before the idea of opening ourselves up to demonic possession, this idea of the religious experience, it's dangerous in and of itself.

I mean, the fruits are horrible, but the thing itself is already bad. Because if I'm judging the truth of God's Word or whatever on my own experience of it, then

I'm setting out to sea without an anchor. I am the definition of being tossed to and fro by every wave and wind of doctrine.

So that, you know, I remember for our radio show, I was interviewing Chris Tomlin, who's this world -famous contemporary

Christian music guy, and how great is our God and all this sort of stuff. And I said, what's the purpose of a worship leader?

And he says, to lead people into the presence of God. And I said, well, how do you know when you're in the presence of God?

He says, well, you know it. But here's the profound problem with that, and that is that long before the church service starts,

I'm in the presence of God. And long after the service is over, I am in the presence of God.

If I ascend into heaven, or if I fall down into hell, I'm, the Lord is there with me. I cannot escape

His presence. That's what Psalm 139 says. And so when they say to be brought into the presence of God, what they really mean is to be brought into an experience of the presence of God.

But there's a, there's so much danger, I mean, once, it's dangerous if it works.

Because then I think, now I'm in the presence of God and all is well, and I mistake my feeling and experience for the gospel.

And then there's also the danger when it doesn't work. Well, now God must be abandoned to me. And I think most of my pastoral work is to fight people's mysticism.

They come to me and they say, they say, Pastor, I think this is the right decision. I'm going to get a divorce because it just feels right.

And I say, your feelings are wrong. God's Word says you shall not commit adultery. Do not trust your feelings.

Or someone comes to me and they say, Pastor, I just don't feel like God loves me. God has accepted me or God's forgiven me.

And I say, well, your feelings are wrong. God says that I will never leave you or forsake you. Whoever sins you forgive on earth will be forgiven in heaven, and I forgive you all your sins.

In other words, I mean, most of this work of the pastor is to convince people that what is to be trusted is not our feelings, but rather God's Word.

I mean, John says it like this, if our heart condemns us, we have one who is greater than our heart. So that our feelings should stand in service to the

Lord's Word, not make the Lord's Word stand in service to our feelings. The feelings are to be servants of God and his truth, not lords over it.

Yeah, and wouldn't you say that a part of the reason there seems to be a rise in mysticism, a lot of it could be the blame could be laid at the foot of the evangelical church at large very often will have a so -called worship service that is hard to distinguish between a self -help meeting at the

Ramada Inn. There is something, you know, there is a removal of awe and reverence in some cases, where it is truly

God that we are worshiping. He is our audience when we are worshiping.

We're not supposed to be caught up so much in how we and those around us are feeling and how we're being entertained and all of that.

That awe and reverence has been so removed in so many places that people are looking for that religious experience.

Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, entertainment -based worship is just pure paganism. But there's even, you know, for the serious folks who want to bring people into the presence of God, there's even a danger there, because you assume that we have some sort of internal spiritual antenna that tunes into the secret presence of God.

But we don't need that. If God is going to come to us with promises, then we don't need any sort of internal spiritual antenna.

I mean, I don't need to feel like I'm in the presence of God, because Jesus told me I'm never going to leave you or forsake you.

I mean, I don't need the feeling that God is happy with me because I have the promises of the

Gospel. I don't need the feeling of closeness to my neighbor, because the

Scriptures tell me that all you who are far off are brought near in the Beloved. I mean, I have the promises of the Scripture.

And if my feelings don't tell me the things that the Scripture tells me, then my feelings, just like my will and my mind and everything else that's part of my fallen nature, stands rebuked by God's law and covered with the blood of Jesus.

We have Christopher from Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says, you mentioned pietism earlier.

Is pietism really a problem in the 21st century Church? Yes, I can't think that we escape it, because there's this inescapable law.

I mean, some of the problems of American Christianity, this idea that God wants you to be happy, that there's no wrath, no law, no sin, the antinomian stuff, the hard -hearted, not caring about theology, these are real and true problems.

But I think there's even problems when you get into the Christians who are serious about their Christianity, but they're theologically off, so that they're looking for comfort, not in the promises of God, but rather in their own religious activity.

And that looking for comfort in those places, that would be what pietism is, is looking for comfort in the fruit of faith rather than in the source of faith.

Looking for confidence in the result of faith rather than God's means of grace.

Then we're in a dangerous sort of thing, because then we start to do this kind of fruit checking, testing ourselves, measuring up, and that's also a spiritually dangerous sort of thing.

Now, would you say that those that are involved in a pietistic heresy or aberrant behavior are very often very much like Protestant monks?

They tend to separate themselves from the world. I don't mean necessarily in a drastic way like the

Amish, but they're people that they're not really being salt and light in the world very often because they're so huddled together.

Yeah, yeah, that's one of the marks of pietism is it kind of excludes you, although there is, there's like a, I think there's a environmentalist pietism, where you start to define

Christianity by good works in the environment, and then your good works are, you know, you're out in the inner city planting trees and all this sort of stuff, and you find your confidence in that.

So there's that, and there's a liturgical pietism. It's like, I find my confidence that I'm a

Christian because I'm part of this deep liturgical tradition or whatever. So I think you can, you know, whatever sort of work that you pick, either

God -appointed or man -appointed, that you start to find your confidence in, that's what it is.

I mean, pietism is just one half step in front of work's righteousness, and it's not, and so the work's righteousness says

I have my salvation in my good works, but pietism says I have the confidence of my salvation in my good works, and those good works can be of all sorts of different shapes.

But going to an issue that we were just discussing or that you were just mentioning about there being a danger in some sense of people fruit -checking, perhaps in a way that becomes morbid introspection.

At the same time, don't we have to be very weary of, we have to be very conscious of the fact that we may be allowing our own consciences to become seared by just becoming so much a part of the world, being so absorbed into it that we don't even realize that we are nothing more than a

Christian in name only? Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. There's danger on both sides.

I've written and I've been doing a lot of work on the conscience. I wrote an essay a couple years ago called

Conscience Training about how the Christian needs to be constantly meditating on the Ten Commandments in order to tenderize our conscience so that our consciences don't become hardened to God's law and to the accusation of the

Holy Spirit. But when the Scriptures call good works the fruits of repentance, I think that what that is doing is that when we go to put our attention on something, what do we put our attention on?

And I think that if good works are the fruit of repentance, then our attention goes on repentance.

That is, on hearing the law accuse me specifically of my own sin, and then hearing the gospel specifically forgive me of my sin, and believing and trusting that Christ's mercy has atoned for my sins, and that that repentance, contrition and faith, will then result in good works.

I'm now, I'm set free. In fact, I'm energized. I've grabbed onto the Holy Spirit who's sending me out to love and serve my neighbor.

But my attention is put on the repentance, and then the fruit of repentance will follow.

But if someone lacks repentance, you know, if someone's out there just living like a hellion, or their life is not marked by the beginning of obedience and love for God and the neighbor, then right, they need to hear the law.

But the thing that they need is not to do more good works. The thing that they need is to repent, to repent of their sin, to believe the gospel, and then to trust that the

Holy Spirit then brings them the opportunity to do the gift of good works.

And of course, there are those who are are headed for hell that are not necessarily hellions in the description of the world around us, or even much of the church.

You could be just totally indifferent. You could be someone who is raised in a

Christian home, and perhaps you are an heir of a whole legacy of Christians in your genealogy.

And you may just assume that you're a Christian just because your parents were, and you go to church either regularly or on Christmas and Easter and Mother's Day.

But you don't have a heart that beats for the gospel. You're not excited about the

Word of God. You're not compassionate about seeing lost people come to Christ. You're just an indifferent person going through the motions.

That's just as much a danger as somebody who is a prostitute. Yeah, the great

CFW Walters, the first president, he's basically the guy who founded the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

His great work is called The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel. And one of the things that he does in there, simply beautifully, is he says, who is the law for and who is the gospel for?

And for those who are confident and secure in their own righteousness or lack of righteousness, they need to hear the hammer of God's law which demolishes and crushes and puts in peace.

The gospel is for those who have been brought to the end of themselves and the end of their own righteousness, the end of their own work, the end of their trust in themselves, and they need to hear nothing but the pure preaching of God's kindness and mercy in Christ.

So you're right, we have this distinction between law and gospel means we have to pay some attention or give some attention to who are the recipients of the

Lord's Word. And for the proud, they need to hear the crushing of God's law. But for those who are despondent, they need to hear the sweet kindness of the

Lord's mercy for us in Christ. Perhaps you could just spend two minutes now summarizing what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

Well, you know, as we come on this 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation and we think about what it means,

I think this is the basic thing which we can agree on, and that is that if God is God, then he will be

God in the way that he wants to be God. And it is not our job to define God or to invent

God or to decide how he should do his being God, it's his job, and he's given it to us in the

Word. I mean, he said, I'm God, you shouldn't have any others. He says, you're a sinner, and apart from me, you could do nothing.

He says, I'm your brother, of your flesh and blood, bearing your sin. He does all of these things, and he does all of them for our great benefit and for our comfort.

So that to be a Christian, you know, we don't say, oh, well, I believe, but, you know, I don't go to church, or oh,

I believe, but, you know, I live how I want, or oh, I believe, but also

I'm so good to get into heaven. We don't, that's not our option. To believe

God is to trust what he says in his law, his 10 Commandments, and to trust what he says in his

Gospel, the death of Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins. And so we trust in him, and we find our comfort and our confidence and our joy and our peace and our hope and our life and everything in him and his kindness and his

Word. That is the key thing, the truth of the Lord's Word and law and Gospel. Well, I want to thank you so much,

Pastor Brian, for being our guest today. I want to make sure that everybody has important websites and other contact information.

First of all, I know that you have a blog, which can be found at wolfmuller .co, that's

W -O -L -F -M -S -M -I -C -H -E -L -L -E -R, wolfmuller .co.

And then, of course, the Hope Lutheran Church in Aurora, Colorado.

I have hope -aurora .org, hope -aurora .org.

And then our friends at Concordia Publishing House, they have been very kind to us.

If you want to order the book that we have been giving away, if you didn't win one today, or perhaps you've already won one, but you still want to give copies to your family, friends, and loved ones, well, you can go to Concordia Publishing House.

And please, when you do, if you contact them, let them know that you heard about them from Chris Ornsen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

But their website at Concordia Publishing House is cph .org, cph .org.

And then we have the Table Talk Radio website, which is tabletalkradio .org,

tabletalkradio .org. Do you have any other contact information that you care to give? Well, the big one is that wolfmuller .co.

Everything kind of filters through there, and your listeners might be interested. I've been publishing some Luther's works, and they can go and buy these copies of Luther's stuff for five bucks, or you can download them for free.

So I have about 30 books there that you can download for free. So that's available for everyone if they go and see that website.

And let me know if you need anything else. Great. Well, I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who wrote in.

If you did not yet give me your mailing address, because everybody who wrote in actually won a book today, so make sure

I have your mailing address. But I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater