December 6, 2016 Show with Stephen McCaskell & Barry Cooper on “Luther: The Life & Legacy of the German Reformer”

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.

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

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 Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on the sixth day of December 2016.

I'm looking for what will prove to be, I'm sure, a fascinating interview today on a new documentary coming out,

Luther, the Life and Legacy of the German Reformer, and I hope that you stay tuned for the full two hours for that interview.

But before I introduce my guests today, I have some exciting news. This January, next month, on the 12th and the 13th,

I'm having two very exciting events. I am having another Iron Sharpens Iron pastor's luncheon on Thursday, the 12th of January from 11 a .m.

to 3 p .m. Eastern Time. I am inviting all men in the ministry out there who want to travel to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to attend that free event, and it's absolutely free of charge.

You will be served a gourmet meal. You will have a time of fun and fellowship with fellow men in the ministry, and you will receive a very heavy sack of free books, probably valued at $500 or something like that, because nearly every single major Christian publisher in the

United States and the UK are sending approximately a hundred free books of titles that I specifically pick out myself for men in the ministry, and therefore these are all free of charge.

You're not only going to get the books, but you do get a canvas sack, a free canvas sack, to carry all these books out to your car with.

It's going to be held at the Carlisle Vault, which is a gorgeous catering hall, and they were willing to work with me at an extremely affordable price.

The catering is going to be done by a chef executive, and I'm looking forward to that.

And then the next day, by the way, first of all, I forgot to mention that Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary, who's professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, he is the speaker at the pastor's luncheon.

But the next day, Friday the 13th, kind of an interesting date, at the

Carlisle Theater, which is a gorgeous theater that was built in the early 20th century and was restored.

It's a gorgeous old -fashioned theater that really has been restored to beautiful new -like condition.

The only thing that makes you realize it's old is because of the architecture. It's definitely one of those old theaters from the early 20th century.

At the Carlisle Theater on West High Street in Carlisle, we are having another in the series of the great debates that I started many years ago on Long Island back in 1996.

They began with Dr. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries, but this year, or should I say next year, because it's

January, we are having Dr. Tony Costa from the Toronto Baptist Seminary, who's actually a mutual friend of Dr.

James R. White. He is going to be debating Roman Catholic apologist Robert St.

Genes, and it's going to be the same theme that I started this debate series with back in 1996,

Mary, sinless queen of heaven or sinner saved by grace. It should be a really fascinating debate, so mark your calendars.

Please fly out or drive out or take a train out or run out or swim out, however you want to get here.

Take a parachute here to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a hot air balloon, however you can get here, because this is going to be a really,

I'm sure, phenomenal event. It's only $5 per ticket because we have to pay for the expenses of the theater and pay for travel expenses and so on.

The theater can seat 900 people, so I'm hoping to pack that 900 -seat theater out to capacity.

I hope that you can come to both of those events. Of course, the first event is only for men in ministry leadership.

The second event is open to everyone, men, women, and children, and those who are outside of Christianity.

No matter what religion or lack thereof you adhere to, we would look forward to seeing you at the debate.

For further details, just email me at chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

which is also the email address that you could send in questions for our guests today on this new documentary,

Luther, the Life and Legacy of the German Reformer. And I'm so delighted to have for the very first time our two guests.

Stephen McCaskill is a Canadian filmmaker and director of the documentary,

Through the Eyes of Spurgeon. Many of you may have seen that wonderful documentary on Charles Adams Spurgeon.

And we also have with us Barry Cooper, author, teacher, presenter, and director of product development at Christianity Explored Ministries.

They are both going to be discussing the new documentary, Luther, the Life and Legacy of the

German Reformer. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you both for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Stephen McCaskill and Barry Cooper.

And by the way, Stephen, am I pronouncing your name correctly? My name is

Stephen McCaskill. McCaskill. Okay. Just wanted to make sure that I was pronouncing that correctly, because even though it's kind of phonetic,

I could see how there could be possible different pronunciations of that. Anyway, well, first of all, before we even go into the subject at hand,

I want to get each of your personal testimonies of coming to Saving Faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ, what your religious backgrounds were growing up as a child, if any.

And let's start with you, Stephen McCaskill. All right. Well, I grew up as a pastor's kid.

So I grew up in a very loving home. My parents cared deeply about me, with me consistently reminding me of God's love for me found in the cross.

Despite this, I can remember from pretty much when I became a teenager through most of my high school years, struggling with very just a dark depression and being in a state of rebellion against my parents, despite their love.

To summarize it, it came to a climax one night when my mom's wife was almost taken from me in a highway accident that I caused.

So it's a long story, but it was a very loud and traumatic moment in my life.

God used it to really rescue me from my rebellion against my parents and my rebellion from Him.

I was confronted with the darkness of my sin and the need for a Savior, and it really was in this moment,

I think, that God saved me. The verse that really had a profound impact during my life and still does to this day is from 2

Corinthians 5 .21. It's just, for our sake, He made him to be sin who knew no sin. And this is, of course, talking about Jesus so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

Luther called this the Wonderful Exchange, and we'll be talking about Luther later, of course.

But what Luther says on this verse is equally as good. I'll just say it.

He says, "...that is the mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners, wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours, but Christ's, and the righteousness of Christ not

Christ's, but ours. He has emptied Himself of His righteousness, that He might clothe us with it and fill us with it.

And He has taken our evils upon Himself, that He might deliver us from them.

In the same manner as He grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded, in the same manner we rejoice in glory in His righteousness."

Praise God. And so you become a Christian and, well, before I even go into your journey into filmmaking,

I want to hear Barry's testimony of salvation and something about your background. Barry Cooper, if you could.

Yeah, well, Chris, similarly to Steve, I mean, I grew up attending the church.

The local church was a Methodist church, and, you know, it was taken as read that we would go every

Sunday. Even if we were on holiday, my dad would take us to a local church. We'd go along. And while there were some tremendous preachers who

I was privileged to hear who passed through that church, because of the

Methodist system of having this kind of circuit of preachers, so you had a different preacher who would come in, you know, you'd have different preachers coming in almost on a weekly basis.

It was almost like Russian roulettes with our spiritual life. And so this is a bit of a sidebar, but it rather encouraged

Bible -believing people like my dad to get into the unfortunate habit of just moving from church to church, sometimes on a weekly basis, whenever the pulpit was occupied by somebody who was a core preacher or even an apostate preacher.

So it was hard to be completely committed to the same body of believers from week to week, and very hard for them to rely on us.

So anyway, I lost interest in church at about the same time as I became interested in the opposite sex, so that was around about the age of 16 or 17, and my attendance got more and more spotty, and so by the age of,

I guess, 17 or 18, I basically opted out intellectually and emotionally, if not physically.

And, you know, this was a pretty dark period of my life, really. I mean, to be honest with you, just to put my cards completely on the table, and just hopefully for the encouragement of people who may be listening, for me the issue was that I just wanted to sleep with my girlfriends without feeling like a hypocrite whenever I went to church.

And so something had to give, you know, something had to give, and of course what gave was the church. I stopped going to church.

And then like Stephen, there was just a real moment of crisis where I came to the end of myself. My relationships got me into terrible difficulty.

I'd done a lot, I did a lot of damage to other people. And then wonderfully, at that point,

I got a place, by God's grace, to study English at Oxford University, and I fell for a young woman there.

Now, she was a Christian, and she was a regular churchgoer at a church called St. Herb's. And so, surprise, surprise, suddenly churchgoing seemed a lot more appealing to me, so I decided to spend more time with this young woman.

And as I started attending, I heard the gospel preached faithfully by men like David Fletcher, men like Vaughan Roberts, who is now, you know, many of your listeners may know, has written some great books.

And I was asked to read the Bible one -to -one by the student worker there. It was a guy called Tony Jones, which

I thought was a bit strange, actually, when he asked me, he said, do you want to meet up with me and read the Bible? I thought to myself, well, he's obviously lonely,

I'll go along. And so we met up, and we'd just have a cup of tea, we'd look at a passage of the

Bible together, and say, what does this passage tell us about God? What does it tell us about us?

And now the third question, what are we going to do about it? And that's pretty much what we did, sort of week after week. But then as I read about Jesus, as I did that, it was clear to me that his teaching wasn't derivative of any other previous teaching.

Historically, it just seemed to come out of nowhere, and it was far, far beyond any human genius that I'd ever heard or read about.

And, you know, that's still true to this day for me. And those accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were clearly not myths, as far as I could tell.

I mean, I was a literature student, I studied myths and legends, I was very familiar with that kind of thing. And the

Gospels, as you read them, are nothing like those old myths and legends that I was having to read about as an

English literature undergraduate. And then in addition to that, existentially, as I took Jesus at his word, and I put his words into practice,

I found that remarkable things started happening in my life. I mean, supernatural things. And so those experiences acted as little confirmations that what

I was reading in the Bible was absolutely true. And so, for example, in Eastern 1992, one day,

I imagined, you know, that I imagined that God was somebody who was to be dutifully and begrudgingly obeyed.

And then within a matter of days, I suddenly knew that God was a loving father.

And he was somebody that I longed to obey, even though it was costing me hugely in terms of my, in terms of my approval ratings and my credibility with friends.

So now I didn't have a good non -supernatural explanation for that change, which came to me practically overnight.

I mean, I suppose you could try and explain it by saying, like, maybe I had a stroke or something, but then I realized that literally, literally billions of people, obviously, have had exactly that same experience.

And I personally had met hundreds of them in Oxford. And these were highly intelligent, highly, you know, these were not susceptible people, they weren't gullible people.

And you start to think, well, what if? I mean, what if this person, Jesus, actually is who he claims to be?

What if his claim, what if his claim to send his spirit to live in you and change you is actually true?

And that is the explanation for what I'm experiencing right now. So that was how it all began for me 25 years ago.

Well, let's address the elephant in the room or the elephant and castle in the room. Where exactly are you from?

Well, I was born in a place called Epsom, Surrey.

Epsom is famous for Epsom salts, which is a remedy for constipation, which I realize is not a terribly great comment.

It's not a terribly great commendation for the place. And I've spent most of my working and living life in London.

And just three months ago, I married, wonderfully, I got married to a girl from Florida.

And so I'm going to be relocating to Florida, God willing. And that's where I'm speaking to you from now.

Well, I have plenty of friends in Florida who are members of really excellent churches out there.

So let me know if you need one. And thank you very much. And where would you both be in the realm of Christian theology in your own personal convictions?

Um, and if like a denomination, I guess I would be a reformed Baptist. I attend a reformed

Baptist church. Yes. And yeah, my convictions would be similar to that of Spurgeon.

And Barry? Yeah, that would be similar for me. I mean, I helped to I was one of the core group who helped to launch a church in West London, about five years ago now.

And it is congregational in terms of its policy, baptistic, and, and reformed in terms of in terms of its theology otherwise.

So yes, that's that's where I'm at. Great. Well, obviously, being a reformed Baptist myself, I'm thrilled to hear that.

Although I enjoy fellowshipping with my brothers from many different theological backgrounds, but there's something always special about being in harmony and the doctrines of grace.

Now, Stephen, let's start with you about how you what what providential things in your life did the

Lord use to bring you to consider becoming a filmmaker and actually becoming one?

Yeah, well, I can tell you, as a kid, I never thought I would be making movies.

I was quite nerdy growing up. And so I naturally gravitated to computers.

And from a pretty early age, I learned how to read code and how to write code.

And then I... Out of high school and through post -secondary,

I was in... I was a web developer and a website designer. So it started about five years ago.

I was working for a creative agency out of Atlanta, Georgia, and I was the lead web developer.

And so we did a lot of websites for all sorts of nonprofits across the

US and across the UK. And the creative agency also did a lot of live -action videos for a lot of these same nonprofits.

And I saw some of the work we were doing, and I was... I mean, I thought it looked really interesting.

And for fun, as a kid, we would make little films, little short films. My friends and I would grab the camcorder, and we would spend a weekend making a short film and then editing it.

And we would just watch it with ourselves for fun. So I did that growing up, and I was...

I guess I was always interested in that. I just never thought I would do it professionally. But in this creative agency, we did live -action videos.

And I pretty much just asked the CEO if I could go on some of these live -action video production sets and help out in whatever way.

And so five years ago was my very first entrance into the professional video world.

And it was only within a matter of a few months, maybe a year from that point, that I actually had shifted from doing web development to doing video production and actually became the director of video production at this creative agency.

And it was during this time we did all sorts of different, really interesting video projects where I learned a lot, and I got to manage very large crews.

And it was also during this time when I was kind of learning all this and kind of getting the handle of how video production works that I met a guy named

Matt Robinson. And I'm not sure if you know Matt, but he... Matt is the founder of a media company called

Media Grazie. And Media Grazie is the company that has made the whole

Chicago Bible study series. Okay, yeah, great. Yeah, and they've done the documentary on Martin Luther Jones called

Logic on Fire. Yes, I saw that entire documentary. I picked it up at the local

Banner of Truth, which actually is their United States headquarters, about a five -minute walk from where I'm sitting right now.

Oh man, if I was there, I would be spending way too much money at that story. Yeah, so Matt actually invited me to come on set for a portion of Logic on Fire.

He had heard that at the time I was also reading a lot of Spurgeon, and I'm sure we'll talk about that later, but I was reading a lot of Spurgeon, and I was bouncing off the idea to Matt.

I was thinking, you know, maybe I should make a Spurgeon documentary. I think it could be worthwhile, and I think we can look at some things that, you know, maybe type documentaries haven't.

And so Matt invited me to come help out with Logic on Fire, and so I spent,

I think it was about 10 days with them as they were shooting in England, and that was really my first taste of documentary filmmaking, and it really was my first taste into what

I really just grew to love. And since then,

I know I've only been doing this, I guess, professionally for four or five years, but since then,

God has really opened up a lot of doors, and I've done documentary work kind of all over the place.

Just in the last couple years alone, I've been to Iraq and Jordan and Cuba and Peru, just to name a few places, and I've got to work with some really neat Christian organizations and do some short documentary work and some long -form documentary work.

Nope. Yeah. What were some of those projects that you worked on in those countries?

So in Iraq, the first project I worked on there was a project that's called

Rescue for Refugees, and we were with Americans First and a couple other organizations, and we were really seeing what these

Christian organizations were doing on the ground for these refugees that had fled ISIS, because ISIS came in and pushed them out of their villages, and so we were interviewing them and we were building a little short documentary for that.

Cuba, most recently, they've started to allow Bibles back into the country, and there's a huge Bible shortage, and so there's all these organizations raising money to get

Bibles back into Cuba, so I went with an organization that brought in, I think, 70 ,000 or 80 ,000

Bibles, and we did a little documentary on that. It's really, really awesome to see the reformation that's happening in Cuba, and Peru, I was just there a month or two ago, and it was for the

Bible Institute that is working in the Amazon. The Bible Institute will actually fly in Indigenous people that are in the

Amazon that the only way to access their little village would be by river, because there's no roads that go throughout the

Amazon, and so what would take nine days by river takes, you know, an hour or two by air, and so they actually fly these guys in from these villages into the city.

They train them and equip them to be pastors and then send them back to their villages to plant churches to preach

God's word and share the gospel, so we did a documentary on that. Great.

Well, if you could ever get me a lead for someone to interview from Cuba, well, that'd be great, because I would love to do a program on the gospel in Cuba, especially doing an interview, obviously, after the recent death of the dictator

Fidel Castro, who amazingly, although knowing how leftist many in the

United States are, it's not that amazing, but it's disturbing to see how many people are lauding him as some kind of a fallen hero, but I would love to do a program on that, so after our live program is over, and perhaps you could give me some leads, but Barry, tell us about Christianity Explored Ministries.

Yeah, so we produce resources that help people to love, live, and tell the good news about Jesus.

That's the little tagline that we have, and so we have a trilogy of series that we produce, and they're all kind of spin -offs from that trilogy, but my job is to write and develop those resources, so the three in the series are

Christianity Explored, which is an evangelistic series grounded in Mark's gospel. Life Explored is an evangelistic series grounded in the whole storyline of scripture, and Discipleship Explored is a series for Christians, which is grounded in Philippians.

So I started writing Christianity Explored material around about 1999,

I think it was, with Rico Teiss, who's a minister of evangelism at All Souls Church, Langham Place in London, which is the church that I was attending at the time, and many of your listeners will know is the church where Dr.

John Stott was rector for many years. Yeah, I had the privilege to meet him probably back in the early 1990s.

I met John Stott when he came out to Long Island, New York, where I live, and preached at a gathering of evangelical

Episcopalians. Ah, yeah, wonderful, and such a joy.

The thing about Uncle John was that, you know, you'd walk into a room, he'd walk in, and all he'd want to do is talk to you about you rather than about himself.

He was the most remarkably humble man, and so anyway, he was one of the catalysts, actually, for creating

Christianity Explored, and that was first published in 2001. We're now into our third edition of that, so it's sort of ongoing work, but after Christianity Explored, we produced

Discipleship Explored, and then most recently, in September this year, just this

September 1st just passed, we released Life Explored, which is something I wrote with Nate Morgan -Locke, my good friend and also best man.

And alongside these, we've worked on editions for low literacy groups, and teenagers, and kids, and we've created online editions, and also we've created editions for folks to be used in prisons.

So currently, I think the stats are that our series are being run in 101 countries at the last count.

They've been translated into about 50 different languages, and so far, this is something which we're hugely giving thanks to God for right now.

This whole project of getting the Gospel into prisons, together with Prisoners Fellowship International, has just absolutely snowballed, and so far, 74 ,000 prisoners have been through a version of Christianity Explored, which we've created for that context.

The aim is to invite a million prisoners by 2020, and the projection, God willing, is that 450 ,000 prisoners will come, so we would really value your prayers for that.

A very rough estimate is that around 400 ,000 people per year, worldwide, are doing

Christianity Explored, and we estimate that about 1 .5 million people have done

Christianity Explored since publication, so the Lord has been immensely kind. He's always kind, but in terms of the blessing that we've seen flow through that, it's been remarkable.

And really, what we say is, we work very hard on these resources, but ultimately, we're under no illusions.

We're convinced that, and this is where it begins to connect with Martin Luther and his life in ministry, we're absolutely convinced that the power is not in the methodology, the power is not in the production values, although we work very hard to make our stuff very high quality, we're absolutely convinced that the power is in God's Word.

That's what changes the lives of men and women, boys and girls. Amen. So that's why our, and so that is why our, everything we do is absolutely grounded in Scripture.

Amen. And if Jonathan Edwards could hear you, he'd be smiling from ear to ear, because obviously that was his philosophy, and his sermon,

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, I think was intentionally just read with a very calm and unemotional tone of voice, because he was relying specifically on the power of the

Holy Spirit to convict sinners. And obviously, in New England, that sermon brought about a powerful revival in the 18th century.

But we're going to our first break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for our guests on this documentary they are creating, which will be released very soon, on Martin Luther, our email address 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 of the

USA. And please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter, but I doubt with a topic like this that that would be the case.

So we hope to hear from you soon with your questions for our guests after these messages, so don't go away.

We'll be right back with Stephen McCaskill and Barry Cooper. I'm Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and here's one of my favorite guests,

Todd Friel, to tell you about a conference he and I are going to. Hello, this is Todd Friel, host of Wretched Radio and Wretched TV, and occasional guest on Chris's show

Iron Criticizing Iron. I think that's what it's called.

Hoping that you can join Chris and me at the G3 Conference in Atlanta, my new hometown.

It is going to be a bang -up conference called the G3 Conference, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation with Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Votie Baucom, Conrad and Bayway, Phil Johnson, James White, and a bunch of other people.

We hope to see you there. Learn more at g3conference .com, g3conference .com.

Thanks, Todd, I think. See you at the Iron Sharpens Iron Exhibitor's booth.

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between 12 noon and 1 p .m. Eastern time, and I hope that you start listening to and calling in to a visit to the pastor's study hosted by my very dear friend of nearly 30 years,

Pastor Bill Shishko of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And today we have, for those of you who just tuned us in, our guests today are

Stephen McCaskill and Barry Cooper, and they have cooperated together to create a new documentary called

Luther, The Life and Legacy of the German Reformer, and our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com

if you have a question for Stephen and Barry. That's chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And if you could,

Barry, how did you and Stephen meet? That's a good question.

Stephen might have an interesting side of the story. I think, as I remember it,

I think the connection was made through Aaron Armstrong, who wrote the

Luther documentary. Yeah. So he reviewed a book of mine called

Can I Really Trust the Bible, and then online, and then I think he suggested my name to Stephen.

Stephen got in touch with me via Facebook, and I watched Stephen's other work, and I was immediately interested, and partly because I love documentaries, but also partly because I love

Christian biography. So my all -time favorite book outside the Bible would probably be

Arnold Gallimore's two volumes set on George Whitefield. I absolutely adore those books.

Yeah, that's a classic. Oh, I absolutely love it. And so to be able to present a

Christian documentary like this, I think it's been a secret dream of mine for some time. And just out of curiosity,

I forgot to mention this earlier. Perhaps, Stephen, you would know more about this.

As far as the documentary on Martin Lloyd -Jones, I was looking forward to hearing someone that I thought was going to be a part of that documentary, just because I knew that he used to pastor sandfields in Port Talbot, Wales after Martin Lloyd -Jones had left the pastorate there.

Peter Jeffrey, I don't know if you're familiar with him. Peter Jeffrey is a globally known evangelical preacher, conference speaker, and author.

He's probably written close to 50 books, maybe more than that. And he was one of the successors of Dr.

Martin Lloyd -Jones at Sandfields. Do you have any idea why he was not a part of that documentary? No, I wouldn't know the answer to that.

The stint I was a part of was right before we went up to Wales. So I don't know if that would have been addressed there.

But that would be a question for Matt Robinson. Have you had Matt on the show? No, but I'd love to.

Yeah, he'd be good. I think right now they're filming the new

Behold Your God series. So he's got a lot going on, a lot of exciting stuff. Okay. Well, before we even go into the documentary on Martin Luther, why is it that for your first documentary, you chose the life and legacy of Charles Haddon Spurgeon in your documentary

Through the Eyes of Spurgeon? Yeah, well, from a very early point in my

Christian life, I remember stumbling upon this little book that I was going to just kind of talk to the side, but I decided

I'd read it. A little book Charles Spurgeon wrote called All of Grace. And since then,

I've probably read the book 50 times, and the original copy I have has been marked up.

Almost every page has markings on it. But it was in that book that I was reminded of the gospel of Jesus in ways

I had never seen or thought before. Spurgeon has a real gift with words. He can pack so much gospel truth in so few amounts of words.

And anyway, so I started with All of Grace, and then I started to read other books of his, and I just couldn't stop reading.

And there were so many little sentences and snippets that I felt like could be shared online and actually would encourage someone, you know, maybe just for the moment they needed a bit of encouragement.

And so, I actually started a Spurgeon quote Facebook page and website, and that kind of was growing, and so it kind of motivated me to keep reading more of Spurgeon.

I started reading his sermons, and then I started reading his autobiography.

I read some biographies, Dialing Words I started with, which is a great place to start if you want to start reading a

Spurgeon biography, but then I read his autobiographies, and it was in these biographies and autobiographies that I got to see more of just this...more

than just a preacher and pastor, but this man who was a very good husband and father, and he's just a very well -rounded man, a man that loved

God, and really, every word that you read of his points you to Christ.

And so, I thought this could be... Anyway, at first I looked at what documentaries were out there, and there was one really good documentary out there, and it was kind of your talkie drama type documentary, which a lot of documentaries are like.

I thought there were some elements that that one didn't touch on, because it's kind of on the shorter side that we could look at in a new documentary.

And so, I made a few phone calls to some friends and got their thoughts, and then we just kind of built up this plan, and then we decided to launch a

Kickstarter, and if you're not familiar with Kickstarter, Kickstarter is just this platform, this crowdfunding platform where you can get people from all over the world to fund a project.

And so, we put through the eyes of Spurgeon on Kickstarter, and it was funded, and we got funding from all over the world, and people wanted to see this documentary.

And so, yeah, we set out to make it, and a lot of the team that helped to make that documentary, because our budget was so low, just dedicated their time for the project, and we did it with the intention of releasing it for free all along, too.

And so, you can actually view the whole thing for free online. And Barry, you must live fairly close to where the

Prince of Preachers pastored. You must live somewhere near Elephant and Castle, where the

Metropolitan Tabernacle is? Yeah, it's true. At least I used to.

I'm relatively near South London, and yeah, I had the privilege of going to both of those churches visiting during my time in London.

So, yes. Yes, I understand Peter Masters is still the pastor there, and has been carrying on the legacy of Spurgeon at that historic place.

By the way, do you two have any plans, I'm hoping you do, to develop the documentary through the voice of Chris Arnzen, The Life and Legacy of the

Golden Voice that transformed Christian radio? How about that? Brother, I think it's too soon to assess your legacy.

I think you've got to be dead 500 years before you can do it. Yeah, well,

I just want you to do it early enough so, you know, no bad things happen since now.

But, well, this new project, I'm very excited about this.

It's interesting that Martin Luther is, you know, in your average person's mind, their thinking immediately goes to Lutheranism, and that may have a good reaction or a bad reaction from your average person that you mentioned the term or the name

Martin Luther to. Of course, many people in ignorance will think that you're talking about Martin Luther King Jr.,

and I have that happen a lot. But as far as the great reformer, you have people who immediately just connect him with Lutheranism.

And, in fact, I even know of a Lutheran pastor who is now with the

Lord. He passed away a number of years ago, but he actually admitted he didn't think that if Martin Luther were alive today that he would be

Lutheran. He was lamenting about some of the sad things that were disturbing him within Lutheranism in general.

And, of course, you have all different kinds of Lutherans today, ranging from biblically sound to ultra -liberal.

But why did you folks choose Martin Luther as the subject of this documentary?

And on the other side of the coin of what I just mentioned, for those who really cherish and love their

Reformation heritage, the doctrines of grace, which stand in stark contrast to the works righteousness of Rome and all other religions that deny or are outside of the gospel of free and sovereign grace, it's interesting how

Martin Luther is upheld as a hero, whether you're a Baptist, whether you're a Presbyterian, whether you're a

Congregationalist, whether you are a Bible -believing Methodist, or whatever background you're from, very often

Luther is upheld as a great hero of the faith, even if you're not a Lutheran. But if you could tell us why you chose this figure from history, and maybe we'll start with Stephen this time.

Yeah, from the very first moment we completed and released this virgin documentary, there was people messaging us and sending emails to me asking who is going to be the subject of the next documentary.

We released this virgin documentary at the end of 2014, and I kind of just pushed aside thinking of making another documentary in a way.

I just wanted to give myself time to kind of recuperate, because it took a toll on me and on my family.

There's a lot of work that goes into a documentary, and when you're not getting paid anything for it, it means you do your day job during the day, and then at night you work on the documentary.

And so, of course, that takes a toll on the family. But we had people asking, who are we going to do next?

It was in July of 2015, I guess July of last year, we started to talk about potentially doing another documentary, this time with proper funding, where we don't have to sacrifice our families to do a documentary, because that, of course, wouldn't be honored to the

Lord. So we thought, with the timing of the 500th anniversary, that's right around the corner, and that is, of course, next year,

October 31st next year, we thought it was the perfect time to look at the life of Martin Luther.

And while there is a couple of documentaries out there, and there's some really good ones. I especially like the 1953 docudrama version of Luther, and it's a bit older, but if you're going to watch one that's already out there, that's the one to watch.

But there are some things about those documentaries that we thought, if we were to make a documentary, we would cover some things that those documentaries didn't.

Some of the more controversial things, some of the things that people kind of have in the back of their head when they think of Martin Luther that they don't address them.

So we wanted to cover some of those things, and we wanted to look at the legacy in which he left the church.

And so we thought, yeah, let's do Luther, and so we just started to explore that, and God provided some connections to some of the top scholars on Luther in the world, and they helped us as we kind of worked through the process.

And yeah, and here we are. Well, you can't leave me in suspense. You got to give me some of those things that you wouldn't likely hear or see in other documentaries about Luther, some of the things that you added that are more controversial or perhaps unknown.

Well, yeah, so there's, I mean, the two things that come to mind right away are the

Peasants' War, and more popular than that, or more infamous than that, of course,

Luther and the Jews. And so we asked some of the top scholars those questions, and I really do believe when people watch documentaries, they'll be satisfied with the answers, and they'll be able to better explain

Luther. But yeah, Luther and the Jews is probably the big one. As soon as people found out we were making this documentary on Martin Luther, my inbox was flooded with emails and I was getting texts and Facebook messages saying, if you don't talk about Luther and the

Jews and his writings against the Jews, then, you know, it's not going to be worth it. And like some really harsh things came in.

So we had all along, from the very beginning, thought, okay, we are going to address this. Yeah, there are a number of Christians, especially the

Dispensationalists, and specifically Messianic Jews, who are upset that we who cherish our

Reformation heritage laud Luther as one of our heroes. They would say that he, they would very often caricature him as a fire -breathing anti -Semite, and that we don't want to hear any explanation for it.

The man, if the man hated the Jewish people, we want nothing to do with him and neither should you.

How do you respond to that kind of a reaction that is actually fairly common in this day and age?

And there was even a movie that came out maybe a year or two ago, and I can't remember the name of it, but it was a movie that was supposed to be painting the

Reformers in a light. I think it was really characterizing them all as anti -Semites, but if you could address that.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's an incredibly loaded topic, and I can't answer it nearly as good as it is answered in the documentary, but I'll mention a few things.

The first thing is that anti -Jewish sentiment was deeply embedded into the culture that Luther was born into, and so we have to understand that Luther lived in a very different world.

Medieval Germany was very different than Western civilization as we know now, so anti -Jewish sentiment was common.

Jews were seen as second -class citizens, and they didn't have the same rights as everyone else did. The second thing is that in the early years,

Luther actually had some very favorable things to say about the Jews. That's what I heard, yeah. Yeah, unlike everyone else.

No one else was saying this. This was very counter what everyone else was. He actually wrote a book that talked about this and how

Jesus Christ was born a Jew, and this was a big deal, and so he actually advocated as well that Jews should be able to own their own land, and they should be able to own their own farms and houses, and that was very counter what everyone else was thinking.

And then Luther, this is kind of where the turn happens, Luther thought that because of what was happening during the

Reformation with God's Word being made available to the public, he was living really with end -time thinking in mind, and he thought this was when

Christ was going to return, and he thought that because God's Word is now available and people can read it for themselves and there's power in God's Word, he thought there was going to be this mass conversion of Jews.

And when this set out to happen, he became very angry. And then this is when he wrote his book,

Of the Jews and Their Lives, and that's when all of the terrible things that we've read of Luther and the

Jews generally comes from that book. And the last thing I'll just mention is that no one should try to defend what

Luther said and wrote, because it's just plain wrong. In that area, in that area.

For sure. And at the same time though, it's important to understand the context in which he said these things, because when we think of when we, well first of all, anti -Semitism wasn't a thing back then.

That came around, you know, World War II. There was just no understanding of that.

It's important, I think, to note that his issue with the Jews was not one of race, like people often probably think.

It was one of, it was a theological issue, and it's because they weren't turning to Christ.

He saw the Jews very much like he saw the Roman Catholics, as the false church, as ones that were outside of the true church.

So yeah, those are just a few things. But in the documentary, there's a section that is dedicated to this, that addresses this, in more detail than I can.

Yeah, and unfortunately, Hitler and the Nazis made use of some of those negative and horrible things that Luther had said.

But there is a difference between an ethnic hatred of a people and a misuse of righteous indignation toward a false theology that can turn into a hatred.

And one of the difference that is clearly seen is that Luther wanted the

Jews to come to Christ. The Nazis were searching the genealogies of people who were

Christian, to see if they had Jewish blood, and would send them off to the camps, no matter what their faith was.

So this was all about ethnicity and race and blood with the Nazis, and had nothing to do with faith.

And the Nazis, of course, were not Christian by any stretch of the imagination, even though many of them were nominal

Lutherans and Catholics. Hitler hated

Christianity, looked at it as just another branch of Judaism, and looked at it as a weak religion, unlike the pagan idolatry and mythology of the the

Norse religions that many of these Nazis embraced. But well, we cannot throw out the vital contributions that Luther made, even though he was a sinner, like we all are, and it'd be a tragic miscarriage of justice if we just entirely buried beneath a ton of rubble the wonderful contributions this man of faith left for the church for these last 500 years.

So I think that although our Messianic brethren and others have a very truthful and rightly felt anger and even sadness toward this unfortunate chapter in Luther's life, just like none of us should be characterized only for our sin and remembered only for our sin, especially when we may have contributed great things to the

Christian faith, Martin Luther should be no different. He should be remembered and valued when it is appropriate.

But we have to go to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, and we do have a couple of questions here for people who are waiting to ask you about Martin Luther and this documentary, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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

USA. Don't go away, we'll be right back after these messages with Stephen McCaskill and Barry Cooper.

Chris Arnzen here, and I can't wait to head down to Atlanta, Georgia, and here's my friend Dr. James White to tell you why.

Hi, I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. I hope you join me at the G3 conference hosted by Pastor Josh Bice and Praise Mill Baptist Church at the

Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta, January 19th through the 21st in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation. I'll be joined by Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Bodie Balcombe, Conrad M.

Bayway, Phil Johnson, Rosaria Butterfield, Todd Friel, and a host of other speakers who are dedicated to the pillars of what

G3 stands for, gospel, grace, and glory. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

That's g3conference .com. Thanks, James. Make sure you greet me at the

Iron Sharpens Iron exhibit booth while you're there. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am

I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,

I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, pastor of Providence Baptist Church. We are a

Reformed Baptist Church, and we hold to the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. We are in Norfolk, Massachusetts.

We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do than how men view these things.

That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the Apostle's priority, it must not be ours either.

We believe, by God's grace, that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.

If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.

You can call us at 508 -528 -5750, that's 508 -528 -5750, or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our

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that's providencebaptistchurchma .org, or even on sermonaudio .com. Providence Baptist Church is delighted to sponsor

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to a visit to the pastor's study every

Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am

.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the pastor's study by calling in with your questions.

Our time will be lively, useful, sometimes controversial, but never dull. Join us this

Saturday at 12 noon for a visit to the pastor's study, because everyone needs a pastor.

And our guests today here on Iron Sharpens Iron are Stephen McCaskill, Canadian filmmaker and director of the documentary

Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, and Barry Cooper, author, teacher, presenter, and director of product development at Christianity Explored Ministries.

They're discussing their new documentary, Luther, the Life and Legacy of the

German Reformer. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And we do have a listener all the way in Slovenia listening.

We have Joe in Slovenia, and I have to enlarge Joe's email because the font is microscopic.

So while I am enlarging this, let me give you our email address again. It's chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Okay, Joe in Slovenia writes, I've always been intrigued by what seems to me to be

Martin Luther's naivete in regard to his apparent belief that the

Roman Catholic Church would be open to objectively discussing his reformation ideas and issues contained in the 95 theses and subsequent defenses of his doctrine.

He knew about the martyrdom of Jan Hus and others before him for similar for similar stances.

Please ask your guests to discuss their opinion about why Martin Luther thought that Rome would change its theology and practice if he could just get them to listen to his ideas.

Why did he think he could persuade them to embrace reformation? Very interesting. Do you have any ideas on that,

Stephen and Barry? It's a really good question. I mean, my first thought hearing that question from Joe is that there's a sense in which

Luther couldn't do anything else. I mean, he, you know, this is a quote that's often it's questionable whether Luther actually said it, but famously, there's that quote attributed to Luther where he says,

Here I stand, I can do no other. And I think that's germane to the question. It's not as if,

I'm not sure Luther was absolutely convinced that the Catholic, the Roman Catholic Church would change its trajectory.

But the fact was, his conscience compelled him to put himself in a situation which he knew was incredibly dangerous to him physically.

I mean, he knew he was in danger of being burned to the stake, as well as, of course, being excommunicated.

And so, but his reading of Scripture, particularly that understanding of Romans, meant that he could do no other.

His conscience bound him to speak up and to say, Look, you know, what

I see in the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in this area of selling indulgences, is profoundly immoral.

And therefore, I have to speak up against it, even if it costs me my livelihood.

And it must have been self -evident to him, but that is a very real danger.

But I think he could do no other, I think is the bottom line on that. I don't know if Stephen has any other thoughts, but that's just,

I've got to say off the bat, I'm not a Luther scholar, despite my theological degree.

I leave that to men like Carl Truman, but certainly would lead me to believe that that's very much where he was coming from.

Stephen, do you have any thoughts? No, I think Barry really nailed it, because I do think, yeah,

I mean, there was, in Luther's time, there was the true Church and the false

Church. And so for Luther to say, I'm not a part of, um,

I mean, like the Roman Catholics, it was a true

Church. And so Luther, for him to actually say, I'm not a part of the

Roman Catholics, he had to ask himself the question, am

I alone? Why? I forget which interview this came out in. I think it may have been Dr. Robert Godfrey, but Godfrey was saying that Luther had to ask himself this question, am

I alone? Why? Because he had to wrestle with himself, and you've got to imagine, I mean, he must have had restless nights wrestling with this question, am

I alone? Why? Where is he the only one that actually is kind of getting it?

And he had to say, okay, no, they're the false

Church, and the true Church is everyone that adheres to God's Word here.

And so he had to wrestle with that question, and I think all the way up until the

Diet of Worms, which was, I mean, it's less than, it's about four years from when he posted the 95

Theses, and the Diet of Worms is, of course, when he is in front of the emperors and princes and everyone at power, um, and he would defend, or he was supposed to be able to defend his 95

Theses, and really they just called him to recant. I think all the way up until that point, he actually thought it, um, that maybe there was the chance that they would listen, and that he would be able to explain things to them, because he had to ask himself that question, am

I alone? Why? And I think, um, yeah. I mean, I'm trying to put myself in Luther's shoes, and I couldn't,

I couldn't imagine going, um, just the medieval church realm back then with, you're either in or you're out.

And, uh, we don't have that kind of thing said, because we have all these sorts of denominations, and we're kind of scattered.

Of course, you know, we have our core, our closed -hand beliefs, but then we have a lot of things that we hold open -handedly. They didn't have that back then.

Um, and we, you know, I can call a Presbyterian my brother in Christ, and we're a part of the true church.

But back then, they didn't have that. So, it's just, it's very different, but, um, yeah, that's all

I would add. Now, I'm assuming that when you're referring to the Roman Catholic Church as the one true church, you're talking about how it was viewed, because obviously, there were faithful Christians outside of that organization which had become apostate, and not across the board.

There were people who, uh, perhaps privately held or even publicly held in certain degrees to, uh, biblical truth and even the gospel.

But once the Council of Trent came, obviously, they really officially declared themselves to have another gospel than the one you and I would believe to be biblical.

Um, but... That's correct. And, you know, it's worth mentioning too, that even though we would call the

Roman Catholics the false church, we can't say that everyone in a part of Roman Catholicism is unsaved, because I'm sure there are

Bible -believing Christians within the Roman... Yes, I mean, Luther was an

Augustinian monk, and he didn't want to start a new religion. He, you know, had no...

He had to flee for his life from the Church of Rome. And obviously, Jan Hus, or John Hus, as he's also known, he actually gave his life.

He was martyred because of his beliefs, but he probably would have described himself as a Catholic, no doubt, all the way to his last breath.

And I'm also under the understanding that when Luther first nailed the 95

Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, that this was just a very common thing that the scholars and intellectuals were doing to spark in -house debates, that Martin Luther did not likely have any clue about the firestorm that would develop from his posting of these theses.

Do you get that same sense? Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, Luther wrote the 95

Theses in Latin, and the common person could not read Latin. But what happened was, and that's exactly right, it was just like your church bulletin board.

He was just kind of posting some topics for discussion. If anything, he just wanted to start this kind of moral

Reformation. He wasn't thinking of this mass -scale Protestant Reformation. But yeah, he was just posting some 95 topics for discussion, and it was in Latin.

What happened was, some of Luther's students actually got a hold of it, and it was right around the same time

Gutenberg invented the printing press, and it started to become a more and more common piece of technology that was available.

A couple of his students saw the 95 Theses, and there is a few kind of more jarring moments in the 95

Theses. A lot of them are quite kind of ordinary, but he talks about fun things when he's dealing with money, and whenever you deal with money, the sign of intelligence is that money kind of grabs people's attention.

And so, his students grabbed his 95 Theses, and they translated it from Latin to German, and then with the help of the printing press, started printing out copies of the 95

Theses in German, and then that kind of spread throughout the land, and some of the more controversial things he mentions in the 95

Theses really sparked people's interest and got people kind of all rattled up, and then it all kind of broke loose.

Thank you very much. Joe in Slovenia keeps spreading the word about Iron Sharpens Iron in that country, and we do have

Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker in Greensboro, North Carolina.

How do the recent changes in Canadian government, which are hostile to the clear preaching of the gospel and calling biblical sin what it is with respect to same -gender wedding, affecting the distribution of Christian history movies in printed media?

Uh, sorry, so the question is for me, because I'm a Canadian, and the question is about how...

I mean, is the government of Canada making it difficult for you to distribute this

Christian history videos? As far as the distribution of what

I do, I haven't had any issues, but I know um, as our country becomes more and more liberal, and these kind of transgender and LGBT issues become more and more prioritized over religious freedom, it makes things difficult for Christian ministries.

There's, I mean, if you were just to Google Canadian Christian ministry LGBT, you'll see several articles about the fights that these

Christian ministries have. Um, so yeah, and obviously now we have a liberal government, so we have less protection than we did beforehand.

But as far as what I'm doing, I haven't run into any issues, and I should just make note as well, all of the distribution

I do is out of the U .S., because if I were to ship everything out of Canada, it would just be a fortune, and most of the people that would be interested in purchasing the documentary would be in the

U .S. anyway, so it should be easier to ship everything out of the U .S. And Pastor VanderWorker has a follow -up question.

Ask Stephen McCaskill if he has a family member in the jewelry business.

Mr. Ian McCaskill is a friend of mine. Do you know of any relation named Ian McCaskill?

I, no, I don't. Um, I can't, yeah. Well, uh, sorry about that, uh,

Pastor VanderWorker. I guess that's, uh, likely not a relation, but thank you very much for your question today.

And, um, let's see, we have, uh,

Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who has a question that I was going to ask you. What scholars or contributors did you have to be a part of this documentary on Martin Luther?

Okay, um, yeah, uh, so we have, we had a, we had a few scholars that kind of oversaw the script writing process.

Um, we actually, so beforehand, in pre -production, before we even filmed anything, we wrote out an entire script with the story arc and everything, um, including the interview questions where they'd be scattered throughout the documentary, and then who we would hope to ask the interview questions to.

Um, and so as we wrote the script, we had, um, Dr. Carl Truman of the Westminster, um, yeah, so we had

Dr. Truman on, uh, he oversaw parts of the script. We would balance any questions that we had off of him.

Actually, very early on, we had a call with to talk about Lutheran abuse, because that was one of the things we wanted to discuss, and we wanted to get the thoughts on that very early on.

Um, and then we had some folks at Ligonier Ministries that also gave their input into the script and helped us craft it a bit.

Was it Stephen Nichols? Was he one of them? Uh, yeah, Stephen Nichols was one of them, and Stephen Nichols was one of the guys we interviewed as well.

Um, Archie Sproul, we interviewed, Carl Truman, we interviewed, Robert Godfrey, um,

Steve Lawson, and we interviewed probably the top Lutheran scholar in the world on Luther, a guy named

Robert Kolb. Um, Dr. Truman has done a lot of work with Dr. Kolb, and they've, actually,

I think are working on, or maybe it's finished now, but releasing a book together. Um, but, um, yeah, those are the six key interviews that we got for, um, for this documentary.

Great, and I've interviewed all of those folks, except for the last one you mentioned, and I would like to get him on the program, uh, at some point in the future.

Uh, let's see, we have BB in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know if you know of anyone who has come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ through the

Charles Spurgeon documentary, Through the Eyes of Spurgeon. Yeah, you know, that's, that's one of the really neat lessons.

I wasn't expecting when I, when I put that documentary together. Um, we, we hoped and prayed, and we still do, that, um,

God would use us for His glory, and that people would come to know Him. Um, and I, for, when it was released for probably the first year, from the release date for probably the first year, year and a half, every week in my, uh, email inbox,

I probably would receive between, I don't know, three to twelve emails, and they would all be different emails, either just, you know, mentioning how it was encouraging to them, and it opened their eyes to new things, or that it actually, um, in a few cases, there were some very, kind of, um, dark things happening in some people's lives, and they would, they happened to stumble upon the

Spurgeon documentary online, because, you know, it's available on YouTube, and it's available on the website, all for free, and they happened to stumble upon it, and then they watched the whole thing, and, um,

God actually used that to bring them back, and so it's, it's, it's really encouraging in that way, and, um, yeah, it was one thing that we never really thought would happen with, with the documentary.

With Luther, um, I'll just mention this, uh, Luther online Spurgeon will, will be sold, and the hope in doing that is that we'll be able to, well, retrieve our costs, and then be able to make more documentaries, because we really want to be able to make more of these, and if we keep releasing them for free, um, there's just, unless it's some kind of ministry model, and there's people funding it, and we don't have that right now, um, there's just, there's no way to keep it going, and so we'll, we'll be selling it, and, uh, and then hopefully we'll be able to make more and more documentaries.

Great. Well, thank you, B .B. and Cumberland County. Please keep listening to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. One of the things that makes

Luther a controversial figure is because, uh, very often

Roman Catholics, uh, want to either claim him as one of their own, or they want to legitimize some of their aberrant beliefs and practice, practices, because they will point to the fact that, uh,

Luther held to them, like they will bring up about Luther's Marian devotion and things like that when you have a debate or discussion between Roman Catholics and evangelicals, but isn't it the fact that since, number one,

Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk who was one of the, uh, you know, initial figures from history that sparked the

Reformation, so he had, uh, very few, uh, stepping stones beneath him, uh, that were not already, you know,

Catholics from the, the, his present or the past before him, and therefore his journey involved a lot of gradual shedding of aberrant teachings, some of which he didn't shed until much later in his life.

Isn't that one of the reasons why people are scratching their heads about Luther holding on to certain things that are uniquely

Roman Catholic even after the Reformation? Hello?

Hey, uh, Bill, do you want to take it, or? Well, I think let's both chip in on this one.

Um, it seems to me that that is very much the way human nature works, isn't it?

I think that we do, when you, when I think about my own conversion to Christ, um, there is a certain amount of overlap, um, regrettably.

Um, in my case, I can think of, though there was clearly a radical change, thinking back to my own sort of testimony of becoming a

Christian, yet there are, um, certainly I, I can see that it's not as if I suddenly became a completely different person in, uh,

Easter 1992. There was some overlap, there was some, as it were, certain things which were, you know, a hangover from my former life, and I think that there's a sense in which this is one of the reasons why

I love Martin Luther so much, is that, you know, he is a profoundly human figure, he's very warm, you see that, you see the cruelties, you see that, um, the fact that there were certain sort of inconsistencies in his, in his thoughts, things that aren't quite, you know, fully joined up, and, um, so he can be frustrating, but also, um, just glorious in equal measure.

So I would just say there's a sense in which it would be pretty strange if historically we, you know,

Luther suddenly, you know, had sort of abandoned every single aspect of Roman Catholic thought, you know, overnight.

There is definitely a sense in which it was a journey for him, and I think that's actually right. And we are going to our final break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Stephen McCaskill or Barry Cooper on the documentary, the new documentary that is expected soon on Martin Luther, The Life and Legacy of the

German Reformer, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com,

and before go to the break, I just couldn't resist playing for you a bit of my own personal tribute to Martin Luther that I hope you enjoy.

During the 16th century, the Church of Rome reached its height of power as well as its depths of debauchery, greed, and corruption.

One of the most vile and greedy puppets of the papal throne was a member of the

Dominican Holy Order named Johann Tetzel. Tetzel sold indulgences to the spiritually ignorant and enslaved laity, warning them that this was a necessary means to purchase the souls of their deceased loved ones out from the torments of purgatory.

A limerick became popular in that day as it went when a coin in Tetzel's kaffa rings a soul from purgatory springs.

This abuse of papal power through pilfering the poor, pious, and peasant people did not go unnoticed by a young German Augustinian monk who was once one of Rome's most faithful and loyal subjects.

Outraged by the level of greed and wickedness that the church sank to, this monk nailed his protest to the practice of indulgence selling to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, hoping to spark a debate with the intelligentsia of Rome.

The hammer blows as these 95 feces were nailed to the church door were like cannon fire heard around the world and ignited the blaze of a holy inferno that is still burning brightly today.

This holy inferno is the Protestant Reformation. That Augustinian monk who ignited it was me.

Hello, I'm Martin Luther and this is my story. Oh yeah,

I'm the great reformer, reforming the churches that I'm known for.

I made my protest before Zwingli and all of the rest, nailed it up to the

Wittenberg door. Oh yeah,

I'm the great reformer, reforming the church was my goal.

But the Pope threw me out like some bad sauerkraut, flushed me right down his

Vatican pole. I would not indulge that dirtbag

Johann Tetzel, so they threatened to twist my spine up just like a pretzel.

Yeah, I'm the great reformer. The Pope put a price on my head, but while out on the run,

I married a nun. Sure beats living with guys who bake bread.

That's very bold guys there in robes baking bread. My lady, sweet Katie, gave up her old habit.

She once dressed like a penguin, now multiplies like a rabbit.

Yeah, I'm the great reformer. I turned

Tetzel's church upside down. Tell those greaseballs that Trent, centuries after they came and went,

I'll be dead, but that won't keep me down. They wanted to slice me and dice me and feed me to the papal palace puppy dogs, but I'll bet you that in the 21st century that I'm...

I am

Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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Call Lindbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402 or visit lindbrookbaptist .org.

That's lindbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guests today for the full two hours are and will continue to be

Stephen McCaskill, Canadian filmmaker and director of the documentary Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, and Barry Cooper, author, teacher, presenter, and director of product development at Christianity Explored Ministries.

We're discussing Luther, the life and legacy of the German reformer, and our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

chrisarnzen at gmail .com. We do have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know if that last

Lutheran scholar you mentioned is actually a Lutheran and if he is from the

Missouri Synod denomination. Yes, he's a

Lutheran and yes, he's from the Missouri Synod. He used to be a professor there at whatever seminary is over there.

Concordia? Concordia, yes, Concordia. He used to be a professor of systematic theology at Concordia.

Great. Well, thank you, Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Keep listening to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

And what have you two learned about Martin Luther that you did not know before, that basically has transformed the position he holds within your heart and mind?

Either one of you? Yeah, I'm thinking right now.

Just to jump in, I would say, I think it's something I already knew a bit from myself.

I mean, I did some studies at seminary, but one of the things which really strikes me about Luther as a theologian is his sense of humor.

Oh, yeah. Actually, I'm an ex -comedian, so I'm an ex -comedian. I mean, when I started out in university, I was doing stand -up comedy and sketch comedy and then trained as an actor, and so I'm very drawn to his sense of humor, which is sadly not always a feature of Christian believers and is certainly not something that you associate with theologians generally.

Well, that kind of gives me a sigh of relief after playing my Martin Luther trivia. But this is the thing with him.

He's so puckish and so provocative. You know, he's always making fun of his wife and his friends and himself, and he's goading and insulting his opponents, and that's no small thing when you consider he's in danger of being burned at the stake.

Now, undoubtedly, it's true that he could certainly go far with the insults.

I mean, this is the man who said to the Pope, all you say is sealed with the devil's own dung. You know, this is pretty fierce stuff, and he spends a lot of time talking about dung and bodily functions, and he could be a scoundrel.

Yeah, there's a famous woodcut of him that I don't even know if I should describe it.

It has to do with flames, and I won't say anything more. Yeah. But here's the thing.

I think both as a theologian and as a comedian, one of the common denominators there is that to be good at those things, you need to be fearless with your audience.

You have to be able to say what you're convinced is true, even when the culture does not want you to say it.

And the thing with Luther is he feared God quite rightly, but whatever else he said about Luther, he clearly didn't fear men.

You know, he was completely fearless in that sense. And living as we do at a time when thoughts and language are being so brutally policed,

I just love that about him. I really love that about Luther. And then, of course, related to that, that, you know, there is something very human about Luther.

There are flaws, there's priorities, he says things he shouldn't really say, especially in polite company. But he loved life.

He was ebullient. He was colorful. He was funny. He knew life was both a comedy and a tragedy.

I mean, he smuggled his soon -to -be wife out of a nunnery by having her hide among a load of fish barrels.

I mean, it's a remarkable, it's a remarkable man, a remarkable life. And I think that, actually,

I think it is cultural. He says at the end of one of his books, he said, If I had to spend time on a desert island with either

Calvin or Luther, much as I admire the genius of both men, it would have to be

Luther. I would concur with my learned friend on that particular question.

Yeah, one of the reasons I felt at ease reading that musical parody of Luther is I really believed that if he was alive that he would completely applaud it and laugh.

I didn't think that I was mocking him in any way by doing that. And we have, let's see, oh, we have

RJ in White Plains, New York, who wants to know, I have heard

Roman Catholics mock Luther by saying that he was a drunkard. Now, I know that he enjoyed his beer, as many people throughout the centuries, especially in Germany, did and still do.

But is he really known for have abused that drink? Well, of course, the same was true of the

Lord Jesus, and people mocked him as a drunkard. Right, and a wine -bearer, right? Yeah, exactly, because he was at parties and he was presumably drinking wine, especially given the first miracle credited to him in the

Gospels. So I think that, in some senses, is high praise for Luther in a sense of, you know, woe to you when all men speak well of you.

I can't speak to how much, you know, beer he was drinking. I've no idea what his annual consumption was.

You know, it's certainly true that, I mean, he told that wonderful story, didn't he, when someone asked him how the

Reformation happened, he said, well, you know, it just happened while I was out drinking beer with my friends. Even that story in itself was not intended to glorify beer.

It was intended to glorify the power of the Word when it's unleashed. So, you know, scripture's like a lion, as Spurgeon said, you don't need to defend something that powerful, you just unleash it and it will defend itself.

And so, you know, with that in mind, the story of the Reformation, of course, and the story of Luther, it really isn't so much a story about how great

Luther is, it's a story about how great God's Word is. You know, once it's translated into the common tongue, once it's unleashed in pulpits, once it's unleashed in the fields, and it's unleashed in people's homes, it will change the world.

And so, you know, that's my big takeaway from all of this, ultimately, is that I want to say to people, you know, let that breed confidence in the power of God's Word.

You know, you read Psalm 51, you read 2 Corinthians 4, what does it tell us? It tells us that the power unleashed by God's Word at the moment of creation is the same power unleashed by God's Word when it's heard today.

You know, it creates life where there is nothing, not even empty space. It resurrects the dead. There's no earthly power able to contain or control or suppress it.

So I would say to people, people who might be listening today, you know, do everything you can to constantly bring yourself under the sound of it, because if you will hear it, it will bring about a

Reformation in you. Amen. And as far as alcohol is concerned,

I do not take lightly the sin of drunkenness, because that was one of my, unfortunately, one of my favorite sins that probably came close to killing me.

And I thank God for delivering me from that. But having said that, the teetotaling movement among Christians, the prohibitionists and so on, that many

Christians are absolutely shocked to know that that did really not arrive on the scene until the 19th century.

Most Christians throughout the centuries viewed the moderate, responsible consumption of alcohol as being completely appropriate, although drunkenness is clearly a damnable sin, and people should never dabble with drunkenness at all.

It's wicked. But moderate consumption of alcohol was really viewed as being completely acceptable throughout the centuries.

Wouldn't you men agree with that? Hello? I think that's wrong.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think, you know, to throw that particular piece of mud at Luther is what we might call an ad hominem attack.

It doesn't really. It's what you do when you're refusing to deal with these incredibly powerful arguments that he was advancing from Scripture.

Right, and the Church of Rome has never been known as a teetotaling denomination.

Oh, right, right, and I think you're actually right. The key issue is we have to be, and I think

I've heard you talk about this on previous shows, Chris, I think the key thing is, you know, we obviously have to respect all the brethren.

That means that where we know that people have a particular vulnerability in a certain area, then that is, we have to be careful not to hurt them by the free exercise of our freedom in Christ, and I think that's absolutely right.

That's absolutely crucial. Well, I'd like both of you, perhaps we could start with Stephen this time, to tell our listeners, why do you think that making documentaries to begin with is such an important task?

Why do you consider documentaries such a valuable tool for Christians today?

Well, I'll answer the second question first. The way that our world, my generation anyways,

I'm, how old am I? I think I'm 27 or 28. The way that my generation consumes media these days is especially by video.

There's less and less of my friends that spend any time reading books, unfortunately, and most of our time is spent in front of screens of some sort, and so video is just becoming more and more popular, and it's really the way that people consume their news and consume everything else, and so documentaries are, they speak to that medium, and I think people would easily sit for a 90 -minute documentary over reading a book for a few hours.

It's just the way the world is, and I think that's, yeah, I think that's why documentaries have, or do well today, or in any kind of media.

Why do I believe it's important that Christians make, well, any documentaries? Well, I think like anything that we do as Christians, we're asked to do it with all of our heart, all right, in collation, but whatever you do, work heartily as for the

Lord and not for man, and I think this applies for us making documentaries too, because we really try to do our best, because ultimately it's about glorifying

God and not ourselves. And do you have any thoughts on that,

Barry? Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think, you know, well -made documentaries, well -made anything is important for everyone, not just Christians, but especially for Christians, because if we make something well, then it commends the

God we worship, and if we make something badly, then obviously the reverse is true. But I would say that particularly documentaries, historical documentaries, or history books, which, as it were, put us in the time machine and take us back in time 500 years, as this one does, are absolutely vital, because as C .S.

Lewis said, every age has its blind spots, right? We all have, you know, living as we do in 2016 in the

West, and we're blind to certain things, about which future generations will look at us, and they'll say, well, how could they possibly have thought that?

You know, the way that we maybe look back 100 years and look at some of the things people did and thought, and we think to ourselves, well, how on earth could they live like that and believe things like that?

And the only way to protect against that kind of blindness is to use C .S.

Lewis's words, the only way to protect against that kind of blindness is to keep that clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and that can only be done by considering old ideas, old history, reading old books.

And Lewis is right. It's not just that there's any particular magic about the past. I mean, people were no cleverer than they are now.

They make mistakes just as we do. But here's the thing. They didn't make the same mistakes that we do.

That's the issue. And so when you hear about the time of Luther, and you read about that particular culture, it can help us to see our own age that much more clearly, and so be in a better place to see clearly where otherwise we'd be blind.

And so that's why I think a documentary like this one is so important. Yes, I personally get aggravated with our brethren who typically these would be brothers and perhaps sisters from more fundamentalist backgrounds who scoff at the idea that great figures from Christian history are in any sense important because they really have twisted what the intention of sola scriptura was.

They wouldn't use typically that phrase, your average fundamentalist, but the

Bible alone is our only authority. It's the only inerrant word we have, which is all absolutely 100 % true.

But that does not mean that we should be so arrogant and proud and full of ourselves and so overly confident without even having a reason to be of our own mind and abilities that we think that we can carry on in our

Christian lives fine and dandy without the benefit of teachers.

Because when it boils down to it, these heroes of the faith are really just teachers who are now in glory with Christ.

They're teachers who are not physically with us now, but they remain with us in their writings and the

Bible is clear that teachers are necessary. The Bible is clear that not everybody should be a teacher.

And it really annoys me when people have the arrogance to think that they don't need anybody, even if these people don't have a clue of what the original languages of the original manuscripts of the scriptures are.

They have no clue what the original writers may have intended to write, etc.

Especially in those harder to understand passages. It really bugs the living daylights out of me when people dismiss these gifts to the body of Christ that these heroes of the faith have been.

Do you share my sentiments on that? Yeah, I do.

And like you, I celebrate that particular doctrine, but I think it goes too far when you say, right, we just need the

Bible and no other books or wisdom apply. I mean, if you're really strict about that, then once you're born, you're going to need certain books and certain teachers to teach you how to read.

And so if you throw those out, you're not going to be able to read your Bible. So I think without wishing to caricature that position,

I think it is overly simplistic. And of course, if you really want to take that to the nth degree, the pastors and preachers should not be preaching sermons.

They should be getting up to find pulpits and reading the Bible and then just closing it and sitting down. That's right.

And of course, the Bible itself teaches us not to do that. Right. So, you know, we have in the

Bible, you know, obviously we have sermons that the Lord himself preached. We have sermons, or at least part of sermons, that Paul and Peter preached.

So the Bible itself teaches us not to relate to the culture in that way.

Well, before we go on to hear about any future projects you're already thinking of, or maybe already thinking of,

I'd like you each to wrap up with a summary of what you want our listeners to most remember about Martin Luther before this program is over.

And perhaps, Stephen, we'll start with you. Uh, what

I'd like people to remember about Martin Luther? What you want our listeners to most remember about Martin Luther before we conclude the program today.

Well, one of the things that I want myself to remember all the time about Martin Luther, and I think

I want the listeners to remember as well, is that there's power in God's word. And even to this day, the

Reformation continues. We're always being called to reform to God's word. And in a day like today, when we're pressed on every side and all these issues to conform to the world, we can stand strong knowing that God's word and his promises are true, and that the gospel will still change lives.

And that's what Luther was set on, and that's what I think we should be set on.

And Barry? Yeah, I absolutely resonate with that. I think it goes back to what

I was saying a few moments ago. I would say to people, don't lose confidence in God's word.

Don't lose confidence in the power of God's word, whether you're a preacher, whether you're somebody who's investigating these things and reading the

Bible perhaps for the first time, or whether you're somebody who's been a Christian for many, many years, and perhaps has just lost the taste for personal study of the

Bible. It is a tremendous privilege. I mean, as you read about the time of Luther and hear about the countless thousands, millions of people who did not have the

Bible in their own tongue, but then wonderfully, by an act of God's grace, suddenly have it in their own tongue.

You know, most of us now are carrying the Bible around in our pockets on smartphones. And yet how many of us just ignore it, simply don't take time to read it, or just get very blasé and complacent about it.

We are carrying around with us in our pockets absolute dynamite, and it's the dynamite that caused the

Reformation itself. And I think that would be the one thing I'd want people to take away from the documentary and from this chat is that, you know, it is what a privilege, what a wonder, what a glory.

The Bible itself says, taste and see that the Lord is good. You know, the word of the

Lord is like honey on the lips. It is sweet, and we should taste it, and we should love tasting it.

So I think that's what I'd love people to go away with, just keep dipping a finger in the honey pots.

Amen. And don't you think it's also wise to be diverse in our, or eclectic in our study when it comes to heroes of the faith?

Now, I'm not saying that we should be immersing ourselves in, you know, wasting valuable time reading tomes by false teachers and so on, but as far as those that we would recognize as true reformers, not only of the past, but even of the present, that we should be eclectic and read our libraries, our bookshelves should contain a diversity of men and women who have written wonderful scholarly works and wonderfully helpful works because there is a danger in hero worship.

There is a danger in getting tunnel vision by remaining a disciple of one particular heroic figure of ours, and then we tend to become almost cultic in our understanding of the

Bible and of life because we go solely by the words of one man or perhaps one woman, for the ladies listening.

But don't you think that that's a very wise thing for Christians to do? Yeah, absolutely.

You know, today in our culture, it's so obsessed with celebrities and that has carried over to our churches and now we have these celebrity pastors and it carries over, as well, to all these old denkais that we read about and that we watch documentaries on.

Whatever it is, I guess it's just human nature, but yeah,

I think we need to fight against that and having an eclectic, a wide range of books to read from and documentaries to watch,

I think is absolutely important because we see the dangers of the celebrity pastor movement.

You know, one thing that I think it's important to, first of all, I think, listen to and watch and read modern pastors, but the one thing

I appreciate about the old dead guys is that we know how they finished the race and I think there's,

I mean, you have a well -rounded view of their character and oftentimes we don't really see that in this celebrity pastor world that we live in and that's one thing

I appreciate about reading the old dead guys, where a lot of my friends might not even be interested in the old dead guys.

I'm trying to encourage them to do so because we see how they finish and they finish well.

Amen. Yeah, that's another reason why I think parents should be warned not to name their children after anyone famous until they're dead.

I have heard of parents who have been dabbling with the idea of naming their children after very famous living sports heroes and I warn them, you may live to regret that.

I would be very cautious about doing that because you have no idea what the future holds for these people.

It may be so scandalous that your child will be embarrassed for his entire life and the good thing that will come out of it is learning how to fight at a young age.

But what do you have in the tool shed, as it were, that you are thinking about or working on as a future project outside of the

Luther documentary that's soon to be released? Well, right now all of my focus is on Luther.

I'm not thinking about anything else. But this Luther's not even out and I have people already, apparently, thinking for me on what should be next.

And so I'm getting emails still of people suggesting who should be next.

And it all is dependent upon, of course, Luther doing well. And Lord willing, it'll do well and people will be interested in it and will be able to do more.

But some of the names that have been thrown out, at least in the circles, have been

John Calvin, John Bunyan, George Whitefield, John Edwards. I think, and I mean, that list could just go on and on.

There's so many potential documentaries that could be done. I think one that would be very interesting would be

John Calvin because, I mean, everyone knows the name

John Calvin and there's a whole group of people named after him. And so looking at the life and ministry of John Calvin, I think would be quite interesting and it'd be worth doing.

There's really been no documentary done on John Calvin. There's been, a few years ago, there was some kind of Hollywood thing released of John Calvin.

I didn't watch it. I just saw that it got less than favorable reviews. Was that the one

I was talking about before that was painting all the reformers as anti -Semites? It, yeah, that might've been it.

Yeah. Like it had something, the word lion was in it. Yeah, yeah. The lion roared, perhaps?

Yeah, I think that's close to it. Okay. But yeah, so a good documentary on John Calvin, I think, would be worthwhile.

Yeah, and I might even recommend to join the parade of others that are harassing you about ideas.

But you might even consider, at one time anyway, in the future, doing documentaries on little known figures that have powerful testimonies and great impact upon the church that even well -read

Christians are unaware of. I strongly urge you to get a copy of the book,

A Pastor in New York, The Life and Times of Spencer Cone. It is about a 19th century

Baptist pastor, Calvinistic Baptist pastor in New York City, who was the pastor of the

First Baptist Church of Manhattan. And this man's life needs to be a movie.

When you read the book, you'll understand what I'm talking about. Absolutely amazing life that this man had, going from being a stage actor to a teacher to a lawyer to eventually being a pastor.

He was also a war hero in the War of 1812. Really remarkable stuff, just that my two stints put in there.

Yeah, I'll check it out. And I want to make sure that our listeners have the websites.

It's lutherdocumentary .com, lutherdocumentary .com. Also, the

Spurgeon documentary can be found at throughtheeyesofspurgeon .com, throughtheeyesofspurgeon .com.

And lastly, christianityexploredministries can be found at ceministries .org,

C -E for Christianity Explored, ministries .org, ceministries .org.

Do you have any other websites or contact information? I think that's it.

That all sounds good. That's it? Okay. Well, brethren, it's been a joy to have you on the program.

I look forward to further interaction with you and getting you back as guests on Iron Sharpens Iron at some point in the future.

And really, especially perhaps after the Luther documentary comes out, I'm looking forward to seeing that too with bated breath.

And I hope that many of you look out for that video, that documentary as well.

I'm using antiquated language video. But once again, that's lutherdocumentary .com. lutherdocumentary .com.

Don't forget to email me at chrisarnsen at gmail .com if you're interested in the

Roman Catholic versus Protestant debate on Mary in Carlisle, Pennsylvania at the Carlisle Theater.

And also if you're a man in ministry, if you're interested in attending the Iron Sharpens Iron radio pastor's luncheon in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

But I thank everybody who listened today, especially all those who wrote questions. And I want all of you to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron radio.