May 2, 2018 Show with Craig Carter on “The Faith Once Delivered: An Introduction to the Basics of the Christian Faith (An Exposition of the Westney Catechism)”

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, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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 Arnson. Good afternoon,

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

This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this second day of May 2018.

I'm delighted to have joining me for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, a first -time guest,

Craig Carter, professor of theology at Tyndale University College in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and theologian in residence at Wesney Heights Baptist Church in Ajax, Ontario, Canada, who will address

The Faith Once Delivered, an introduction to the basics of the Christian faith, an exposition of the

Wesney Catechism, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Craig Carter.

Well, thank you, Chris. It's nice to be here. Great, and I will announce right away our email address if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question.

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I can understand that, but other than that, please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. And many of you are wondering why I constantly repeat all of those instructions, and that's because we even right now have emails with questions coming in where the city and state or country are not mentioned in the email.

So please include that information whenever you send in a question. You may think that I remember these things if you've asked questions in the past, but I don't have that kind of a computer -like brain where I remember where you are.

In fact, everybody who listens to the show knows that I do not have anything close to a computer -like brain.

But that's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Craig, before we have you give your personal testimony of salvation or a summary of it as we typically do on this program whenever we have a first -time guest,

I'd like you to let our listeners know something about Tyndale University College and then also

West Knee Heights Baptist Church in Ajax, Ontario. Well, sure, thanks

Chris. Tyndale University College and Seminary is formerly known as Ontario Bible College and Seminary.

The name was changed about a dozen years ago. It's right in Toronto. It's a small liberal arts college, about 500 -600 students, and a seminary with about 500 -600 part -time, mostly part -time students, so maybe 100 full -time.

And we are the largest, one of the two largest, anyway, evangelical interdenominational college and seminaries in Canada.

The school is quite old. It goes back to 1892 and started out as a

Bible college, but it's lately become a liberal arts and seminary.

I teach theology there. We have a department of three at the undergrad level, and I'm one of the three full -time, and we have five or six part -time, and we offer major in biblical theological studies.

So I teach systematic theology, core course for everybody, and then I teach Doctor of God, Doctor of Christ.

I teach a course in Augustine. I teach a course on theology of marriage, and I also teach a course on the

Psalms and one on Isaiah, and Isaiah is my big interest right now, but I'm writing in the area of Isaiah and also the

Doctrine of God. And now tell us something about Westney Heights Baptist Church in Ajax, Ontario.

Well, Westney Heights is a great church. We're a suburb of Toronto, so Toronto's a very large metropolitan area.

For those that aren't familiar with it, it's several million people, and southern Ontario, it just goes on and on.

There's eight or nine million altogether, but we're a city of 100 ,000 just next to Toronto, a suburb and commuter place, and we have a church of around 500 people on Sunday morning, and it's like the

United Nations. There are people there from all over the world, but it's a church that loves to study the

Bible, and that's what we really like about it. My wife and I are both involved there in a number of ways.

My wife teaches a ladies' Bible study, and they've been doing hermeneutics, and now they're doing

Old Testament survey, and I'm doing a similar thing with the men. I have 25 men on Thursday night who come out to study a college -level

Old Testament survey course, and it's amazing. We have seen adults, lay people, really get involved in the study of the

Bible over the last three years at this church. I've been there 10 years. I'm part -time. I preach a little bit and teach

Sunday school, and I do some consulting with the deacons, and I recommend books for the library, and I answer people's theological questions.

I just do a bunch of things like that. We have about three full -time pastors and four part -time pastors and a couple of other staff.

So I kind of fit in, and I do a Sunday school class, for example, with teaching through the book of Isaiah, and I finished my third year, and I thought

I was going to finish this year, but it looks like it's going to be September -October before we actually finish Isaiah. So a little over three years going through Isaiah, and a hundred people come for that and love it.

And so we are really, really feeling that God is doing something specific at Weston.

Our church is solidly theologically rooted and grounded in the

Word, and like I say, I just don't know of any other church where there are so many adults so interested in serious, in -depth

Bible study. That's just something I've never encountered in my life before, and I just feel very blessed to be a part of it.

Praise God. Well, the website for those of you listening who want to visit that church, whether you live in that area of Canada or you intend to visit there, it's westony .ca,

W -E -S -T -N -E -Y dot C -A, and the

Tyndale University College and Seminary can be found at tyndale .ca,

T -Y -N -D -A -L -E dot C -A. By the way, you are the second

Canadian we've had on the program this week. Yesterday we had my dear friend Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary on the program, and he had a discussion -slash -debate with Kirk MacGregor, who is a

Molinist, and Dr. Costa was representing Calvinism in that discussion -slash -debate.

And by the way, those of you listening, we are having part two, God willing, of that Calvinist -Molinist discussion - debate,

God willing, this coming, I'm sorry, next Thursday, the 10th of May.

So mark your calendars for Thursday, May 10th, for part two of the Calvinism versus Molinism discussion.

Do you know Dr. Costa? Just out of curiosity, Craig? We have,

I don't know him personally, but we moved in similar circles, so I know of him for sure. Yeah, he's a dear brother, and in fact,

West, he might want to consider inviting him to speak there at some point. He's quite a brilliant brother in Christ.

Well, since you are, as I said earlier, a first -time guest on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, what we typically do is have our first -time guests give an abbreviated version of their testimony on what kind of religious atmosphere you were raised in, and what providential circumstances did the

Lord bring about in your life that drew you to himself and saved you? Well, it was providential.

My parents were not really Christians, but they moved to, we were brought up, born in my early years in Moncton, New Brunswick, in Atlantic Provinces, Canada.

We moved when I was in grade one to Newfoundland. Now, this was

Stephenville, Newfoundland, and there used to be what was called

Harmon Air Force Base, which was a U .S. Air Force Base in Newfoundland.

It had been put there during World War II, and it was there in the 60s when we were there, but while we were there, toward the end of our time, it phased out, and so it closed around the end of the 1960s.

But during the time that it was there, there was a Baptist church that was a joint effort of the local

Atlantic Baptist Convention, but it was really Southern Baptist in its ethos.

There were all kinds of Southern Baptist people stationed at the base, and they formed the nucleus of the church.

And my father was a contractor working for the base, doing work for the

Air Force Base, so he knew lots of the people there, and they got him going to church. And so our family attended

Stephenville Baptist Church, and when I was eight years old, I went forward on a Sunday evening service, and that's when

I was saved. I was baptized shortly after. My father also was baptized at the same time. So I always say that I owe a debt to the

Southern Baptists, humanly speaking, for their ministry and their witness and drawing me in.

I've been a Baptist all my life, but Atlantic Baptist and now Fellowship Baptist here in Ontario.

But after that occurrence, I went through my teen years always drifting away and coming back, and it was mainly summer camp,

Camp Wildwood, that was the main influence in my life during those years and kept bringing me back.

And then I went to Christian college and then to university and at a seminary, and I was struggling with the call to ministry, but I felt called to ministry, but I felt specifically called to academics, and sort of had to work that through for a number of years.

But eventually, I was pastor for seven years in New Brunswick and PEI in two churches, and then

I went back and did my PhD at the University of Toronto School of Theology under John Webster, and I finished that and went to Atlantic Baptist University, which is now

Crandall University in my hometown of Moncton, New Brunswick. And from there, I was recruited to come up to Tyndale to be the vice president of academic to help them transition from a

Bible college to a liberal arts college, and I did that for a number of years and then got into full -time teaching around 2005, and I've been happily teaching and writing and doing a lot of things during those years.

And part of what's happened during these years of having time to really think and study after 12 years in administration has been a theological change, where theologically,

I have moved from being sort of left -wing evangelical.

I had been a Calvinist as a young person, but had sort of drifted away and not really totally disavowed it, never really embraced

Arminianism, but just got more and more vague. And during the last 10 years,

I have become much more grounded in the Catholic orthodoxy of the ancient

Church, the Nicene Creed, the Trinity, the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, and have come to see that as foundational, and I've moved back towards my own theological roots.

And I would say that the Second London Confession of Faith would be the statement of faith that best sums up my theology today, and that's a bit of a move to the right for me over the last decade.

Well, praise God for that. That happens to be my confession as well, and I'm delighted to hear that. That is the confession of Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I'm a member.

And it has been the confession of faith of every church that I've been a member of since I was saved.

I was raised Roman Catholic, and the Lord delivered me out of that false system. And thankfully, the very first congregation where he placed me by his providence was a

Reformed Baptist Church, although I had no idea what that meant when I first entered through those doors.

But the book we are addressing today that you've written, The Faith Once Delivered, an

Introduction to the Basics of the Christian Faith, an Exposition of the West knee

Catechism. Now, I had never heard of the West Knee Catechism before, and I'm assuming that it is connected with the

West Knee Heights Baptist Church. Am I correct on that? That's right.

It may seem grandiose in a way for a person to write a catechism, but as I studied my own tradition and the

Reformation tradition and Reformed Baptist theology in the 17th and 18th centuries, I was quite surprised to learn that, well, first of all, catechisms were a big part of the

Reformation, and there were many catechisms, and it was not just the two or three big famous ones, like the

Westminster larger and smaller catechism, but there were many catechisms. And it was seen as something that was the most effective way of preserving and transmitting and passing on the faith.

You would never know that to look at Baptist life in the 20th century. Catechisms have not been a part of it, but even as late as Spurgeon in the 19th century, he revised

Benjamin Keech's catechism, which was based on the Second London Confession, and for use in his church.

And so as I became aware of this tradition, I discovered that it would make sense for us to develop a catechism for Wesley.

I can't say that I was completely satisfied with any of the catechisms that I read, and I thought there would be a couple of things that could be done better, so I decided to give it a try.

Over the years, I have done sermon series or Sunday school series of various kinds on all of these things.

I spent a year in Sunday school going through the Apostles' Creed. I did a series of sermons on baptism, and several people got baptized as a result.

I did a series on the Ten Commandments. I did a series on the Lord's Supper, a series on the Lord's Prayer. And as I looked over this material,

I realized that I was systematically going through the basics of the Christian faith, and what

I considered to be the basics of the Christian faith were pretty much the same things that the Reformers and early

Baptists had considered to be the basics of the Christian faith. And I was teaching this stuff systematically to my church, and I thought, well, why don't we put it together and put it into a book form and to make it the sort of the standard of the basics that we're expecting all people to know.

And so we're going to use this book in our church as the basis for a class, a membership class.

So whenever somebody comes into membership, they're going to get this book, and they're going to be going through an eight -week class where they study it, and they study the

Catechisms, the questions and answers, and then we're going to use them in various places in the church and Sunday school and whatnot to try and establish a baseline of knowledge.

This is more than what you need to know to be saved. You don't need to know this much to be saved.

You need to know John 3 .16 and a bit of explanation. You need Romans Road. I mean, you just need four or five main truths and a commitment to be saved, but it's...

so this is a lot more than that, but it's a lot less than what a pastor would need to be the pastor of a church.

It's not a Bible college program. It's not an in -depth study of theology.

So it's in between. It's what ordinary Christians need, what parents need to know to raise their children

Christianly, what Sunday school teachers need to know, what elders and deacons need to know to be responsible office holders in the church, that sort of thing.

So that's how I envision the book. It's for those kind of purposes. Now, many

Baptists utilize, as you know, the larger and shorter Catechisms of the

Westminster Confession and just change the polity and the areas on Baptism that would make it more applicable to Baptist life.

What do you think was lacking in those standards as well as Keech's Catechism and even

Spurgeon's update of that Catechism that you felt a need to be involved in a new

Catechism? Okay, well there are three main areas where I think this

Catechism is distinct. And I'll address the one that really speaks to your question first.

I dare to ask a dangerous question. What would a specifically Baptist Catechism look like?

Because as you just said, many Baptists use one that is basically Presbyterian, Reformed in background, and Adaptive.

But what if you started out from scratch to do a Baptist Catechism? And I thought, well, one thing that might be important would be the placement of the teaching on Baptism.

So in this Catechism, the Baptism comes right after the

Lord's Prayer. The Great Commandment. And the purpose of beginning with the summary of the

Law by Jesus is that we want to, I want to place in the front of the person's mind the need, our need of salvation first.

Because you know, the Lutherans and the Calvinists had debate back and forth as to how you begin the

Catechisms. The typically Lutheran way would be to begin with Law, so you do

Ten Commandments, and then you do Gospel. But the Calvinists wanted to emphasize the use of a

Law, the third use of the Law. They wanted to emphasize it in terms of sanctification, in terms of holiness, of Christian life. So then, but on the other hand, they could also see the validity of establishing the need for salvation before talking about salvation.

So I solved that problem by dealing with the Great Commandment first, and then talking about the

Apostles' Creed, as in what it is that Christians believe. So in other words, the Part 1 on the

Great Commandment ends with, okay, we can't keep the Law. We can't love God and love neighbor as we ought.

So is there any hope for us? And yes, there is, and the Apostles' Creed declares the Gospel. And then the very next section of the

Creed is, what is Baptism? And Baptism is presented as, okay, if you believe the

Apostles' Creed, what do you need to do now? And this is the Baptist emphasis. The Baptist emphasis is that you need to be converted.

You need to repent and believe and be born again, and that is then symbolized in Baptism.

That's what Baptism is for. It's your public confession of your faith, and you're supposed to have this faith, and come to faith, and then be baptized to express that faith.

And so Baptism then comes at that point in the Creed, in the Catechism. And then after that, the next three sections deal with the

Christian life. So then you have the Ten Commandments, so how do we live in the life of holiness,

Lord's Supper, worship, Lord's Prayer, spirituality, and then the final distinctive of this

Catechism, which is unprecedented. There's no other Catechism that I know of, and I stand to be corrected if there is one out there, but I don't know of any

Catechism that ends with the Great Commission. And so the final section of the

Catechism is, what is the mission of the Church? The mission of the Church is the Great Commission. And so that again expresses what

I understand to be a very Baptist emphasis. We are people who emphasize the Lordship of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the necessity of evangelism and conversion, and missions and evangelism.

So the Catechism reflects that sort of Baptist emphasis, Reformed Baptist, to be sure, but Reformed Baptist.

Amen. Well, obviously, well, perhaps this is just my take on your title, but I'm assuming that since you are using a quote from Jude, Jude 1, 3, where the complete text reads,

Beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all handed down to the saints.

And as the, that's the NASB, and as the ESV translates it, once for all delivered to the saints, which is exactly what the way that you phrase it in your title.

I'm assuming that even though that there are things in this Catechism that are specifically

Calvinistic, you recognize that these teachings did not come into existence in the 16th century

Reformation. These were rooted in biblical, God -breathed teaching. Oh, for sure.

I think that's very important. This Catechism is meant to focus us back on Scripture.

So it's the Great Commission, the Great Commandment, Lord's Prayer, everything is scriptural.

And I, and except for the Apostles' Creed, and I specifically address the issue, if the

Bible is God's Word, Chapter 3, why do we need creeds? And the point, and the answer is that we need creeds because they help us to read, they arise from the previous generation's reading of the

Bible, and they help us to stay on track in reading the Bible. So it's not as if they operate as a higher authority than the

Bible, but they are, they help us to be biblical, and that's the only good reason for having a creed. So the whole thing is biblical, for sure, and the whole thing is trying to point people back to Scripture and prepare them for the reading of Scripture.

In terms of, I thought you were going, when you started that question, I thought you were going to ask me about apologetics, and is there anything about apologetics in the

Catechism, and I was going to say, no, my thought in choosing that text for the title was that we live at a time when the faith is under attack as never before.

We live in a situation where culturally, the culture is not just neutral but out to evangelize us toward paganism.

It's a public school system that's out to get our children to not believe what we believe, in an aggressive way, and I don't know what it's like in Pennsylvania, but that's certainly true in Ontario.

So the Catechism is meant to be a response to the warfare that we're a part of.

It's meant to be a tool, and it's laying down a marker and saying, we've got to be intentional, we've got to be strong, we've got to work hard at teaching the faith and handing it on, because it won't just happen.

It's going to only be happening if it's intentional, and if it is something that we prayerfully do in a way that is very deliberate and determined.

Like, we have to be determined if we're going to hand on the faith to the next generation, more so than in any other generation, probably going back,

I don't know, 20, 30, 40, 50 generations of Western culture behind us, where it's been easier to hand down the faith than it is today.

And so that was the thought behind choosing that text. In fact, you are really starting to answer a question that was submitted to us by Brian in Franklinton, North Carolina.

Brian asks, could you ask Dr. Carter, I'm not sure if you're a Dr. Carter, but that's what our listener has called you.

Are you a doctor? I am. Oh, yes, yes. Okay, good. Could you ask Dr. Carter what he believes is the most distorted or overlooked basic truth of the faith in American evangelism today?

And since you're Canadian, we'll put the word North in there, in North American evangelicalism today.

So, and he also says, please have Fred Malone back on the show. I was greatly blessed by those two recent episodes.

Yes, we are, Brian, intending to have Fred back on to address the mode of baptism since last time we had him discuss during those two parts on baptism, the subjects or the biblical candidates of baptism.

So next time we're going to address the mode, biblical mode, God willing. But going back to our question or his question for you,

Dr. Carter, what is the most distorted, overlooked basic truth of the faith in North American evangelicalism today?

Sin and judgment, I would say. Oh, yeah. I have been speaking through, teaching through Isaiah, and Isaiah is very, the emphasis is made over and over and over again.

He promises that the Lord is going to bring salvation to the believing remnant.

But he also, like the other 8th century prophets, warns people against longing for, in a frivolous way, for the day of the

Lord to come, because the day of the Lord is going to be a day of darkness, a day of judgment, a day of grief.

And just the other day we were in chapter 63, and looking at the figure, that incredible figure that Isaiah, this anointed one, who is the world conqueror, who is coming to bring about judgment on the world.

And this person is, the question is asked in verse 2, why is your apparel red, and your garments like his who tread in the winepress?

And some Christians have read this verse and they have thought, they know that this is a reference to Jesus Christ in his second coming.

They know that Isaiah has got a vision here that is the same vision of the same person as Revelation chapter 19.

And so they assume that the redness of the garments is due to his blood shed for salvation.

And that's not right. The text itself tells us that, I have trodden the winepress,

I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath, their lifeblood splattered on my garments and stained all my apparel.

So the blood on the red garments of this conquering Messiah is the blood of those who are judged by his coming.

Now, this is a vision, as I talked about this to the people on Sunday, I said, this is a vision you can hardly imagine people today read this, and I'm not sure that they can actually process what is being said.

This is so amazing. I mean, where is this Jesus, gentle Jesus, meek and mild?

Where is this Jesus, my little buddy, my pal, the guy who, you know, my cosmic butler who takes care of my problems?

This is, and where do we get the idea of the angry father and the loving son?

Here is the son returning with his garments splattered with blood.

This is such a disconcerting, disorienting image that it makes us realize that we, perhaps, are very selective in the way we read

Scripture, and we are very, we protect ourselves against Scripture by not really facing some of the things that it says.

But the judgment that is being promised here by Isaiah is just astonishing.

And when I say, and so I said to the people, if you want the Lord to return, because you want an end to all your problems and tensions, and you want everything to just be nice, and you want to just sit on a fluffy cloud and play your harp, you're not really envisioning what the

Bible is promising to us. The Bible is promising, and people say, why does the Lord wait so long?

And I say, mercy. He's waiting a long time, because it's merciful to wait a long time, because look at what's going to happen.

And I think this is the thing that we are, we just, we're in denial about what the

Scripture says. The Scripture is far more powerful in its portrayal of judgment, and specifically of the judge

Jesus Christ, than we are willing to admit. And as evangelicals,

I don't think we have come to terms yet with the Bible. I don't think we understand

Isaiah. In fact, I know we don't understand Isaiah. Isaiah is like a closed book in the modern

Church. It's too big, it's too long, nobody understands it, and modern hermeneutics conspires against interpreting it

Christologically. By the way, I've just written a book on that, on the interpreting Scripture as a great tradition, and I think that's a big issue, a reason why it's a closed book.

Well, we'll have to have you back to discuss that. Yeah, well, that's another whole topic.

But you ask me the question, and the question I think that we underemphasize is we do not take judgment seriously enough.

Well, Brandon, thank you so much for the question. Please give us your full mailing address in Franklinton, North Carolina, so that CVBBS .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, can ship that out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

And we want to thank our Joshua Press for providing these books to us absolutely free of charge.

And we're going to a break right now, and I just want to let you know, Dr. Carter, that I emailed you or forwarded to you a question from one of our listeners.

It's rather lengthy, so I thought it might be good to have you have it right in front of you, so during the station break you could look it over.

This is from Bashir in Piqua, Ohio. And we are going to our first break right now.

If anybody else would like to join us on the air, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com,

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

USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away.

God willing, we'll be right back with Dr. Craig Carter. Calvary Chapel, South Jersey would like to invite you to a day with Dr.

Jason Lyle. Dr. Lyle is a well -known Christian astrophysicist who writes and speaks on various topics relating to science and the defense of the

Christian faith. Dr. Lyle will be joining us here at Calvary Chapel, South Jersey on Sunday, May the 6th at 9 and 11 a .m.,

and then again that same evening at 7 p .m., speaking on topics such as the ultimate proof of creation, understanding

Genesis, and astronomy reveals creation. So, plan on joining us for an exciting experience of knowledge and wisdom as we spend time with Dr.

Jason Lyle at Calvary Chapel, South Jersey, 1210 Hessian Avenue, West Stafford, New Jersey.

For further information, check out our website at ccsouthjersey .org or call us at 856 -848 -4500.

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We are now back with our discussion with Dr. Craig Carter, professor of theology at Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and theologian in residence at West Knee Heights Baptist Church in Ajox, Ontario, Canada.

We are addressing his book, The Faith Once Delivered, An Introduction to the Basics of the Christian Faith, an

Exposition of the West Knee Catechism. If you'd like to join us on the air with your own question, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

chrisarnzen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the

USA and only remain anonymous if your question is personal and private. Our listener in Piqua, Ohio, Bashir says,

Hello brothers Chris and Craig. I am extremely grateful for the Iron Sharpens Iron broadcast and today's topic of discussion.

I attend a church where the leadership strongly promotes biblical discipleship, particularly at home through family worship.

As the spiritual head of my home, I recognize my responsibility to cultivate a healthy and productive spiritual formation of my wife and my children.

However, I have found it to be quite the challenge to regularly set apart time for family worship and bible study in the midst of the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

I have to admit that at times I feel vastly underprepared and overwhelmed when faced with the task of leading family worship in my home.

I have tried to use several resources to assist me, particularly in the area of catechism, such as the

Westminster Shorter Catechism. My question for Brother Craig would be, for someone like myself who desires that my family grow spiritually by learning these precious essentials to our

Christian faith, but also has to contend with the busyness of life, what would be a practical approach to much -needed spiritual formation to my wife and children?

Would being intentional about setting time aside each evening at dinner for the purpose of discussing the catechism questions be a sufficient method of family worship?

Finally, does our guest have any other suggestions for resources or methods that the modern -day busy

Christian family can utilize to bolster and cultivate a healthy worship time?

Thank you both for all that you do for the benefit of the body of Christ, and thank you for blessing us the listeners today with such an edifying topic of discussion.

That's Bashir in Piqua, Ohio. So if you could respond now, Dr. Carter. Well, Bashir, I would say that I have two answers for you.

Number one is you talk about the setting aside time to do the catechism, and you mentioned the

Westminster Shorter Catechism. That's a great catechism, and it's a great, useful tool.

I would recommend, as you would expect, my own catechism. One of the reasons why

I put it in the form of a catechism was because, and I divided it into sections, was because I wanted it to be something that could be used in smaller chunks.

So there are 84 questions, but they're divided into seven parts, and I tried to make as many questions, as many of the answers short as possible, so that they could be possibly memorized.

Children memorize very well, and they can memorize far more than they're being challenged to memorize, and helping children memorize

Scripture is a great idea, and that memorizing a catechism can be very helpful as well.

So I would suggest a member going through a catechism like this one at a time, one question at a time, or one group of questions at a time, and if you can't do it every day, to do it once a week,

I think is a possible thing. The other thing that I would just say, though, is I would encourage you to find out, learn somewhere, somehow, and there are many ways you can learn it, but learn and practice inductive

Bible study. Inductive Bible study is powerful.

When I... I have found that people in our church really want to read the

Bible for themselves. They want to be able to fish for themselves. You know, the old saying, teach a man to fish, and feed a man...

give a man a fish and he eats for today, teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Well, they really want to learn to fish.

They want to learn how to feast on the Word of God without being taught by an expert, and there's a great deal of difference between reading the

Bible in such a way that you yourself understand, you see it, you get what it's teaching, and that is authoritative in a way that someone else telling you that that's what the

Bible teaches is not. When somebody else tells you that the Bible teaches that you must believe in Jesus Christ to be saved, you can believe that, and you can be saved on the basis of believing that, but you can gain a deeper sense of conviction if you can learn that truth from Scripture yourself.

So it's really... I think it's really something that we need to be teaching all of our people, to how to study the

Bible inductively. Now, my wife started a class three years ago, and a woman in that class has two boys, and she learned inductive

Bible study, she really got excited about it. She started sharing what she was learning with her husband and the boys, and before you know it, the husband was involved, and then the boys were involved, and they've been doing inductive

Bible study in their family devotions, and they have been growing, and the boys are becoming more and more excited.

I believe they're nine years old, and they'd be getting more and more excited about studying the

Bible on their own, and I do think it can be done by anybody. I think it's...

obviously the Bible is as deep as you need it to be. It can be... you know, there are basic truths that children can understand, and then there are going to be truths that are beyond the most experienced and most educated theologian.

There's just such a... the Bible is amazing that way. There is such depth. You can study a book, or a passage, or a chapter, and then go back to it months later, and you think you studied it extensively, and you learn new things from it.

That's just because the Holy Spirit of God is living and active and speaking through the words on the page into your heart and mind, and therefore

He keeps revealing depths of meaning and more aspects of what it means. So I would just encourage you to read...

to learn to read the Bible inductively, to learn and to read it as a spiritual discipline, to learn to read it slowly.

You know, I tell the people in the seminars, I say, look, you know, maybe you're in business, and you've been...

you've had a speed reading course, but I'm here to tell you you need to unlearn all that. I want to teach you to read slow.

I'm not here to teach you to read fast. I'm here to teach you to read slowly, and it's a very different kind of reading from any other reading you do, and we need to understand that.

We need to understand the Bible's a unique book. We need to read it in a unique way, with reverence, slowly, meditatively, with attention to detail, and it takes hard work.

There is no substitute for time. Now, Sherry, you mentioned being busy.

We're all busy, but we all have 168 hours in the week, and we will spend hours on the things that interest us and draw us in and excite us and cause us to be curious, and from which we seem to derive some sort of pleasure.

When you get to the point where you can't stop studying the Bible because it's so much fun, because it just draws you, that's where we're all trying to get to.

That's what we want to see, and so the time issue will take care of itself. If people want to study the

Bible, they will find the time, and I just encourage you, and I hope that works for you.

Well, thank you, Bashir, and please make sure we have your full mailing address in Piqua, Ohio, so that CVBBS .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, can ship out a free copy of the book that we are discussing today by our guest,

Dr. Craig Carter, The Faith Once Delivered, An Introduction to the Basics of the Christian Faith, an

Exposition of the West Knee Catechism. We have Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, is there a danger in overloading your family with too lengthy of a presentation on a regular basis of Bible study that will drive them away eventually?

I know of children of very strict fundamentalist parents who left the faith and are now living the lives of devils because of the fact that their parents were overbearing in the way that they instructed them, and legalism was involved.

Do we need to be balanced to allow children and even spouses to enjoy life and enjoy recreation while at the same time having a regular structured

Bible study as a part of tradition in the family? Oh, sure.

I can't argue with that. Yeah, we need to be balanced, and yes, we need to make sure that the balance includes

Bible study. Of course, that's not the reason that we talk about the need for Bible studies, because so few families are balanced.

So few families, you know, in the world are studying the

Bible at all. You know, I have, what, 100 adults in my class, and I asked them for a show of hands how many had read

Isaiah, and we're talking a very, you know, pretty serious church with a lot of mature

Christians, and less than 20 % had actually read all the way through Isaiah.

And that's just typical, I think. So the problems this person is speaking about, yes, there are real problems.

Being overbearing, being harsh, being legalistic, none of that is Christ -like behavior.

But I think we all have to sort of take what we hear from the pulpit and exhortations, like what we're getting today on this program, and apply them to our situation.

Most people are in a situation where they hardly ever open the Bible. So that's a context.

If you are in a very religious family, and a family where there is already family devotions, and maybe a long family devotion, then you're in a very different, unusual context, and you obviously need to take what is said in a slightly different way.

But I think that the... what I would hope is that we all would, as Christians, take very seriously the fact that we should be teaching our children a lot more than we do.

There was a very good article recently, I think in Christianity Today, by Jen Wilkin, about how we fail to challenge our young people.

You know, we've got young people who are learning calculus in high school, and we've got young people who are being intellectually challenged and held to a high standard in many areas of sports and athletics.

And when they come to church, we don't challenge them at all. We say, you know, when it comes to Christianity, eh, show up for a half an hour at Sunday school, half listen, have a few little stories, have a few laughs, and go home, and that's all you need to do.

But when you go to school, you better buckle down and learn that calculus, or when you go for football, you better be in shape, and you better be on time for practice, and you better have high standards, etc.,

etc. What message does that send to young people? It seems to me that we need to be a lot more serious in the way that we approach the passing on of the faith.

Well, thank you, Susan Margaret. Make sure we have your full mailing address in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, so that cvbbs .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, can ship out to you a free copy of The Faith Once Delivered, An Introduction to the

Basics of the Christian Faith, an Exposition of the Weston Catechism by our guest, Dr. Craig Carter. We're going into our midway break right now.

It is a longer than normal break. It is the break that Grace Life Radio 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us, because they need a 12 -minute gap between the two major segments of our program, so that they can air their own advertisements and public service announcements, and so on, to be local to the

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Craig Carter and more, The Faith Once Delivered, an introduction to the basics of the

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnson. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with an hour left to go is

Dr. Craig Carter, Professor of Theology at Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Theologian in Residence at West Knee Heights Baptist Church in Ajax, Ontario, Canada.

We have been discussing and will continue to discuss the faith once delivered, an introduction to the basics of the

Christian faith, an exposition of the West Knee Catechism published by Joshua Press.

If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Before we return to the discussion with Dr.

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That's also the email address that you can send in a question to our guest, Dr. Craig Carter. That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com, and we do have

Dr. Carter, an anonymous listener, who wants to know, is the information and the teaching in your catechism general enough that all

Christians, regardless of whether they are Arminian or Calvinist, could benefit from this, or will it be so joltingly obvious that it is

Calvinistic that an Arminian might immediately put it down? Oh, I would say the former is probably true.

The catechism is really focused on the scriptures, and so everything is appealing to the scriptures for authority.

Many of the answers are simply quoting a Bible verse to answer the question, so I think that people will not see it as overtly

Calvinistic at the beginning. And really, at this level of theology, see,

I work at different levels. I teach in a local church, and I'm operating at the lay level, and then

I teach college -level courses, second -year, third -year, and fourth -year seminars, so I teach at several levels there.

And when I write books, I sometimes, you know, this is an exception, but when I write other books, they're more scholarly books addressed to other professors, so I'm used to speaking at different levels.

The level at which this book is pitched, many of the debates between Arminians and Calvinists just don't come up in this context.

You would have to take something that I say in the book and then say, if you say that, and then deduce something from that, and then that could lead to a controversy between the two, but I don't think that the statements that I make themselves would seem that controversial to an

Arminian who was closely following scripture. Well, thank you, Anonymous.

Please give us your full name and your mailing address, of course, off the air. We're not going to identify you, but we would love to mail you out a free copy of this book we have been addressing,

The Faith Once Delivered, by our guest, Dr. Craig Carter, and that will be shipped to you by cvbbs .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, and we look forward to doing that if we get your full name and mailing address.

Thanks a lot for joining us on the program today. We have, let's see here, we have

John in Bangor, Maine, who says, are these teachings in your book based on the salvific essentials of the scripture, or are there other areas that you delve into, such as eschatology and other things that aren't necessarily hinged on salvation?

Yeah, the word basics is the key. It's meant to be basics, and I do, when

I go through the Apostles' Creed, of course, it speaks about the resurrection of the dead and the return of the

Lord and the judgment, but those are basically the only things that we talk about.

We don't talk about interpretations of the millennium or things like that in the catechism. We're focused on simply, you know,

I can't say it's not focused on eschatology, because I think it's a very important doctrine to believe that Jesus is going to return.

Amen, and unfortunately, the hyper -preterists are spreading that dangerous teaching all over the place.

It's still a minority teaching, but it's unfortunately spreading to some extent, and in fact,

I'm trying to establish a debate on this program between someone who would be a partial preterist, more in line with biblical teaching on eschatology, and a hyper -preterist.

Of course, he wouldn't call himself a hyper -preterist, but that is a very important teaching, and also eschatology involves heaven, hell, and the afterlife.

Well, yes, and we talk about heaven and hell and the afterlife a bit in the book. I'm used to teaching at Tyndale.

Now, Tyndale is an evangelical college that is pretty much a pretty broad definition of evangelicalism, so it's pretty much reflective of evangelicalism as a movement, which has been getting broader and broader continuously since the 1940s and 50s, when the fundamentalists, like Harold Ockingay and Carl Henry, founded what they initially called neo -evangelicalism.

But evangelicalism has always been a union, a working together of Calvinists and Arminians, going all the way back to John Wesley and George Whitefield, and in the 20th century, people like John Stott and Billy Graham.

You always have had Calvinists and Arminians working together. So in my teaching at Tyndale, my focus has been on,

I tell my students that I am a Calvinist, and that the school is a coalition of Calvinists and Arminians, and so there will be certain places in the theology course, like in Materiology, Application, and Salvation, where there will be some differences, but I will identify those, and I will talk about Arminianism, and I will talk about Calvinism.

But I always tell them that my goal is not to get the Arminians to become

Calvinists. That's not actually my objective. My objective is to make sure that for the

Arminians to be sure, and in some cases I have to say even people who think they're Calvinists, but for all of us to be absolutely sure we understand the difference between Arminianism and semi -Pelagianism and Pelagianism.

Because there are so many evangelicals who unwittingly are Pelagian, and sometimes semi -Pelagian, well, quite often semi -Pelagian,

I'm afraid, that, you know, if I could get all, if everybody in my class was either a

Calvinist or a solid biblical Arminian in the mold of John Wesley, I would be happy to get to that point, and we would worry about the

Calvinist -Arminian debate after that. But if we could just root out the Pelagianism, it would be a big step forward.

Now, I don't want to offend any of my Arminian listeners, so please be patient with me, but can you be an

Arminian and not be a semi -Pelagian? Well, I think so.

I mean, I think that people like John Wesley believe in, they believe that they believe in election, that they believe it's on the basis of foreknowledge of the response.

The key is they believe in prevenient grace. This is what I find is not well understood today.

Wesley would believe that the only way a person can receive Christ, can repent and believe, is if that person is first given grace, which is exactly what we

Calvinists believe. But Wesley has this view that when you hear the gospel,

God always gives you enough prevenient grace so that you can make a decision yes or no. Now, as a

Calvinist, I don't think that makes sense, because I think that if you are given the ability to say yes and see the truth of the gospel, you will believe and repent.

But I understand what the Arminian point is, and the Arminians are not trying to say, the theologically sound

Arminians, they're not trying to say that we're saved without needing grace, that we can somehow regenerate ourselves.

They don't want to say that. They know that's not biblical. They know that God must regenerate us. They know that grace is necessary to believe and repent, but they're trying to preserve free will, and that's the point that we can debate.

Where I find it is problematic is when I encounter people who say that they believe that when they hear the gospel, they possess the ability to evaluate the gospel claims and make a decision, yes or no, on their own, with no grace needed from God.

That, I think, is very untypical and very problematic, but also very widespread. Now, I'm assuming that the difference between the

Roman Catholic version of prevenient grace, because they also believe in that, and the

Wesleyan or Arminian understanding of it, is that the Roman Catholic doctrine of prevenient grace extends into God's grace, gives sinners the ability to perform the works that cooperate with faith in order to save a person.

Yeah, I think the parallel is imprecise. Catholics have a different problem,

I think, than Arminians, with regard, from a Calvinistic perspective. The problem with the

Catholic doctrine, I think, is that it's the idea that grace is mediated through the sacramental priesthood, through the sacraments, under the control of the church hierarchy, rather than grace being free and being mediated through the

Word by the Holy Spirit. So that's where I have the biggest problem with the

Catholic superiority. It's not so much the prevenient grace idea. I think the justification -sanctification thing, in a lot of ways, that debate throughout the 20th century showed that the church has been, the

Protestants and Catholics have been talking past each other on that point, and that what

I call sanctification, I see that as a cooperative thing between God and man, where we cooperate with God in sanctification.

But I sharply distinguish sanctification from justification, which is totally, by grace and faith alone, it's a legal forensic act of God, instantaneous, with no human input or causation at all, and so that's traditionally how

Luther and Calvin, they wanted to say two things. They wanted to say, we must understand that our salvation is by grace alone.

But on the other hand, they want to say, we also must understand that salvation is not some kind of mechanical thing that just happens to us and doesn't affect us morally or spiritually at all, it just leaves us in the same condition, and we don't behave any differently.

They didn't want either legalism or antinomianism. They wanted to have, so they made this distinction between justification and sanctification, so that we can understand that justification is what

God does, and it's completely God's work, and by faith alone.

And sanctification becomes an ongoing process that we can cooperate with by mortifying the flesh and submitting to the

Spirit and so on. But I think the Catholics fail to make that distinction, and that's why we can't seem to communicate.

I think, in many ways, many Catholics today actually mean the same thing as Protestants mean, but the terminology is such that we cannot make agreement.

So while I'm fairly optimistic on that aspect of the superiological difference, I'm not as optimistic on the idea that grace is limited to the sacramental priesthood.

They seem to be very strong on that, and very clear on that, and unchanging on that. And whereas Luther and Calvin believe that the

Church is where the Gospel is rightly preached, the sacrament is rightly administered, the Spirit flows where He wills,

He's free, and the Spirit can take the word and can speak to hearts with or without a mass, with or without a priest, with or without a bishop's blessing.

And so that, to me, is where the difference really lies. Yes, and I'm sure you would agree that there is a huge difference between the average

Catholic or a lay Catholic, or even a priest or a scholar that defies the dogmatic teaching of Trent in this area and believes in something that's closer to or even identically to the

Protestant understanding or the Reformational understanding of justification. There's a big difference between that, a chasm of difference between that and what

Rome dogmatically has declared must be believed in Trent in other places.

They clearly say that our understanding of justification is anathematized.

Yes, Trent is of course several centuries old, and so I was referring to what

Catholics tend to say today. Right, but Trent is still dogmatically binding, whereas the

Catholic Catechism, the modern -day one, does not exclusively contain things that are binding.

Some of it is just the opinion of those that have drafted the Catechism. Right, and that's the

Catholic conundrum. Even if they want to admit that the

Protestants are right on justification, how do they do so and still maintain the appearance of dogma never changing, given

Trent? That is the problem that you keep running into. And by the way,

I want to just recommend a couple of books. Actually, one is a booklet. It's the booklet that the

Lord used to bring me into the doctrines of Sovereign Grace, also known as Calvinism or Reformed Theology.

It is the booklet George Whitfield's Letter to John Wesley on Election, and you can get that from Chapel Library at chapellibrary .org.

chapellibrary .org. You can also get it at cvbbs .com, our sponsor is cvbbs .com.

And then also you can get, as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, one of my favorite books of all time in regard to this subject is the book by William Webster called

The Church of Rome at the Bar of History, and you can get that at cvbbs .com

as well. And mention that it is a banner of truth publication, The Church of Rome at the

Bar of History by William Webster. We are going to go to our final break right now, and if anybody would like to join us on the air, speak now or forever hold your peace because we're rapidly running out of time.

So send us an email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c h r i s a r n z e n at gmail .com.

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Don't go away, we'll be right back after these messages, God willing, with Dr. Craig Carter and The Faith Once Delivered, an introduction to the basics of the

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Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastor's Study, because everyone needs a pastor.

Calvary Chapel, South Jersey, would like to invite you to a day with Dr. Jason Lyle. Dr. Lyle is a well -known

Christian astrophysicist who writes and speaks on various topics relating to science and the defense of the

Christian faith. Dr. Lyle will be joining us here at Calvary Chapel, South Jersey, on Sunday, May the 6th at 9 and 11 am, and then again that same evening at 7 pm, speaking on topics such as the ultimate proof of creation, understanding

Genesis, and astronomy reveals creation. So, plan on joining us for an exciting experience of knowledge and wisdom as we spend time with Dr.

Jason Lyle at Calvary Chapel, South Jersey, 1210 Hessian Avenue, West Effort, New Jersey.

For further information, check out our website at ccsouthjersey .org, or call us at 856 -848 -4500.

And I sure hope I can get there myself to hear Dr. Jason Lyle, truly one of the most brilliant minds in Christendom in the 21st century, and especially in the area of science.

And I hope that I providentially can get there and hope to at least make the evening session this

Sunday, if God permits. And this is our last segment of the program today, so if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, email us at chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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We have a listener in Rome, New York. Charlie in Rome, New York has a question for you,

Dr. Carter. I mean, I have to enlarge it. I have to enlarge the font on this email because the font is microscopic, and I'm 56 and going blind.

Charlie in Rome, New York says, in regards to dogma, how can we ensure that we are inside the lines of always reforming and being stuck in false dogma?

How can we ensure we are not either swayed by every teacher we hear and also are not stuck in one way of thinking?

Well, I guess the answer to that is that we want to... we need to understand that the

Christian life is not a solo adventure, and it's not an individualistic thing. We are part of the

Body of Christ, and so the Body of Christ helps us with our thinking. The Body of Christ helps us with staying out of ruts and being open to the

Spirit. The Body of Christ helps us to not be swayed by winds of change and dogma, of changing doctrine.

So I think what we need to do is to appreciate the Body of Christ in its depth and breadth, and to understand that one of the great ways that we can challenge our thinking is to deny something basic.

I mean, that's a common mistake. Lots of people think that, well, you either just swallow everything or you challenge it and deny it.

But another way is to look at something from a different perspective. Well, how do you do that?

Well, one of the best ways to do it is by reading old books. C. S. Lewis, in his preface to Athanasius on the

Incarnation, C. S. Lewis writes that we should try to read two old books for every new book.

Now, that's perhaps a stretch for most of us, and I keep track in my reading, and I try to read...

I'm lucky if I read one for every one old book published. I define it as published before 1900.

For every 10 new books I read, I'm doing well if I do that. But the more important thing was, why did he think we should do that?

He said the reason you read old books is not because the writers centuries ago were infallible and never made mistakes, but because they make different mistakes.

And he said the thing you need to do when you read a book is to think about not only what is the author trying to say, what is the author arguing in this book, but also ask yourself, what does the author take for granted and not see any need to argue?

And that's going to be a reflection of the time and the situation and place in which the author is writing.

When I begin to write a book, I take certain things for granted, but that's because I'm living in the 21st century in Canada and the

Western world. But if I was writing in the 18th century in Germany, I would be taking different things for granted.

If I was writing in the 4th century or the 16th century, I'd be taking different things for granted, and I would be concerned to deny certain things, which today nobody would bother denying because nobody thinks that anyway.

So we need to learn to read books that are coming from other times and places, and we need to read them intelligently and notice, what do they assume?

What do they teach? What do they take as priorities? What do they feel they need to deny?

And that's a way of getting out of our rut, out of our groupthink, our simply repeating what we've been told, but without necessarily just challenging and denying things.

We're just getting a different perspective. I think that's a very helpful thing to do, and that's why college professors get students to read old books, or at least they used to, and they still should.

Amen. And they should go to solid -grand -books .com to find those old books, but Solid Ground Christian Books also publishes new books as well, but they are theologically sound, and I thank

God for Solid Ground Christian Books because they help keep this program on the air through their sponsorship.

By the way, thank you Charlie from Rome, New York. Please give us your full mailing address there in Rome, New York so that cvbbs .com

can ship you out a free copy of the book we are addressing, The Faith Once Delivered, by our guest

Dr. Craig Carter. Don't you think, to segue from what you just said and to segue from what

Charlie asked, we have to be very careful about hero worship.

I know Christians that I respect that say we shouldn't use the word hero.

I disagree with that. I think that there's nothing wrong and I think there's everything right with having heroes from history that we highly regard and we devour as much as we can from their writings and so on, but at the same time we have to be

Berean. We always have to go back to the scriptures to make sure what these heroes are teaching can be proved by the

Bible. I know Christians who sadly, and believe me this is no offense to my

Pato Baptist brethren, I love you and you know that I interview probably more Pato Baptists on Iron Trip and Zion Radio than Baptists even though I am a

Reformed Baptist, but I have actually heard Pato Baptist brethren when they tell me why they became

Pato Baptists. Some of them were Baptists and they became Pato Baptists and they will say, well all those great heroes of the faith from the

Reformation and the Puritans and so on, they can't all be wrong. Well yeah, they can.

They're fallible finite men who still have the baggage of sinful flesh on this earth and their minds are not pristine and they are not writing

God -breathed words like the authors of scripture, but isn't that a very dangerous thing?

Sometimes it may be even more prominent amongst those of us who are Reformed or Calvinistic to put too much weight on our heroes, am

I right? Yeah, I think it's true, but we need to have more heroes.

Oh yeah, I agree. And more, a wider variety of heroes. I have a book in front of me which

I just happened to be putting in my bibliography of something I was writing. It's called The Trinitarian Faith by T .F.

Torrance, but the subtitle, The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church.

I love that subtitle because there's lots of things that Torrance writes that I don't agree with, but that aspiration to find the evangelical faith in the ancient church fathers,

I think, is very helpful. So I think that we who are Reformed should take seriously the word

Reformed and meditate on that word a little bit. I mean, the word Reformed implies that our belief is not something new invented in the 16th century.

That word implies that our faith is what we have discovered as the true faith of the ancient church and uncovered it again, rather than inventing something new.

And so I find that Athanasius and Irenaeus and the Cappadocians and Augustine, especially

Augustine, are so helpful in my life, and they're among my heroes, as well as Calvin and the

Reformers. So I think we need to have lots of heroes and not just one or two.

That's probably the most dangerous, is when we think that there's one particular person who got absolutely everything right, and we just have to repeat that person's words.

I think that's dangerous because unless that person is Paul, and even

Paul, according to the fact that we have a canon of scripture, needs to be supplemented with Luke and Peter and John and the others, you know, unless you're talking about canonical scripture,

I don't think we should have one non -canonical writer who we think is right about absolutely everything, and we just follow that.

That seems to be the sign of servility and laziness, rather than a sign of honoring somebody.

If we honor somebody, we honor the Reformers best by agreeing with them that whatever teaching is true is based on scripture, and therefore we should always be trying to work our way back to scripture, using all the resources of all the teachers of the church throughout history to understand scripture as well as we can.

And that's the way we honor them the best. That's the way we honor our heroes the best, not by slavishly repeating what some one particular person says, as if that person was infallible.

Amen, and I'm fairly certain you would agree with me wholeheartedly that the slogan often repeated by our

Roman Catholic friends is totally incorrect. The quote of Bishop or Cardinal John Henry Newman, that to be steeped in history is to cease to be

Protestant. I can think of nothing that is more incorrect than that, because the more

I read from history and the church fathers, as you were mentioning, the more I'm convinced that Protestantism is true.

Of course, in the genuine sense of Protestantism, not modern apostate liberal mainline

Protestantism. Well, you know Cardinal Newman was an astute critic of modernity, and I have used his quote, and I change it slightly, because I think that what that quote points to is a big debate.

We should have that debate someday. The quote presumes that modernity, as in Western modernity, which is now expressing itself as neo -paganism, that this is somehow the result of the

Protestant Reformation. That the Reformation starts a process that ends up in secular modernity, secularism, and I think that's wrong.

I think that Cardinal Newman should have said, to be deep in history is to cease to be modern, rather than Protestant.

And so I want to group the Protestant Reformers as part of the Catholic Church, as part of the ancient church, as part of the pre -modern church, rather than seeing them as the forerunners of modernity.

And so this is a debate about where does, where do we understand Western civilization to have gone off the rails?

Did it go off the rails with Luther, or did it go off the rails with the denial of realism, and the rise of nominalism, and then with the

Enlightenment philosophy that happened in the first 16th, 17th century, that is trending away from Christianity altogether.

So it's an analysis of where did things go wrong, and I don't think things went wrong with Calvin. I think things went wrong with Descartes.

And to lump in the Reformers with the early modern philosophers is irresponsible, and it's just not a right interpretation of history.

And the worst thing about that is that much of what Newman decried in terms of the liberalism in the

Anglican church of his day, you know, I'm with him. And he is right to be concerned about the liberalism, but he's not right,

I don't think, in his diagnosis of where it came from. Amen.

And we have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who asks, if you could list three or four of the most essential doctrines that you address in your book, what would they be?

The most essential doctrines. Well, I would say that the way

I answer that question in my class is I say, look, what is the gospel?

And the gospel is a more complicated word than people think. So you could say, with Paul, 1

Corinthians 15, you could say that Christ died, and that he died for our sins, was buried, and rose again, and ascended, and is going to return.

That's the gospel. So that's talking about the events of saving history. However, you could also say that the gospel is the application of those saving events to the life of the believer in terms of salvation.

So the gospel is, you're a sinner, and you're under judgment, but Jesus died for your sins. If you repent and believe, you can be saved.

That's also the gospel. See, the gospel has these two levels. It has believing in the saving events of God creating and becoming incarnate and saving us, the whole plan of redemption, these great series of events that the

Bible bears witness to. And then there's the interpretation of those events in terms of what we have to do to be saved based on those events.

And I say to the students as a way, primarily, of getting them thinking, I say, now, let's consider

Roman Catholicism, and let's consider liberal Protestantism. And let's ask, because this is in the context of the doctrine of the lecture on the

Church, and what is the true Church. So could we say that which of these two manifestations of Christianity are actually possibly the true

Church? And I say, well, let's analyze it in terms of the gospel. Now, our

Catholic friends, we have a problem with them. The good thing about the

Catholics is that now, these are, of course, assuming that conservative Catholics, I know there are liberal

Catholics, but they're just liberal Protestants pretending to be Catholics, but real Catholics... I'm sorry.

The real Catholics are actually believing in the resurrection and the virgin birth and the second coming and so on.

So they believe in the saving events. They believe in the miracles. They believe that God brought Israel out of Egypt in the

Exodus and the Crown Pharaoh and the Red Sea. They believe all that. But where we disagree with them is on how we understand the application of those...

how do those saving events become beneficial to us in terms of salvation? So we have a problem with them in terms of the sacramental priesthood and doctrine of justification, etc.

But at least they believe in the saving events, and we're arguing about the interpretation of those events. The liberal

Protestants, on the other hand, don't even believe in those saving events. So we can't even get around to talking about the interpretation of the saving events because they don't believe in the saving events.

How can you talk about the meaning of the resurrection when they don't believe in the resurrection? How can you talk about the meaning of the penal substitutionary meaning of the atonement when they don't even believe that it was an atoning death?

So I say that to point out to people that liberalism is further away from our faith than even

Catholicism is, and J. Gresham Machen said the same thing in Christianity and liberalism. He said that, you know, he said, you know, we tend to think that just because somebody is a

Protestant, that means that that person is closer to Biblical Christianity than any

Catholic would be. But he says, you know, actually, that's not true. Liberal Protestantism is a different religion altogether.

It's a religion of progressivism. It's a humanistic religion. It's really not

Christianity at all. So what I try to do is to get my students to think through, what makes

Christianity Christian? What is the essence of it? And I want them to go away with the idea that, well, we need to believe in the saving events of the

Gospel as announced in Scripture, but we also need to believe in the correct interpretation of those events and how they become meaningful and beneficial to us in our lives, and we need both senses of the

Gospel. But liberal Protestants are even further away from us than Catholics because they don't believe in those saving events in the first place, and that's where we have to start.

If we don't even believe in those events, then there's no point in even arguing about their meaning. CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York says,

Don't you agree that Pope Francis is just as far away from Christianity as a modern liberal

Protestant? He seems to be denying most of the essentials of the faith, even most of the essentials of historic

Roman Catholicism, and I know that he hasn't declared anything ex cathedra that would be deemed as heretical by a

Roman Catholic, but he is still guiding his flock in those areas into liberalism.

Yes, I agree with everything that is said there. I must tell you that I have a great fondness for John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

I admired them as great minds and great thinkers and very orthodox on many, many, many points, and in many ways, you know, the

Catholic Church, for all its faults and heresies, is still a bulwark against persecution in the

Western world. When the Catholic Church crumbles and falls, it will be bad for all of us, in terms of the rising tide of secularism washing over Christianity.

It will lead to the further marginalization of Christians. But when you see what's happened in the last five years in the world, you realize that people say things can always get worse, and some people don't think so.

They think that things are as bad as they could get. Well, I can tell you they can always get worse, and they just did. Francis is a liberal

Protestant in his heart, and how the

Catholic Church, and I mean, many of my Catholic friends were so proud of John Paul II and Benedict XVI's orthodoxy, and they said, look, see there, the

Holy Spirit has given us these pastors. How can you not be a Catholic? And of course, now they're very embarrassed.

I mean, they just don't know how could

God allow this to happen after the ministry of those two popes. It's astonishing.

But yeah, Pope Francis is dangerous because he is deliberately encouraging murky thinking.

He's doing exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do in this catechism. In the catechism,

I'm saying that if we're going to stand up to secularism, if we're going to pass on the faith to the next generation, if we're going to be faithful Christians, then we need clarity and courage in understanding our faith.

We need to know, we need to be clear exactly what we believe, and we need to be clear enough to communicate it, and we need to be courageous in standing for it.

That's precisely what Francis is not doing. He's obscuring and muddling things, and being very unclear, and he's saying one thing out of one side of his mouth and another thing out of the other, and it's confusing people.

It's leaving people not knowing what to do, and I just think it's unfortunate. Well, you and I may have some disagreement in regard to Pope John Paul II and Benedict, because I believe,

I'm a former Roman Catholic, and I believe that any Pope is dangerous spiritually because of the very titles and power that they claim for themselves.

The fact that if any Pope upholds Trent, which is a different gospel than the one that we embrace, it's dangerous.

And in fact, I have a friend who's a Roman Catholic apologist, Robert St. Genes, who has been involved in several debates that I organized.

I have organized quite a number of debates, over 10 with Roman Catholics, and Robert St.

Genes, who is the Catholic participant in a number of them, he was fired from EWTN, the

Roman Catholic Television Network, because he dared to criticize Pope John Paul II for his ecumenism with all kinds of occultic and false religions, kissing the

Quran and having prayer gatherings with all kinds of pagan priests and false religions outside of Christendom.

And so, one of the things that I always go back to is the book of Galatians, where the

Apostle Paul, when he was being confronted with the Judaizers, the only thing that we know about the

Judaizers from the Bible is that they believed that circumcision needed to be added to faith in order for one to be a

Christian, and Paul thought that alone was repugnant enough and evil enough to consider them anathematized, and that we should declare them anathematized, too, the teachers who would dare to add anything to faith to justify a sinner.

And so, how do you respond to what I just said about those areas of ecumenism, if you will?

Well, I agree with you that John Paul could not be the pastor of our church. He wouldn't be theologically qualified.

And I certainly don't agree with everything that he did or said for any stretch of the imagination.

The ecumenism thing that you're referring to, that ecumenical service where he kissed the Quran and all that, that was just abhorrent.

In fact, many of the people who appreciated him and loved him were scandalized by that as well, and many faithful Catholics were.

That was just, nobody's perfect. When I talk about the

Catholic Church, there's a big difference between whether I think it needs to be reformed, which

I do, and whether I think that, you know, whether we can make distinctions between better and worse kinds of theology.

You know, I think that there are reasons why a conservative

Catholic pope would be better for evangelicals than a liberal pope.

It has to do with things such as, well, it's similar, actually, to Mormonism.

Do I think Mormonism is Christianity? No, I think it's a cult. I think it's false teaching. I don't think you can be saved believing the doctrines of Mormonism.

But if I were given a choice between having a group of postmodern relativistic secularists dominating my town or Mormons, there would be advantages to having more

Mormons around. You know, you'd have less, your schools wouldn't be as bad where you send your children.

They probably wouldn't be teaching gross sexual promiscuity indoctrination because of the

Mormon influence on the community. So there are things like that that, you know, we need to make distinctions, logical distinctions between this is better, that's worse.

But that's different from theology. That doesn't mean that just because Mormons live a more clean living than certain others, or more honest, or more family -oriented, that doesn't make their doctrine correct.

But it does make them better neighbors than certain other people. And that's kind of the way

I think about it in terms of Catholics. I'm thinking of the Catholic Church not just strictly in terms of doctrine, but I'm thinking of how do we evaluate the

Catholic Church in terms of our culture, and where our culture is going, and what it means to have...

You know, if all Roman Catholicism becomes liberal, then we're going to have the total number of people in the population who believe in God is going to go down rather than up, and that's going to harm the country as a whole.

You know, so there are reasons like that that I think are the basis of what

I'm saying. But, you know, no, I don't disagree with you. When it comes to the Gospel, the

Roman Catholic Church needs to be reformed. The Catholic Church needs to accept the

Pauline teaching on justification by faith and grace alone, and if it doesn't do that, it's teaching false doctrine, and that's bad.

But it could always be worse, and when we look around at some of the things that are happening in our society,

I mean, if you look across the ocean at Europe, the rise of Paganism in Europe is astonishing.

And as Paganism rises, it makes you realize there are things even worse than a culture dominated by the

Catholic Church. Worse, not necessarily worse in terms of salvation doctrine, but in terms of influence on the culture as a whole.

And we are out of time, and I know that your website for the West Knee Heights Baptist Church is westknee .ca,

w -e -s -t -n -e -y .ca, and I know that the Tyndale University College and Seminary can be found at tyndale .ca.

Do you have any other contact information that you care to give? No, that's fine. My email is on the websites, and anybody can email me at any time.

That's fine. And don't forget that the book that we have been discussing, The Faith Once Delivered, can be found at joshuapress .com

if you'd like to order that, or you could go to cvbbs .com, c -v -b -b -s dot com.

I want to thank you so much, Dr. Carter, for being my guest today, and if you could hold on,

I'd like to say a proper goodbye to you off the air. I want to thank all of our listeners, especially those who took the time to write in questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater