Book De recommendations (Part 3)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. I had at an opportune time to push record while Steve was singing a pop song.

You know, it�s interesting with� I�ve never heard �A Mighty Fortress is Our God� described as a pop song.

Well, it�s interesting, I�ve never heard of �Anticipation� by Carly Simon being a ketchup commercial song until sometime after the original song was released. Yeah.

Yeah, I can remember those commercials where they�re holding the bottle upside down. Yes, there�s nothing worse than having to wait for ketchup. That�s why we, you know, to come out of the bottle, that�s why we added extra water.

So it would come out faster. That was extra high-fructose corn syrup. I think John Kerry�s idea was that before he married into the family, the Heinz family. That was a brilliant idea. Do you buy Heinz stuff even though you know it�s owned by John Kerry?

Nine. Yeah, what do you buy instead? Nine Heinz.

You know, I don�t even remember the stuff. I mean, we don�t get the Heinz ketchup because it�s got the high-fructose corn syrup, and then I prefer brown mustard anyway, so.

I don�t really care. I mean, I just get whatever is in there. You don�t really carry? But if I had my druthers, I would get the Trader Joe�s, kind of, it�s organic. Not that I have to have organic stuff, but I like the taste of the organic ketchup at Trader Joe�s because they only sell organic, that�s it.

It tastes kind of tomatoey. You know, I would have thought that Trader Joe�s would have bought out Aldi, but Aldi bought out Trader Joe�s. That shows you the worldwide force of Aldi, but in America, it�s not such a nice place.

Is that what happened? Yeah.

Well, I�m just impressed that, you know, Amazon bought Whole Foods, that�s what impressed me.

I drove past the new Whole Foods down on Route 9 the other day, and they�ve got that, like, back alley swath of new places. It looked kind of cool. Yeah, it is.

I�m not a big Whole Foods person. When I go there, I go get a salad. That�s about all I get. They slashed the prices, though, Amazon did, when they. Oh, really? Oh, big time. Oh, see, I didn�t know that.

Yeah, I think, like, on day one, they cut them by 32%, and now they�ve cut them again. Well, because their whole thing is, they�re going to drive people out of business. That�s their goal.

So, that�s what they do. Now, Steve, there�s something that has come to my desk that�s of utmost importance. You know, I�ve heard Paul sometimes use the language in 1 Corinthians 15 of �first importance.

That�s this kind of thing. This is news. It�s breaking. It�s the new Beth Moore book. And the thing about it is, it�s a novel. So now she�s got a new novel. She�s dipping her toe into the waters of novels.

And so here is the name of the novel, �The Undoing of St. Silvanus. Now you know what? I normally� Are we going to review copies? Well, here�s what happens. I�ve even preempted that. I normally, since this is an elder-run congregation, I have to get permission from the elders if we� You know, we�re going to spend $500 ,000.

We don�t really need permission. But when we move over $1 ,000, we need elder approval, but I have to sometimes throw my weight around. And so I bought a case of Beth Moore, �Undoing of St. Silvanus� novellas for every person.

And so I maxed out the limit.

So are we switching over from the ESV to a.

Well, actually, that would be the indescribably thin ESV novella. And it says here, �This delivers engaging characters who expose the darkness, that friendship with word-faith people wait a second, �that destroy a father and threaten to separate a mother and daughter left behind.

Plus, readers can get the study guide to do contemplative prayer and meditation with John Piper and Lou Giglio and Francis Chan at Passion every year. Nice. That is fascinating to me. That�s great. See why I spent the limit and just went big?

Go big or go home. I just have one question before we move on to the different category. Where's Beth Moore�s husband?

He's on Beth Moore Island.

He's probably cashing the checks is what he's doing.

I look at that, you know, one interesting thing before we move on and wait for the books, this fascinates me because, you know, we've been talking about study Bibles and whatnot. Why isn't there a message study Bible?

Things that just, you know, it's just crazy to me. The Bible and contemporary language celebrate the important moments with a Bible that expresses, that fully expresses the joy of the occasion. The message is a reading Bible by scholar, pastor, author, and poet, Eugene Peterson.

It's a fiat. Did you see it? Give the message and share the unexpected passion and personality that fills God's Word.

In other words, if you don't have the message Bible, you don't see the passion and personality that fills God's Word. Yeah. That's the underlying subtext.

Wait, I have a great idea. Wait, there's still more. Yeah. What about a passion and personality study Bible in the message version?

Well, it could be, yes, but it would have to be for single ladies whose husbands are in South Korea at the wartime. Perfect. I think there's a large market for that. I was thinking that it says here, celebrate, I mean, I misread things, kind of like the sturdy Bible, study Bible.

I misread this one too. Celebrate the most important moments with the Bible that fully expresses the joy of the occasion. The message is a reading Bible by scholar, pastor, author, and man who frequently changes his mind on the meaning of 1 Corinthians 6, and homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God.

I thought that was kind of a special, it had a cadence to it.

That's the alternate reading to poets. Sure.

So now you're trying to go higher critical thinking on me. It was given like a what? A D rating by the Nestle Elan 28?

So true, and the new Greek New Testament version that's out. Yeah.

What would you do, Steve, if you wanted to write someone like you on No Compromise Radio? What's your email address? How do they write you? Is it the Tuesday guy or Tuesday guy?

I don't know. I think it's just Steve at No Compromise. Oh, that would probably get there. Yeah, okay. Or they could just write info at, you know, nocompromiseradio .com and just say, I have a question for Steve.

Yeah, or sometimes if you say, or here, let me just say this, and this is to Steve Chagrin. If you say Mike and Steve, I get a lot of them that say to Mike, so then I just send them to you when it says Steve and Mike, right?

Yeah, so make sure you leave me out. Yeah, totally. Okay, what else is going on in your world? Anything we need to talk about that's here in this magazine or, you know, the painful drama of being born again or anything by Beth Stovall?

No, I'm just awaiting the King, so the cultural liturgy.

The Painful Drama of Being Born Again

Okay, there's a story in here called The Painful Drama of Being Born Again, and it shows a hand going underwater with all kinds of bubbles effervescently going to the top. What if we took Jesus' famous metaphor more seriously by Beth Stovall?

Taking the birth metaphor seriously allows us to see in a new way how being born is linked to the hope of being the children of God. She is the Old Testament professor at Ambrose Seminary of Ambrose University with a sub-specialty of the theology of Bruce Springsteen.

Hmm. I'm just kidding. When I was at the University of Nebraska, they had a class called The Philosophy of Star Trek, and I laughed about it, but I should have taken it. Wouldn't that have been fun?

Well, I just think, you know, Springsteen does have a song called, you know, The Promised Land, because he believes in a promised land.

I think he has an album that I've never listened to, also called Nebraska, but I'm from Nebraska. Is that any good? Yeah, I like that album, actually. Yeah? Yeah. There's a new, oh, I thought about you the other day.

There's a new Van Morrison album out, Remembrances or something like that. Yeah, I just got it.

Yeah, is it any good? Well, I haven't, it actually just arrived last night, so I haven't listened to it. Actually, CD form. You didn't get the digital. No. So why is that? Because I like to be able to put it in my truck.

Oh, okay.

So. Yeah, all right. Well, what's happening in this article is thinking about birth, and she's thinking about the birth of her own son, and John is using these metaphors in chapter 3, verses 7 and 8 about being born again.

Now, the bad news is I haven't read the article, but if I was just going to make stuff up, because I know Christianity today in general, I would think that the, that she's going to take this birth thing a little too far.

What? So here are her points. Universal human experience. Not a painless process. Groaning with the bangs of childbirth. So, all right. John 16.

Yeah, there you have it. John 16 tells us that rebirth is not a one-time event. It doesn't say that. It does say that. Where? Right there. No. Page 57. No. John 16 tells us that rebirth is not a one-time event, but an event that occurs to us again and again and again.

Well, see, we needed to read this ahead of time so we could have zoned in on that. We could have zoomed in on it right away. This is just like saying you're justified, but then there's another justification, so you could have a process of justification.

That kind of sounds like Rome to me. By the way, we were just thinking about the pope. The pope is very disturbed that Jerusalem is going to be the capital. You know, it was only voted in 18 years ago, but he's disturbed now.

Well, he had measured the drapes for his own place and very disappointed.

I said to the kids the other day, if you had an opportunity as a pastor, as a Bible teacher, to address 60 ,000 people, you had one shot, what would you talk about? Right? So I've been to see the pope, different popes, three different times, St. Peter's in Rome.

And the last one I remember, and it was a message by this current pope. What's his name? Francisco?

Fernando. You know, I have a hard time keeping up with him. I mean, there was the Benedict and this new guy.

Steve, you know what? For so many years with Pope John Paul II, we had no changes in the papacy. So we didn't know about all these white smokes and mirrors that are... It's not innocent the fifth. He didn't go with that.

Yeah, I know. Boniface the... What was... Is it Bono? Race Bannon the fourth? Was that it? Is Bono the... I think Bono wants to be the pope. He'd be better than... You know what? I think we forgot to talk about it last time, the Bono study Bible, bringing out social activism in every verse, especially the Psalms.

He took the time to do his own study Bible. Yeah, it's called October.

I can't believe the news today. I can't. I just can't close my eyes and make it go away.

Anyway, I heard the pope last time, and he said, there needs to be more family time, and so you need to turn off your devices, electronic devices. And play board games. And I said to my kids, you know what?

That's actually true, but I don't need a religious leader to tell me, right? I need some good news. Do you have any good news for me? If you have one opportunity... He wouldn't even have to give a message.

He could have just read John 10.

I would have been happy. Well, you know, if you're a pastor... Now, you are a pastor, but if your pastor sat down with you and said, Mike, you've got young kids. You don't have young kids, but let's say you did.

You have young kids. Let me just give you some tips. Take all their cell phones, all their tablets, all that stuff. Put them in a box. It's dinner time. You know, let's gather together. Let's have some scriptures, some discussion about God, about Christ, about the gospel.

You know, let's talk about how we flesh that in our daily living, you know. And then after everybody's done eating and talking and everything else, well then, you know, maybe at your discretion, everybody gets their stuff back.

But let's not be distracted while we're talking about the things of God.

Evangelicals, Church History, and Rome

Steve, I'm feeling some evangelical drift coming from you. Could you clarify? Evangelical drift. Okay, so we're looking at this Christianity Astray magazine, and there's a book that you could order, and that's giving it all away and getting it all back again.

I just thought it was subtitled Karma, but that was a different story. Evangelicals Don't Forget Your Heritage by Greg R. Allison. And he teaches at Southern Seminary, and he's got an article about, and he's a church historian, remember, he's got the Mirror to Grudem Systematic Theology, and it's called Christian History or something like that, that green one, right?

And I think what he's going to try to do is, I don't know what his goal is. I hope his goal is not the blending of Protestants and Roman Catholics. Yeah, bad goal. That would be a bad goal. He quotes Scott McKnight back in 2002, quote, this is Scott McKnight, many feel they are isolated in the faith in a modern evangelical movement that has cut itself off from the history of the church.

Most evangelicals know almost nothing about the early fathers, and what they do know supports what they already believe, so why bother studying them? This historical disenfranchisement, when discovered, can lead to curiosity.

Even more profoundly, it can lead to a need to discover how the church developed, and many evangelicals were led right to Rome when they began to study this part of church history. What do you think of that?

What do you think of the evangelical that needs to go back to see what tradition is? Is that okay for students to do? Is it okay for the lay people to do? Is there a warning that we should put on this label?

Well, I think maybe his point, if I can go this direction, I think his point is that if we ultimately fail as pastors to identify ourselves in a historical stream of teaching, then ultimately if people start looking for the roots of what they're being taught, some might actually go back to Rome, seeing there the consistent—although that would be erroneous— seeing the consistency of hundreds of years of teaching.

And the reality is, if you go back—it's funny, because if you go back far enough, even the church councils conflict with one another, these supposedly inerrant church councils.

Steve, not talking about the article by Greg, but just generally speaking, when it comes to church fathers and Roman Catholicism, and do we know our heritage as Protestant evangelicals? And didn't Calvin quote Bernard of Clairvaux and Augustine and Augustine?

You know, they were twins, I think, Augustine and Augustine. Yeah. Yeah. Here's what I think—. Crazy cousin, Aquinas. Even when it comes to biblical studies, biblicism, and sola scriptura, and what kind of tradition does sola scriptura allow for, here's my big thing.

I'm a pastor first, and so I have to be careful that I just don't point the people that I'm shepherding. Here, go back and study these fathers. See how close we are to Rome. It just has some danger. So when I'm doing a podcast, or I'm sitting around with friends, or it's a seminary class, or something like that, and people are saying, you know what?

Aquinas was right when it comes to God without passions and parts and all this stuff, and see what he did there, and he had a lot of good stuff. Okay, I understand that, and I'm not naive to it, but I have to be careful that, especially here in New England, these people are Roman Catholics in this area, and many of them saved out of Roman Catholicism.

For me to try to blend Rome and the Protestant vein of thinking back together again, it's not pastorally wise until people are ready. And additionally, and by faith alone. So that when they study Church history and say, you know what?

Before Trent, there were a few Roman Catholics that believed in justification by faith alone. Well, yeah, duh, there were. But that doesn't mean Rome back in those days is Rome these days, and Rome back in those days is Protestant evangelicalism today.

I have to be careful, because Rome is a damning system that is so close to being right, but then goes off the deep end. I just, there's a pastoral element that is different than the scholastic element, is my point.

Well, I think the key, whether it's me, whether it's you, whether it's Spurgeon, whether it's Augustine or Augustine. Augustine. Any of those guys. We always have to compare what is taught with Scripture.

And if it's wrong, it's wrong. And I don't care if it's, you know, if Aquinas got, let's say, 70 of his theology right, and I'm being nice, because I think probably 70 is not even comprehensible. But if he got 70 of it right, well, how critical were the 30 in errors?

So we always have to look at the whole corpus of what they did, of what they produced. And certainly, if Aquinas got things right, well, you know what? Guess what? If we were talking just in terms of theology, we could find some theological truths, wait for it, in Aristotle.

Does that mean that we, you know, that we should study Aristotle so we can understand what we believe? No, we should not. Aristotle might give us useful categories, and he might, you know, give us useful principles.

Is he going to teach us anything about Scripture? The answer is no.

When I study church history, Steve, I'll say to myself, you know what? Let's study the fathers. What did they contribute that, as you just said, was biblical, and where were they in error? What did Aquinas contribute?

Where was he in error? And you just see what has been happening as the Spirit of God has been directing not just church history, but history with these different people. But when I read Galatians, and I say, well, you know what?

Paul did not say, hey, these are all the things we have in common. These are all the threads of Judaism that we've been gleaning from. Because they're adding works, i .e. circumcision, and we can easily put in baptism in its place now, to the finished work of Christ Jesus, he blistered them.

Well, you were saying he didn't say, you know what? It's no big deal. These are minor differences.

We can paper over, right? Seriously. I mean, because he could have said in Galatians 1, now they agree that there's a Trinity, right? They believe in the name of God, the singular name of God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit in Matthew 28.

They believe that Jesus is fully God. They believe that Jesus turned the water into wine. They believe that He healed lepers. They believe that He died on the cross. They believe that He was literally raised.

He's literally coming back. They believe all that. But what Paul did instead is he said, listen, if you appropriate those benefits that Christ has achieved through faith plus anything, your anathema, I don't care if I say it or the guy on top of the Mormon temple Moroni says it, it doesn't matter.

And we have to be careful when I think we look at people who are baptismal regenerationists in church history and church fathers. S. Lewis Johnson used to call church fathers church children, because we've been seeing the Church of God being built for 2 ,000 years now, and maturing.

Haven't we matured in our thoughts compared to the church fathers?

Steve. Absolutely. And don't we have more materials and better ways of sorting through and even comparing, you know, the teaching of different men and scripture and everything else over the centuries.

So we've got more now than they ever had. And yeah, I absolutely agree with that.

Steve, I think also when we study church history, even with, remember the Bernard Ram? History and Science of Biblical Interpretation. I love that book because it showed the philosophical underpinnings of different hermeneutical styles in time.

So generally speaking, in medieval time, it was much more figurative, and it was something representing four other things. And, you know, I'm trying to remember, it wasn't the quadrangle Wesleyan thing, but something pretty close, that weird kind of deal.

There's a regular meaning, there's the underlying meaning. Even studying the history of hermeneutics is going to be helpful for the student. And as a pastor, I want to be very careful not to cloud things so that everybody thinks, well, you know, we came from Roman Catholicism and all that.

I just have a different.

Approach. Mark. Because we didn't come from Roman Catholicism any more than, you know, Scripture was created. I mean, if you listen to Roman Catholic apologists, they'll tell you that, hey, without us, you wouldn't even have the Scripture, you know.

No, we are not schismatic. We didn't break off from Rome as if Rome were a legitimate church. We had some certain disagreements over some issues. And so, you know, this isn't like Presbyterians and Baptists, where we disagree over mode of baptism or, you know, timing of baptism.

These are real salvific issues. The Roman Catholic Church was and is apostate. That is to say, they teach a false gospel, a false works system. And, you know, to suggest that we are the spawn, you know, of that is just wrong.

Mark. And I think probably what.

Some will do is they'll take any type of, hey, we have some of the same roots type of philosophy, and then try to bring Protestants and Roman Catholics back together now. And the jokes on the Protestants, because Rome's not going to change, jokes on the evangelicals, because Roman Catholics will say about anything without changing the doctrines.

They'll say we're coming together with this Lutheran statement of faith, but they didn't change. Trent, Vatican II, or.

Anything else. Tom. And they never will.

Statement of Faith, Church Websites, and Ministry Contact

Mark I know, I know. So if you would like to contribute a statement of faith to No Compromise Radio, we'd like to just come up with our own statement of faith, things that are important to us. We're accepting applications.

And I think it's a pretty high paying job, the official statement.

Of faith maker. Tom I think we'll probably get some applications on this one. Mark. Uh-huh. Well, you know, it's like,.

You know, people won't make certain cakes. They won't be cake makers for certain people. Would.

You be a statement of faith maker for others? Tom Pray about it, and if you get a warm, fuzzy.

Feeling. Mark. Uh-huh. When you look at a website, a church website, and it's got a statement of faith with kind of 10 things on there, this is our statement of faith, what do you usually think of, Steve?

Tom I usually think, I usually think this is light and fluffy, and I can only imagine what.

Sermons are like. That's what I think. Mark Uh-huh. Well, you know what? I typically think that they're using the life application study people. Tom. With massage. Mark Uh-huh. If you want to write us, info at nocompromiseradio .com.

Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.