May 20, 2021 Show with Dr. Nathan Busenitz on “Forerunners of the Faith”

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

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Chris Arnzen. 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 Arnzen, your host at Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 20th day of May 2021.

I'm thrilled to have back as a returning guest today Dr. Nathan Buzanitz and Dr.

Buzanitz is such a kind brother that he never even corrected me during our last interview for mispronouncing his name.

I was calling him Dr. Nathan Buzanitz and I just was informed that the correct pronunciation is

Buzanitz. So Dr. Nathan Buzanitz who is Dean of Faculty and Associate Professor of Theology at the

Masters Seminary, the seminary founded by John MacArthur, he is going to be addressing today one of his books,

Forerunners of the Faith, Thirteen Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the

Basics of Church History. We're also going to be announcing the G3 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia which is being held

September 30th through October 2nd where Dr. Nathan Buzanitz, I did it again, where Dr.

Nathan Buzanitz is on the roster with over 20 speakers and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Ayn Trupman's Ayn Radio, Dr.

Nathan Buzanitz. Hey thanks Chris, you know either way you pronounce it's fine with me, it's just good to be back on the show so thanks for having me back.

Oh it's great to have you back on the show and tell our listeners something about the Masters Seminary. Yeah the

Masters Seminary out here in Los Angeles, I think it might be encouraging for your listeners to know that there are

Christians on the West Coast. They obviously don't vote.

Well we're outnumbered but we're a faithful remnant and we're eager to see men trained to take the gospel to the ends of the earth.

So we're training preachers, expository preachers, to prioritize the authority and sufficiency of the

Word of God and bring that to bear in the lives of people in their churches. So it's a joy to be out here and a joy to be on the show with you today.

Amen, and I want to give the website for that seminary, it's TMS .edu,

TMS for the Masters Seminary dot edu. And a couple of my friends have graduated from that seminary, that fine institution.

One of them long before your time, Pastor Chris Pandolfi, a very good friend of mine who's now pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Medford, Long Island, New York.

And also Matt Tarr, are you familiar with Matt Tarr? Yeah, sure, I know Matt, in fact he just finished up his doctorate of ministry degree with us, which was his second degree from TMS.

Yes. Great guy. Oh, he's a great guy, and I look forward to him returning to the program.

In fact, since I think so highly of Pastor Matt, let me give you a plug for his church.

It's High Point Baptist Church in Larksville, Pennsylvania. And the website for that church is highpointbaptist .com,

highpointbaptist .com. And they also have highpointbaptist .church as a

URL, highpointbaptist .church. And I strongly recommend if you are visiting the

Larksville, Pennsylvania area, or if you live in that area, to pay that church a visit and even join it if you are living locally.

I have nothing but the highest regards and recommendations for Pastor Matt and High Point Baptist Church.

I'm sure there's many other people that I know that graduated from the Master's Seminary that I didn't even know that aspect of their lives, but certainly

John MacArthur is one of my greatest living heroes, and Grace Community Church and all that comes out of that fine congregation is a blessing to me greatly.

Well, we are going to be discussing today your book on Forerunners of the

Faith, Thirteen Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the Basics of Church History. And actually before we go into that topic, tell us something about how you got in contact with Josh Bice, who is the founder of the

G3 Conference. He's also pastor of Praise Mill Baptist Church in Douglasville, Georgia, not far from Atlanta.

And I'm very happy that you are once again on the roster of that conference, the

G3 Conference. Well, I will be manning an Iron Trip and Zion Radio Exhibitor's booth for the fourth year in a row.

So how did this all come about for you? Yeah, thanks Chris. Well, Josh and his staff there are just a great group of people, and we've been very thankful for the influence that the

G3 Conference has had over the last number of years. I had an opportunity several years ago, in fact

I think it was in 2017, to be part of that conference.

It was, at that point, it was the first year, I believe, that they were doing it in the Convention Center there in Atlanta, and did a presentation on looking at the doctrine of justification in pre -Reformation

Church history, which was some of the content that was in the book that I put together called

Long Before Luther, and so I had an opportunity to be part of the conference in that way.

And then this year, the theme is all about the person and work of Christ, the supremacy of Christ as the

Lord of the Church, and I had the opportunity to be one of the presenters, one of the speakers, just really, really excited about the topic and grateful for the opportunity and thrilled about the rest of the men who are going to be speaking.

It's a great lineup. So thank you for mentioning the conference, and also thank you for your part in being part of it every year.

Yeah, it has been an extraordinary blessing to me every year, not only because of the speakers that are all so gifted and thoroughly equipped to expound and exegete the scriptures and the music that they provide, but also the fellowship, not only reuniting with friends, some of whom

I have not seen for many years, even some of my friends that I had from Long Island, New York, who fly into Georgia that I have not seen in years, who were among my very first friends as a

Christian, also making new friends and meeting people that I have never met before who listen regularly to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

It's amazing how many people, when I go to the G3 conference, people recognize my face from the website and from Facebook, I'm assuming, because I'll hear people yelling to me from far away in the crowds, ìIron

Trip and Zion, Chris Harnson !î And it's such a blessing to meet some of these folks and learn from them how much a part of their lives

Iron Trip and Zion Radio has become. It's very humbling and I'm very honored and privileged to hear these things, and sometimes

I even have the privilege of not only interviewing the speakers on site at my

Iron Trip and Zion exhibitors booth with the help of my webmaster, Eric Nielsen, and his wife,

Sandy, and his daughters, who distribute literature and so on, but I also interview, on occasion, listeners who let my listeners know, my other listeners know, how they've been blessed.

So, go to G3conference .com if you want to find out more about registering, G3conference .com,

and I hope that you register and I hope you visit me at my exhibitors booth, that's September 30th through October 2nd.

Now, Four Runners of the Faith, 13 Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the

Basics of Church History. As you know, Nathan, there are many books on church history, and even many books on church history written by those that share our theological background.

Why did you feel a need to add another book on history to the library shelves of Christians to help them even in a greater way appreciate those that have lived and died before us, whose shoulders we stand upon, really, in many ways.

If you are a wise person, you are not going to be so arrogant of your own knowledge or so cultic about your own church that you do not make use of great minds and great lives of Christians that have lived throughout the centuries, even after the apostolic era.

And there are people out there like that. They don't think they needed to know anything about those folks, which is such a tragedy and such a sign of arrogance, in my opinion.

But tell us why you feel or you felt or believed. Sometimes that word, feel, slips out of my mouth.

Tell me why you believed or why you thought that Forerunners of the

Faith was a good idea to add to the volumes on history that we already have. Yeah, thanks,

Chris. You're right that there are many very, very good resources that have been written that document the history of the church.

And some of them give broad overviews. Others are biographical in their approach.

Others are apologetic in the way that they handle that historic data. But there really is a wealth of information that's readily available for those who want to study it.

What makes Forerunners of the Faith a little bit different, and I think provides a unique contribution, at least

I hope, is that it's actually a curriculum that's designed for churches, either through the

Sunday school class or in other group settings. It can be done as an individual study as well.

It provides them with a curriculum to actually teach their people the basics of church history so that their congregation comes away with more or less a foundational framework for how to understand what

God has been doing in the church over the last two millennia. So it was that curriculum approach, the

Sunday school material approach to the subject matter that I think makes it unique.

Obviously, the content is content that is well known by those who have studied history.

I think, ironically, many in the church today, even in good Reformed Evangelical churches, many are fairly ignorant of the history of the church, especially pre -Reformation church history.

So this was intended to be a way for people to sort of ease into a subject that they may not know a lot about, to do it in a group context through their church, and hopefully to begin to bridge that gap so that all of those other resources that are out there fit within that framework that hopefully we provide in this curriculum.

So it's an entry into the study of church history through a curriculum -style format that's intended to help local churches teach their people about what

God's done in the church over these last 20 centuries. So you go back as far as the patristic era and go into a summary, at least, of the church fathers?

Yeah, we actually start with the Book of Acts, which of course is a Spirit -inspired book of church history.

I like to tell my students at the seminary that God cares enough about church history that He put a book of it in the

New Testament. So we start with the Book of Acts on the day of Pentecost. And Luke, of course, was a historian himself.

He was, very much. And a doctor. And a doctor. And then we go, right after the first century, we go into the early church fathers.

So there's 13 lessons. We don't get to the Reformation until Lesson 9 or 10.

Wow. So we want to make sure that people have a thorough understanding.

Again, it's an introduction, but we want to make sure that they have a comprehensive understanding of all 2 ,000 years of church history, not just the last 500 years.

You know, that is very important and very good news to hear, because having been someone who has arranged over 30 debates,

I believe, over the last 30 years, primarily debates that I have orchestrated between Dr.

James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and more recently I have included even

Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary. Primarily these debates, not exclusively, but primarily they have been debates on the heresies of Roman Catholicism and Dr.

White or Dr. Costa will have a Roman Catholic opponent of the

Roman Catholic Church of high standing within Catholicism, typically, with a good reputation.

And one of the things that has troubled me is when

I hear the testimonies of evangelicals who have converted to Roman Catholicism, they very often have as the greatest influence on their decision to do this.

To apostatize, as far as I'm concerned, is they've been seduced by a

Roman Catholic apologists or Roman Catholic apologists, plural, with a warped and falsified understanding of church history.

And I think that even our own evangelical

Protestants, who are typically under the heading of fundamentalists, do us a disservice when they could not care less about the patristic era or those years before the

Reformation. And even hand to the

Roman Catholic Church that period of history gift -wrapped and agree with the

Roman Catholics, oh these are nothing but Catholics, these are nothing but Roman Catholics. Now of course there is a difference between Roman Catholicism with a capital

R and a capital C and Catholicism with a small c. Am I right? Isn't it important that we, just like the

Reformers did, regain as a part of our own history, this period of time, because the

Church Fathers agreed with us over Rome on a multitude of issues, especially those issues involving salvation, did they not?

Yeah, you're exactly right. And again, I would agree fully that sadly many evangelicals have kind of surrendered the first 1500 years of Church history to Roman Catholicism as if Roman Catholicism is an accurate representation of the patristic and early medieval period, and the reality is that it's not an accurate reflection of what the

Church Fathers and early medieval scholars really believed. And you're absolutely right that on the majority of theological issues, the

Church Fathers are far more evangelical than they are Roman Catholic. We talked about this the last time

I was on your program, but one of our mutual friends is Bill Webster, and he has done an incredible amount of work on this particular area, and I would highly recommend his works to your listeners.

His Church of Rome at the Bar of History, published by Banner of Truth, his website,

ChristianTruth .com, has a lot of his articles on there, and then of course his work on the

Matthew 16 Controversy, his three -volume set with David King on Holy Scripture, he just does,

Bill Webster, or William Webster, just does an amazing job. He was a former Roman Catholic who the

Lord graciously saved, and his heartbeat is then to reach out to Roman Catholics by demonstrating that Roman Catholicism is not only not biblical, it's also not an accurate representation of what early

Christians really believed throughout Church history. And I think part of reclaiming

Church history for the Evangelical Church is to make Evangelicals aware of their history.

Ignorance can and is used against the Church and the Evangelical Church when it comes to the history of the

Church, and so the way to combat against that ignorance is to begin to explore what

God did through the lives of believers in those early centuries, and I think when Evangelicals discover the richness that's there, they're greatly encouraged, because they see that like -mindedness on so many of our core convictions.

Amen. And, so what, you said you start at Acts, which is obviously the biblical account of history, a

God -breathed account, and you go up to the

Reformation, and I believe you said the 10th lesson, I think it was? Yeah, it's

Lesson 10. And how, where does Lesson 13 bring you in history?

Yeah, so, well, Lesson 1 sets the biblical framework, so we want to make sure that we are always being faithful as Protestant Evangelicals to the priority and primacy and sufficiency of Scripture, so even as we study history, we have to do so through a biblical grid, because Scripture alone is our authority.

So the first lesson sets sort of a biblical grid for how to think about Church history, and then

Lesson 2 is the Book of Acts, then Lessons 3, 4, 5, and 6 all deal with the

Patristic period, Lessons 7, 8, and 9 deal with the Medieval period, and then

Lesson 10 is the Reformation, and then 11, 12, and 13 move from the

Reformation all the way up through the Modern period. Lesson 13 in particular is called the

Battle for the Bible, and it focuses in on the fundamentalist liberal controversies of the late 19th and early 20th century, and then the birth of Neo -Evangelicalism, what today we would just call

Evangelicalism, and then sort of ends with a call for the reader to continue to champion the authority and primacy of Scripture in this generation as those who are called to be faithful.

So that's where the Forerunner's curriculum ends. Yeah, I think that,

I'm sure you would agree that a lot of the problems that have arisen in Neo -Evangelicalism have been due to a very lack of knowledge of Church history.

I mean, obviously, it demonstrates a serious lack of knowledge of the

Scriptures, which is even more important, but they very often go hand in hand because many folks, due to their ignorance of history, allow history to repeat itself in a horrible way by reviving, perhaps unconsciously, heresies that have already been refuted very articulately in the past by our

Christian heroes. Am I right? Yeah, absolutely. I like to use the analogy of getting vaccinated, which

I know right now is a controversial thing to talk about, but I don't mean it in the modern sense. Studying Church history is sort of like, when you see how the

Church handled error in the past, you can learn from the arguments, the

Biblical arguments that they used to expose and to reject and to refute that error, and so rather than you having to go through the entire process of engaging that error the way they did, you can take what they thought, you can learn from it, you can glean it, or it's almost like when we're ignorant of Church history, we are so susceptible to falling for those same errors, whereas when we learn from Church history, it's like our immune system has already handled this particular disease, and we are ready to refute it without having to suffer unnecessarily from it.

So, maybe I need to change my analogy because vaccinations have gotten so controversial, but I do think that studying

Church history prepares us well to face any sort of error or any sort of heretical threat, and when we're ignorant of Church history, whether or not we repeat the history exactly, we certainly are susceptible to errors and to pitfalls that we don't need to be susceptible to because the

Church has already thought through those issues in the past. Yes, in order to avoid having the unpleasant thoughts of Dr.

Fauci rise up in one's mind, perhaps you should change the analogy to having a healthy diet and exercise.

I like it. I'm sorry, go ahead.

I just was going to say I want my analogies to be Fauci free. I want everything to be

Fauci free as far as I'm concerned. I just want to let our listeners know we're going through our first break right now, so if you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzenn at gmail dot com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail dot com.

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We'll be right back with Dr. Nathan Buzanitz and our discussion on Forerunners of the

Faith, 13 Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the Basics of Church History, right after these messages from our sponsors.

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Thank you. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned us in.

Our guest today for the full program is Dr. Nathan Buzanitz, Dean of Faculty and Associate Professor of Theology at the

Masters Seminary. We are addressing his book, Forerunners of the Faith, 13

Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the Basics of Church History. Our email address if you have a question that you'd like to ask on the air is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

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

USA. We have Grady in Asheboro, North Carolina, a very loyal listener and very generous financial supporter of this program.

He says, Greetings, brothers. How much do we know about the church during the medieval period?

Was the laity kept in the dark, no pun intended, when it came to the

Bible and the gospel? Yeah, that's a great question about the church in the

Middle Ages. And I think there are a number of different perspectives, even among evangelical scholars, about kind of the nature of the remnant of true believers during that period of time.

The prevailing viewpoint would be that there were true believers who were part of the broader

Roman church, and I'm using Roman there to refer to the church of the entire

Roman Empire. It wasn't until the year 1054 that we can speak about the

Roman Catholic Church of the West and the Eastern Orthodox Church of the East.

And I do think we find, even among those that would kind of be considered part of that Roman church,

I do think we find evidence that there were true believers who were part of that system, even though there were elements of corruption that had been sown and eventually reached the point where that church became an apostate movement.

I think that was a little bit later, and we do have forerunners to the Reformation who come on the scene right around that time.

There would be others who would say that maybe there were some groups that were outside of the main

Roman church who represented faithful groups. There's an author who put together a book called

The Pilgrim Church a few years ago that kind of looked at some of those groups, and there's quite a bit of debate about that.

Where there really is no debate, though, is knowing that God has always had a remnant of his people in every age and every generation.

We see that principle, of course, all the way back in 1 Kings 19 during the days of Elijah, but we see the truth of it in church history.

And again, I think we see testimony to the truth of the gospel, testimony to the truth of the

Lordship of Christ, to the priority of his word, all throughout the entirety of church history, both the patristic and the medieval periods, and then, of course, the

Reformation and modern periods. If you're interested, another good book recommendation would be

Steve Lawson, Stephen J. Lawson, his book, A Long Line of Godly Men.

It's called Pillars of Grace, it's volume two, and actually traces the doctrines of grace throughout the first 1 ,500 years of church history, and I think you would be very encouraged to find that there are champions of not just biblical soteriology, but more precisely, a

Reformed soteriology, which, of course, is a biblical soteriology. You find champions of that Reformed soteriology all the way from the

New Testament through the Church Fathers, through the medieval period, up to the time of the

Reformers. So that's Pillars of Grace by Stephen Lawson. Yeah, I had the privilege years ago to interview

Dr. Lawson on that book on the old Iron Sharpens Iron radio when we were still broadcasting out of WNYG on Long Island, New York, and I remember being utterly riveted by that conversation and being extremely blessed by the book itself, and I'm very happy to know that Dr.

Lawson will be joining you along with over 20 other speakers at the G3 conference again this year, so it's another good thing to look forward to.

Thank you, Grady. Absolutely. Thank you, Grady, and I know that we have your mailing address on file, so our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com,

will ship that book out to you that you just won, Forerunners of the Faith, 13

Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the Basics of Church History, published by Moody.

CVBBS .com will ship that out to you as soon as they get it. Our friends at Moody just shipped those copies of the book out to us today, so please be a little patient with us, because CVBBS .com

doesn't have them yet, but we will get them over to CVBBS immediately when we have the shipment, which should be arriving at least by early next week, and we thank

Janice Todd and the folks at Moody Publishers for their generosity in providing these books, as they always do when we interview one of their authors.

And just to give them a little plug, their website is MoodyPublishers .com,

MoodyPublishers .com. The problem isn't true.

The problem with finding about more of what those outside of the

Catholic Church, whether it is the more recognized Catholic Church amongst the patristics or the truly aberrant and apostate group that we would call the

Roman Catholic Church, isn't one of the difficulties of knowing the theology of those that existed outside of those groups, you just mentioned there's been a debate about that amongst historians, but isn't it one of the things that makes this problematic is that there were

Christians that were very severely persecuted, and their literature was burned and so on.

Am I correct in understanding it that way? Yeah, that's right.

So, I do think we have to be careful before we just embrace any group that was outside of the mainstream

Church of the Roman Empire, because some of those groups truly were heretical, aberrant groups.

Yeah, some of our Fundamentalist friends make the mistake of branding all under the umbrella of Anabaptists as being a part of their ancestry, and many of those

Anabaptists from centuries past would never be allowed in membership in the Fundamentalist Baptist Churches of our day.

And of course, even that's problematic, because Anabaptists is a very broad term.

They were not a monolithic group. Yeah, that's right. And you're right, the term

Anabaptist was often used by the enemies of those groups to label all of them under one umbrella, and then to persecute them all as a result.

So we have to take these groups on a case -by -case basis, and sometimes it is difficult to know what they really believed, because as persecuted groups, a lot of the things that they produced were destroyed or did not survive.

I tend to be more of the opinion that God had a true remnant within the lowercase c

Catholic Church, which, of course, that word simply means universal, and it doesn't have negative connotations until we get into the

High Middle Ages and then the Late Middle Ages, when the Roman Catholic Church becomes the apostate movement that it is today.

So, you know, in the book Long Before Luther that we had the opportunity to discuss the last time

I was on your program, really the heart of that book is finding witnesses to the

Gospel of Grace within that Roman Church in the pre -Reformation period, and I came away convinced that there are witnesses to the

Gospel of Grace. They're abundant in the Patristic period, and they're still there in the

Medieval period. It is true that sacramentalism and synergism and traditionalism begin to obscure the

Gospel in the Medieval period, and that's why the Reformation becomes so necessary, because those doctrines are recovered in the

Reformation. But the Reformation is not something new in Church history, it's the recovery of doctrines that you can find in both the

Patristic and Medieval periods, and then, of course, you find them taught in Scripture, which was the

Reformers' primary concern. Yes, and of course, those heroes of the faith that were members of the

Roman Catholic Church were most often executed, so they began in that communion, but the truths over which they could not remain silent typically got them in some serious trouble.

Well, we certainly see that when we get into the high Middle Ages, which is the late

Middle Ages, 14th, 15th century, so with the

Waldensian movement, which I would regard as a movement of true believers, even though Waldensians today have largely embraced liberalism, but the

Waldensian movement going all the way back to the 12th century, very persecuted by Roman Catholic authorities.

And then you have John Wycliffe and the Lawlord movement in England, persecuted by the

Roman Catholic Church. John Huss, the Hussite movement, the Moravian movement, persecuted by the

Roman Catholic Church. And then you have the Reformers in the 16th century, and they also were persecuted by the

Roman Catholic Church. So no question that those, especially when we get into the high and Middle Ages, after Roman Catholicism has apostatized fully, that those who attempted to stand boldly for the gospel of grace often paid for that stand with their very lives.

Even the word martyr, you know, the Greek word martus means witness, and that's where we get the

English word martyr. To be a martyr is to be a witness to Jesus Christ, even unto death, and in the early

Church, Christians were martyrs because of the Roman government. In the pre -Reformation and Reformation period,

Christians were martyrs because of the Roman Catholic Church. And so it's interesting how

Rome was involved in persecuting the true Church, both in the early days and in the centuries surrounding the

Reformation. Well, I'd like you to highlight some of the primary figures that you address in your book throughout the ages that our listeners should at least begin to become acquainted with, and then they can find out more later with further research in your books and others.

But tell us. Yeah, happy to. I'll start at one of the earlier ones. Sure. One of the things that I think is so wonderful about Church history is it really is a collection of biographies.

And I haven't met anyone who doesn't love a good biography. And when it's a

Christian biography, it becomes such a compelling, almost continuation of Hebrews chapter 11 with the heroes of the faith, that these are men and women who walked in faithfulness to the

Lord, and their faithfulness in the past spurs on our faithfulness in the present. So we start very early, after the time of the

Apostles, with some of the Apostolic Fathers, meaning the Church leaders who came right after the

Apostles. This is men like Polycarp of Smyrna, Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, and others.

Then we move into the Apologists, like Justin Martyr, the Polemicists, like Irenaeus of Lyon.

We talk a little bit about Tertullian and Origen, and then we're into the fourth century with Athanasius taking his great stand for the deity of Christ, and the

Council of Nicaea, and then the Post -Nicene Fathers with Augustine and Chrysostom.

Chrysostom, the great preacher, and Augustine, the great theologian of the late fourth, early fifth century.

Then we jump into the Middle Ages, and we talk about the seven major councils of Church history, and how evangelicals should think about those things.

Spoiler alert, we need to submit them to the authority of Scripture. So we embrace a council only insofar as what the council has determined is consistent with what the

Word of God reveals. So Scripture's the authority over councils, not vice versa. Then we go into the, really, the middle of the

Middle Ages, and we talk about the Great Schism of 1054, we talk about the Crusades, we talk about the birth of the university system in Europe, and then we're into the

High Middle Ages with the forerunners of the Reformation, those groups I just mentioned. Guys like Peter Valdo, John Wycliffe, John Huss, and then we're into the

Reformation, Luther, Calvin, Knox, the whole group of Reformers.

That's Lesson 10. Lesson 11 is kind of those groups that come after the Reformers, with specific emphasis on the

Puritans, all the way up to the First Great Awakening and the evangelical revival in England.

So guys like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, John Wesley. And then from there, it's the

Modern Missions Movement, William Carey and Adniram Judson, and all of the great stories about how

God saw fit in his providence for the gospel to go to the ends of the earth. And then after the

Modern Missions Movement, it's right into the Modernist -Fundamentalist controversy, and we get all the way up to the present.

So that is a three -minute overview of pretty much everything that's in the curriculum.

Yes, I want to highlight some of those things. In fact, I want to ask you specifically about councils when we return.

And this is our longer -than -normal break, folks, in the middle of the show, because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

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Dr. Nathan Busenitz, as we continue our discussion on Forerunners of the Faith, 13

Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the Basics of Church History. Now, you brought up councils before,

Dr. Busenitz, and councils are an interesting topic because you have both

Roman Catholic apologists and those who are in cults who are vehemently opposed to both the

Roman Catholic Church and Bible -believing Evangelicalism. They're equally opposed to both, and both will claim that many of the core doctrines that even the

Reformers and even Evangelical Bible -believing Christians today, they contain teachings that both the

Catholic Church and Protestants agree upon. And you have the

Catholics and the cults both giving the Catholic Church credit for actually coming up with, and in the case of the

Catholic Church's explanation, that a part of the whole gift that they claim they have of an infallible magisterium is that these truths that we hold dear, like the

Trinity, the canon of Scripture, and on and on, and of course they have a different canon than we do, a longer

Old Testament, but they would claim that we as Protestants really have no business correcting

Roman Catholics on anything because they're the ones that, for lack of a better term, invented these truths at these councils.

And they would obviously believe that God guided those gathered at these councils to bring forth these truths for the very first time.

And of course you have the cults who say they don't believe that God led them to do that, but they say that the

Catholic Church invented these false teachings like the Trinity and so on. So how does a

Protestant, a Reformed Christian, intelligently answer those charges?

Yeah, Chris, that's a great question. So we have to take things on a case -by -case basis in terms of which doctrine we're talking about.

You mentioned both canonicity and theology proper with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity, and then we also have to take it on a case -by -case basis with regard to which council we're talking about.

So let me just isolate the doctrine of the Trinity and the Council of Nicaea, because when it comes to the allegation that you're mentioning that cult groups like the

Jehovah's Witnesses like to bring up, it does center in on the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and the doctrine of the deity of Christ with the corollary doctrine of the

Trinity. And Jehovah's Witnesses will claim that it was

Constantine, who was the emperor at the time, and the members of the Council that determined or established the deity of Christ in 325, and therefore it's not something that was believed by the

Church prior to that time, and so the Jehovah's Witnesses allege that it was essentially invented in the 4th century.

The answer to that objection, and really the answer to any other objection regarding the councils, is to remember that Scripture is our authority, not

Church history. Scripture is the authority over any other council or personality in any of post -biblical

Church history. Scripture reigns supreme. It is our authority over tradition, and so we're going to evaluate any doctrine, any event, any person through the lens of what the

Scripture reveals. In the case of the Council of Nicaea and the doctrine of the deity of Christ, which was the main issue, and then the doctrine of the

Trinity is the corollary doctrine related to that, the people who gathered at the

Council of Nicaea, we have a record of 318 bishops, so essentially 318 senior pastors who were there at that council.

Their concern was to defend the doctrine of the deity of Christ from Scripture, and that's where we always need to go back to.

It's not about what a council said or didn't say, it's always about what the Word of Christ, as well as the doctrine of the

Trinity, are so clearly revealed on the pages of Scripture that when a

Jehovah's Witness is standing at your doorstep, you don't need to debate him or her about the

Council of Nicaea, you just need to go back to the New Testament, and you need to explain through the

New Testament the passages where it clearly reveals the deity of Christ, and then when we get to the doctrine of the

Trinity, the deity and personhood of the Holy Spirit, and as we elaborate these truths from Scripture, we demonstrate that the doctrine is established in the revelation of God Himself.

So the doctrine of the Trinity is not established by a church council, it's established by what

God has revealed about Himself in His Word. So the first principle is always the principle of biblical authority.

The other thing to keep in mind with the Council of Nicaea is that there's ample evidence from the

Church Fathers prior to the Council of Nicaea demonstrating that they overwhelmingly affirmed the doctrine of the deity of Christ.

So not only do we have biblical evidence that establishes the doctrine of the deity of Christ, we have historical evidence that overwhelmingly affirms it in the years prior to 325.

All the Council did in 325 was it articulated, in response to a particular false teacher, a guy named

Arius, it articulated biblical doctrine in a way that took that doctrine and formulated it into a creed so that every generation since then could understand that the teachings of Arius were contradictory to what the

Bible reveals about the person of Jesus Christ. Of the 318 bishops who were there, 316 of them signed the

Nicene Creed which affirmed the deity of Christ. The two bishops who did not sign it were essentially best friends,

I call them BFFs, with Arius, and it explains why they did not want to sign the

Nicene Creed. But it was not something that was quote -unquote voted on to promote Jesus to divine status, rather it was the

Church of the 4th century affirming what they saw to be taught in Scripture and what they knew to have been taught in the generations prior to the 4th century.

So when you dig into the history, and certainly when you dig into the biblical text, the allegations of Jehovah's Witnesses, Unitarians, Muslims, and others who would deny the

Trinity, those allegations fall flat and demonstrate that the person making the allegation actually has no real understanding of the history of what took place at that event.

Yes, isn't a great figure from history that we can learn a lot from, especially when we have these discussions with Roman Catholics who point to councils and popes as their ultimate source of authority?

Isn't Athanasius, who was referred to with the phrase

Athanasius Contramundum, Athanasius against the world, because he, perhaps this is a little of an exaggeration, but he was practically the only one standing firm for the deity of Christ, and he was not looking to popes or councils as his evidence.

He was looking to the Scriptures. Yeah, 100%. Athanasius is a great example of a man determined to be faithful to sound doctrine, no matter the cost, and of course it cost him a great deal.

He was exiled five times from his pulpit there in Alexandria, Egypt, exiled five times for a total of 17 years, all because he was tenacious in his defense of the doctrine of the deity of Christ.

But Athanasius realized that it was a biblical doctrine and a cardinal doctrine at that, and to compromise on that which you know to be true is a form of betrayal, and Athanasius just was simply unwilling to betray the

Lord whom he loved, even if it meant he had to endure exile on five different occasions.

You know, Chris, a couple of good resources if your audience is interested on that issue of authority.

We mentioned William Webster earlier. William Webster's volume in the three -volume set

Holy Scripture, which he co -wrote with David King, that volume two demonstrates that the early

Church Fathers overwhelmingly saw the Word of God as their authority, their highest authority, over any pope or council.

Another wonderful resource by Webster is the Matthew 16 Controversy, which demonstrates that the early

Church did not regard the bishop of Rome as, or in the way that modern

Roman Catholics try and associate the pope as the successor of Peter.

And then James White, who I know is a friend of this program, he has a chapter that he wrote in a book quite a number of years ago called, the name of the book is

Sola Scriptura, and his chapter was chapter two, and he demonstrated

Sola Scriptura in the Church Fathers. And then I had the opportunity to contribute a chapter to a book called

The Inerrant Word, where I attempted to demonstrate that same thing.

My point in saying all that is the evidence from the early Church is overwhelming that the early

Church held to the authority of Scripture above any other authority, which is the

Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura. That principle got lost in the late

Middle Ages, and the Reformers were recovering it in the 16th century. Okay, we have

Joseph in South Central Pennsylvania who asks, what are the primary counsels that Reformed Christians can wholeheartedly embrace, of course, keeping in mind that they were not

God -breathed decisions made at these councils, but nonetheless important, but that Reformed Christians can embrace without fear that they are embracing uniquely

Roman Catholic heresies? Yeah, that's a great question.

So when we talk about the early Church councils, there are seven councils that are called the seven ecumenical councils.

They're called ecumenical not because of the modern sense of the term ecumenical, but because they encompassed both representatives from both halves of the

Roman Empire were there when the council met. Really, the first Church council,

I would argue, took place in AD 49 or 50 of the Jerusalem Council, and it's recorded in Acts 15, and the issue there was the purity of the gospel.

But when we talk about the seven major or seven ecumenical councils, the first council is the

Council of Nicaea in 325. The main issue was the deity of Christ.

Then you have the first Council of Constantinople in 381, where the issue was an affirmation again of the deity of Christ as well as an affirmation of the humanity of Christ and an affirmation of the deity and personhood of the

Holy Spirit. Then you have the third council in the early 400s.

It's the Council of Ephesus. The Council of Ephesus is one that I think evangelicals might have some hesitation with, not so much because of what the council decided, but because of what happened after the council.

It was at that council that the council affirmed the deity of Christ. This is year 431.

But they affirmed the deity of Christ by actually applying to Mary, Mary the mother of Jesus, the title

Theotokos, which means bearer of God.

The title came to be referred to as Mary the mother of God, and of course the

Roman Catholic Church took that and turned that into something that was far and above, in a bad way, what it was ever intended to be.

It was intended to be an affirmation of the deity of Christ, even at the moment of his birth.

The unintended consequence of it was that it elevated Mary to a place that the

Bible does not elevate her. That's the third council. The fourth council is the

Council of Chalcedon, which affirmed the hypostatic union that the Lord Jesus Christ is one person, but that he possesses in his incarnation two natures, his deity and his humanity.

So those first four councils, I would say evangelicals unhesitatingly affirmed the first, the second, and the fourth, and then the third council, there's just a little bit of tension there because of what happened with the title bearer of God later in church history.

The sixth council, the second council of Constantinople, was in the year 553, and it really was a reaffirmation of the

Council of Chalcedon from 451. Then you have the third council of Constantinople, which is our sixth council, which was in the 600s, and there you had debate about whether or not

Jesus had one will or two wills, and that council became more relevant in recent discussions about the

Trinity, even within evangelical scholarship. Those two councils, the second and third council of Constantinople, I think evangelicals would more or less embrace.

Then you have the final council, which is the seventh, the second council of Nicaea in 787, and it was there that the

Church affirmed the veneration of icons, and obviously evangelicals would have major problems with the veneration of icons, because really the veneration of icons constitutes a form of idolatry that violates the biblical approach to worship.

So of our seven councils, I would say that evangelicals are pretty much on board with one, two, well they're very much on board with one, two, four, pretty much on board with three, five, and six, and most of them have jumped off the train by the time we get to number seven.

So that was a bit of a data dump, but hopefully it answers your question. I would never consider that wealth of information a dump.

That was very enlightening. Thank you, Joseph. Please give us your full address in South Central Pennsylvania, because you have also won

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We have an anonymous listener who says, I'm remaining anonymous because I do not want to offend the folks in my church about whom

I am speaking. There are some in my church that agree with the late

Dr. R .C. Sproul that Thomas Aquinas was a hero of the faith that we as Reformed Protestants can also embrace.

I know other Reformed men, including those who were very close friends of Dr.

Sproul who disagree with him over that issue, and they believe that Thomas Aquinas was far too

Roman for us as Protestants to truly embrace as a hero and as someone from whom we should learn.

What is your guest's opinion on this? Yeah, well that's a very insightful question.

So Dr. Sproul, who of course I have great respect for, it was actually his mentor,

John Gerstner, who really held Thomas Aquinas in high esteem and wrote an article for the

Table Talk magazine entitled, Thomas Aquinas was a

Protestant. That was the title of the article, and Dr. Gerstner in that article made the case that he believed that Thomas Aquinas, who of course lived prior to the

Reformation, Aquinas lived from 1225 to 1274, that Aquinas anticipated the evangelical or Reformation doctrine of sola fide.

In response to that, I believe it was, I want to say Robert Godfrey, I may have that wrong,

I'm trying to recollect, but there was a response that was written in the Westminster Theological Journal that was actually titled,

Thomas Aquinas was not a Protestant, and it was a direct response to Dr.

Gerstner's article from Table Talk. And in that article, the author made the case that Thomas Aquinas actually was far more

Roman Catholic in his soteriology than he was Protestant evangelical.

So this is a debate that really has taken place at the highest level in terms of Reformed evangelical scholarship.

I think that part of the reason that both Dr. Gerstner and Dr. Sproul were so supportive and appreciative of Thomas Aquinas is because Thomas really did lay the groundwork for some of the classical arguments for the existence of God, which were part of the classical apologetic that both

Gerstner and Sproul advocated. And so I think their appreciation for him probably stemmed largely from Thomas's apologetic work in his

Summa Contra Gentiles and those kinds of things. As much as I appreciate

Dr. Gerstner and Dr. Sproul, and again, I hold both of those men in high regard,

I probably would question whether or not

Thomas is more on the Protestant side when it comes to his soteriology.

Thomas was very synergistic in his understanding of the doctrine of justification, meaning that he believed that the sinner had to cooperate with God's grace in order to merit justification, which is a very

Roman Catholic understanding of salvation, as opposed to the monergism that characterizes the

Reformation, that God alone justifies the sinner apart from any contribution, merit, or work that the sinner would offer to God.

So I do tend to see Thomas more on the Roman Catholic side than on the

Protestant side, but I do acknowledge that men smarter than me have debated both sides of the issue.

And again, I can't remember who wrote that article in the Westminster Theological Journal. It may have been

Robert Godfrey or Robert Raymond, or I probably shouldn't guess, since I can't quite remember, but it was an interesting debate to see both sides of the issue.

Again, a very insightful question. Now, is there any truth to an accusation that I have heard?

I've heard it from, and perhaps accusation is the wrong way to say it, unless I'm referring to those that were opposing

Aquinas, but there are those that opposed Aquinas for believing he was too

Calvinistic, and there are Calvinists who have a warm view of Aquinas because they believe he was a double predestinarian.

Is there truth to that claim? You know, Chris, that's a good question.

I don't know the answer to that question, so rather than speculating, it probably would be better for me to just claim ignorance on that one.

You know, I do know that there are others in medieval church history, um, uh,

Gottschalk and others who do present a very

Calvinistic understanding of both the doctrine of election and the doctrine of reprobation, but I would actually have to go back and do a little bit more investigatory work on Thomas to see where he lands on that issue, so I apologize for my ignorance.

That's quite right. You can't know everything. Have you ever heard that claim that he was a double predestinarian?

I don't know if I have or not. I know, so when we think about, and this actually takes us back to something we were talking about earlier in the program, when we think about the

Reformers, and even going back to the question that was asked in the previous hour, where were the, where was the true church during the medieval period, during the

Middle Ages? If you were to ask the Reformers that question, they would have looked to the

Roman church, to those like Augustine, those like Anselm, those like Bernard, and others.

In fact, Martin Luther considered Bernard of Clairvaux to be the last of the church fathers, even though Bernard lived in the 12th century, because he felt like Bernard was sort of the last representative of a non -apostate form of the

Roman church before the Roman church totally apostatized. Now, Thomas lived a little bit after that.

Thomas is a 13th century figure, and to what degree Calvin saw

Thomas as a contributor to his understanding of the doctrine of repudiation, that's a great question.

So, if this was stumped the professor, you've succeeded. That was not my intention.

And by the way, I just received an email from John and Bangor Main, who says there is an article on this question of the predestinarian views of Aquinas at journal .rts

.edu from the Reform Theological Seminary, and if you type in the search engine

Cavalli, C -A -V as in victory, A -L -L -I, you can find

Aquinas and Calvin on Predestination. Is there any common ground?

Thank you, John, and thank you Anonymous for sending in the question.

In fact, both of you, if you give me your full mailing addresses, have won

Forerunners of the Faith, 13 Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the

Basics of Church History. We're going to our final break right now. It's going to be much more brief than the last breaks.

So, if you want to also ask a question, I would advise you to do so immediately because we're rapidly running out of time.

ChrisArnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and country of residence.

We'll be right back with Nathan Buzanitz after these messages. Fellowship and Worship, one another, as we're walking in the light.

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where you can click support. That's ironsharpensironradio .com. Welcome back, and our guest today has been for the entire program, our friend

Nathan Buzanitz, and we have been discussing his book, Forerunners of the

Faith, 13 Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the Basics of Church History, and let's see, we have time for a couple of our remaining listener questions.

We have a listener who also chooses to remain anonymous, and our listener asks,

As far as the views of re -baptizing Roman Catholics, throughout history has the understanding by most

Reformed Christians be that Roman Catholics need not be re -baptized after they come to faith in Christ, or that they should be re -baptized, because even from a paedo -baptist point of view, the understanding of baptism is a different interpretation altogether.

What is your guest's knowledge of history on this point? I have been having arguments about it in my own church, and that's interesting, because I've been having,

I wouldn't say arguments, I've been having disagreement with some of, not only my friends, but strangers on the internet over that very same issue.

But what do you have to say about that? Yeah, thanks,

Chris, and grateful for the question. I did want to just give a quick clarification from my answer to an earlier question.

The article about Thomas Aquinas and Protestantism, it was

Robert Raymond who wrote that article, and it was called Dr. John Gerstner on Thomas Aquinas as a

Protestant. Maybe that's why Robert Godfrey has such a high position at Ligonier Ministries.

Yeah, so in case Dr. Godfrey ever listens to this, I want to make sure that I clarify that it was

Robert Raymond who wrote that. And thank you also for that recommendation for the

Cavalli article from RTS, I was actually looking at it a little bit over the break, and it was interesting, he does see some parallels between Thomas and Calvin on the doctrine of predestination.

With regard to baptism, I mean, from just a pastoral standpoint, not so much from a historical standpoint, my strong recommendation would be that someone who grew up Roman Catholic and was baptized as an infant within the

Roman Catholic Church, or within the Roman Catholic system, that upon coming to a true saving knowledge of the

Gospel and a true saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus, that they ought to be baptized as a

Christian, because baptism marks entrance into the family of God, and when someone is part of an apostate system, the fact that they got sprinkled as an infant as part of an apostate system, there's no way that I can think that that could be construed as genuine baptism.

In terms of how that issue was handled historically, that is an interesting question, and again, probably an issue that I would have to go back and dig into in terms of how the

Reformed branch, guys like Zwingli and Calvin and Knox and others, handled that specific issue with those who were part of their churches during the

Reformation, and then how subsequent Reformed groups have handled that issue after the

Reformation, because during the Reformation, coming into it, everyone grew up Roman Catholic prior to the outset of the

Reformation. So, again, a very good question from a historical standpoint.

I just think biblically and pastorally, the answer is actually quite easy, and it is that they ought to be baptized as a believer, and I'm saying that not because I am credobaptist, although I am, but because to be baptized as an infant, even if you are coming at this from a pedobaptist perspective, to be baptized as an infant in an apostate movement is not true baptism by anyone's definition, and so I don't think it would matter whether you're pedobaptist or credobaptist.

I think that person ought to be baptized again. Well, not baptized again, baptized for real.

Right, right. And of course, there are a minority of Roman Catholics who came to the

Roman Catholic faith and were never baptized in a

Trinitarian formula before, until they were requesting baptism by the

Roman Catholic Church as adults. So, even a person like that, you would still insist, even if they were immersed as a believer by a

Roman Catholic priest, you would still insist that they be baptized, if they came to faith in the true gospel and were seeking membership in your church.

Yeah, I would not consider baptized within a Roman Catholic church or done, performed by a

Roman Catholic priest, I would not consider that to be true baptism, because the

Roman Catholic system is an apostate system. In the same way that if someone got, if someone was baptized in a

Mormon church or if someone was baptized in a Jehovah's Witness, Kingdom Hall context,

I'm speaking pastorally and biblically and personally at this point, I would not regard that as a genuine baptism.

Yes, the Pato Baptists who are Reformed, who accept Roman Catholic baptism, seem to think that the

Roman Catholic view positively of the

Trinity, that they share the doctrine of the Trinity with us, they seem to think that that trumps everything else.

That even knowing that the Roman Catholic Church is a false gospel, for some reason that is immaterial to them when it comes to baptism,

I don't know why. Yeah, I would struggle with that, and to be honest,

I would struggle even with the acknowledgement that Rome truly holds to the same theology proper that we do, and I would struggle with that because of their elevation of Mary to Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, almost semi -divine status.

And so while I recognize that Rome affirms the doctrine of the Trinity, in practice

Rome undermines the purity of worship that the Triune God requires because of the way that it treats the veneration of Mary and the saints.

So I would be reluctant even to give Rome a pass when it comes to their theology proper.

By the way, there is an excellent book written by a 19th century Presbyterian, Pato Baptist, who did not accept

Roman Catholic baptism. He wrote an entire book on it. The book has been renamed

Sacramental Sorcery, the Invalidity of Roman Catholic Baptism. I think it may have been taken from a larger work by J.

H. Thornwell, but it is retitled that, and you can get it on Amazon.

So that's Sacramental Sorcery by J. H. Thornwell, who did not accept

Roman Catholic baptism, even though he was a Pato Baptist. Well, I'm sorry folks, we don't have any more time for any more questions, but the next time we have

Nathan Busenitz on, make sure you contact us again. I want to make sure that our listeners have all the information they need to get in touch with Dr.

Busenitz. Tms .edu is the website of the Master's Seminary. Tms .edu.

Don't forget about the conference that he will be speaking at, along with over 20 other speakers, where I will be manning an exhibitor's booth this

September 30th through October 2nd in Atlanta, Georgia, the G3 Conference, and go to g3conference .com,

g3conference .com. I want to thank you so much, Dr. Busenitz, for proving to be, once again, such a superb guest.

I want to thank everybody who listened. I want you all to always remember, for the rest of your lives, that Jesus Christ is a far greater