October 26, 2020 Show with Roger Wagner on “Getting to Know the Late Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen” (Day 1 of a 5-Day Tribute to Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen)

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,

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

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

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

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions, and now here's your host,

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 of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 26th day of October, 2020.

And I'm so thrilled that the entire week from today through Friday, we are going to be paying tribute every single day to the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson, born 1948 and went home to glory in 1995, the same year that my own mother went home to be with Christ for eternity.

And I am just thrilled that my friend, my longtime very dear friend,

Pastor Bill Shishko of The Haven, currently meeting in Bohemia, Long Island, New York, set this entire week of interviews up for me, and I am looking forward to it with great anticipation.

Today, to start off this week of programs in tribute of Dr. Greg L.

Bonson, we have a close friend of his, Roger Wagner, who is pastor of Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Chula Vista, California, and we're going to be addressing specifically the theme,

Getting to Know the Late Dr. Greg L. Bonson. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Roger Wagner.

Thank you very much. It's a delight to be with you. And tell our listeners about Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Chula Vista, California.

Well, we are a congregation in the Presbytery of Southern California of the

OPC. Congregation started in the mid -50s, and I became the pastor in 1983, so I'm just going through my 37th anniversary here as the pastor.

And tell us a little bit about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in general. I'm sure that most of our listeners, especially this week, are very familiar with the

OPC, but we do have people who tune in for the first time, discover the show, and sometimes they are new

Christians, sometimes they are not Reformed, sometimes they're not Christians at all. Sometimes they are

Muslims or atheists or members of other denominational groups like Roman Catholics and so on.

But tell our listeners about the Orthodox Presbyterian denomination. Okay, I'd be happy to.

It was founded in 1936. It really arose out of the fundamentalist modernist controversy in the early part of the 20th century.

J. Gresham Machen, who is a name known to some, certainly within Presbyterian circles, began to raise questions in the

Presbyterian Church of the USA about modernism that was becoming entrenched in the denominational committees, particularly the

Committee on Foreign Missions. And that led to, within the Church, discussion, debate, controversy that heated up and eventually led to his being tried and put out of the ministry of the

Presbyterian Church. In the meantime, others who were conservative,

Bible -believing, historic Presbyterians rallied around Machen, and after he was put out of the

Church, they met together in Philadelphia in June of 1936 and banded together as what was then called the

Presbyterian Church of America. A couple of years later, they changed the name because the mother denomination, or the former mother denomination, sued them over the name.

So it's not a large denomination, but we have congregations all over the

United States. And our church is about 100 people, that's probably an average size for OPC congregations.

We hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith, larger and shorter catechisms that have been historic doctrinal statements for Presbyterians ever since the

Reformation. And I guess that sort of gives you a quick sketch, anyway.

We've been active in foreign missions and church planting over the years as well. We have missionaries scattered around the world and would welcome anyone who's interested.

There's a website for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church that will give you a lot of information, or you can check and see if you've got one in your neighborhood.

And I believe that website is opc .org, is it not? I believe so, yes.

And if anybody wants further information specifically on Bayview Baptist, I'm sorry,

Bayview Baptist. There's a Bayview Baptist on Long Island, and for someone I saw, Bayview, it just popped into my head.

Bayview Orthodox... Excuse me? We have a Bayview... Sorry. Go ahead.

We have a Bayview Baptist down the street from us, too, yes. Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church's website is bayviewopc .org,

bayviewopc .org, if you want to find out more about this fine congregation in Chula Vista, California.

Well, you are a first -time guest here on the program, and we have a tradition that we have first -time guests give a summary of their

Christian testimony. That would include what kind of religion, if any, they were raised in, and what kind of providential circumstances our

Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you. And I understand that there's a wide variety of stories.

There's one gospel, of course, but there's a wide variety of stories on how our

Lord used that gospel to draw His elect to Himself and save them. Sometimes those of us who have been privileged to have been raised in Bible -believing homes come to faith very early on as young children and don't even remember a time when they first began to love

Jesus and follow Him, as far as they can remember, always did. And then those of us who were not raised in a

Bible -believing home—I was raised Roman Catholic myself, very godly parents, but not raised in the

Word and was a lost rebel who came to faith in my 20s, and it was more of a sharp, stark contrast of night and day for me and,

I'm sure, many in our listening audience. So tell us about your story. Well, yes,

I was raised by non -believers, very stable home, just two kids.

I was the oldest and my brother a couple of years younger than me. My dad was always politically conservative, but we rarely went to church, maybe

Christmas and Easter from time to time. But they made the sacrifice early on to put me in Christian schools, not primary—I mean,

I'm sure they wanted a moral influence, but they really weren't interested in gospel as such.

But they wanted a good quality education, and even back 60 years ago, weaknesses in the public school system were evident.

And so I went all the way, with the exception of my sixth -grade year, I went to Christian schools and always heard, you know, the assumptions were always

Christian and biblical. The gospel was shared in chapel regularly, and I don't really remember not believing in it, but it was just something that was kind of in the air that you breathed.

But by the time I got into high school, I began to sense more and more that this had to—it needed a commitment to follow

Christ, not just to kind of believe in the abstract that God was the

Creator and that we had fallen into sin and that Jesus came into the world to save sinners. And so about the time

I was in the 10th grade, through the influence of a couple of coaches that I had in the

Christian school, it took a special interest in me and started taking me to youth meetings and other things.

I just was led eventually to—my commitment involved going to church on my own.

I had a bike. The church that sponsored my school was about six or seven miles away, and so I started riding my bike to church on Sunday mornings and went every day.

And when I could drive, I started going. So that was really the time when I understood that this was very personal and involved a commitment on my part.

And so I began to grow from there. But the church was broadly evangelical, certainly committed to the authority, the infallibility of the

Bible, but Arminian in its soteriology, dispensational in its approach to church life in light of the imminent return of Christ and so forth.

I don't mean to be using a lot of slogans. They may or may not mean anything to everybody. And then

I went to college, and that's where I met Greg Bonson. And from there on out, my growth as a

Christian and my call to the ministry were very much angled up with his influence in my life.

So that'll become part of the story as we go forward. Well, let's start off after that very interesting testimony of salvation.

Let's start off now by hearing in summary who was

Dr. Greg L. Bonson. Yes, well, at the end of his life, he was an ordained minister in the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He was a churchman, an academic, a preacher, a teacher, a conference speaker, a debater.

Just did all kinds of things. As I said,

I met him when we both entered college together as freshmen, Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.

And so I was friends with him from 1967 until his death in 1995.

He wrote several books during his lifetime, and he's left behind an even larger legacy of recorded material, which is part of the reason for this week's remembrances is to let people know about the

Bonson Project, trying to get that audio material out to the broader world. He was just capable in everything that he did and devoted to the

Lord, and yet a man who suffered professionally and personally many trials and afflictions through which he was sanctified and grew and helped a lot of the rest of us grow along with him.

And he is probably most well known as being an apologist.

Some might even call him the father of modern Christian apologetics, with Cornelius Van Till perhaps being the grandfather.

But he is a highly regarded intellect and scholar and theologian and apologist, not only by those who would adhere very strictly and closely to one stream of Reformed theology known as Christian Reconstruction and Theonomy, which are things that are clearly a strong part of Dr.

Bonson's life, but many outside of those streams of thought have grown to cherish and owe a great deal to Dr.

Bonson because of the brilliant mind that God gave him and his ability to teach disciples how to defend the faith.

Do you want to pick up from there as far as anything I just said? Yes, yes. I think his chosen area of service was certainly apologetics.

Even the Theonomy material for which he became notorious, if not famous, he kind of backed into rather than setting that as some theological agenda for his thought and life.

But he was introduced to the writings of Van Till when he was in high school, maybe earlier.

Certainly saw the consistency, the biblical consistency of Van Till's approach to apologetics.

And so by the time I met him in college, he was planning to go to Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia so that he could sit at the feet of Cornelius Van Till.

And once we all got there in 1970, he took advantage of Van Till's instruction through all of the regular curricula.

And then every conversation that he could have, every elective class he could have.

And then, of course, there were other men like John Frame who were there at the seminary at the time who were also disciples of Van Till, if we want to put it that way.

And so, yeah, that was... And if people have listened to any of his material on apologetics, he often makes the distinction every

Christian needs to be ready to give some kind of defense, a reasoned answer for the faith that they have.

But some Christians are particularly called to apologetics as a spiritual vocation.

And that's how he saw himself. But never an ivory tower type of apologist.

He liked to talk about taking it to the streets, which echoed his love for rock music and that Doobie Brothers song kind of set it for him.

And he wanted to make sure that he helped people who have a general

Christian calling to defend the faith to be able to do that. And so his book,

Always Ready, for example, which was published after his death and drew on some printed material and some audio material, is very much a kind of primer for Christians on how to understand the issues that arise in apologetics and then what is a simple methodology for answering the fool according to his folly while not answering a fool according to his folly.

Well, let's hear now about your first memory of meeting Greg L.

Bonson. This theme today, as I've already mentioned, is getting to know the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson. And since you were a personal friend of his and probably knew him personally better than any of the other guests that we are going to feature this week, we want to hear from your point of view, your unique point of view, some things about him that perhaps the other guests that will follow you don't even know about.

But tell us about that very first meeting that you can remember anyway. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, as I said, we entered

Westmont College, which is an evangelical liberal arts college up in Santa Barbara or near Santa Barbara, as freshmen in 1966, the fall of 1966.

And I heard his name before I remember meeting him. I didn't actually become closely acquainted with him until late in our freshman year.

But the memory that sticks for me, well, two, he ran for freshman class student body, a freshman class president, along with several others.

He wasn't elected, but I knew his name. But in that first year, he wrote some letters to the editor of the school newspaper.

We didn't know it was Greg Bonson because they were printed over the name Dalem's Ass.

And they caused quite a stir. That's the alias he used?

Yeah, that was the nom de plume. And what was interesting was he was taking issue with the administration of the college as they were considering opening the school library on Sunday afternoons.

It had up to that point been closed on Sundays, but things were changing in the 60s.

And the thought was students perhaps in the afternoon would like to be able to access the library to work on their schoolwork.

And Greg was basically arguing, based on the Fourth Commandment and its application, that that shouldn't be done, that the

Sabbath or the Lord's Day was a day that belonged to him. And coming out of my background, you know, you went to church on Sunday.

If you were really devoted to the Lord, you went Sunday morning and evening. But the rest of the day was pretty much for your own entertainment or your own use.

And so my first reaction was, this guy must be from another planet, that the whole

Lord's Day should belong to the Lord, and that things like libraries where people work should be closed.

But then I also thought, he really knows his Bible. And Greg's letters argued from the scriptures and from what

I didn't even know what the Westminster Confession of Faith was in those days. But he was using what turned out to be confessional and catechetical material to make his case.

And there was some interchange. There were others who wrote in and argued very vociferously against him on this subject.

Eventually, the administration did open the library on Sunday afternoon.

So he didn't win the argument in terms of result. But in my mind, he won the argument for me.

Later in the year, we found out, or I met him personally through a mutual friend,

Dennis Johnson, who was another man that joined our little circle, both at Westmont and then going to Westminster Seminary.

And Dennis taught for years at Westminster Seminary here in California. Yeah, I had the privilege of interviewing

Dennis. In fact, I'm going to give a shout out to a friend of mine who may be listening.

Although Steve and I have some very strong theological differences, especially today, my friend

Steve Schlissel gave me the great honor and privilege back in the early 1990s when

I was visiting his church, because I knew Greg Bonson was preaching there that Sunday, Messiah's congregation in Brooklyn.

He gave me the privilege of, after the morning service was over, going into his study with Greg to interview him.

And Steve said to me, I know one day you are going to be a Christian Talk radio host. This is before I even had this program.

And he said, I want you to interview Greg Bonson and record it. And I was awestruck by that opportunity.

And every time I tell this story, I have a guttural reaction of excruciating pain because I lost the tape.

Oh, no. But I remember enjoying interviewing him nonetheless.

And who knows, maybe one day it will turn up. Somebody will find it and mail it to me somehow. But I also remember being awestruck by his sermon on the

Ascension. It's not often I had heard before then or after, to tell you the truth, a sermon on the

Ascension. And that was Dr. Bonson's message on the importance of the

Ascension of Christ. And it's a vivid memory and a cherished memory that I will never forget.

And thanks again to my friend Steve Schlissel. But I'm sorry I cut you off there. Well, that's all right.

So I finally made personal contact through Dennis.

Dennis and Greg were both pre -ministerial majors, which meant that they had to at least have a

Bible minor. Greg majored in philosophy, minored in Bible. Dennis, I think, minored in Bible while he majored in English.

And so anyway, they were friends. And then

Dennis and I became friends. And then Dennis introduced me to Greg. So by the end of that freshman year, at least if memory is serving me accurately,

I joined them in a weekly Bible study that they were just, the two of them were having.

And Dennis came out of an evangelical covenant background. And of course, I was non -denominational evangelical.

So Greg was, we were studying the Bible, but he was also introducing us to the

Reformed Faith. Now, both of them were already ministry bound. Going into the ministry or even going to seminary was the farthest thing

I could imagine from my personal plans. But over the years,

God changed that incrementally. So Dennis and Greg and I were just great, close friends.

We did, you know, we got together whenever we could. We talked about things. Occasionally we would cross paths in a class, especially general ed classes in the first couple of years.

We got involved in some things on campus with speakers, bringing speakers and so forth.

I mean, I don't want to dig into too much detail. Maybe people can ask when they're asking questions about things.

So what's ironic to me, Greg was part of a church plant by the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Goleta, which was just north of Santa Barbara.

And many times he invited me to come to visit.

Well, they were meeting in a restaurant. And I just thought from my background, any group that meets for church in a restaurant has to be, you know, lunatic fringe.

I never did actually accept the invitation. And actually,

I'd never darkened the door of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church until I went to seminary and then began to attend an

OP congregation there in Philadelphia. But yeah, everything about... But he kept trying and the influence was going on.

So anyway, yeah, lots of things that we enjoyed during those years.

Maybe one other just event that was pretty significant as well as pretty crazy. During the spring break of 1969,

Greg persuaded Dennis and I to drive with him to Philadelphia for a student open house weekend.

So we piled into my VW Bug, put the bags on the roof, and the three of us drove straight through 56 hours from Southern California to Philadelphia for a long weekend.

We met Dr. Van Till and some of the other faculty members. I remember Greg spent a whole afternoon with Dr.

Van Till on that visit. And then we piled in the car and headed back for school. That was kind of our pilgrimage.

And that was part of Greg's campaign to get both Dennis and I to come to Westminster Seminary with him.

Dennis was planning on going to the seminary that his denomination sponsored, and I wasn't planning on going to seminary at all.

But in the end, all three of us, when we graduated in 1970, headed off to Philadelphia to begin our seminary studies there at Westminster.

Now tell us something about his personality. In fact, I'm going to go to my first break before I have you do that, but I'd love to know about his sense of humor.

I'd like to know about some of the things that people who are devouring his writings and listening to recordings of the late

Dr. Bonson might be completely unfamiliar with. And when we come back, we could start off with a sense of humor and any kind of anecdote you'd care to share.

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

chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. We will be right back with our guest Roger Wagner and more of our discussion on the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson. Getting to know the late Dr. Greg L. Bonson right after these messages from our sponsors.

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This is Chris Armisen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours is

Roger Wagner, pastor of Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Chula Vista, California.

And we are discussing day number one of a five -day tribute to Greg L.

Bonson. And the theme specifically is getting to know the late Dr. Greg L. Bonson because our guest,

Roger Wagner, was a close personal friend of Dr. Bonson. And if you could pick up where we left off,

I was just about to ask you, or in fact I did ask you, what his sense of humor was like and other things personal to him that you can share with our audience that other folks who love and follow the teachings of Dr.

Bonson might be completely ignorant of. Well, yeah, there's so much that I could say on that score.

He was just a wonderful friend.

Engaging, amusing, helpful. I mean, just, yeah,

I mean, I could count on maybe three fingers people that have...

Well, I've said this in other contexts. This isn't a sense of humor. We'll get back to that in a moment.

But he prized loyalty in others, and I think he did that because loyalty on his part in friendships was one of his most obvious and sterling characteristics.

And I told my wife years ago, I said, you know, I think if I was anywhere on the planet and I was in trouble, if I could get word to Greg that I needed his help, he would find a way to get to me and to do what he can to help.

There's not many friends that you could say that of. So during, as I mentioned, he and Dennis Johnson and I were thick as thieves during college and seminary.

We had so many lunches together after class where we would make fun of what we were learning.

We would explore what we were learning. We would challenge each other. Greg did so much extra explaining.

You know, I was so ignorant. I didn't even know what kind of questions to ask in class. But Greg always knew the right kind of questions.

He knew how to kind of push back against teachers sometimes. And that was the supplemental education that was so valuable to me.

But he loved to laugh. And maybe just as one illustration, because I mentioned to you before the program started,

I've been sort of sifting through things in light of being back in connection with this

Bronson Project, talking to people about my reminiscences. So I've got stashed stuff here and there.

And just today, I dug out a letter that he wrote to me in September of 1983.

And he was upset with me that I hadn't let him know that I had taken a call.

I was in Northern California in a pastoral charge. And then I had been called to my present church in Southern California, which was the same presbytery where Greg was.

And I hadn't let him know in advance. So he writes, well, first of all, he addresses it to Roger Dodger Wagner.

We were both Dodger fans. And that's timely, because when he signed off, he said, watching the

Dodgers go all the way, Greg. So we're back in that boat again, waiting to have our hopes dashed one more time.

But maybe the Dodgers will go all the way this year. Oh, and then he signed his name Greg, the Prince of Pico Rivera, which was where he grew up in Southern California.

Anyway, he says, I confess to being a little bent, a bit out of shape, over the fact that my best friend made plans to transfer into my presbytery and even went ahead and moved into the

Southern California area without talking with me about such major decisions ahead of time.

Yeah, he said I could have let him know. He says, I know as presbyterians, we do not subscribe to the idea of bishops where you have to get the permission of a bishop to make such a move.

But that fact does not keep one from trying to practice the prerogative, at least with one's friends.

That kind of, he made sure that he had an opportunity to give me the business.

Now, here's an inside joke, though, that is going to catch your younger audience in a time warp.

Those of you, when he published Theonomy and Christian Ethics, Meredith Klein, who was a professor at Westminster Seminary, wrote a scathing review of it in the

Westminster Theological Journal and made a crack at the beginning of his review about Greg Bosson's overheated typewriter.

Okay, so that's the back story. Some of our, a lot of our younger listeners won't even know what a typewriter is,

I'm sure. Yeah, right, right. Well, it gets worse here when you hear this sentence. So that's the back story to this sentence.

Much has happened since we last talked with each other. I now operate on a

K Pro 10 microprocessor. Does anybody remember what that is?

But then this parenthetical statement, if Meredith Klein thought my typewriter was overheated, won't he be shocked to find out now

I have the writer's equivalent of the atomic bomb? Actually, you've got to finish that sentence because I laughed over it.

What did you say the second part of it, right after the atomic bomb? That was it. Oh, just exclamation point.

So that, you know, his interactions with Klein on matters theological and theonomic are kind of legendary now, at least for the older set.

But he could still make jokes about it. So, yeah, he had a wonderful sense of humor.

I remember when Dennis and Dee and I, I think it was our senior year, we would try to get together on Thursday night after we got all our homework done and prep done.

We would go to a coffee shop down in Santa Barbara and hang out for a couple of hours, just shooting the breeze and so forth.

He loved to antagonize the waitress by his order.

He always wanted a round Danish with red filling, raspberry, let's say.

And when the waitress would say, we're out of those or make some other excuse, he would just tease and tease and tease.

And, of course, the poor waitress didn't know that he was joking until he would all crack up and laugh.

So, yeah, wonderful sense of humor. And, again, anybody who's heard his lectures on tape know that even in the most weighty and serious discussions, he wasn't beyond making a joke about things.

And, yeah, so back in that letter, my eye flipped over it, but he said, now here again, here's the rock music allusion for those who can pick it up.

I have been slandered and libeled, heard words I've never seen in the Bible, by a major national publication, the

Christian Century. A little Paul Simon reference there.

What kind of, from what you know, before Dr.

Bonson discovered, embraced, and became a champion of Reformed theology, what was his own background before reaching that point?

Yeah, he was born into a family that just attended, like so many of us, just a generally evangelical

Bible -believing community church. When his family—he was born, actually, up in the state of Washington, as you mentioned, in 1948.

And a year or so later, his father moved—the family relocated down to Pico Rivera in Southern California when his dad got work down there.

And it was during—it was when Greg was in elementary school that the family started attending an

Orthodox Presbyterian church in East Los Angeles, Beverly, OPC.

And that's where the family was introduced to Reformed theology and the ecclesiology of the

Orthodox Presbyterian church. And that's where Greg began to sense a call to the ministry.

And, you know, he was always a good student, doing much more than was expected.

And so within a church setting, he was just voracious. Whatever the pastor could teach him or books that he could loan him, you know,

Greg just gobbled it up. So from about mid -elementary school on, when his family moved into the

Orthodox Presbyterian church, that's when he became Reformed. By the time I met him in college, he had already read things like Lorraine Bettner's Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, which is a classic.

He was—you know, those years while we were in college, that's when Francis Schaeffer was beginning to be a name.

R .C. Sproul begins his Ligonier ministries and that. So, you know,

Greg was in that generation. R .C., sadly, you know, died a couple of years ago in his 70s.

That's where Greg would be now if he was still with us. And the fact that he's—you know, he's—I mean, obviously nothing is premature according to God's schedule, but if Greg had had 20 more years to write—and again, just a kind of a sidebar, the

Bonson Project is so important because most of Greg's legacy is in audio form.

And while I hope that some of those audio materials will continue to find their way eventually into transcription and print, we are just so excited about the possibility of giving people direct access without charge to Greg's vast audio library through the

Bonson Project. And that's why we're—you know, we're excited now. We're pretty much in a position where we can get the license for that material.

But it needs editing. It needs remastering. Some of it is professional quality, but a lot of it, you know, needs a lot of work before it can actually put out—be put out in the form that we want it.

So we're continuing fundraising. We're encouraging people to pray for the project and support the project and track on what's happening because this is the bulk of Greg's legacy.

The Vantill book is great. The theonomic works are wonderful and helpful, but so much of what he did so well only exists right now in audio form.

And so that's why—so anyway, that's a digression, but it's a relevant digression.

Yeah, I want to give the website for the Bonson Project, and I'll be repeating this throughout the week.

In fact, tomorrow we have the founder of the Bonson Project as one of our two guests.

Tomorrow we have Graham Dugas, and I hope

I'm not mispronouncing his last name, but the Bonson Project website is bonsonproject .com,

and Bonson is spelt B -A -H—I'm sorry—B -A -H -N -S -E -N

Bonsonproject .com, B -A -H -N -S -E -N Bonsonproject .com.

By the way, am I pronouncing Graham's last name correctly, Dugas? I don't pronounce the

S, just Duga. Duga. He said it's like the painter

Degas, but without the E, so Duga. Okay, great. Yeah, and there's also, if I might just add, there's a

Facebook page for the Bonson Project as well. Some stuff pops up on there as well as on the—eventually the audio material will be on the

Bonson Project website as well as Sermon Audio. But we really do want to get this material in as pristine a condition as we can, and some of that's beyond the reach of remastering, but if we can raise the funds, we're going to make the investment to get this work done professionally with as high a quality as we can.

We think that the content is so valuable that we want the delivery system to be as quality as we can, so that's why having bought the rights, we still need to raise additional funds to pay for the editing and remastering work.

And we have to go to our midway—you can pick up where we left off, but we have to go to our midway break right now.

Okay. This is the longer -than -normal break, folks. We hope that you're patient with us, but Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show so that they can obey

FCC regulations and localize Iron Trip and Zion Radio to Lake City, Florida by airing their own public service announcements and other local announcements.

So while they do that, we air our own globally heard commercials, and I urge you to make the best use of this time by writing down information provided by as many of our advertisers as you can so that you can more frequently and successfully patronize our advertisers, or at the very least, reach out to them and thank them for sponsoring this program if indeed you love this program.

So write down the information provided by our advertisers, and also write down questions about Greg L.

Bonson by our guest—or for our guest, I should say—Roger Wagner, pastor of Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Chula Vista, California, who is also a very close friend of the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson, who went home to be with the Lord in 1995. The email address to send in your questions is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Roger Wagner right after these messages from our sponsors.

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Harvey Cedars, where Christ finds people and changes lives. Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said,

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That's solid -ground -books .com and see what priceless literary gems from the past to present you can unearth from Solid Ground.

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Before we return to our guest today, Roger Wagner, on day number one of our five -day tribute to the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson, let me just announce a couple of very important things.

First of all, as I just mentioned, this is a five -day tribute to Dr. Greg L. Bonson. Tomorrow, Tuesday the 27th of October, we have

Graham Dugas and Christian McShaffrey, our guests tomorrow, to pay tribute to Dr.

Bonson. On Wednesday the 28th of October, we have Dr. Jeffrey C.

Waddington and Dr. Lane Tipton. Then on Thursday the 29th, we have

Dr. Jason Lyle and Eli Ayala. And then finally on Friday, October 30th, we have

Paul Vigiano and Bill Shishko, who organized this entire week of guests and sub -themes, sub -titles, for our tribute to the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson. So please try to tune in every week, I'm sorry, every day this week to hear our guests pay tribute to this great man of God.

Also, folks, if you love Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and you don't want us to disappear from the airwaves, please,

I'm urging you to go to ironsharpensironradio .com, click support, then click to donate now.

You can donate instantly with a debit or credit card in that fashion. We are in urgent need of your donations.

The hysteria connected with the coronavirus pandemic has hurt us pretty seriously and significantly financially because it's hit many of our benefactors and also our advertisers who had to temporarily withdraw from financial support of this program.

I hope it's just temporary. So we have been left in a pretty serious financial hole.

We need you to help us dig out of it. If you love the show, please go to ironsharpensironradio .com,

click support, then click, click to donate now. You can also advertise with us if you want by sending me an email to chrisorenson at gmail .com

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Also folks, if you are not a member of a biblically faithful, solid, bible -believing church,

I have lists, extensive lists of biblically sound churches all over the planet earth, and I have helped many people in our audience already in all parts of the world find churches that are biblically sound right near where they live, sometimes within just a couple of minutes drive around the corner from where they live, that they didn't even know existed.

So if you are in that category, you need to find a church home, send me an email to chrisorenson at gmail .com

and put I need a church in the subject line. Folks, if you have a question for our guest today, and our guest today is

Roger Wagner, this is day number one of our five -day tribute to the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson, and Roger Wagner is a close personal friend of the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson, and he's also the pastor of Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Chula Vista, California.

So if you have a question, our email address is chrisorenson at gmail .com chrisorenson at gmail .com

and please give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. And Pastor Wagner, we do have a question from John in Bangor, Maine.

Are you with us still, Pastor Wagner? Oh, I'm sorry,

I had you on mute. I know that our audience probably wishes

I was on mute a lot more frequently, but John in Bangor, Maine asked the question, one thing that has disturbed me about my fellow

Reformed brethren is that all too many of us have become very soft on Roman Catholicism.

They even go as far as maintain ecumenical relationships with Roman Catholics.

Now, I am not saying that I believe all Roman Catholics are damned or that they are not

Christian. I do believe that there is a remnant amongst the Roman Catholics that do believe in the true gospel in spite of the fact that the dogmatic gospel of Rome is a false gospel, as defined at the

Council of Trent. But I think that there is a haphazard, a reckless and a heretical embracing of Roman Catholics.

And that is not only, of course, being done by professedly Reformed Christians, but throughout modern evangelicalism.

What was Dr. Bonson's opinion about this? Well, he would have the same problems that your questioner has just outlined.

I'm trying to think. I'm sure in the catalog somewhere there are materials where he specifically addresses that.

I mean, yeah. I think, you know, Greg was a teacher, and the best teachers are willing to teach anybody who will listen.

And his tendency was to, you know, he recognized the difference between the teaching office of Rome versus the rank and file of Roman Catholics.

And I think there are many out there in the world who may even still be inconsistently in the

Roman Catholic Church that have still been exposed to biblical teaching, Reformed teaching, and find a lot there that's very compelling because they love the

Bible. So Greg was not one to draw lines in the sand to say, we are right and you are wrong.

If there was an opportunity to persuade somebody to come from a wrong understanding to a right understanding, one of my pet peeves with some of us as Reformed is we just want to demonstrate that we're correct.

And we don't have a whole lot of patience or interest in trying to persuade people. But I remember hearing

Francis Schaefer one time say of J. Gresham Machen, the founder of the

OPC, that anyone who loves the Bible and believes in the authority of the

Bible, in principle, is Reformed. They just haven't got there yet. So Greg was one who was always trying to help people as much as he could, as much as they were willing to get there.

But no, his critique of Rome and the firmness of his critique would have been just the kind of thing that you would have found in Calvin or in the 17th century

English Puritans or any number of people since. Well, John and Bangor Maine, guess what?

Because of the generosity of our friend Gary DeMar, president of American Vision, you have received or will receive a book

Against All Opposition by Greg L. Bonson. And this is a book published by American Vision that is a compilation of lectures given by Dr.

Bonson that have been put into written form. And we hope that you enjoy this book.

We have been given one copy to give away per day this week.

And you are our first questioner, so you are the blessed one to receive this free copy.

And we thank Gary DeMar of American Vision and that website, just to give my friend

Gary a plug, is AmericanVision .org, AmericanVision .org.

Uh, let's see here. We have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.

And B .B. asks, I know that there are those within a theological camp known as Auburn Avenue Theology or the

Federal Vision who maintain that Greg L. Bonson is their hero of the faith as well.

Do you think if Dr. Bonson was still with us that he would have a favorable view of the

Federal Vision? Well, you know, Greg's son

David jokes that trying to express what

Greg Bonson would think of things if he were still with us would become a kind of a cottage industry among followers as well as opponents of Greg.

So, and you know, one of the things that for sure, Greg was not one to criticize at a distance or to categorize people.

So I guess I would have to say, what is it that the Federal Vision, a

Federal Vision proponent says that, you know, would be objected to?

Anyway, so, you know, what would he think of new perspectives on Paul? What do you think? What would he think of this, that, and the other thing?

There's just really no way of knowing. I could say what he might think about particular emphases of certain teachers, but, you know, it's like,

I don't feel obliged to agree with every person who claims they're a Calvinist or a

Protestant, certainly not if they claim to be a Reconstructionist. I've run off a lot of Reconstructionists in my career.

So I guess all of that, I'm not trying to be coy, but I think Greg, if he were still here, would want to question the questioner to get it more specific down to what particular teaching rather than to affirm or denounce a movement or a group.

In fact, from my own personal experience, the movement is not monolithic.

So you have people, just like theonomy and Christian reconstruction are not.

You're right, that is a harder question to answer. But I think a lot of it depends on whether this person who claims to be an adherent to federal vision clearly opposes the gospel of the

Reformation justification by faith alone and I have heard some that seem to clearly be at odds with that great reformational truth, which obviously is infinitely more importantly a biblical truth.

But then I've met and know those that claim to be a part of that camp of federal vision who adamantly deny that that is a tenant of their beliefs.

In other words, that they agree with the reformers and the Bible that we are justified by faith alone.

So I know that Dr. Bonson affirmed that really vital pivotal doctrine of justification by faith alone.

And I remember hearing him debating during a radio debate,

Jerry Matitix, a Roman Catholic apologist, and he was very clear of his opposition to the unique dogmas of Rome that sets them apart from the

Protestant Reformation. Right, right. Yeah, and there's no question

Greg, to his dying day, agreed with the statements in the

Westminster Concession of Faith regarding faith and justification, as well as the necessary role of a changed life and obedience and service.

So, yeah, you want to know what he believed on a confessional level, that's what he believed.

Now, I understand that that doesn't tell the whole story, but, you know,

Greg was also one for making sure that doctrinal expressions were as clear and precise and agreed upon.

So, you know, even when you say justification by faith alone, you could get 10 different theologians that would nuance that phrase slightly differently, and maybe even significantly differently.

So, again, it's just, you know, in the internet age, there's too many condemnations of too many generalities, and certainly the internet isn't the place to become theologically precise.

And that's why Greg wrote lots of letters, and he had lots of phone calls and lots of conversations after lectures, where he could get very specific about helping people think biblically about complex and simple biblical truths.

Yes, so obviously there are people who claim to champion justification by faith alone who are seriously heretical because they deny that fruit, good works are needed as evidence of genuine faith, and they would deny the necessity of repentance.

So, obviously, not everybody who claims justification by faith alone as a part of their cardinal doctrines would really understand it in a biblical way or a reformational way.

Right, right. Bibi, guess what? You've won a different book, a book by Greg L.

Bonson himself, Van Til's Apologetics, and that is compliments of P &R

Publishing, and we want to thank our friends at prpbooks .com

for providing these copies of that book that we're giving away this week. We're also only giving one a day away, and you are one of those winners.

And by the way, I don't know if I said this to the previous listener,

John in Bangor, Maine, but John and Bibi, please give me your full mailing addresses so that cvbbs .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, can ship out these books to you, cvbbs .com.

Before the time gets away from us, before we even realize it, I want to make sure that you include in this discussion some things about Dr.

Bonson that I might not even think to ask, because I did not know him personally other than meeting him that one time and interviewing him in the early 1990s.

I did not know him as a friend or as a very close personal acquaintance, so if you could tell us some things about him that you want to make sure our audience knows.

Oh, well, I would do much better with specific questions. But, you know,

I do think for people who do not know him or did not know him very well, you know, obviously he was a controversial speaker, a figure.

His books, particularly those on theonomy, stirred up some serious discussion and some heated opposition.

Even his commitment to Vantillian presuppositional apologetics, you know, raised objections by R .C.

Sproul and others in the classical, so -called classical apologetic approach.

And sometimes that bled over into accusations about his own personality.

When I spoke at his memorial service, I made the point,

I compared him to a gunfighter in an old western, you know, the townspeople are concerned because the bad guys are basically doing whatever they want in the town.

So they pool their money and they hire a gunfighter to come in and subdue the bad guys.

But, you know, gunfighters have to fight. And then once the bad guys are driven off, then the question is, what do you do with the gunfighter?

And sadly, oftentimes the townspeople turn on the very person that has been so helpful to them, and sometimes for the same reason.

And so I think it's really important, and I've heard this over the years, people who heard about Greg, perhaps negatively, about his personality or his behavior, and then maybe people who have read his materials, but then especially people who met him in person, said over and over and over again, he isn't, he wasn't at all like the person

I imagined him to be from reports that I had heard. Part of it,

I think, is that he was a controversialist. And, you know, if you lose a debate, and you're not persuaded by losing the debate, then you have to come up with an explanation of why you weren't persuaded by losing the debate, and that is to accuse the person on the other side.

He was harsh, or he was unreasonable, or he was dogmatic, or, you know, any number of things.

So part of that arose out of his own calling as a controversialist.

I also knew, if I could call him the early, young Greg, and the old, mature, seasoned

Greg, and just like I hope we all want in all of our lives, there were changes.

And he was an incredibly gifted young man, and a lot of times incredibly gifted young men are sorely tempted to think more highly of themselves as they ought to.

And, of course, then you've got people who are putting you on a pedestal. You know, when you introduced Greg as perhaps the father of modern reform,

I mean, Greg would hate that kind of a designation. He wasn't the father of anything. He was a servant of God doing his very best to be as faithful as he could.

And the lionizing of him, even though we all want to talk to him about him in those terms, he would have said, no, no, no, not me, but Christ.

Christ defends himself. Christ chooses servants to defend him and to instruct others about him.

But he suffered a lot. He suffered in his family life.

He suffered in his ecclesiastical life. He suffered in his academic life, his professional life.

He suffered in his ecclesiastical life. I mean, when I go back over my history with him, and I think of what a peaceful, quiet, supportive life

I've had in all of those areas, and not to mention his own physical health, which finally culminated in his premature death.

And he learned, just like Hebrews says of Jesus, he learned obedience by the things that he suffered.

Not at all to compare Greg's suffering with Jesus' redemptive sufferings, but there is also that pattern.

And he was humbled. He was broken. He was taught things through that.

And so the death of the Greg that I knew in that last week before he died, well, two weeks, because he was in a coma for nearly a week.

And the one I knew when I met him, first of all, in college, they're not the same men. And yet they are the same men.

So that, to me, is very, very important for people who are only going to know him by reputation, both from his friends and his critics and his enemies.

You know, we think about the older worthies, and all we know about them is from their books.

And maybe biographies. But Greg hasn't been gone that long, and there's still people around who have axes to grind against his ideas, but they become ad hominem as well.

So Greg was not a perfect man by any stretch, but he was a man who throughout his life, through some real, real difficult trials, was humbled, was changed, was matured and ripened.

And people who knew him late in his life, especially, gained all of the benefits from that growth in Greg.

And that's something that I long for people who didn't know him to know about him.

Yes, you used the phrase, the old Greg Bonson, but Greg never lived to be old.

He was, I believe, even younger than I am right now. When he went home to be with the

Lord, he was in his 50s. Am I not right? 47. 47. Wow.

Younger than I thought. In fact, he was over a decade younger than me, which is,

I'm always embarrassed when I hear a note about men who were so extremely brilliant and who have accomplished so much for the kingdom that are younger than me.

It's always a rebuke to me in some way. I'll be 59 in February.

But can you tell us some of the details, how and why Dr. Bonson did depart this earth and enter glory?

How did he pass? Well, he, at the time that he was entered college, at least this is what

I understood, he, you know, when we had to enter college, we all had to have a physical and they discovered,

I think for the first time then, that he had a congenital heart condition.

One of the valves in his heart was malformed and weakened. So in 1978, he had his first open heart surgery, which replaced this defective aorta valve.

He went to Denver because that's where his parents lived at the time and there was a good surgeon there.

And then 10 years later, almost in 1987, he had a second open heart surgery.

These pig valves that they used for the replacements, they didn't expect them to last more than 10 years at the outside.

So he got some extra mileage out of that. And one of the ironies was that when in December of 1995, when it was determined that he needed to have another replacement, that time they were going to use a completely synthetic valve that was supposed to have a more or less indefinite lifespan.

So he'd had two valves that they knew if they worked and he lived on.

And of course, you know, he was so intensively involved through particularly those last 10 years of his life.

So he went into the hospital. The initial report was that the surgery was successful.

And I think that surgery was on a Monday, if I remember properly. My wife and I drove up into Orange County to the hospital to pray with them and just wish him well before the surgery.

And then we stayed overnight with his folks who were in town for the surgery as well. And everything looked good the next day.

I think Tuesday was fine, if I'm remembering correctly. The Wednesday, a couple of his sons were in the room with him and they were chatting.

And they said he just lost consciousness and slumped over. And he went into a coma.

They kept him on life support for a week. And we were up there waiting and watching and praying with the family through that week.

And finally, on December 11th, the doctors just said that his other systems were shutting down.

And they recommended that they take him off of life support, which they did. And so he passed away on that Monday.

So yeah, those were sad days. But it was the culmination, I guess they would say complications of open heart surgery, the third one that he had had.

So those were the circumstances. Yeah. And by the way, I met no disrespect, obviously, to the late

Dr. Bonson by referring to him as someone who many revere as being the father of modern

Christian apologetics, because that is just how he is viewed by many, especially those who are in the field of apologetics.

I didn't mean to insinuate that Dr. Bonson himself viewed himself that way.

No, and I know you didn't, but I just thought I would make that point. If you could, we could all call him that, but we would have an argument.

That I do know if he was still here, he would argue with us about that. Yes, and in fact,

John Calvin himself had the same view of himself as a very humble view and did not want to be exalted in his memory and would have recoiled with horror to hear the term

Calvinism, I'm assuming, being used, although I believe it's a very handy and useful historic nickname because there's so many different theological views in existence.

But I know Calvin would not approve. We have to go to our final break. It's going to be a lot more brief than the last two breaks.

And if anybody wants to join us with a question of your own, send it in now before we run out of time.

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

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnsin and our guest today has been and will continue to be for the next eight minutes or so,

Roger Wagner. And Roger Wagner was a close personal friend of the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson to whom we are paying tribute this entire week. And we hope that you continue listening to this program every day this week as the tribute to Dr.

Bonson continues. And we do have an anonymous listener, Pastor Wagner, anonymous listener who says, my life has been filled with great, deep, and sorrowful trials as well, including having at one time an unfaithful spouse and witnessing close loved ones in my family perish and battling with serious illness.

What was unique about Dr. Bonson's theological views that would make him more victorious in his spirit and life and outlook when facing the trials that he himself faced?

That's a good question and I don't have much time to try to answer. I guess

I would say as much as anybody that I've ever known, Greg, on a gut level, had absolute confidence that the sovereignty of God meant that whatever he was going through, no matter how disappointing, no matter how wrong it might have been, how painful, that God meant it for good.

I think for a lot of us, until we go through trials, that Romans 8 -28 is a nice sentiment, but it isn't until we're really pushed to the wall by affliction that we find out whether we really believe that, and Greg really believed it.

But he also, you know, at least in his relationship with me, he was...

I talked about him being a loyal friend. He was also a trusting friend, which sometimes set him up for trouble.

But I know there were times when he would say, for example, Roger, will you remind me why

I'm staying in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church? Or will you tell me again what you think

I ought to do? Which is just kind of... And this sounds strange because he seemed so, you know, squared away and people were always asking him what to do.

But there were times in those difficulties where he kind of gave me carte blanche.

He said, you know the situation now. What do you think I ought to do? How should I respond? And I could point him back to those foundational convictions and he really believed them.

And so I guess for all of us, it's a lesson that when our circumstances and our experiences tempt us to doubt the truth and the reliability of God in Christ and through the

Spirit, we need to doubt our doubts. We need to deny our doubts rather than letting that temptation cause us to deny our

Lord. Praise God. And by the way, folks, I would be amiss if I did not let you know about something offered by one of my financial supporters,

Solid Ground Christian Books. They have a book that Dr. Bonson has contributed to.

The Risen Christ Conquers Mars Hill Classic Discourses on Paul's Ministry in Athens.

And Dr. Greg L. Bonson is one of a number of folks who are featured in The Risen Christ Conquers Mars Hill.

So if you want more information about that, go to Solid -Ground -Books .com Solid -Ground -Books .com

Why don't you remind our listeners, Pastor Wagner, about the Bonson Project before we go off the air today?

Yes. Well, it's an effort by a number of us churchmen and academics and others who are trying to make available to a worldwide general audience without charge the vast audio legacy of Greg Bonson.

I said earlier in the program that though he published some books and they're wonderful, and I hope there will be more, the vast amount of his output was recorded and has been available since his death, but for a charge.

So we're trying to get the license and then to do the editing and the remastering to produce high -quality recordings of his audio material that can be made available through Sermon Audio and especially through the

Bonson Project website to the whole wide world and hopefully to extend his influence in a day when it's needed more than ever before.

So BonsonProject .org, that's the place to go online. Really? I'm looking at BonsonProject .com.

Is it both of them? Oh, you're right. I'm sorry. My bad. Yeah, it's .com.

BonsonProject .com. That's B -A -H -N -S -E -N -Project .com

and they need funds to help them accomplish what they are sitting out to do.

Right. We understand everybody needs financial support and we don't want to rob it from somebody else, but if you want a cause to help, this is a good one.

And if you could, I'd like you to leave our listeners with what you most want etched in their hearts and minds about the life and legacy of Dr.

Bonson before we go off the air. Well, when I think about it, it was a short life, comparatively speaking, as we said, 47 years, a lot of toil and trouble.

But we remember what the scripture says, that the steps of a man are established by the

Lord, and though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong. The Lord upholds his hands.

And so, through all of his experiences, he not only made a wonderful contribution to the life of the church, but for those who knew him and may yet come to know him, he's an example of someone who, through many tribulations, entered the kingdom of heaven.

And that's a promise. You know, we all may say in many ways we're not like Greg Bonson, intellectually, academically, whatever, but we are like him in the sense that we are sinners saved by grace, strengthened by the

Spirit to persevere, and we have that promise that Jesus will never leave us or forsake us.

Amen. Well, I want to repeat, bonsonproject .com, B -A -H -N -S -E -N, project .com.

Find out more about this wonderful effort, very vital, valuable effort, so that you can be a part of it.

And I also want to remind you of the website of our friends at the

Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Chula Vista, California. That's bayviewopc .org,

bayviewopc .org. I want to thank you so much, Pastor Wagner, for being our guest today.

I look forward to your frequent visits, your return visits to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio as a guest.

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

Savior than you, our sinner. Don't forget to keep tuning in every day for the remainder of the week for our continued five -day tribute to the late

Dr. Greg L. Bonson here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater