A Conversation with Greg Bahnsen’s BEST FRIEND!!!

I'll do my basic introductions here.

Walter Martin, the Upcoming Interview, and the Bonson Project

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today I have a very special guest with me that I'll be introducing in just a few moments. But before then, I'd like to make just a couple of announcements.

This Thursday, I will be having an episode which is going to cover the topic of the apologetic influence of Dr. Walter Martin. Now, if you guys, some of you old school apologetics guys would know Dr. Walter Martin was the original Bible answer man.

And he was an excellent gift to the church, whether you agreed with him on certain things.

Or not.

He definitely made a great impact apologetically, both in his heyday, and of course, after he had passed, his influence continues to be felt in various quarters, especially amongst a lot of young apologists, believe it or not.

So we're going to be interviewing Walter Martin's daughter. And so we'll, you know, when that comes, that should be really interesting. She wrote a book about her father and, you know, that kind of takes a look at her dad from a personal kind of a personal angle, as well as kind of a ministerial angle.

And so it's a really interesting take and perspective on Walter Martin that perhaps folks haven't haven't been able to explore. So that's this Thursday at 5 p .m. Eastern.

All right.

So looking forward to that. Also I'm going to be releasing some shorter videos. I know when we have interviews with folks, I do appreciate everyone enjoying the guests that I have on. We've had Scott Oliphant on, Dr. James Anderson, Saiten Bruggenkate, Greg Koekel, Frank Turek.

We've had some really great guests on. But at the same time, the interviews, as much as I enjoy them and there's such great content there, they can be a little long. You know, I like I like things when they're long.

And I know a lot of you guys do, too. But I'm going to be trying to put out some weekly content, some videos around 10 minutes or less addressing various things related to apologetics in general and presuppositional apologetics in particular.

Also, you guys, if you have any specific items you'd like me to address, for example, some objections to presuppositional methodology, you can email me at revealedapologeticsatgmail .com. And you can give me ideas of videos you'd like to see, response videos that you'd like me to put out.

And so I really want to be in touch with what you guys are asking. I want to scratch where you're itching, so to speak, so that I can continue to give you content that you find useful and beneficial as you grow in the realm of apologetics.

Also, if you are listening in today, you can send in your questions. If you have any questions about Greg Bonson, we're going to be talking about the legacy of Greg Bonson from a more personal aspect.

Now, we will talk a little bit about presuppositional apologetics. But the guest that I have now is, I have been told, was Greg Bonson's best friend. And so he knew Dr. Bonson from an angle that perhaps a lot of us who are introduced to him through kind of the apologetic route may not know.

And so I don't know about you, but I like kind of the biographical information. You know, Dr. Bonson used to do classes on Vantill, and he would give kind of the backstory of Dr. Vantill. And I used to enjoy that kind of stuff.

So hopefully we can cover some of those things today. Also, if you want to support Revealed Apologetics financially, one way you can do that is send in a super chat. You send in a super chat. We'll get your question or your comment up on the screen there, give you a little shout out.

Those are always super duper appreciated. Well, without further ado, let me welcome Roger Wagner. Roger Wagner is Dr. Bonson's very close friend, and we're happy to have him on today. Why don't you introduce yourself briefly there and we'll kind of go through some stuff.

Roger Wagner on Greg Bahnsen’s Life, Churchmanship, and Friendship

Here. All right. Well, currently I'm pastor of Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church down in Chula Vista, California, which is right down near the Mexican border south of San Diego. In about a week, I will have my 38th anniversary here in this church.

And when I think about Greg, among all of the other things that he did for me, he coaxed me to seminary, had no intention of going to seminary. He coaxed me into the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And so I wouldn't be here doing what I'm doing now if it hadn't been for his influence.

So I'm a father and a grandfather, been married for pushing 50 years now. That anniversary is coming up next year. Really thankful for the opportunity both to talk about my friend, particularly to promote this Bonson project.

I'm so excited about the idea of having more of his materials available free of charge out in the wide world. I hope that will just increase his influence for a new generation. So that's who I am. And I met Greg in 1966.

So I'm probably his oldest surviving friend. We had another very close friend in college, Dennis Johnson, who taught at Westminster Seminary for many years, retired about a year ago. And he's out in Tennessee now.

But he and I were sort of the three amigos from California that went east to Philadelphia to go to seminary.

Very good. Now, for those who don't know what the Bonson Project is, it is an attempt to get Dr. Bonson's audio material, hours and hours worth of lectures, philosophy courses, apologetics courses, theology courses, courses on ethics.

There's just countless hours that he really spilled his life into to teach people throughout the years. And so the Bonson Project is seeking to get all of those audio files out in the public domain and to remove the paywall so they can be made available to folks for free.

I believe the folks running this are trying to get it out on Sermon Audio. Is that correct? Do you know anything about that?

Well, we're working on the platform and we'll have a web page devoted to his things. They may end up on Sermon Audio as well. But we don't want them to be lost anywhere in the midst of other stuff. We want people to be able to get online and find them quickly and take advantage of them.

So we're still working on the technical side of it. But right now, we're trying to raise some funds for the project because there's some copyrights that have to be purchased and so forth.

Yeah. And just to let people know who are listening, some of the details as to how you can support the Bonson Project, because obviously these sorts of things cost money, I highly recommend. I know a lot of people who follow my channel and I've received a lot of messages of folks who have appreciated my debates, a lot of my videos and things like that.

I went to seminary, but I did not learn apologetics in seminary. And I've had people personally ask me, you know, I want to do apologetics. You know, should I go to seminary? Well, you can and there's great value to going to seminary.

But I learned almost all of my apologetics from listening to audio lectures and debates by Dr. Bonson and many others as well, but mostly Dr. Bonson. And so if you really like what I put out and how I do things, I learned a lot of this stuff from listening to countless of hours of Dr. Bonson.

So I highly recommend it. Once the site is up and I'll keep my listeners updated. You definitely want to support it. It is I think once this material is put out there, it can be a game changer in terms of equipping people with what I think is a biblical apologetic approach.

And of course, Bonson, in my opinion, was the best representative of the presuppositional method. All right.

Well, let me just respond to that. I think, you know, listening or learning by listening and observing. I mean, there's so many areas of life where if you can come alongside somebody and watch them do what they do, whether it's auto mechanics or house painting or whatever, that's often so much more effective than an academic setting.

That's not to say taking courses in apologetics is is not helpful. You need to learn the content. But so much of what Greg was so good at was actually, as he liked to say, taking apologetics to the streets.

And he was a great model for that. So hearing your testimony about how you learned apologetics by listening to him. Yeah, I think a lot of people who can't afford or don't really have an interest in a whole seminary curriculum will benefit from accessing this audio material once we get it out in the broad world.

Right. Right.

Yeah. My first introduction to Greg Bonson was listening to the Gordon Stein debate.

Oh, yeah.

That's how most of us youngins got introduced to Dr. Bonson. They're like, oh, that's that's different.

That's a different way of reading.

I've never really heard that before.

So that was definitely my introduction. But let's get into some of the some background here. Why don't you describe how did you meet Dr. Bonson? And why don't you describe for us a little bit of your friendship and how that developed over the years?

From Westmont College to Westminster Seminary

Sure, sure. Well, I went to Westmont College, which was a Christian liberal arts, is a Christian liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, California. And so that was 1966. And I first heard of Greg just distantly because, you know, as entering freshmen, they needed to elect a freshman class president.

And Greg was one of the ones that was running for that office. He didn't win. He lost out to a fellow who had a great campaign strategy, how to get a bunch of people to vote for him who had never heard of him before.

But I'd heard the name. I think my first exposure was he started Greg started writing letters to the school newspaper. And I should say at that point, I was a Christian, had been a Christian through high school, broadly evangelical, dispensational, Arminian-ish.

And so I didn't even know what the Reformed faith was, let alone any of the Reformed standards. And Reformed ecclesiology was completely over the over the rainbow as far as I was concerned. But here's this guy and he's not signing his letters to the editor, but he's writing letters to the editor and he's signing them Balaam's ass.

And there was a whole series of them. And the first thing I remember him writing about was he was objecting to the opening of the, this is going to sound strange to a lot of your listeners, but the college was considering opening the library on Sunday afternoons.

So students after church and lunch, if they didn't go to the beach, they could go study in the library. And Greg was basically holding forth the biblical Sabbath ethic and saying, we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't open up for business on Sunday.

And the business of a college is to study. And and I thought, this is so strange. You know, why would you not do that? And and what impressed me was that he had biblical arguments and he had confessional arguments.

Now, again, I was not from a confessional church, so that didn't. But it impressed me. This is this is a guy that's not just a kind of a Christian pragmatist. And of course, those were traits that were so prominent in his life and ministry through to his death.

And and so before I met him as a friend, I kind of knew who this guy was. And of course, he drew a lot of fire in the school newspaper. I mean, how how can you be saying these things? Keep the library closed.

We need more time to study, blah, blah, blah. So we had a mutual friend. Greg was a pre-ministerial major, majored in philosophy, minored in biblical studies. And he had a friend who was an English major who was also pre-ministerial.

And I had some classes with him. And this is Dennis Johnson, who I mentioned before, eventually became a professor at Westminster Seminary here in California. So I don't remember exactly, but I think Greg and Dennis were roommates.

But through my contact with Dennis, he introduced me face to face with Greg. And towards the end of our freshman year, we began to get together in their room once a week. And it was basically a Bible study where Greg began to introduce both of us to what we later became known as the as the reformed faith.

But it was basically biblical Christianity and a lot of apologetical issues as well. But as I recall it at first, it was much more just, you know, learning the Bible. And we weren't there to study apologetics, per se.

So I think through through our college years, we attended a couple of courses together. But I really was in a little different orbit from him. But as we became friends, this is a long answer to your question.

No, I.

Through the college years, we he and Dennis and I, we we just talked a lot. We enjoyed each other's company and we developed a kind of an interest in bringing ideas to the college campus that weren't part of the standard fare.

So we we organized this group, three of us that were the Controversial Speakers Bureau. In 1966, everything had to be controversial. And so we would bring I know Greg brought a few fellows to the campus that were out of his world in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Lectures on eschatology that were not kind of common, quasi-dispensational teaching, and that stirred up a lot of controversy. The International Collegiate ICSI, International Collegiate Students Institute or something like that, they would pay to bring speakers to college campuses.

If you got a slot for them to come. So it was kind of like free money, you know, you could get speakers. So we we actually had Owen Barfield, who was a friend and colleague of C .S. Lewis's, come to campus.

Thomas Molnar, who was a Hungarian emigre, very conservative on political matters. He came anyway. So that kind of contact kind of got me more into the apologetic world. Honestly, I wasn't I wasn't planning to be a minister.

I wasn't desperately interested in apologetics, but it all makes sense. And it was part of the package deal. If you were going to become more theologically self-aware, you were going to have to realize that controversy would arise.

And so defending the faith against atheism or just defending biblical positions against those who disagreed. A lot of it was in-house and conversations with students. So that's how I got to to know him initially.

But we just became such good friends. I think it was later on in our life together that we were growing and maturing and that friendship deepened. But there that was my initial exposure personally to Greg.

Bonson as Apologist and Churchman

Well, I think you said something that's very important and I think people need to hear it. You said that you guys used to meet together and do Bible studies, but that the Bible studies were not necessarily apologetic focused.

And I think that's that is very important because what I appreciate about Dr. Bonson and folks like him is that in my estimation, he struck a very good balance between an apologist and a churchman. And there was more to Christianity than just apologetics.

Now, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the online scene in apologetics today. They got a lot of cool, hip, young people starting YouTube channels and things like that. But there is often very little evidence that there is any kind of meaningful connection to a broader body of believers, a healthy church.

These things are often done as kind of like we're kind of rogue online apologist, which when I take a look at someone like Dr. Bonson, it didn't seem as though, you know, if the Internet was around back then, he probably wouldn't be that sort of person.

What do you think? What do you think or how do you think Bonson held together? Did you think he held together, you know, in a healthy way, the balance between being an apologist and being a churchman and having kind of that broader outlook on things, not just focusing on one thing?

Yeah, yeah. I think I think Greg was he was a churchman before he was an apologist. The church was very important to him. You know, he had been as a as a child, his family had joined the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, so he was raised in it.

I think he was around in his ninth grade or so when he began to feel like he wanted to enter the ministry. And so by the time I met him in in college, he was seminary bound. He wanted to go to Westminster Seminary and study with Cornelius Van Til, but.

You know, it was in the service of the church, and when I think about his well, you know, we knew each other about 30 years and his love for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the pain that he experienced in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the fact that he never left.

I mean, there were a lot of people along the way that found it too difficult to be constrained by the interaction of an ecclesiastical body. And so they went on their own. They developed in individual ministries and so forth.

And Greg never did that. I mean, there were times when I had to have a heart to heart talk with him, too. He would say, Roger, remind me why I'm staying in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. So I would remind him and he would he would say, but I never had to.

I had to remind him I didn't have to remind him his commitment was there. And and he really taught me by his example, as well as in principle, to be a churchman. You know, I know there's a lot, particularly in our day and age, where being a Christian might even be anti-church.

But at best, it's kind of like, well, yes, you can be a part of the church. But I think the heritage of the Reformed church and Reformed confessions, you know, if you love the Savior, you love the bride of Christ and the bride of Christ is the church with all of her rewards and with all of her difficulties.

And and Greg paid a price for that over the years. He he had a lot of difficulties within a church, but he never left. He didn't become an independent. And and I think after all was said and done, God blessed that testimony because he created.

I use that term in quotations, he discipled a lot of other people to be churchmen as well as apologists.

Non-Denominational Churches and Ecclesiastical Commitment

Yeah. Now, what what do you think Dr. Bonson would have or what did I mean? Maybe you guys spoke about this. I know he's very much a churchman being connected to the OPC. How did he feel with regards to non-denominational churches?

Well, you know, he he appreciated that there were Christians outside a particular denomination, and I think his I remember this is going to sound like gratuitous name dropping, but Francis Schaeffer once said in a lecture that I heard of J. Gresham Machen, who was the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, you know, he sort of made the point that anybody who takes the Bible seriously is reformed in principle.

They they may not have gotten there yet. They may not get there through their whole life. But the idea was that anybody who would listen to the Bible as Greg tried to present it, whether theologically or pastorally or ethically or apologetically, was going to be moving in the direction of a strong ecclesiology because that's what the Bible teaches.

And it may take a lifetime and it may never happen. So he was always very open to non-denominational settings where he might minister. But he he was a churchman. So para-ecclesiastical kinds of ministries, again, he would work with them, but not to be kind of a promoter because the ministry of of evangelism and missions as well as church life, it it should come under the heading in one way or another of a church.

And that in our setting, that means some kind of denomination or other. Even non-denominational churches are pretty denominational when it comes down to it.

That's right. Now, as a friend, what if I can just put this kind of as a friend, what was his best quality? And as a friend, what were things that he would do or say that was kind of like, oh, man, you know, no friend is perfect.

Sometimes we argue with our friends. What were some of the good things that you really valued about your friendship? Not so much what he was doing in the broader picture, but just as a personal friend.

And what are some of the things that maybe stood out to you that, hey, you know, he was a great guy, but sometimes, you know, he'd be a little too much of this or he would say something like that. Why don't you kind of draw that out a little bit for us?

Loyalty, Tenacity, and the Human Side of Greg Bahnsen

Yeah, yeah. Well, I would say loyalty. I used to say if I was in trouble anywhere on the planet, if I could get word to Greg Bonson, he would find me. Sorry. And he'd help me. And so just that kind of constancy was what I most admired.

The other side, and this is going to to his enemies, they're going to say amen to this. But I remember one time in a particularly frustrating conversation with Greg, I said, you know, you would win the argument even if you knew you were wrong.

I get that impression.

I've listened to so much of him.

I feel like I know myself.

And I mean, he was he was just so skillful. I mean, thankfully, I believe that ninety nine percent of the time he wasn't wrong. But he could be stubborn, particularly, you know, in our student years. He he I don't like the word mellowed because it sounds like you lose your convictions or your or your metal.

But, you know, in his later years and of course he died when he was still so young. But through the things that the Lord put him through providentially later in his ministerial career and his family life, he he definitely learned that winning the argument wasn't always the most important thing, even when you were right.

So I don't I don't hold that against him at all. Hopefully all of us grow and we grow in good ways if the spirit is sanctifying us. So but he just had the skills that, you know, he could he could win an argument even if he was knew if he knew he was wrong.

So that, you know, that kind of tenacity or pugnaciousness or whatever, that was there more in the young man than it was in the more mature man. But, you know, he was he was fun loving. He loved to joke.

He was not at all. I don't know my opinion, and this is just the old geezer talking, you know, a lot of you young bucks. You just seem like all you want to do is win an argument and if you don't have a friend that will rein you in, you know, that that can be a problem.

So anyway, that that's kind of my short answer to your question. But yeah, we had so much fun together. He liked to eat, you know, now drinking beer and doing apologetics is such a fad. He wasn't so much into that.

He wasn't a teetotaler, but, you know, he didn't have to have a beer in his hand and a cigar smoking in order to do good apologetics. But yeah, he he liked to play, you know, he was in his younger days, he was an athlete.

He played basketball, played softball, played football. And so, yeah, there was just he was a very complete man and enjoyable. And, you know, one of the things that's been said by so many over the years that.

If all you knew was the apologetic Greg. Pressing an argument and then you met him, particularly if you met him in a pastoral setting. People just would say, I had no idea that he was that kind of person.

From my impression from him as as an as a defender of the faith. But, you know, again, that's there's a sense in which that would be kind of obvious because I remember the same thing said about Jay Adams when they would hear him pressing a point with respect to biblical counseling, as opposed to meeting him as a counselee.

And realizing how tender and compassionate and thoughtful he was, they would say, you know, the public man and the private man just don't quite seem to to match up until I've met them both. And then I can see the private man in the public man as well.

And I think that was definitely true of Greg.

Learning from Bahnsen’s Lectures and Personal Example

Yeah. And as I said before, I've listened to countless of hours. I mean, I can't I mean, I've when I started doing apologetics and became reformed and was introduced to Dr. Bonson, I kind of soaked in all of the, you know, the lectures and the audio.

But the beautiful thing that I used to appreciate about I remember coming to a point where I used to listen to I had like this CD set that I would keep in my car. And so we have a rule in my house. Well, it's not a house rule.

It's a van rule. Every time we go on a road trip, whoever's driving gets to control what we're listening to. And so since I'm the one who's always doing the driving in my family, my van becomes a seminary on wheels because I'm always listening to to something to that effect.

But I used to listen to these desks that I think was called Destroying All Opposition or something like that or something that I think American Vision was selling. And I had it and it was just it lived in my car.

It felt like, you know, when I went into my car, I was visiting Bonson's classroom. It was, you know, just countless of hours. And I remember driving on a road trip down to Virginia and one of the CDs finished and I kind of had this weird feeling come over me.

And I looked at my wife and I said, you know, I really wish I got to know Dr. Bonson. Like there was this interesting thing where you said that there's the Bonson, the scholar and Bonson, the man. A lot of times if you listen to a lot of his lectures, you know, with many of his students, Bonson, the man would spill into and over Bonson, the scholar.

And he would, you know, tell a joke or, you know, have a certain way of saying things. And you kind of develop that, you know, that kind of a fully a more fuller orb picture of who he was. And it makes for me as a kind of someone looking on from far away and from a distance, it always made me feel as though he seemed to be a very interesting man.

And it made me become more interested in his personal life. Just, you know, because people like that tend to draw that kind of curiosity. You know, what kind of person is this guy when he's not doing all this other stuff?

And I always found that stuff very interesting. And so I really do appreciate you sharing some of these bits here.

Travel, Westminster Seminary, and Meeting Van Til

Yeah. Yeah. When this is just a side anecdote, but when Dennis and I, as I said, were both English majors and Greg was a philosophy major. So, you know, the whole business about philosophy majors, never thinking about anything that was very worthwhile and just being eggheads and stuff.

So we were always goading Greg into you should take an English class, you should read a novel or something. So in our on the spring break of 1969, Greg asked us and I if we wanted to go to a student kind of open house weekend at at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.

And so we thought, well, why not? It seemed kind of crazy, 58 hours on the road, but why not? So we piled into my little VW Bug and the three of us platoon drove coast to coast for a weekend. So 56 hours there.

And so, you know, one guy drive for three hours, somebody navigate for three hours and somebody sleep for three hours. So during that trip, Greg decided that he was going to read Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina just to satisfy us.

So we're driving across country and he reads Anna Karenina. And so I just remember him sitting in the backseat reading this book, being so captured by it and interacting with it. You know, he was angry.

He was crying. He was happy. He was I mean, it's such a book and he's soaking it in. And Dennis and I are just thinking he's getting it, he's getting it. So then we went to this weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then we jumped in the car on Monday and came back again.

But that was when we got to meet Dr. Van Til in person. Greg tracked him down on campus, introduced himself. And so this was the year before we actually well, yeah, it was the year before we began seminary.

But that was our hegira as we traveled from Santa Barbara to to Philadelphia and back in a week.

Now, now I want to make a transition to his relationship with Dr. Van Til. We can talk a little bit about how they how that first meeting went. But what was it like to drive in the car for that many hours with someone like Dr.

Vonson?

Well, it was one of those nutty things that you do when you're a college student, you know, but we had we had a purpose. So, yeah, it was it was crazy because we were just platooning. And on the way out, it was OK because the car ran fine.

On the way back, we broke down in in Texas and. Had a kind of a surreal experience with a crooked mechanic who supposedly fixed the car, and then we limped the car on to Amarillo, Texas, where we got it to a VW agency.

And it was one of those, you know, this is not so much about Greg, but, you know, when we limped into this parking lot at this at this dealership about three in the morning and we all went to sleep because we'd been up so long by that time.

And then about eight o 'clock, the service bays open up and this the service technician comes out and he's wearing a white coat. He looks like a doctor. And we just thought we're saved. We finally have somebody who's going to be honest and competent.

And he got us back on the road and we came back again. But, yeah, that was kind of crazy eating on the road and just again goofing around and stuff. Yeah, it was it was a memory of a lifetime, you know, to to do something like that.

So, yeah.

Bahnsen’s Interest in Van Til and Westminster Seminary

All right. So you guys went to Westminster. I mean, what what drew Dr. Bonds into Westminster? Was it specifically his desire to learn under Vantill? How did he learn about Vantill? What drew him to Vantill?

In the part of the OPC that he would have been, you know, I mean, he was always interested in theology and apologetics, so he would he knew Vantill had books that were already published, The Defense of the Faith and and so on, so forth.

So he knew of Vantill and just knew that he wanted to study presuppositional apologetics with Vantill. And so now Vantill at that point was actually the year that we were there, 1970, was the last I believe it was the last year that Vantill taught kind of the basic apologetics course to all of the entering first year students.

He still was on campus and he did upper division classes and so forth. But or maybe it was the year we graduated. I can't remember quite. But anyway, Vantill was near the end of his teaching career. And so we just kind of got through the door before it closed as far as being able to study with him.

So, yeah, Greg had met him and I wasn't in on that conversation where he and Vantill met on that prelude trip. But we were all in class with Vantill as entering first year students in 1970 when we began.

And and, you know, one of the things about this isn't germane to your question, but, you know, I wasn't brilliant. I was interested, but, you know, Greg was just kind of on a on another level from me.

So when when we would sit in class, I learned as much from Greg's questions in class because I didn't know enough to ask the right kinds of questions. And then we would always have lunch. He and Dennis and I, because we were Californians, we were kind of suspect in the world of Westminster.

You know, it's like, what are these guys? People in California are totally crazy. So we'll let them be by themselves. So we would eat lunch pretty much every day and rehash whatever we'd learned that morning.

And it was just a rich. So I learned half of I probably learned 40 percent of my theology in class and the other 60 percent during lunchtime conversations and others with with Greg and Dennis as we just kind of chewed it all up, you know, because, you know, if you're a student in class, you're just writing stuff down.

You're not thinking about it. You're trying to get it down. And so those debriefings with Greg were were hugely valuable. And and he just asked incisive questions. He would challenge professors always respectfully and and submissively.

But, you know, if he raised his hand, the professor knew that they were going to have to give an account of themselves, not in a belligerent way. But, you know, all of us as teachers get used to the students just going yes or yes or three bags full, you know, and so when a student pushes back a little bit and I think those professors, most of them would say they became better professors for having to interact with that kind of of of interested, thoughtful.

I mean, they you know, they knew Greg was trying to get to the same place they were. And and so, you know, of course, John Frame, as well as as Dr. Van Til, admired Greg greatly and benefited from him as a student even while he was going.

And so I'm sitting there like the fly on the wall, gaining from all of this interaction. So, yeah, it was it was great. But on a personal level, it was always wonderful.

John Frame, Seminary Courses, and the Westminster Environment

Now, did you and Dr. Bonson meet Dr. Frame at the same time or was that at different times or?

Oh, no, that was Dr. Frame was teaching there. He probably can't. I can't remember exactly. I read John's theological autobiography a year or so ago, and I think he came to the faculty maybe in 68. So he was he was pretty new, but Greg took to John really quickly and vice versa, I think.

So we had some of our core theological curriculum from John Frame. We had ethics from him. Doctrine of the Christian life. Well, that was ethics.

Yeah.

And and Greg took a number of upper division courses from John as well. As well as Van Till. So, yeah, it was it was. A really rich environment for learning theology and apologetics.

That's awesome.

Once again, guys, you are listening to Revealed Apologetics. We have Roger Wagner, Dr. Greg Bonson, the late Dr. Bonson's best friend, giving us the inside scoop on some of the personal interesting stories of and adventures with with Dr. Bonson.