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

Revealed Apologetics

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I'll do my basic introductions here. All right. Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics.

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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,

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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.

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Walter Martin. Now, if you guys, some of you old school apologetics guys would know Dr. Walter Martin was the original

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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.

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We're going to be interviewing Walter Martin's daughter. When that comes, that should be really interesting.

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She wrote a book about her father that takes a look at her dad from a personal angle as well as a ministerial angle, and so it's a really interesting take and perspective on Walter Martin that perhaps folks haven't been able to explore.

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That's this Thursday at 5 p .m. Eastern. Looking forward to that.

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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.

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We've had Scott Oliphant on, Dr. James Anderson, Saiten Bruggenkate, Greg Kokel, Frank Turek.

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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.

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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.

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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

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and you can give me ideas of videos you'd like to see, response videos that you'd like me to put out.

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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.

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Also, if you are listening in today, you can send in your questions.

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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.

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Now, we will talk a little bit about presuppositional apologetics, but the guest that I have now is

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I have been told was Greg Bonson's best friend. And so he he knew

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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.

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And so I don't know about you, but I like kind of the biographical, you know, information. You know,

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Dr. Bonson used to do classes on Vantill and he would give kind of the backstory of Dr.

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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

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Revealed Apologetics financially, one way you can do that is send in a super chat. You send in a super chat.

03:51

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.

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Well, without further ado, let me welcome Roger Wagner. Roger Wagner is

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Dr. Bonson's was Dr. Bonson's very close friend. And we're happy to have him on today.

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Why don't you introduce yourself briefly there and we'll kind of go through some stuff here. All right.

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Well, currently, I'm pastor of Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church down in Chula Vista, California, which is right down near the

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Mexican border south of San Diego. In about a week, I will have my 38th anniversary here in this church.

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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.

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He coaxed me into the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And so I wouldn't be here doing what

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I'm doing now if it hadn't been for his influence. So I'm a father and a grandfather.

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I've been married for pushing 50 years now. That anniversary is coming up next year.

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Really thankful for the opportunity both to talk about my friend, particularly to promote this

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Bonson project. I'm so excited about the idea of having more of his materials available free of charge out in the wide world.

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I hope that will just increase his influence for a new generation.

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So that's who I am. And I met Greg in 1966, so I'm probably his oldest surviving friend.

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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.

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

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Very good. Now, for those who don't know what the Bonson Project is, it is an attempt to get

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Dr. Bonson's audio material, hours and hours worth of lectures, philosophy courses, apologetics courses, theology courses, courses on ethics.

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There's just countless hours that he really spilled his life into to teach people throughout the years.

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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.

06:38

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

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Well, we're working on the platform and we'll have a web page devoted to his things.

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They may end up on Sermon Audio as well. But we don't want him to be lost anywhere in the midst of other stuff.

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We want people to be able to, you know, get online and find them quickly and take advantage of them.

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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.

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Yeah. And just to let people know who are listening, once some of the details as to how you can support the

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Bonson Project, because obviously these sorts of things cost money, I highly recommend.

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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.

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I went to seminary, but I did not learn apologetics in seminary. And I've had people personally ask me, you know,

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I want to do apologetics. Should I go to seminary? Well, you can. And there's great value to going to seminary.

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But I learned almost all of my apologetics from listening to audio lectures and debates by Dr.

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Bonson and many others as well, but mostly Dr. Bonson. And so if you really like what

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I put out and how I do things, I learned a lot of this stuff from listening to countless of hours of Dr.

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Bonson's teaching. So I highly recommend it. Once the site is up and I'll keep my listeners updated, you definitely want to support it.

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It is, I think once this material is put out there, it can be a game changer in terms of equipping people with what

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I think is a biblical apologetic approach. And of course, Bonson, in my opinion, was the best representative of the presuppositional method.

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All right. Well, let me just respond to that. I think, you know, listening or learning by listening and observing,

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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.

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That's not to say taking courses in apologetics is is not helpful. You need to learn the content.

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But so much of what Greg was so good at was actually, as he liked to say, taking apologetics to the streets.

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And he was a great model for that. So hearing your testimony about how you learned apologetics by listening to him.

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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.

09:34

Right, right. Yeah, my first introduction to Greg Bonson was listening to the

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Gordon Stein debate. Oh, yeah, that's how most of us youngins got introduced to Dr.

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Bonson. They're like, oh, that's that's different. That's a different way of reading. I've never really heard that before.

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So that was definitely my introduction. But let's get into some of the some background here.

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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?

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Sure, sure. Well, I went to Westmont College, which was a

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Christian liberal arts is a Christian liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, California.

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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.

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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.

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But I'd heard the name. I think my first exposure was he started

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Greg started writing letters to the school newspaper. And I should say at that point,

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I was a Christian, had been a Christian through high school, broadly evangelical, dispensational,

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Arminian -ish. And so I didn't even know what the

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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.

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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

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Balaam's ass. And there was a whole series of them. And the first thing

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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.

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So students after church and lunch, if they didn't go to the beach, they could go study in the library.

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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.

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And the business of a college is to study. And and I thought this is so strange.

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You know, why would you not do that? And and what impressed me was that he had biblical arguments and he had confessional arguments.

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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

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Christian pragmatist. And of course, those were traits that were so prominent in his life and ministry through to his death.

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And and so before I met him as a friend,

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I kind of knew who this guy was. And of course, he drew a lot of fire in the school newspaper.

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I mean, how how can you be saying these things? Keep the library closed. We need more time to study, blah, blah, blah.

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So we had a mutual friend. He Greg was a pre -ministerial major, majored in philosophy, minored in biblical studies.

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And he had a friend who was an English major who was also pre -ministerial.

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And 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.

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So I don't remember exactly, but I think Greg and Dennis were roommates.

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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.

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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

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Reformed faith. But it was basically biblical Christianity and a lot of apologetical issues as well.

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But as I recall it at first, it was much more just, you know, learning the

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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.

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But I really was in a little different orbit from him. But as we became friends, this is a long answer to your question.

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No, I through the college years, we he and Dennis and I, we we just talked a lot.

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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.

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So we we organized this group, three of us that were the

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Controversial Speakers Bureau. In 1966, everything had to be controversial.

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And so we would bring I know Greg brought a few fellows to the campus that were out of his world in the

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Orthodox Presbyterian Church, lectures on eschatology that were not kind of common, quasi -dispensational teaching.

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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.

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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.

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Lewis's, come to campus. Thomas Molnar, who was a

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Hungarian emigre, very conservative on political matters, he came. Anyway, so that kind of contact kind of got me more into the apologetic world.

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Honestly, I wasn't I wasn't planning to be a minister. I wasn't desperately interested in apologetics, but it all makes sense.

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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.

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And so defending the faith against atheism or just defending biblical positions against those who disagreed.

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A lot of it was in -house and conversations with students. So that's how

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I got to to know him initially. But we just became such good friends.

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I think it was later on in our life together that we were growing and maturing and that friendship deepened.

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But there that was my initial exposure personally to Greg. Well, I think you said something that's very important and I think people need to hear it.

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You said that you guys used to meet together and do Bible studies, but that the Bible studies were not necessarily apologetic focused.

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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.

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And there was more to Christianity than just apologetics. Now, I'm not

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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

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YouTube channels and things like that. But there is often very little evidence that there is some any kind of meaningful connection to a broader body of believers, a healthy church.

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These things are often done as kind of like we're kind of rogue online apologists, which when

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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.

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What do you think? What do you think or how do you think Bonson held together?

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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?

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Yeah, yeah, I think I think Greg was he was a churchman before he was an apologist.

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The church was very important to him, you know, he had been as a as a child, his family had joined the

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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.

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And so by the time I met him in in college, he was seminary bound.

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He wanted to go to Westminster Seminary and study with Cornelius Van Til, but.

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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

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Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the pain that he experienced in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the fact that he never left.

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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.

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And so they went on their own. They developed in individual ministries and so forth.

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And Greg never did that. I mean, there were times when I had to have a heart to heart talk with him, too.

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He would say, Roger, remind me why I'm staying in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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So I would remind him and he would he would say, but I never had to. I had to remind him

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I didn't have to remind him his commitment was there.

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And and he really taught me by his example, as well as in principle, to be a churchman.

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You know, I know there's a lot, particularly in our day and age, where being a

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Christian might even be anti -church. But at best, it's kind of like, well, yes, you can be a part of the church.

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But I think the heritage of the Reformed church and Reformed confessions, you know, if you love the

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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.

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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.

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He didn't become an independent. And and I think after all was said and done,

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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.

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Yeah. Now, what what do you think Dr. Bonson would have or what did

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I mean? Maybe you guys spoke about this. I know he's very much a churchman being connected to the OPC.

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How did he feel with regards to non -denominational churches? Well, you know, he he appreciated that there were

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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.

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Gresham Machen, who was the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, you know, he sort of made the point that anybody who takes the

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Bible seriously is reformed in principle.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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That's right. Now, as a friend, what if I could just put this kind of as a friend, what was his best quality?

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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.

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Sometimes we argue with our friends. What were some of the good things that you really valued about your friendship?

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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.

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Why don't you kind of draw that out a little bit? Yeah, yeah. Well, I would say loyalty.

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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.

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Sorry. And he'd help me. And so just that kind of constancy was what

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I most admired. The other side, and this is going to to his enemies, they're going to say amen to this.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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He he I don't like the word mellowed because it sounds like you lose your convictions or your or your metal.

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But, you know, in his later years and of course he died when he was still so young.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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But, you know, he was he was fun loving. He loved to joke.

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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.

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You just seem like all you want to do is win an argument. And if you don't have a friend that will reign you in, you know, that that can be a problem.

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So anyway, that that's kind of my short answer to your question. But yeah, we had so much fun together.

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He liked to eat, you know, now drinking beer and doing apologetics is such a fad.

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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.

26:54

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.

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And so, yeah, there was just he was a very complete man and enjoyable.

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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

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Greg. Pressing an argument and then you met him, particularly if you met him in a pastoral setting.

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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.

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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.

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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.

28:06

And then I can see the private man in the public man as well. And I think that was definitely true of Greg.

28:13

Yeah. And as I said before, I've listened to countless of hours. I mean, I can't I mean,

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I when I started doing apologetics and became reformed and was introduced to Dr.

28:25

Vonsen, I kind of soaked in all of the, you know, the lectures and the audio.

28:31

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

28:36

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.

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It's a van rule. Every time we go on a road trip, whoever is driving gets to control what we're listening to.

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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.

29:00

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

29:09

American Vision was selling. And I had it and it was just it lived in my car. It felt like, you know, when

29:15

I went into my car, I was visiting Vonsen'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

29:24

CDs finished. And I kind of had this weird feeling come over me. And I looked at my wife and I said, you know,

29:30

I really wish I got to know Dr. Bonson. Like there was this interesting thing where you said that there's the

29:36

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,

29:45

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.

29:54

And you kind of develop that, you know, that kind of a fully a more fuller orb picture of who he was.

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And it makes for me as a kind of a 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.

30:09

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.

30:17

Well, you know, what kind of person is this guy when he's not doing all this other stuff?

30:22

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

30:28

Yeah. When this is just a side anecdote, but when Dennis and I, as I said, were both

30:36

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.

30:49

So we were always goading Greg into you should take an English class, you should read a novel or something.

30:56

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.

31:12

And so we thought, well, why not? It seemed kind of crazy, 58 hours on the road, but why not?

31:18

So we piled into my little VW Bug and the three of us platoon drove coast to coast for a weekend.

31:29

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.

31:40

So during that trip, Greg decided that he was going to read Tolstoy's novel

31:45

Anna Karenina just to satisfy us. So we're driving across country and he reads

31:52

Anna Karenina. And so I just remember him sitting in the backseat, reading this book, being so captured by it and interacting with it.

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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.

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And Dennis and I are just thinking he's getting it. He's getting it. So then we went to this weekend,

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Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then we jumped in the car on Monday and came back again. But that was when we got to meet

32:23

Dr. Van Til in person. Greg tracked him down on campus, introduced himself.

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And so this was the year before we actually. Well, yeah, it was the year before we began seminary.

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

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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.

32:51

But what was it like to drive in the car for that many hours with someone like Dr.

32:57

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.

33:04

So, yeah, it was it was crazy because we were just platooning. And on the way out, it was

33:09

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.

33:28

And then we limped the car on to Amarillo, Texas, where we got it to a

33:34

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.

33:50

And then about eight o 'clock, the service base opened up and this the service technician comes out and he's wearing a white coat.

33:58

He looks like a doctor. And we just thought we're saved. We finally have somebody who's going to be honest and competent.

34:06

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.

34:14

Yeah, it was it was a memory of a lifetime, you know, to to do something like that.

34:21

So, yeah. All right. So you guys went to Westminster. I mean, what what drew

34:26

Dr. Bonds into Westminster? Was it specifically his desire to learn under Vantill? How did he learn about Vantill?

34:33

What drew him to Vantill? In the part of the OPC that he would have been, you know,

34:40

I mean, he was always interested in theology and apologetics, so he would he knew

34:47

Vantill had books that were already published, The Defense of the Faith and and so on and so forth.

34:54

So he knew of Vantill and just knew that he wanted to study presuppositional apologetics with Vantill.

35:01

And so now Vantill at that point was actually the year that we were there, 1970, was the last

35:10

I believe it was the last year that Vantill taught kind of the basic apologetics course to all of the entering first year students.

35:19

He still was on campus and he did upper division classes and so forth. But or maybe it was the year we graduated.

35:26

I can't remember quite. But anyway, Vantill was near the end of his teaching career.

35:36

And so we just kind of got through the door before it closed as far as being able to study with him.

35:42

So, yeah, Greg had met him and I wasn't in on that conversation where he and Vantill met on that prelude trip.

35:53

But we were all in class with Vantill as entering first year students in 1970 when we began.

36:00

And and, you know, one of the things about this isn't germane to your question, but, you know,

36:07

I wasn't brilliant. I was interested, but, you know,

36:12

Greg was just kind of on a on another level from me. So when when we would sit in class,

36:18

I learned as much from Greg's questions in class because I didn't know enough to ask the right kinds of questions.

36:26

And then we would always have lunch. He and Dennis and I, because we were

36:32

Californians, we were kind of suspect in the world of Westminster. You know, it's like, what are these guys?

36:38

People in California are totally crazy. So we'll let them be by themselves.

36:44

So we would eat lunch pretty much every day and rehash whatever we'd learned that morning.

36:50

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.

37:09

You're not thinking about it. You're trying to get it down. And so those debriefings with Greg were were hugely valuable.

37:18

And and he just asked incisive questions. He would challenge professors always respectfully and and submissively.

37:27

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.

37:38

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.

38:02

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,

38:10

John Frame, as well as as Dr. Van Til, admired Greg greatly and benefited from him as a student even while he was going.

38:21

And so I'm sitting there like the fly on the wall, gaining from all of this interaction.

38:27

So, yeah, it was it was great. But on a personal level, it was always wonderful. Now, did you and Dr.

38:34

Bonson meet Dr. Frame at the same time or was that at different times or?

38:39

Oh, no, that was Dr. Frame was teaching there.

38:45

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.

38:57

So he was he was pretty new, but Greg took to John really quickly and vice versa,

39:06

I think. So we had some of our core theological curriculum from John Frame.

39:13

We had ethics from him. Doctrine of the

39:18

Christian life. Well, that was ethics. Yeah. And and Greg took a number of upper division courses from John as well.

39:27

As well as Van Till. So, yeah, it was it was. A really rich environment for learning theology and apologetics.

39:37

That's awesome. Once again, guys, you are listening to Revealed Apologetics. We have

39:42

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.

39:54

Bonson. If you have not already, please subscribe to Revealed Apologetics on YouTube and on iTunes.

39:59

I try my best to convert the audio from these interviews and these episodes here on YouTube and put them over onto iTunes if that is preferred in terms of, you know, you might maybe like listening to podcasts better than watching videos.

40:15

That said, let's move on to a question. This is a question that someone sent me. It's not one that I'm going to put up on the screen, but someone sent to me sent this to me through a private message.

40:25

And I thought this I thought this was a cool question. I thought that it would be fun for you to kind of get into this if you know the answer.

40:32

The question was, how did Greg Bonson spend his spare time and what did his recreation look like?

40:40

How does someone like Dr. Bonson have fun? Well, you know, he just he really loved social occasions, but I have to tell you, he didn't have a lot of spare time.

40:56

He would get up routinely at four or so.

41:02

And I don't know really when he went, you know, went to bed. But he ended up he ended up earning two master's degrees while the rest of us were earning one.

41:16

So, I mean, he just studied, studied hard. He was very efficient in his use of time.

41:23

But, you know, he he actually we didn't go to church together.

41:30

My wife and I would go out to the Hatboro OPC, which was about 30 minutes away from the seminary area where we all lived around the seminary.

41:41

We didn't live on campus, but we would have rented rooms. And so and Greg went to the

41:49

Glenside OPC, which is right across the street from the campus. He and his wife went there.

41:55

And so but we would still occasionally get together on like a Saturday or something.

42:01

And, you know, we all enjoy it. We enjoyed music, just the socializing.

42:08

He and his wife would come over to we my wife and I rented a third floor apartment in an old house near the seminary campus.

42:18

And they were regular visitors. And we would just, you know, hang out and talk shop and talk, you know, sports or whatever.

42:29

I mean, it was just so he didn't have, as I recall, hobbies as such.

42:35

OK, but he really enjoyed any kind of social occasion and was a lot of fun to be around.

42:43

We probably went to a few baseball games, but they weren't Dodger games. So I don't remember them.

42:51

Probably went to see the Phillies some time. It was a tough sell. Oh, man,

42:58

I was going to ask something that slipped my mind. But if you can, I think people might be interested.

43:04

I ask people this all the time, you know, when I have a scholar on or something like that, you know, how do you study?

43:10

You know, what's your method? And I find it interesting that a lot of great thinkers tend to wake up very early.

43:16

Now, you just made a mention that Dr. Bonson used to wake up around 4 a .m. Was Dr. Bonson's study life something that was private or did you ever have kind of an inside look as to what that looked like?

43:28

Why don't you unpack that for us, if you can? Yeah, no, not not so much. You know, we weren't living in a dorm or studying in the library together.

43:39

So, I mean, he was very, you know, as a married man, he was very conscious of wanting to spend time at home.

43:46

So he had his study at home. I, I think I, well, actually, I had a job during seminary as a library supervisor, you know, behind the desk, checking out books and stuff like that.

43:59

So I spent a fair amount of time in the library just because that was part of my my job.

44:05

So so I didn't really observe his. But, you know, he kept up with all of the reading and he wrote long papers.

44:14

You know, Dr. Van Til used to like he said in apologetics, he said,

44:20

I want your term paper to be good and long, not good and long, but good and long.

44:28

And the joke was that he would stand upstairs in his house and threw the papers down the stairway and the ones that rolled the farthest got the

44:37

A's and the ones that got the B's. So, you know,

44:43

I worked really, really hard to crank out about 25 pages, but that was all I could say.

44:49

But, you know, Greg, you know, you said good and long. That was fine for Greg. So he would write long, long papers.

44:54

And many of the upper division courses that Greg took with Dr. Frame were they were pretty intensive in writing as well as in reading.

45:06

Again, a number of those I didn't take. There was a faculty member who, you know, when we think about electives, there was a faculty member who had been an

45:20

English major. He was very interested in evangelism and some apologetics in connection with evangelism.

45:29

And I kind of gravitated more to his specialty courses than the ones, you know,

45:36

Greg took anything that had anything to do with philosophy and theology. And that was pretty much

45:42

Dr. Frame's wheelhouse. And so some of those upper division courses

45:47

I wasn't in on. But anyway, back to Greg's studying habits. We just knew how productive is what he was.

45:54

We didn't know really how he did it, but he just seemed to manage to and again, he was an efficient worker and he didn't watch a lot of YouTube videos.

46:11

I guess he lived in a day where there wasn't that many distractions with regards to the internet and stuff.

46:19

It definitely does change things a bit. I mean, but waking up, I mean, I'm a father of three.

46:26

My youngest is one. My middle is three. And my eldest is five.

46:34

It's hard work. If I want to get my study in, I have to wake up early in the morning. And so when

46:39

I can, I try to wake up at five. That's as early as I go. I can't four in the morning.

46:44

I mean, that is not going to happen. But five in the morning, I mean, probably my most productive study time is early in the morning.

46:52

If you could find the energy, there's encouragement to some people out there who are listening. If you can find the inner strength to roll your booty out of bed early in the morning and get that coffee going, once you're up, you can have the most productive time that's quiet.

47:11

There is something about being up before everyone else. And for me personally, it feels like I absorb much more in the morning.

47:18

And then I have the rest of the day to kind of mull it over my mind. I wonder if that was the philosophy behind what

47:23

Dr. Bonson did when he got up that early. I'm sure he had to as well because he had, you know, he's working towards two degrees too.

47:30

So that might have been it. Well, and he had his first child in our seminary time. So he had to work around babies being awake as well.

47:41

So no excuse. I mean, there's no excuse not to study. If you got kids or you're busy, you got to make it work.

47:47

You see the value of what you're doing, you know, and you do it. And I think Dr. Bonson did that. Well, my question here, how did he, how did he manage such a busy,

47:59

I mean, family man, student working towards two degrees. I mean, later in life after, you know, getting out of college,

48:07

I would assume, you know, teaching and preparing for classes than being a speaker all around the country.

48:14

How did he balance all of that? Yeah, well, you know, when he, when we graduated, so in 1973, we kind of parted ways.

48:29

I took a church in Northern California for 10 years. Okay. And he, during that time, he taught for a little while at Reform Seminary in Jackson.

48:38

He finished up his doctor's degree at USC in Los Angeles. And he was involved in ministry during those years as well.

48:50

He didn't begin to pastor a church. And again, my recollection's a little fuzzy here until like in the early eighties.

48:59

And then in 1983, I moved to where I am now in San Diego.

49:07

And so we were both ministering in the same presbytery. So we were much, physically, we were closer and we were much more engaged with one another from 1983 until he died in 1995.

49:19

So during those years, when he was working on his doctorate and when he was teaching and stuff, again, I didn't have any real firsthand close -up exposure, except he continues to produce so much stuff.

49:32

I mean, he's writing, you know, he started working on his book, Theonomy and Christian Ethics when he was a student.

49:39

That was actually, it began life as his THM thesis and then was developed from there on.

49:48

You show the package. Well, I wanted to make a point after you said,

49:54

I was like, he's very busy that even after he's gone, he's still publishing books.

50:00

Well, yeah, right. Gary DeMar down there at American Vision just put together from some of his worldview conferences that took place in the early nineties, right before his death.

50:14

There you go. Pick it up. I have it, but I haven't read it yet. I'm going to go through it with my oldest grandson who is just in his first year of high school.

50:25

So I'm looking forward to that, but we got to get past some of these COVID things before I can hook up with him again.

50:31

But so anyway, he produced lots and lots of stuff, but he was very,

50:37

I mean, he was one of the most disciplined people that I know.

50:42

And so if he had work to do or somebody said, let's go out and play volleyball, he would work.

50:52

He didn't have anything against volleyball, but he just, he was very disciplined about not saying

50:59

I'll do it later. And I think that's one of the reasons for his productivity, even in a short life, he just accomplished a great deal because he, you know, but again, he didn't shrivel up as a scholar.

51:13

I mean, his scholarship didn't make him shrivel up as a human being. And then of course, after his family broke up, sadly, then he was on his own.

51:23

So he really could devote himself full time to his work. And again, that, you know, he had great times with his children and was very engaged as a father.

51:34

But, you know, his life just really changed at that point in his life too.

51:40

Again, until his. What year was that? What year did he divorce his wife?

51:45

What was that? Early, early, late eighties, maybe 80, well, maybe mid eight, 86, 87, something like that.

51:59

You know, that we, he became an associate pastor here at Bayview with me when we, when we began the

52:12

Southern California Center for Christian Studies.

52:18

And I want to say that was 87. And so between, so I came to Bayview in 83.

52:25

So those five, four or five years there were the, that was the window where things fell apart in his family, eventually a divorce.

52:35

He ended up with the custody of his children. And, you know, so it was full time raising them.

52:42

They were, you know, older high school age and into college at that point. So, but then when the study center began, that's when he really went on the road.

52:53

He'd been pastoring a church in Costa Mesa or Newport Beach.

53:00

And actually some of these memories are coming back to me. I was going to sit down and take a bunch of notes and then

53:07

I didn't. But yeah, so he ran a Christian school, taught in a

53:12

Christian school, as well as pastoring a church or co -pastoring a church for a few years.

53:18

Eventually he left that and went full time working for this Center for Christian Studies, which was basically a platform for him to lecture, travel and lecture, do debates.

53:32

So it was in that period. I don't remember. You probably know because you've listened to it many times.

53:38

What year was the Stein debate? Oh, 85, I think. Okay. All right.

53:44

So right in that period. And so then from 87 till 95, when he died, he was, he traveled a lot.

53:54

He went to Russia once or twice. Cold war came back.

53:59

He did it all. Yeah. I mean, he got around, he got around. Yeah. And, you know,

54:06

I mean, he did eventually die from his heart disease, but he had two open heart surgeries before that at increments.

54:16

I can't remember when the first one was, but he had a problem with a valve in his heart.

54:22

So they replaced it. Then they replaced it again. Then they replaced it a third time.

54:28

And it was kind of ironic because the valves that they use for replacement earlier on were only supposed to have a limited lifespan.

54:38

And so they said, you know, you're going to have to do this again if you survive. And so, and then the third one, they were going to put a synthetic valve in, which was supposed to have a much longer life expectancy.

54:51

Right. And it was that surgery a couple of days after that surgery that he had, I think it was a stroke and he was in a coma for a week before they finally said it was irreversible.

55:05

So he passed away. But so he had had health difficulties through all of this as well, which again, is just a marvel of God's sustaining grace to be able to.

55:18

And there were times when he had to moderate his schedule for health reasons. But, you know, even when he was running at half efficiency, he was still accomplishing a whole lot more than most of us were.

55:32

And then those tapes were, you know, they were beginning to be circulated.

55:37

And it wasn't really until after his death that the tape ministry, which has continued to the present

55:43

Covenant Media Foundation, carried on the circulation of his work.

55:49

And that, you know, kind of brings us back to the Bonson Project, getting some of that material that Covenant Media Foundation has curated over these years.

55:58

And Randy Booth's done a great job of, you know, they had just the vehicle, moving it all from cassette tapes to MP3 files, getting it available for sale online.

56:11

And now to try and get those MP3 files out behind a paywall.

56:16

I mean, that's so, but he produced all that material in the first place, you know,

56:22

I mean, we record my sermons every Sunday morning and evening in Sunday school, but my catalog doesn't begin to approximate what he produced in a pretty compact period of time of his public ministry.

56:37

So, yeah, he was a hard worker. All that to say, yes, he's hard.

56:44

When he's working, you have to be disciplined. That's right. That's right. And I think that's something we could all learn.

56:49

And I think this is what makes a lot of these scholar types and kind of influential people so influential is that I think people are intrigued and inspired by the type of dedication that folks like Dr.

57:01

Monson and others put into their work. And it kind of helps us aspire to be better than what we do better than what we are doing.

57:08

And so in that way, he's very much an inspiration to me personally. But let's move on to some questions because we're coming up on the hour and I want to respect your time.

57:19

So we have some questions, not too many, but I think we can plow through some of them rather quickly and then you can go take a nap or whatever it is you do, whatever it is you do.

57:32

Do I look that old? I mean, it is Monday. Okay. Let's see here.

57:37

Let's see. That's the first question here. There we go.

57:43

Here's a question. Here's a question. Did Wagner, that's yourself and Bonson agree upon eschatology?

57:49

Did you guys share the same eschatological views? Well, if I say

57:54

I learned my eschatology from Greg Bonson, that probably answers the question, right?

58:01

No. And we, yeah, but we both learned it from others. The Puritans were great post -millennialists and old

58:10

Princeton was post -millennial. So yes, I tell people

58:16

I'm a short -term nihilist and a long -term post -millennialist. Okay, sounds good.

58:23

Next question. Would be interesting to hear Reverend Wagner speak on Bonson's relationships with fellow theonomists, both those who remained confessionally reformed and others who went independent.

58:34

That's something you think you could address? Great. If not, we can skip through. It's no problem. Yeah, I could. I mean,

58:39

I won't name names, but just in terms of categories, the independent spirit,

58:47

I think, makes you fight with more and more and more people and that has personal fallout.

58:57

And so some of those theonomists that Greg was pretty close with early on later were estranged to various degrees.

59:06

But, you know, the theonomic movement was fracturing quite a bit on personal grounds, if not on theological grounds through those years of Greg's ministry.

59:19

I know it grieved Greg that he wasn't close to some that he had been close to earlier in his ministry.

59:28

And it wasn't because he didn't make a lot of efforts to be reconciled, but others sometimes were not interested in that, either because they thought it was a matter of principle or they just personally were not interested.

59:42

But there were a couple of people that he had been especially close to early on that he was more estranged and that was a heartbreak to him.

59:50

All right. Thank you. Next question here. Can you share any stories or examples of how

59:56

Dr. Bonson used his methodology to talk with normal everyday people outside the academic realm?

01:00:03

Yeah, you know, early on Greg was, well, throughout his ministry, even that book you showed a minute ago was from a worldview conference that was aimed at high school students.

01:00:15

Yes, there it is again. Yeah. And, you know, Greg was just great with young people.

01:00:22

When he was on, you know, when he was, I mentioned before, he was an associate pastor here.

01:00:29

He wasn't here very often because he was, he lived in Orange County an hour and a half up the road and he was traveling all over the place.

01:00:40

But when he was here at Bayview functioning as a pastor, our people just loved him.

01:00:48

And he took an interest in them. He talked to them. So he wasn't always talking apologetics, but, you know, he had the common touch.

01:00:57

He, you know, he was an academic that who could shift gears. Well, I would say I wouldn't even call him an academic.

01:01:04

He was just, he could be really normal and people never felt like he was talking down to them and stuff.

01:01:13

So there were a lot of instances where people, he would be here preaching and people come up or teaching a

01:01:18

Sunday school class. They'd ask him questions and he fielded those questions very approachably, you know.

01:01:26

So this idea that, I mean, he could play hardball with the hardball players and he could, you know, this is again, something that Van Til mentioned in class.

01:01:35

He said, you know, there are giraffes and there are bunnies and the giraffes like to eat the leaves that are clear at the top of the tree and nobody else can eat them.

01:01:45

And the bunnies like to eat the grass that's down around the base of the tree. And he said, you know, we need to be able to do apologetics or anything else where we can feed the giraffes and we can feed the bunnies.

01:01:58

That sounds like something Van Til would say. He's always using these little examples.

01:02:06

Right, but Van Til was the same kind of man. I mean, he was, you know, he fancied himself a,

01:02:14

I think it was from Indiana, an Indiana farm boy. And again, he could go nose to nose with Karl Barth and win, but he could teach guys like me who were bunnies and we could learn something from it.

01:02:31

I mean, I remember in class when I went to study, I always thought his lectures were kind of repetitious.

01:02:36

He went over and over and over things. But when I sat down to study for my first exam, I realized

01:02:41

I had it in my head. It wasn't just in my notebook. And I could write my exam based on what he had already taught.

01:02:49

So, and Greg was very much like that. He could do the academic work if that was called for, but he could communicate.

01:03:00

And if you've listened to his tapes, you know, you mentioned all the different things, but there are sermons in there too.

01:03:07

Sermons reach ordinary people in the pew and are very understandable.

01:03:13

And so, yeah, he had the range. He could do it all. Very good.

01:03:19

Roger, we have two more questions and then we'll wrap it up. Is that okay? Sure. Sure. All right. You're doing excellent, man.

01:03:25

Appreciate it. Here's a question. How do you balance study time between apologetics and studying the Bible for yourself as a good steward of God's word?

01:03:32

I've been trying to cultivate better study habits and sometimes struggle with this. I realize you cannot have apologetics without being grounded in scripture.

01:03:41

That's a nice pastoral sort of question. And if the you is me or the you is anybody, you know,

01:03:55

I think it, again, Greg would often say this, you know, everybody needs to be able to defend the faith on some level, but not everybody has the calling to be an apologist.

01:04:08

And so a lot of the defense of the faith comes right out of understanding and explaining the faith to a friend or a classmate or a child or a husband or a wife or whatever.

01:04:21

And the defense just kind of, but it only rises to a certain level of sophistication.

01:04:28

If you're going to be more of a professional apologist, or if you have a calling within the church to defend the faith as a pastor or as a

01:04:39

Christian academic, then you're going to have to beef that up and you're going to have to devote more and more time to the study of apologetics as such.

01:04:48

So it kind of depends on who you are in your life calling. Most of us can read lots and lots of Bible and a fair amount of apologetics, and that will be sufficient for our purposes.

01:05:01

If you really want to become an apologist and as more of a life calling, then obviously you're going to have to devote more time to that.

01:05:11

But yeah, the study of scripture is essential and all of us need to read more

01:05:16

Bible. And yeah, but I think different life situations to allow us to adjust that balance depending on other circumstances.

01:05:31

Right, right. And that's a question and a topic that we can dedicate to just a completely different episode.

01:05:37

I mean, this is reading your Bible, people joke around, they ask me all the time, you know, what's the best book on apologetics?

01:05:43

I think I'm joking, but I'm like, it's the Bible. There's so many apologists out there, young apologists that are very well versed in philosophy, very well versed in theistic arguments, and even from the presuppositional camp, you know, they know the transcendentals and the preconditions of intelligibility and whatnot.

01:06:00

But when you get down to some of the specifics of the scriptures, a lot of people just are at a loss because we often are reading more books on apologetics than we are actually reading the book we're defending.

01:06:13

And so I think that's something that we need to learn to have a healthy balance in.

01:06:18

You have to understand that we are defending the Christian worldview and the content of that faith comes from scripture.

01:06:23

And if we don't know the scripture, then we're not going to be able to adequately defend the faith once for all delivered.

01:06:30

All right. There's one last question, and it's a simple one, Roger. You've got this. This is simple.

01:06:36

Ready? Here you go. I would love to hear the guest describe what post -millennialism is.

01:06:42

Just in two seconds, just describe what post -millennialism is. I've not gone into eschatology so much myself.

01:06:48

If I can give a very brief definition, post -millennialism is we win at the end.

01:06:55

Christ wins at the end. He'll conquer the end. That's it. That's a simple definition. But why don't you unpack a little bit, just a little bit of summary of what post -millennialism is?

01:07:04

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the shortest answer and the best answer. But I think for me, having come out of dispensationalism and then a kind of a non -millennialism and a post -millennialism,

01:07:18

I'm just more persuaded that God cares about creation and history.

01:07:25

And he's going to take his time. And in the end, the kingdom of God will come on earth as in heaven.

01:07:34

So when we pray that and when we seek first God's kingdom, that's not going to succeed in heaven, whatever we mean by heaven.

01:07:44

Again, that's another podcast all by itself. Not that I doubt the existence of heaven.

01:07:51

But big topic, you know, you read the Old Testament and God is dealing in history with the human race.

01:08:00

And then that kingdom, whether it's Moses or Daniel or whoever, in the end, that's the kingdom of which

01:08:09

Jesus Christ has become the king through his death and resurrection. And he says,

01:08:14

I'm going to rule until I put all my enemies under my feet. And the last enemy is death.

01:08:21

So by the time he comes back and we're raised from the dead, he's defeated all of his other enemies.

01:08:27

That doesn't mean utopia or perfectionism, but it does mean the victory of the kingdom of God in history.

01:08:35

And that, I think, is what biblical postmillennialism is. And it should never be remotely confused with the social gospel.

01:08:45

Most people who dismiss postmillennialism say, well, that's just social gospel, because some of the social gospel heretics claimed to be postmillennial, but they didn't read their

01:08:58

Bibles either. All right. Very good. I thought I think you did an excellent job.

01:09:04

There was someone here that made a quick comment. If you're wondering what people are thinking, someone said, excellent interview.

01:09:11

Thank you, brother. So people do enjoy listening to this sort of stuff and kind of the background information on great thinkers.

01:09:19

Of course, Bonson was a very great thinker, very influential and a blessing to the church. But thank you so much,

01:09:25

Ralph. I'm very happy to ride Greg's coattails into your podcast. I don't get interviewed in my own right very often.

01:09:34

Okay. Well, this was very useful. And I think my hope is that not only will this interview, as people share it and listen to it, that it kind of just makes people aware of the

01:09:47

Bonson Project, which we'll get into a little more details in later episodes as the websites put up and all the details are laid out.

01:09:55

But I'm hoping that stuff like this inspires people to have a good example of a standard of scholarship and Christian apologetics that we all should aspire to.

01:10:06

I'm a person who wasn't perfect, but had a balance of Scripture being the center of everything and how he sought to kind of apply that to every area of his life.

01:10:18

And of course, apologetics was one very fruitful area of his life that we very much have benefited from and hopefully will continue to benefit as his content is put out there and made available for free in the future.

01:10:31

Yeah. With that said, guys, if you have not already, please subscribe to the Revealed Apologetics YouTube channel and the iTunes podcast as well.

01:10:40

And click the notification bell to be aware of upcoming interviews and videos that will be put out in the near future.

01:10:48

Again, this Thursday, I'll be having Cindy Martin Morgan, the daughter of Dr.

01:10:54

Walter Martin, who is the father of cult apologetics. We're going to have her on this

01:11:00

Thursday at 5 a .m. Eastern, 5 p .m. Eastern, sorry about that, to talk about the apologetic legacy of her father and of course, maybe some background

01:11:08

Bible Answer Man sort of stuff. And so I'm very much excited for that. Hopefully, you guys will be listening in for that as well.

01:11:15

Well, that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much, Roger, for coming on. And thank you, everyone, for listening in. It is greatly appreciated.