Aug. 14, 2015 Show with Mark Tooley on “Taking Back the United Methodist Church” & Andrew Rappaport on “What Do They Believe?: A Systematic Theology of the Major Western Religions”

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

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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

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

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

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron wishing you all a happy Friday and today is

August 14th, 2015 and I'm really excited to have two new guests on Iron Sharpens Iron today to start off your weekend.

Two guests that I have never interviewed before and who were both highly recommended to me.

First of all, I'd like to introduce to you Mark Tooley, who is the president of the

Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D .C. Mark worked for eight years for the

Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and he is a graduate of Georgetown University and is a native of Arlington, Virginia.

A lifelong United Methodist, he has been active in United Methodist renewal since 1988 when he wrote a study about denominational funding of pro -Marxist groups for his local congregation.

He attends the United Methodist Church in Alexandria, Virginia and Mark Tooley became the president of the

Institute on Religion and Democracy known as IRD in 2009. He joined the

IRD in 1994 to found its United Methodist Committee and he is the author of the book that we are discussing today,

Taking Back the United Methodist Church. We are also going to be giving away for the first four listeners who write in with a question that's good enough to be read on air that's relevant to the topic, a copy of his previous book or actually should

I say his newest book, Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century. And his articles about the political witness of America's churches have appeared in the

Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, First Things, Pathios, World, World Magazine, Christianity Today, the

Weekly Standard, National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Human Events, the

Washington Times, the Review of Faith and International Affairs, Touchstone, the

Chicago Tribune and the New York Post and elsewhere. He is a frequent commentator on radio and television and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Mark Tooley.

Mark, can you hear us? Yes, I can. Thank you for your gracious introduction and I'm honored to be with you.

Well, it's an honor to have you and I'm sure my guests are going to be very thrilled that you came on.

I've been hearing nothing but good things about you from those who recommended you and I'm excited about the broadcast.

In fact, I interviewed one of your colleagues yesterday, Chelsen Vakari, and what a brilliant young lady she is.

She is a rising star and she's written her own wonderful book.

You'll be hearing much more about Chelsen in the years ahead. Yes, her book, Distortion, how the new

Christian left is twisting the gospel and damaging the faith. You'll eventually be able to hear that broadcast on the archive of Iron Sharpens Iron and that should be there along with Mark Tooley's interview in about a week or two.

First of all, give our listeners a little background about the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Well, we were founded in 1981 in the midst of the

Cold War when, amazingly, churches, mainline

Protestant churches especially, which were then much more influential than now, were actively supporting

Marxist revolution around the world under the rubric of Liberation Theology.

The founders of the IRD were scandalized that American church groups were actively siding with those who were depriving human rights of their people, but particularly persecuting the

Church of Jesus Christ, and so they founded the IRD to make the point that the Church, of course, is not primarily a political instrument, but when it does speak politically, it should speak on behalf of and in favor of human rights for all people and especially religious liberty for all people.

Great. Well, I'm a bit afraid to ask this question, but what did you do with the CIA? What was your role?

Well, it's been a long time now since I left in late 1994, but when

I left I was an analyst covering primarily Mosebee, which had just concluded a horrendous civil war that also was closely related to the

Cold War. And you have been described in your bio as a lifelong

United Methodist. Was the church of your upbringing more of a

Bible -believing evangelical or conservative congregation that most of us today are familiar with in the

United Methodist Church? Obviously, a lot of that depends on where in the country you live, but tell us something about your upbringing.

Well, my church was in a Virginia suburb outside Washington, D .C., and it was very typically

Methodist in that it was not definitively anything in theological terms.

I'm sure we had liberals in the church and conservatives, although I think overall the lay people were more conservative than that.

And the clergy we had while I was growing up alternated. We had one pastor, for example, who was a very hardline, salvation -preaching, hellfire evangelical, and we had others who were more liberal.

And that's very typical of Methodist churches. It's unusual to find a United Methodist church that's strictly conservative or strictly liberal.

They do exist, but probably 80 percent of them around the country are a combination of both. Really? It would be that high a percentage that would have more of an evangelical or conservative membership to it?

In other words, there would be more of a mixture in at least 80 percent of them, you're saying? I would say so.

What polls or surveys have been done have shown that majorities of lay people in the denomination are conservative or describe themselves that way, so maybe 60 percent or so overall.

The clergy, of course, are much more liberal as a whole than are the laity, but the clergy are moved about from church to church by the bishops.

It's not determined by the laity, and so you may have a church where 70 percent of the people are conservative -leaning, and the bishops are a liberal minister, and sometimes a liberal -leaning church will receive a conservative -leaning minister.

I'd like to give our email address now, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question for our guest, Mark Tooley, who is the author of Taking Back the

United Methodist Church, the book we are addressing today. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

And please include at least your first name and your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you're outside of the

USA, but we can only offer the free books to those living within the

United States. The sponsor that we have that mails out these free books is mailing out quite a number of them, and they cannot have overseas shipping costs mount up or even shipping costs to Canada.

It can be quite costly. So we apologize to those of you living in Canada and overseas, but we cannot ship you free books.

But we do welcome your emails with questions for our guest, Mark Tooley. chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

We actually have a listener right now in Tavarus, Florida.

We have Dr. Richard Williamson, and his question is, it has been my experience over 48 years as a

United Methodist pastor that the evangelical leadership and organizations within the denominations are extremely reluctant to effectively confront the hierarchy.

How do we get these leaders and organizations to be more effective, and what suggestions would you have for individual congregations and clergy to act if our evangelical leadership will not?

That's a very good question. Well, I'm sure there has always been, for decades, frustration and exasperation with the denomination and its liberal trajectory, which really dates back a hundred years and certainly accelerated in the 1960s, although many, perhaps mostly a tier, not really informed about what happened in the denomination as a whole, and just only knew about their own local church.

But there's been organized evangelical renewal advocacy in the denomination dating back to the late 1960s, started by a group called

Good News, that still exists today, and with whom we collaborate, and there are other groups as well who have consistently spoken out for evangelical beliefs and convictions in the denomination, and in many ways have been successful in that, for all the problems today, the church's hierarchy and structures are not as aggressively liberal as they were back in the 1970s, for example.

And in fact, evangelicals have gained a lot of ground and have a lot more active clergy in the system than they would have 40 years ago.

But the big monster issue for us today, of course, it goes without saying, are the sexuality issues, and the liberals are pushing very, very hard to overturn the church's official teachings on the definition of marriage and the qualifications for ordination.

Well, those of us who know a bit about church history, we know that John Wesley, the 18th century revival preacher, is known as the founder of Methodism.

How far after, or how long after Pastor Wesley, or Reverend Wesley, founded the

Methodist Church did you see historically liberalism starting to get a foothold?

Well, I'm sure there were bits of it around in the American church by the mid -19th century, but in terms of an organized force that's fully credentialed, probably not to the late 19th century, especially the 1890s.

It really was imported in from Germany through Boston School of Theology, and had pretty much come to dominate the northern seminaries early in the 20th century, and even the southern seminaries probably by the 1920s.

But it's important to remember that most Methodist clergy did not go to seminary until probably the 1950s, and so what had happened to liberalism that dominated the seminaries by the 1920s didn't fully reach the local church probably until mid -century.

And was this just a part of the plague that really started to overcome denominations across the board, which gave rise to the fundamentalist modernist controversy in the earlier 20th century?

Yes. As you know, all the seminaries of what are called the Maymire Protestant churches were affected by liberal theology early in the 20th century, certainly by the 1920s.

So the same trends of course hit Methodism, which was the largest mainline denomination.

Now would you say that this liberalism that has crept into the

United Methodist Church, do you think that it had something to do with people identifying themselves as Christian who believe, and of course since I'm a conservative

I think wrongly believe, that liberalism was more clearly demonstrates the attributes of Jesus Christ, such as meekness, compassion, tenderness, forgiveness, caring for the underdog, the poor, the needy, the outcast, that kind of thing.

Could that be one of the reasons why liberalism took a foothold in the

Methodist Church? Yes, that's very true, but also more largely those in Methodist academia and elsewhere in Protestant academia decided that having a conservative view of the authority of scriptures was no longer intellectually tenable, and also deprived them of the credentials and respect they wanted from secular academia, and so they began to compromise standards, and the effect of course leaked out throughout the whole church.

Now when the denomination, the United Methodist Church, when it came into existence as a denomination, in fact if you could tell us when that happened, was that already a denomination that was infiltrated with liberalism, and how much of that denomination was affected by the higher criticisms of the 19th century and so on?

Well of course Methodism was originally a renewal movement within the Church of England led by John Wesley, and Wesley never wanted to become a separate denomination, but after the

American Revolution in the new United States, because the Episcopal Church had at least temporarily collapsed, he reluctantly allowed the

Methodist societies to create their own new denominations so they could ordain their own clergy, etc.

in the 1780s, and then the Methodist Church in Britain was founded after John Wesley died early in the 19th century, and Methodism in America and in Britain to a lesser extent was enormously evangelistic and successful, and went from a few thousand adherents after the

Revolution to becoming America's largest religious movement early in the 19th century.

And when do you think, about what period of time in our history do you believe the

United Methodist Church and its clergy and seminaries became very dominated by liberalism?

Well, as I mentioned, certainly by the 1920s at the latest for all the seminaries, and so probably most clergy were captive to theological modernism by the 1940s and 1950s.

And the other groups that we know of, the Primitive Methodists, the

Evangelical Methodists, the Nazarene, the Wesleyan churches, were they all, did they all break away from the

United Methodist Church because of the liberalism, or were they always separate streams from the

Wesleyan history? The Free Methodists and the Wesleyans broke off in the early to mid -19th century in disputes somewhat related to slavery, but also relating to issues like charging rents for pews, and I think they had thought

Methodism had become too institutionalized and too uppity and too respectable.

The churches like Church of the Nazarene and those that were part of the Holiness movement who felt that they were rejected within official

Methodism pulled out and formed their own denominations in the late 19th century.

And you growing up in this denomination, the United Methodist Church, when did you realize that there was something that was very alarming to you, that there was something very unbiblical or foreign to Christianity from a historical and biblical perspective that really made you feel like you perhaps are a foreigner, if you will, living in a foreign land, and you know, where you felt even the need to write the book taking back the

United Methodist Church? Well, I probably noticed the politics of the church before I fully appreciated the theological problems.

So I would read as a teenager in the Washington Post occasionally on its religion page about some very far -left stance that Methodism would be taking with groups like the

National Council of Churches in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

But it wasn't until the late 1980s as a college student, I was sent by my local church to represent them at our

Virginia State Convention for Methodism and became our missions chair, and sensing the very liberal political resolutions that were promoted at the

Virginia Convention and also at our missions board based in New York City, which was one of the largest missions boards in America, I was horrified to discover that it no longer believed in missions evangelism and was minimizing the number of missionaries it was dispatching.

And in place of that, it was offering political advocacy that was very far -left and, as I mentioned, often aligned with Marxist revolution around the world and, in fact, actively providing financial grants to groups aligned with, say, the

Sandinista regime in Nicaragua or the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador and similar groups around the world.

Wow. And now that we are in the 21st century, how far steeped in liberalism are we speaking about?

I'm assuming you are talking about full -fledged support of same -sex marriage, homosexuality as being compatible with Christianity, abortion, and so on.

Am I right that that would be the dominant thought amongst those who are in the upper echelon, if you will, of the academic and clergy arena?

For the liberal elite, definitely so, but it hasn't been as though it's gotten constantly worse.

The United Methodist Church first endorsed abortion rights in 1970, and in 1973 joined other church groups in creating the

Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, which under different names still exists today and to which

Methodism scandalously still belongs. However, bishops back in the 1970s actively spoke about support for abortion rights.

They don't do that anymore, and there's been, I would say, much reduction in open support for abortion rights, even among liberal elites within the church.

But all their energy and focus, of course, goes into the sexuality issues and promotion of same -sex marriage and, of course, transgenderism and whatever comes after that.

We do have another listener who has written us a question. Ted from Tuscaloosa, Alabama says,

I've noticed in recent years that Bishop William Willimon, I don't know if I'm mispronouncing that,

Willimon, he may be a former bishop now, has been quite popular with many evangelical leaders who are normally quite critical of the

United Methodist Church. How influential has Bishop Willimon been with the denomination at large, and specifically, how influential has he been with the more conservative evangelical wing of the denomination?

That's Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Well, he's been very influential, not just in Methodism, but has a much wider audience.

He was head of the majestic chapel at Duke University for years, where he also was a professor and then was elected a bishop dispatched to North Alabama, where he served eight years.

And he's always been quirky and contrarian and writes popular books.

Before he left the chapel at Duke University, he had gone along with the new policy imposed by Duke University to allow same -sex marriages in the chapel, which previously he had opposed, and obviously that was very controversial.

But he pledged when he was running for bishop that he would in no way promote same -sex marriage and would affirm the church's official position, which he did while bishop.

But I noticed just this year he has gone publicly squishy again, and now says he favors a compromise with liberalism that would allow essentially a local option on same -sex marriage.

We do have another listener in Fort Myers, Florida. We have Mike, who says,

Hello, Mark. I'm wondering if you had attended or are familiar with the United Methodist Conference that had convened a few years ago in Tampa, Florida, a church divided in order to discuss whether or not the practice of homosexuality is compatible with Christian teaching.

What is your sense of where the United Methodist Church is heading since that convention? Are you familiar with that one in Tampa that our listener is referring to?

I'm not immediately recalling the one in Tampa. There was one just concluded over this past week in,

I believe, Austin, Texas, that the LGBTQ advocacy groups in Methodism convened to promote their cause.

They have regular conventions, so perhaps they did have one in Tampa that I'm not immediately recalling.

But every four years at our church's governing general conference, they push to overturn the church's standards.

And the church's last general conference, perhaps this is what the listener is referring to, met in Tampa in 2012 and rejected any liberalization of the church's standards on sexuality.

And the next general conference meets next year in Portland, Oregon. We have a listener in Nassau County, Long Island, New York, Susan, who asks, what power does each local congregation have to welcome a new minister into the pulpit that is more according to their own beliefs?

In other words, can a conservative United Methodist church make sure that a new minister that takes over the pastorate is reflective of their evangelicalism and so on?

A very good question. Well, the bishops have the full power to appoint and to move clergy around.

However, and this actually has become even more so in recent years, which is probably a good trend, local churches do have some, at least unofficially, say in terms of who is appointed to their pulpit and can request to meet with that pastor beforehand.

And it's probably unusual that a bishop would want to impose on a local church a minister who is deeply at odds with what most members of that church think and prefer.

It's not in a bishop's interest to have a local church conflict. So if a local church is very biblical, or most of its members are very biblical, and they're pretty united in wanting a minister who shares that perspective, if they're assertive about it, they probably can get what they want.

Now, you've already spoken about the United Methodist support for Marxists and so on.

What about the climate today in this very dangerous world of terrorism that we know of?

Obviously, there wouldn't be something that you would necessarily know about extreme illegal support of terrorism, but what can you say about the

United Methodist Church's denomination as a denomination in response to Islamic terrorism? Well, the good news is that the

New York -based missions board that had been so involved in pushing liberation theology and Marxist revolution back in the 70s and 80s has undergone a transformation and has returned to a more traditional missions evangelism perspective, and has largely become non -political, with the notable exception of being still critical of Israel, but by and large has become much more traditional in its missions perspective.

In terms of how the church overall looks at radical Islam and terrorism, it still is very naive and utopian in terms of how it looks at conflict and war and threats to security and peace, just as it was during the

Cold War. So it is with Islamic terror and is functionally pacifist and opposes military action and responses and assumes that the offering of goodwill and accommodation are the ultimate remedies to almost any conflict situation.

I remember years ago I arranged a radio debate between a well -known evangelical conservative theologian and a

United Methodist professor at a United Methodist college. He was actually a professor of medical ethics and he was pro -abortion, and when he was debating, my friend who

I arranged this debate for, my theologian friend, when he asked the

United Methodist professor during the radio debate a simple question, he said, do you believe in God?

And he said, I refuse to answer a question on my personal religious beliefs.

And when my friend pressed him, he actually said, the United Methodist professor said, go to hell and hung up.

How prevalent would the abortion rights activism be amongst those in not only the medical field, but the academic field in the

United Methodist Church? In terms of Methodist seminaries, it's much more subdued than it would have been 20 or 30 years ago.

I'm sure the abortion rights advocates are still very much embedded into Methodist academia, both in the seminaries and in the church -related universities and colleges, but I don't hear a lot about it.

And the biggest issue for us on that issue is the continued membership of our church's lobby office on Capitol Hill and the church's women's division, both of which still belong to what's called the

Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which supports abortion on demand.

And we almost won a vote to withdraw from that coalition in 2008.

In 2012, the loopholes of newness and parliamentary procedure, no vote was permitted.

I think we'll have the votes next year. We're going to be going to a break right now.

If you have any questions for our guest, Mark Tooley, please email them to chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And when you email your questions, please include your first name, city and state of residence, and country of residence if outside the

USA. And we look forward to hearing from you and your questions for Mark Tooley on taking back the United Methodist Church right after these messages.

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arnsin. If you've just tuned us in, we are interviewing today Mark Tooley, who is the president of the

Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D .C. And we are addressing his book,

Taking Back the United Methodist Church. If you have a question for him, you can email us at ChrisArnsin at gmail .com.

ChrisArnsin at gmail .com. And we do have a question for Mark from Robert in New York, New York.

He asks, what are the basic minimum required beliefs that a

United Methodist minister must believe today to be ordained? Now, that's a very good question.

Well, it is a good question, and there's no clear answer when they are ordained. They do pledge to uphold the doctrine of the

United Methodist Church, but what exactly is that doctrine? It's defined as the articles of religion of the

Church, which John Wesley essentially distilled down from the tenets of the

Church of England. And so that's fine, of course, but essentially the problem with theological liberalism is that it can continue to pay lip service to the words of orthodoxy while reserving to itself the ability to privatize the meaning of those words.

So yes, I believe in the Apostles' Creed, but I get to interpret for myself what it actually believes.

Yeah, I had a conversation years ago with an evangelical United Methodist who told me that he had had conversations with United Methodist clergy who were atheists.

Now, was that an exaggeration or is that possible? Well, we have over 40 ,000 clergy in the

U .S., so I'm sure it certainly is very possible and very likely. I would suspect it's a pretty small minority, that most clergy are probably well -intentioned and dedicated and sincerely believe in a supreme being and are followers of Jesus, but have a very fluid view of what doctrine is and what the authority of the

Scriptures means. What do you believe? I mean, some of this may be just an assumption on your part, or maybe you've actually heard detailed explanations for this, but what is the reason, because I've discussed this with evangelical friends and colleagues and so on, what is the reason that someone who is a liberal, who really publicly identifies themselves at odds with much, if not most, of the morality spoken of in the

Scripture, who doesn't even believe that Scriptures are inerrant, who doesn't even believe in the teachings of John Wesley or in the

Wesleyan movement or the Methodist movement from history, why on earth do they continue to identify as Christians?

Why do they seek ordination in Christian denominations? Why do they continue to operate as churches and so on?

What do you think the reason is behind this? Well, a dedicated few are intentionally subversive and Alinsky -ite and seeking to exploit existing institutions to promote their goals of social and political and spiritual revolution, if you will.

But I think the majority of those who are on the liberal side are not that zealous or strategic and simply are religious seekers who want the benefits of religious faith but prefer to define for themselves what that faith is.

We have another, Susan, this time in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who asks, do you really think that taking back the

United Methodist Church, as your title indicates, is even remotely possible?

Why would you not either flee from this liberal denomination that teaches such horrible and unbiblical things and either join an existing evangelical body or start a new denomination of your own?

Why would you remain faithful to this? Is it just sentimentalism? That's a good, hard -hitting series of questions.

Do you have an answer for those? It is. Well, several reasons. I was raised and brought to Christ within Methodism, so it is a sense of duty and gratitude from my perspective.

It also is an acknowledgement that liberalism has won so many of the cultural battles because liberals are willing to contend for institutions and power over them for many decades, whereas conservatives tend to walk away.

If you keep walking away, you're going to keep losing. Third of all, United Methodism, uniquely among almost all denominations in the

U .S., is global. It's not a U .S. denomination anymore, and unlike all the mainline denominations, it is growing, and it is by my calculation now the ninth or tenth largest denomination in the world with 13 million members, gaining a quarter million new members every year in Africa.

So for that reason, the Orthodox side is prevailing within Methodism as the

African church grows and the U .S. church continues to decline, but the elites in the

U .S. church, of course, remain very liberal. Their power is receding, and they are not going to lose quietly or walk away quietly.

Let me repeat our email address. We've only got about 20 minutes left. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, it's chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Bruce from Suffolk County, Long Island asks,

I know that your more recent book is on Methodism and politics in the 20th century.

Was there a major contribution to the conservative political arena from the

United Methodist Church that you write of? It's hard to think of an example in the last 100 years because the left has dominated the political witness of Methodism and of mainline

Protestantism for most of the last 100 years, and it all dates back to Prohibition and the

Temperance Movement, which Methodism championed successfully initially and, of course, ultimately revoked and defeated, and that was the last great

Methodist political cause that was championed by conservatives and liberals, and after that, the liberals held sway.

And so the majority of your book, the later book that I have not yet read, this would be more addressing the liberal influence that the

Methodists have had in the political arena in the 20th century? Essentially, yes, how they opposed and were pacifists right up to and through World War II and either endorsed beforehand the

New Deal or favored something far more radical and essentially were pacifists through the

Cold War and jumped aboard the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, jumped aboard Liberation Theology and Marxist Revolution in the

Third World in the 70s and 80s, and vigorously affirmed U .S.

efforts to win the Cold War in the 1980s, and the story goes on. Now, the scriptures warn us to avoid the appearance of evil.

How do you feel when you are very routinely hearing things on the news, in newspapers, magazines, television, radio, internet, that you know that thousands and perhaps millions of people are hearing about that are equating some of the extreme liberal ideologies on this globe with activism from your own denomination?

And how do you basically maintain an identity as an evangelical or a conservative and while at the same time being clearly having perhaps the appearance of evil in the minds of many who, when they hear about your affiliation with the

United Methodist Church and don't look much deeper than that, may assume that you agree with these extreme liberal ideas that are coming from the seminaries and pulpits of the

United Methodist Church? Well, it's difficult, and it's a struggle that dates back, again, 100 years, when many conservative

Christians would have said decades ago that any genuine believer should pull out of any mainline denomination.

For good or for better, and perhaps it's for better, the media pays almost no attention to mainline

Protestants and their positions in recent years as they continue to recede in numbers and influence, and almost the only time

Methodism is mentioned in the media is when there's a flare -up over same -sex marriage, typically when a local minister defies church law and conducts a same -sex marriage and then bases a potential church trial or other repercussions, and those stories typically report that the church officially disapproves of same -sex marriage, which often shocks people because they just assume it's like any other liberal mainline denomination.

So in that odd sense, at least those kind of stories are instructive for at least reminding or informing the public for the first time that Methodism has officially a biblical stance on marriage and sexuality.

Really. So what would be the restrictions regarding someone's sexual activity in the ministry in the

United Methodist Church? Can someone be an openly homosexual, active homosexual in the

United Methodist Church, whether married or single? I mean, it's bizarre to even say that.

When I say married, I mean to somebody of the same gender. But what are the restrictions involved there?

It's officially the church affirms sex only between husband and wife, and clergy specifically must be monogamous in male -female marriage or celibate as single, and there's a prohibition on any celebration of same -sex marriage by any

Methodist clergy or in any Methodist church. Yeah, that is interesting how they would be so liberal in many other areas and openly.

And yet I did hear about in the news about a, I believe it was a United Methodist pastor who received some kind of temporary penalty for marrying his own son to another man.

Do you know what I'm speaking of? Yes, there was a famous Pennsylvania case.

Last year, he had married a man years ago, and it had only publicly come to light that he faced a church trial.

He was defrocked, and then a higher church reinstated him on a technicality, but he'd already been sort of forced to move to a

California, more liberal region, where he's been given a small ministry out there.

So this was really no serious penalty, really, for something so abominable in the sight of God and in the

Scriptures. How long do you envision before the

United Methodist church just collapses on that, or do you have more of a post -millennial outlook that things are going to get much better from here on out?

I don't think it's going to be a collapse. I mean, it is growing. It is 13 million people, 7 million in the

U .S., and then almost 6 million outside the U .S., most of them in Africa.

So the Africans will become a majority in the next eight or nine years, and as they assume more and more power of the church's structures, by definition, that will shift the church in a more conservative direction.

So my hope is that it happens sooner rather than later. So it's just a question of the liberals who previously had been in charge, what do they decide to do next?

And what about the issue that has become the discussion of many water -cooler conversations and other coffee -clotch discussions all over the

United States and other parts of the world, the infamous Bruce Jenner gender transformation?

What is the United Methodist church's, and obviously there's going to be varied, varied views amongst members and clergy, but what is the official position, if any, on someone, especially in the clergy, having a gender -orientation surgery, however you want to phrase that?

Well, officially the church has no specific position on sex change claims or procedures.

There have been two or three cases of clergy having undergone sex change procedures or claims.

One involved a Baltimore person who switched from female to male, had a church in Baltimore, was affirmed, essentially, by the bishop in the

Baltimore -Washington area of Methodism, but somewhat oddly then left that church and now is doing, last

I heard, environmental advocacy in Alaska. There's one other Methodist minister who came out several years ago and said that they had undergone a sex change procedure from female to male 15, 20 years ago, and that very few people had even known about it, and so the organized liberal caucus groups, as part of their

LGBTQ agenda, very much include transgenderism and their sloganeering and advocacy, but to my knowledge, there have only been a very small handful of cases involving clergy.

And what would be the restrictions, if any, on a conservative

Bible -believing evangelical United Methodist congregation and or its pastor on conducting church discipline and perhaps even excommunication of someone because they were unrepentant in their homosexual activity or getting gender reassignment surgery or getting an abortion, etc.,

etc.? Is there any restriction on a pastor's discernment who is a

Bible -believing United Methodist and the congregation that would follow suit with him in wanting to discipline such a person who is not repentant of their sin?

Well, there is not any excommunication process, per se, for a layperson, except you can theoretically file a complaint against anyone in the church, lay or clergy, which could potentially lead to a church trial, but that only happens with the clergy, with laity almost never.

Local pastors do have discretion in terms of who is ready for church membership, and this became a big issue some years ago when a

Virginia pastor refused to give immediate membership to a choir member who was openly homosexual.

He didn't say no, he just said he didn't think that person was spiritually ready yet, and someone else reported that to the liberal bishop of Virginia, who removed the minister from his pulpit.

But a church court, in fact, the church's highest court, rebuffed the bishop and restored that minister to his pulpit, and then an effort to compel automatic church membership for anyone failed to be approved by the whole church.

It was approved at the General Conference Convention, but had to be ratified by the local conferences around the world and failed by a large margin.

So, local pastors still have discretion about church membership. And when you say taking back the

United Methodist Church, what practical challenges and steps and counsel do you offer to the

Bible -believing, evangelical, born -again, conservative United Methodist person who is either a clergy person or a member of the congregation to take back this denomination from the clutches of liberalism?

Well, first of all, to be faithful where they are and to continue on with the work of the church, which is evangelism and discipleship and helping the poor.

Second of all, to become and remain informed about the wider church bureaucracy beyond their local church, and to challenge bishops and church bureaucrats and seminaries when they go against biblical and official

Methodist beliefs, and to inform their congregations and other church friends about what is happening beyond local church.

And also, if they have a special calling to do so, to become politically active in the church's governance, to attend the local state conventions as a delegate, try to get elected to the larger regional or global conventions.

Anyone can submit legislation to all of those bodies, and they should do so. We have

Stephen in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, asking, how can you, as a

Bible -believing Christian, support financially organizations that you believe are conducting the work of Satan when you're speaking of some of the more extreme forms of liberal activity?

Well, it's always a hard balance to make, but I would submit that the balance confronts almost every

Christian everywhere in every church all the time. Even the most doctrinally conservative churches still have plenty of error and sin within them, and the

Lord warned us that the wheat and the tares are always intermixed, and He will sort them out.

We should not take it upon ourselves to strictly sort them out ourselves, lest we create more destruction than purity.

And so I can remain in my denomination as long as the official beliefs remain orthodox and biblical.

Is anybody in the United Methodist Church—well, I'm sure that's probably too broad of a question is anybody—but is a significant or a significant number of people alarmed enough to see that liberal mainline churches are radically reducing numerically in membership all over the

United States? And do they see where this agenda that they have is really creating a sinking ship?

The churches that are really growing in the United States and across the globe are typically not from this rehashing of mainline liberal

Marxism and so on. Yes, liberals and church elites definitely do know that liberal mainline

Protestantism is in steep decline and has been for 50 years.

In terms of how they find self -justification, they will try to say, well, religion is in decline in America and the

West across the board, and that we're just a part of that process, which is kind of a clueless affirmation, because not all religion is in decline.

Evangelicalism, for example, seems to be holding on to its market share in the U .S., in contrast to liberal mainline

Protestantism. Another argument they try is that, yes, we know that we're losing members, but Christ himself, during his earthly walk, never had a large following.

If you're presenting the purity and its truth and the accompanying demands for unpopular social justice, you will always have resistance and unpopularity that's just the price of being faithful.

Your colleague, Chelsen Vacari, was talking about her enthusiasm over the return of conservatism and biblical faith with young people, with the millennials, if you will.

Is that happening in any significant way in the United Methodist denomination, where you have young people returning, perhaps, to the roots of the

Methodist movement and to the Bible itself? That's a mixed picture.

Of course, Methodism in America, like all the other mainline denominations, has become older and older and has now lost a couple of generations and has almost completely failed to reach and hold on to people under,

I wouldn't say under 30, but actually under 40. And so millennial

Methodists are hard to come by. If you're an active Christian or spiritual seeker and you're 25 years old and looking to find a dynamic church with other people your age, it's not going to be

United Methodist, and there are plenty of other options. In terms of the young people who are coming into the seminary system to be ordained,

I'm moderately hopeful about them. They are more orthodox and biblical as a whole in many ways, unlike their...much

more so than their grandparents or their parents who were clergy. Generally, they can affirm the

Apostles' Creed and believe in the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection and the miracles of Christ.

Generally, they're pro -life or pro -life leaning. The big exception is many of them, even though they're semi -orthodox in other areas, tend to be more liberal on sexuality, but not all of them by far.

Do you see any rising stars? And perhaps that's a bad choice of terminology, but young, or not necessarily even young, but men in the pulpit who are becoming more well -known for vigorous defense of biblical orthodoxy and who are bold voices for the

Methodist truths of old, going back to the circuit preachers and so on, the

Wesleyan movement. Are there any individuals that we should look for in either the media or in writing who are championing the true teachings of historic

Methodism and, more importantly, the teachings of Jesus Christ? I wish I could say that.

There certainly are many, many faithful United Methodist clergy with thriving local churches, some of them quite large, but for the most part, they don't seek a lot of attention, much less celebrity for themselves.

They're not writing best -selling books. They're extremely active on social media and, by and large, are only known to their own congregation or own local communities, which is very, very unfortunate, because I think the clergy within Methodism have a larger duty and obligation to share the

Wesleyan message with the wider culture. And so, for example, when I look at who is most popular on, say,

Twitter in terms of the clergy or Christian teachers, it tends to be dominated by the

Reformed and Calvinist world. It's very hard to find almost anyone very big on social media in the, even not just United Methodist, but the wider

Wesleyan world. Well, I'd like you to, in the next two minutes, just unburden your heart with what you most want our listeners to have etched in their hearts and minds when they leave the program today,

Mark. Well, if they happen to be United Methodist, I hope they remain, this hope, they remain in it and are as patient and tenacious as those on the liberal side are.

And for those who are not Methodist, which I'm sure is the majority, I hope that your perspective on Methodism is somewhat better now and that you will pray for that denomination and help us to look for a day when

United Methodism is a more faithful and a growing denomination, not just globally, but also inside the

U .S. I want to repeat Mark's website for the

Institute on Religion and Democracy. It's theird .org.

That's T -H -E -I -R -D .org. Very easy to remember. And don't forget about Mark's latest book that he has written, which is

Methodism and Politics in the 20th Century. And we look forward to having you back on Iron Sharpens Iron in the near future,

Mark Tooley. It's been an honor and a joy and a privilege to have you as a part of the Iron Sharpens Iron program today.

I really enjoyed it. So, thank you so much. Thank you very much. And we thank everybody who wrote our listener questions today.

And those of you who are the first four will be getting a free copy of Mark Tooley's book.

And don't go away, because the next hour we are going to have on our program Andrew Rappaport, and we're going to be discussing a systematic theology of the major world religions.

So, don't go away. We'll be right back with Andrew Rappaport of Striving for Eternity Ministry.

Don't go away. We'll be right back here on Iron Sharpens Iron. Hi, I'm Mike Gallagher.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and today we are beginning our second hour with an examination of world religions with our guest

Andrew Rapoport. Andrew Rapoport is the founder and president of Striving for Eternity Ministries, established

Spread the Fire evangelism training and outreach events, most notably

New Jersey Fire and NorCal Fire, and he is the instructor for the

Striving for Eternity Academy, an online school that teaches hermeneutics and systematic theology.

Andrew is the author of the book What Do They Believe?, which is a systematic theology of the major Western religions, and that is our subject today.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time, Andrew Rapoport. Well, thank you very much for having me,

Chris. Well, first of all, let's hear something about your background. Andrew, I understand that you are a

Jewish believer? That is correct, yes. And so tell us something about your upbringing as a child and how you eventually came to faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ and his word. Well, my father was raised

Orthodox. I was raised more of the conservative event, and was a little bit less.

I still went through 12 years of Hebrew school, but was born Mitzvahed.

I actually became a believer at the age of 16, the very first time that I heard the gospel.

I know most people kind of struggle to hear the gospel over and over, but I tell people that they have to understand that the

Jewish people were raised to believe that Jesus Christ is Hitler's God. That shocks most

Gentiles, but that's how we're raised. At least my generation, the generation after the Holocaust, the

Jewish people remember the Holocaust, the Inquisitions, the

Crusades, and blame Jesus for that. So what ends up happening is that there's a hatred for Jesus Christ, even the name of Jesus Christ to a

Jewish person. Most people that try to evangelize Jewish people don't recognize that. But when the individual,

Chuck, who evangelized to me, I literally told him, hey, Chuck, that's great for you, but I'm God's chosen people,

I'm in like Flynn. And I thought my Judaism would save me. So what ended up happening, though, is he said something that's really not the best thing to say.

He knew my mother died when I was young, and he screamed, you know, what if your mother died so you'd be right here right now listening to this message and you walk away?

Your mother would have died in vain. Not the wisest thing to say, a pretty offensive thing, but it got me to stop and I turned around and I said,

Chuck, if you give me a logical reason to believe, I will believe. This guy who never got past the sixth grade knew his

Bible, and he was able to take Old Testament prophecies, New Testament fulfillments, and I was able to look at those.

I rejected the ones that I thought were self -fulfilling or could be self -fulfilling and looked at those that I thought in the category of coincidence.

And I got to a point where I said, this is beyond its own possibility, which is 10 to the 48th power. And so I said, all right, the

New Testament is clearly something supernatural. It's from God. What does it say? And so he started explaining about Christ being

God, dying for my sins, offering me forgiveness. And when we got to the resurrection,

I really struggled with that and tried to give all the rationale for it. I never read Josh McDowell's evidence,

Samantha Verdict, or more than a carpenter at that point. And yet I had every one of the false views of the resurrection

I came up with. I have one that's still original, I think, to me. My last argument was, well, maybe the disciples dug a hole underneath the tomb and came up from the center and stole the body out that way.

He just sits there and shakes his head and is like, Andrew, they didn't have heavy equipment back then. I don't know if I should be laughing at heresy like that, but I can't help it.

I was just like, you know, that was it. I couldn't argue against the resurrection.

And so three hours after first hearing the Gospel on the steps of the

Dairy Queen in San Francisco, California, I just realized,

I mean, I realized I was a sinner. That was a hard thing for me. But my need for a Savior was hard.

And so at that point, I, on the steps of the Dairy Queen, asked Christ to forgive me for my sin, and my life has been changed since.

Well, I believe in a sovereign God, and He can transform anyone and save anyone from the world, the flesh, and the devil, and the penalty thereof, whenever He chooses to and however

He chooses to. And there are all different types of, although the Gospel is always the same, and the technical aspects of what the

Bible teaches about how God has saved sinners is always the same, but the circumstances surrounding each individual's life may vary widely.

And we are thankful that God has chosen you, and He has brought you to new life in Christ.

And was there a harsh, negative response from your family as a result of this conversion?

Yeah. My mother, when she had, my parents found out actually two years later,

I was so fearful. I did not talk to my family at that point.

That came two years later, and I had talked to, when

I basically explained to them that I became a Christian and had said that I had been baptized, that's when my mother started getting a little violent and had gotten upset.

Unfortunately, my family still does not believe. Two, three years ago now, my father, not to be outdone by my mother, when

I tried talking to him about Christ, he got violent. So the only two times I've ever been hit or beaten for the gospel is my parents.

Wow. And how old were you when they were beating you? The first, my mother hit me when she found out she got so upset, she hit me,

I was 18 years old. My father, it was when I was 46 years old. Wow.

Wow, that is something. And do you have siblings that have, what is the faith or religion, if any, of siblings, if you have them?

Not really practicing. I have two older brothers, two younger sisters, and most of them are not practicing.

Some of them are, I think, more practicing just because to get their children to be bar mitzvahed.

If you're going to have your children be bar mitzvahed, you usually have to at least be part of a synagogue.

Now, with that, you have different things that go on because some of them, in how

I was raised, we used to have to go not only to Hebrew school three times a week, but also on Saturday had to go to synagogue.

At least a couple of years prior to bar mitzvah, we had to attend each synagogue service.

So they had rules like that. Most of my family is more on the Reformed Judaism, those that are still involved in Judaism.

So Reformed Judaism is the very liberal bent of Judaism. And it always amazes me how very often, it seems the typical reaction to Jewish families when someone converts to Christianity or becomes a

Christian, the reaction is far greater than if they had become involved in Buddhist meditation, or if they had become an atheist.

It doesn't really seem to have anything to do with a rejection of the

God of the Bible that they cherish, the Torah and so on.

It's more or that they claim to cherish, I should say. It's more of just a traditional and cultural reaction to someone as being a traitor to someone's heritage.

Am I right on that? Yeah, I have often said that I think my parents would have had an easier time with me coming out and saying

I'm a homosexual or a drug addict than saying I'm a Christian. Wow. We have someone who practices homosexuality in the family, and I think they have received her far better than they received me being a

Christian. But it goes back to what

I was saying earlier that people don't understand. There is a cultural concept within Judaism of a tradition that regardless whether you actually believe it or not, you never turn away from the faith.

It's drilled into Jewish children because of all the persecution that Jewish people have suffered.

The mindset is to make sure you drill that into the next generation so they don't forget. But really what gets drilled in is really hatred for Jesus Christ.

I remember in Hebrew school, the Hebrew school teacher lining all of us up along a wall, and she made a machine gun sound, holding her hand like a machine gun.

She goes, that's what the God of Hitler, Jesus Christ, would do to you. Wow. Obviously it stayed in my brain.

Wow. And the thing that we must remember in our day and age in the 21st century and for quite a while, uh, when we think of racism and bigotry, we typically only focus on that which is believed and committed and perpetrated by white

Anglo -Saxon Protestants or Caucasians in general who are Gentile.

And we don't really recognize the fact that racism and bigotry is a universal sin.

As my friend, I brought this up many times on my program, but I have a friend who's now in heaven, Dr. Robert J.

Cameron, who was a black Presbyterian minister and very well known for his conservatism and biblical orthodoxy.

But he wrote a book on racism and he said, racism is a sin problem, not a skin problem.

And he wrote in his book that the black race is just as guilty of the sin of racism as what the whites are.

And that would go in line with Jewish folks. In fact, one of the reasons why liberals wrongly think the

New Testament is anti -Semitic is because of some harsh things that are said to the

Jews in the New Testament, but they forget that it was entirely, with the exception of Luke, was entirely written by Jews.

And so this was an in -house thing going on here.

This wasn't Gentile anti -Semitism against Jewish people. The writers of every book of the

New Testament except for Luke and Acts were Jewish.

Yeah, I was up in New York doing an outreach. I speak for about 13

Chinese churches that do an outreach every year. And I do the training, the evangelism training for their

English. And what ended up happening was we were out in a park talking to, well, two of the guys were talking to a

Jewish man. I was just kind of eavesdropping because my role is to disciple them. So I listened to the conversations and afterwards try to give them pointers.

If they get stuck, they call me in. Conversation went pretty well, but it was just to a point where the guys basically concluded it was saying, hey,

I'm Jewish, so I have nothing to worry about. And one of my friends just called me over at that point. He makes this gentleman,

Eric, made the point to say, the thing is, I will stick with my people.

And I said, you know, it's funny you say that, Eric, because really the issue is which people are you sticking with?

The Jewish leaders that we both talked about had a political agenda were the

Jewish people that wrote the New Testament. And all of a sudden he had this look on his face like, wow,

I never thought about that, that the writers of the New Testament were Jewish. Those are my people, too.

So which one are you going to side with? The ones that had a political agenda or the ones that didn't? And he was really stuck.

And by the way, I mentioned earlier that you are a convert to Christianity. I know that some of our

Jewish believer brethren take objection to that term for Jewish people.

Are you comfortable with that, or would you prefer a different phrase to describe your coming to Christ in Christianity?

You know, I tell people I came to Christ the same way everyone else has, through Jesus Christ.

There's nothing special or unique about a Jewish person that comes to Christ, because every person that comes to Christ is unique and special.

I don't use labels like completed Jew or messianic Jew or things like that. I think that that just, that ends up highlighting almost, to highlight that there's something different about my conversion than other people's, and there wasn't.

Right. And the wall of separation has been broken down. And it's interesting that even the most, if not all, messianic groups will really loudly and boldly and rightly declare that.

Very often they don't teach that way or practice that way, as if the walls of separation have been broken down.

Yeah, I had, back many, many years ago when I worked in the technology field, and I was working at Lucent Technologies, we had a security guard that went to a messianic synagogue, and she was a

Gentile. And she's talking to me about this festival that they were doing in her synagogue, and how great it was, and how it so pictured

Jesus Christ. And she's explaining this whole thing, and I just turned to her and said, Jews don't have any kind of festival like that.

And her response was, you're just jealous because I'm more Jewish than you. Okay, I don't have a response for that.

Well, the subtitle of your book, What Do They Believe?,

is a systematic theology of the major Western religions. Obviously, especially those who are theologically inclined, who have a hunger and thirst for the deeper things of the word and of theology, they're going to want to know, well, what theological system does this author adhere to or resemble, etc.?

Do you care to explain to us, in the scope or the spectrum of Christian belief, how would you describe

Andrew Rappaport? I usually use the term biblicist, because I never fit into any category.

I'm really a man of the word, and so I have had trouble with every systematic theology, in a sense, because of the fact that there's text

I see difficulties with each system. So I kind of, I agree with what the text says, and often

I get to a point where I say I can't conclude certain things that we will often conclude in some theology to make everything work out right.

And so I went to a dispensational fundamentalist seminary,

Baptist seminary, and that's probably what I most would be associated with. I would hold to dispensationalism, and I, you know, although I don't hold to it perfectly, and I do hold to,

I am Baptistic, and I, you know, I do believe in the fundamentals of the faith.

And as far as the doctrines of sovereign grace would be concerned, where would you be in that category? Yeah, I would be in that category.

It got me in lots of trouble in seminary, because they were not in that category. Because it forced me to have to write a lot clearer and make my points, because I would be writing papers, you know, set on Romans 9 and 10, and I'd be taking a position that the seminary or the professor wouldn't hold to, and it would force me to have to really make my case a lot better.

And, you know, when I took Soteriology, it came up and really had to make sure

I knew what I was talking about, because I was going to be challenged more than other students. And I just want to let our listeners know the email address if you have a question for Andrew.

It's chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please include your first name, city and state of residence, and country of residence if you're outside of the

United States. And I just very quickly, and I already know looking at the clock, that we're definitely going to have you back on for a more in -depth examination of your book.

But I just wanted to say that I had a humorous, I thought it was a humorous story, where an elderly

Jewish journalist, who, he was an

Orthodox Jew. I'm not sure if he's still with us, because he was quite old 15 years ago or so when this debate occurred.

But he challenged to debate a Fundamentalist Baptist on the radio.

And it was at least a two -hour radio debate. And this Jewish journalist fancied himself as a student of the

New Testament. Although he was not a Christian and didn't believe in the claims of Jesus Christ, he said that he had read and reread the

New Testament at least a hundred times and was thoroughly acquainted with what it taught. And interestingly enough, he was not at all very savvy or learned about church history.

And when he was debating this Fundamentalist Baptist, he was automatically, from his study of the

New Testament, coming to Calvinist conclusions, thinking that these were universally held beliefs in the

Christian church. And he said to this Fundamentalist Baptist during his cross -examination period, so let me get this straight.

You believe, as Christians, that before the foundation of the world that God selected a certain number of people for salvation, and that the rest he was just leaving to be damned in their own sin.

And the Fundamentalist Baptist, who was not a Calvinist, who was a freewill -believing

Baptist, said, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, Ira, you're wrong on this. You're equating me with a

Calvinist. I'm not a Calvinist. You're talking about Calvinism. And the Jewish journalist said, what's that?

He said, Calvinism, that's what you're talking about. And he goes, I don't know what that word means. I said,

I'm talking about your Bible, the New Testament. He started quoting from Ephesians and Romans, and it was just hilarious.

And I had to call the radio station and tell one of the engineers, tell Ira to call me after the show.

I mean, a simple reading of the New Testament is so enlightening. I had

Jehovah's Witnesses that I got together with every week, a couple, every week for nine months.

They would come over, and they would just, I would just ask them questions and get them where they'd realize that they didn't have answers, and they'd leave, come back after finding an answer, and come back the next week.

And we went on for that for a while. When our final meeting, which was after I had written the section of my book on Jehovah's Witnesses, one of the things

I did was bring it to people of those beliefs. I brought the chapter to these

Jehovah's Witnesses first to them and then to elders, and then we got into a discussion on where, you know, they say,

Andrew, your problem is you just are believing doctrines that men have taught you that Jesus is

God. I said, wait a minute. I believe that Jesus was God because I read the New Testament. Remember, I didn't know another

Christian for two years. I didn't understand the Trinity when

I first got saved, but I understood from reading the New Testament, Jesus is

God. One of the things I'm doing in my next book is on Jesus Christ, the claims of the deity.

I went through all the Gospels, looking at all the indirect and direct references to Jesus being

God. Every time you read someone's mind, he's being called Lord, all these things. Forty -eight percent of the

Gospels refer to Jesus as God directly or indirectly. That's kind of clear when you read that, and that came across.

One of the things I had done, I had a Jewish rabbi trying to convert me back to Judaism, and he gave me about six or seven hours of cassette tape.

I'm beating myself, I understand. Some people may remember cassette tapes and the purpose of it.

When I started in radio in the 90s, we were doing editing on reel -to -reel tape.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so I had these cassettes, and this guy, the rabbi tells me, you've got to listen to this one rabbi.

He knows his New Testament as well as the Tanakh, the Old Testament. And I listened to the guy, and this rabbi

Israel told me, he'll set up a meeting with me and this guy, and if I want, we'd set up a debate.

I called him and said, anytime you want to set a debate up with me and him, I'd be happy to do it, because he's sitting to a bunch of Jewish rabbis and telling you he knows the

New Testament, and you guys don't know anything in the New Testament. You think he's really brilliant, but there's someone like me who knows the

New Testament and knows other religions. I can easily see that he's mixing up Roman Catholicism and Mormonism, but he's not getting it from the

New Testament. And he can fool you guys, but he's not going to fool me. He's been in my state three times that I know of, and the debate's never been set up.

That became something that I did, really. When I wrote this book, one of the things

I wanted to do is not be guilty of that very same thing. So when I wrote each chapter on Judaism, I gave it to a couple rabbis.

I happen to live not far from one of the largest Talmudic studies on the East Coast, so I brought some rabbis.

When I wrote this lesson on Islam, I brought it to a couple imams that I got to meet.

When I did the lesson on Roman Catholicism, I brought it to a cardinal that was a friend of a friend, and I said, can you check this and see, am

I accurate in saying what you believe? Because I didn't want to be guilty of what the rabbi was doing or what, you know,

I debated Joshua Evans. He's a Muslim apologist, and he speaks to Muslims about what

Christians believe, claiming he was a former Christian youth minister, which he became a Muslim at 17 after questioning

Christianity for a year. I don't know too many ministers at 16.

You know, he was in a youth group, and they made him a youth leader. So he lied to his own people to get speaking engagements, but they believe him because he claims to have been a pastor, and they believe him on what he believes on Christianity.

What he believes is not what Christianity believes. But when you speak only to people that agree with you, you can deceive people that way.

And that's one thing I really wanted to make sure I tried not to do. So I tried to get it fact -checked.

I mean, I had, in the writing of it, I read through the

Talmud, I read through the Quran, I read through their sources, and tried to systematize their religion using their sources, which is not what

I find that most people do. They usually try to summarize what religions believe based on what others say about it, usually what other

Christians say about that religion. And I didn't want to be guilty of that. I wanted to be where someone could read that book and say, yes, that's what we believe.

And in fact, in the Middle East, we have a study guide that goes with the book, and in the

Middle East, there's a missionary that didn't want to tell me where he was, but he uses these lessons, the small group lessons with fill -in -the -blanks and all, because he said he starts on lesson three on Islam, and when they get done, he said they trust what is said, because what's said on Islam is what they believe.

And therefore, he then starts with lesson one on Judaism and Catholicism, and he goes through the book, and in that lesson, it has basically a

Christian response as part two. So he says it's been the best tool he's had for witnessing to Muslims, because he says, hey, if you want to study other religions, just as a general study, and he says because they trust the lesson on Islam, they then trust all the rest.

And so by the time he gets to what Christianity believes, he said he's built a level of trust with them that then they start listening to what he's saying about the differences between all these religions and Christianity when it comes to the divine effort versus human effort, and he's found it as a great tool for that reason.

We're going to be going to our break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Andrew Rappaport on the major Western world religions or perhaps on his own

Jewish upbringing, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. And when you're writing, please include at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you're writing from outside the

USA. That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Andrew Rappaport and a discussion of his book,

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Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen, and if you've just tuned us in, we are discussing on Iron Trump and Zion today the book,

What Do They Believe? And the subtitle of this book by Andrew Rappaport is

A Systematic Theology of the Major Western Religions.

And our email address, if you have a question, is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

We're definitely going to have to break up an examination of your book in at least a couple of more interviews on this one book.

But going to the actual phrase

Western religions, how do you differentiate between a cult and a

Western religion? When I'm personally dialoguing with people, I usually reserve the word cult for something that's pretending to be something else, or if not consciously pretending.

It has taken on the name and identity of an established religion or a faith like Christianity, and it may use the name

Christian and may use figures from the scriptures like Jesus Christ and other terminology may be borrowed from the scriptures, but it's really a false replica, if you will.

It's an imitation of what that religion or faith really is, whereas a world religion, although they would all be in one sense an imitation of the true teachings of God, they would have their own origins, perhaps borrowed here and there from other religions like Christianity, but they have their own identity as a unique religion.

Would that be something similar to how you differentiate it, or do you have an entirely different way of doing that?

Well, in the introduction of the book, I actually give five ways to identify a cult.

The first being scripture twisting. They would take whatever is the perceived text and be twisting it for their own purposes.

That's an important first one, because that's usually required for the second, and the second is an authoritarianism.

Usually what you see within a cult is that there's some group, either person or group of people, that are the only ones that can rightly translate or interpret

God's Word. So whatever they're saying is God's Word, they're going to twist those, and they're going to do it and say that they can do that, because they're going to write people to be able to tell you what

God actually means by what they say. Then what you end up with is an exclusivism, where they basically say, if you're outside of the group, then you're excluded from the truth.

That gives the people this feeling that they must be tied to these leaders. They must be within the group, because if they leave that group, they no longer have the truth.

That idea of exclusivism often leads to isolationism, to members not speaking to people outside the group other than for the opposite, oscillatizing.

You'll see that where they sometimes live together, where they all move into a town together, so that they're always talking amongst themselves.

All their private time is with one another. And then the fifth thing is endangerment.

You'll often see with a cult some form of either physical or mental or emotional endangerment, and a lot of the emotional comes from the idea that you can't leave this group.

If you do, you don't have the truth. And there are people who leave cults and within weeks go and return right back into them, because they feel like they're missing something.

There's some huge void. Because of the isolationism that many of them have, when you leave that group, you're cut off from everybody.

And people feel so lonely that even if they don't believe the teachings of the cult, they'll return for the emotion of it.

And that is something that you see through those people. I think

Todd Friel calls it love -bombing, and I think that's a good term. You come into the group and they just all just overwhelm you with love and affection, and people like that.

And they want that to continue, so they're willing to buy into the doctrines.

And when you look at that, you get into a question that may be controversial.

In our study guide, I asked this question. When you look through these, we might be able to say, okay, Mormonism, Jehovah Witness, many of us would define that as a cult.

But things like Roman Catholicism, that becomes controversial because they fit that definition.

They have an authority that does interpret, and they're the only ones that can.

They twist the scriptures by their tradition. They say that, at least in the old days, if you were outside of the church, you weren't saved.

You couldn't be saved by believing in justification by faith alone. The inclusivism, you saw more in the

Middle Ages. You see it some in some countries today, but it's not as prevalent in America.

And there was definitely harm during the Middle Ages. So it becomes a question where that one is, would you say that that's a cult?

Leave that up for people to figure out. Yeah, the label isn't really the thing that's most important.

The real thing is being a Berean and testing the teachings of a group according to what the scriptures teach, correct?

Correct. Yeah. Because like, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church, they very frequently will tell people, because of the laxity and apathy in the 21st century, and even going back to the earlier part of the 20th century, you have such an apathy amongst

Catholics that even your Catholic apologists will readily admit to this, that if somebody were to join a

Baptist church or a more conservative evangelical church in the community, the

Catholic family will say, that person's joined a cult because they actually go to church three times a week.

And once on Sunday isn't good enough and they go twice and they take seriously everything that they're being taught.

In fact, their church practices church discipline, and you can't just live your life any way you choose to and remain a member and so on and so on.

So they would view your typical conservative Baptist evangelical or fundamentalist church as a cult.

So there, it's really the Catholic Church, if you were to define it as a cult, it would be definitely more towards the theological realm than the practice or the authority, correct?

Yeah, and you know, most people don't know church history well enough to know that during the

Reformation, one of the big arguments that the Catholic Church had with Martin Luther was, Luther, if you are right, then that opens up all kinds of cans of worms, because people are open to private interpretation.

And Luther said, good! I would rather have people having private interpretation and getting into the

Scriptures, and even though some will get it wrong, rather than have the Church tell us wrongly what the

Scriptures believe and condemn people to hell. And that was a big issue, and we have seen that in history.

We have seen, after the Reformation, many people coming up with a lot of different beliefs that they try to find in Scripture, and a lot of different cults have cropped up.

But I would much rather have that, where people are taught how to interpret the Bible, and can study it on their own, than keeping the

Bible in an antiquated language that the common people don't know, so that only the scholars can tell you what it means.

We do have a very frequent listener, Mike in Fort Myers, Florida, writing in again, who says,

Hello, Andrew. I looked up your book, and it looks like a very useful tool.

Thank you. What began your interest in learning and writing about world religions, and in your estimation, what are the key points that believers can learn from them as we endeavor in the mission field?

Obviously, with 15 minutes left or so, we're not going to be able to answer that whole question.

That's why I already very quickly knew that we were going to have you back on. But at least for the first part, we already know about your journey from being raised in a

Jewish household, interestingly a Reformed Jewish household known for liberalism, and yet who was very antagonistically opposed to you becoming a

Christian, which is interesting in and of itself for a religion known for the liberal end of the spectrum in Judaism.

But what began your fascination and your desire to learn more about world religions? Yeah, well, actually,

I was raised conservative. My family would now be Reformed, but I was raised conservative, a little bit more conservative.

But what started, I would often be asked about Judaism because it was my background, because I had years of school.

That means I'm supposed to be an expert. I wasn't at the time. I learned much of my study of Judaism after I became a

Christian, when I started studying through the Talmud. But what ended up happening really was after 9 -11,

I had one of the elders in our church that approached me. Because of the way I do study,

I like to do original source material. And because of that, one of the elders approached me and said, look,

Andrew, we really want to understand Islam, but we don't want to understand a Christian version of Islam.

We want to be able to speak on what Islam believes, and we're going to be dealing with this.

This is going to be the next thing that, as a church, we have to deal with in our culture. We need to be accurate.

Can you do some study and tell us what Islam believes? So I did that. And I took those lessons in Sunday school, and they said, hey, that was great.

Hey, you're from a Jewish background. How about you do the same thing with Judaism? So I systematized that and put that together.

And then they said, hey, that was great. And we know you've done a lot of work with Mormonism and Jehovah Witness.

So I said, okay, I can do that one, because all that study had been done too. So I put that together.

And they were like, well, while you're at it, how about Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism? So I did

Catholicism, and then I stopped at Hinduism and Buddhism for two reasons. One, you can't really systematize them because of the way they are.

They don't have an absolute authority. It's not something that you can systematize. And when I say systematize, what

I did with each of these religions is look at what's their authority, what's their view of God, specifically the

Trinity is what I want to focus in on. What's their view of Jesus Christ? What's their view of sin, man's spiritual condition?

What's their view of salvation? And then what's their view of end times? And you really can't do that with Hinduism and Buddhism.

So I stopped there. My wife was thrilled that I stopped there because she was sick of hearing me in my office screaming,

I can't believe they believe this stuff. They believe that God is on a planet called

Koala. Why? You know, that's Mormonism. And so you get some strange things that they believe.

And I was pulling my hair out and my wife kind of liked my hair where it was. And so she said, get into the word.

And they take a couple of years off. So I took a couple of years off. Wow, a wife telling you to take a couple of years off.

Where did you find that woman? Well, she wanted me studying the truth and not, she was like, get out of the false religions and get into the true.

Get back into teaching the Bible and stop studying all these other books. And Mike's other question is a great question because here's the one thing that really helped me in the study of these different world religions.

In the study of all these world religions, what I discovered is that there's actually only two religions in the entire world.

And I'm an open air evangelist. I go into New York City. I stand up on a box and I will share the gospel and preach the gospel.

And I often tell people, it may surprise you that there's only two religions in the entire world. And those two religions are a religion of divine effort and a religion of human effort.

And in my study, I have discovered that every world religion except Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, all of them believe in human effort in one way or another, even

Catholicism that says it's by faith, but it's faith plus works. Every religion says it's man that has the ultimate work to get right with God.

And that's a clear way of knowing whether it's a man -made religion or divine -made religion. A man -made religion is going to lift man up as the final authority.

And a divine religion like Christianity as taught in scripture says, no man, you are sinful.

You can't do anything. God had to do it for you. God himself had to come to the earth, die on a cross in your place, pay the fine.

And Philippians 1 .9, it's God who has to give you that belief to be granted to you.

So it's a complete work of God. And that was the biggest thing that I learned through all of it was to see that there's really two religions.

When you simplify it that way, it becomes very easy to figure out. People will all say, well, prove

God exists. Well, I can prove that God exists from the fact that we reason together. There must be a

God. And people say, okay, but how come the Christian God? Oh, that's easy because there's only two religions in the world.

And there's only one of those religions that teach that God did the work and that God is the ultimate authority.

And all the others teach that man's the ultimate authority. That's the one that man -made, the one that God believes in is the one where he's the ultimate authority.

Now, obviously, since you've just said that there are only two religions, there are other religions that identify themselves uniquely.

And what are those at the risk of repetition before we go so we can prepare our listeners for our next visit with you?

What are the major world religions or Western religions that you are examining in your book?

Yeah, the ones I dealt with, and I tried to do them in somewhat chronological order, and I'll explain why that in a moment, but I started with Judaism, looked at Roman Catholicism, Islam, the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, which I word that way instead of Mormon specifically, because anyone that has dealt with Mormons or Latter -day

Saints a lot knows that if someone calls himself a Latter -day Saint, they're going to use deceptive language.

They're going to say they believe in salvation or justification by grace and by faith, but they're not going to mean the same thing that you and I would mean.

And that's a change that they had done, so they got away from the Mormon name. And then Jehovah Witnesses, which

Jehovah Witnesses right now are doing the same thing with their new website, where they're trying to put a new faith.

They're removing what they used to say on their website, where salvation was by works. They removed that and say it's by grace.

And the last chapter is on Christianity. That's why I say it's kind of that one is out of order, because I wanted to give that as contrast to all the others.

Here's all these others, and then here's what Christianity believes, and this is the one that's true.

Excellent. So you would, whereas some would label the

Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons in the cult category, you might also identify them that way, but you would also consider them under the heading of a

Western religion. Well, I'm putting them in. I would say that they're a cult.

The original title was a systematic theology of the major Western religions and cults, and the publisher said, no, we're just going to call it

Western religions. Okay. Because it was grouping it, because really the focus became one on what

Westerners have to deal with, and because of the fact you really can't systematize some of the Eastern religions.

Right. And Mormonism has taken on the reflection or the image of being more like a world religion, a false religion nonetheless, but it doesn't have the trappings of what people stereotypically think of as a cult today, because it's become almost like a mainline denomination, and of course we would reject it as Christians entirely, because it's really one of the most antithetical religions to Christianity that there is, even though the name of Jesus Christ is in the name of their religious organization.

But the people don't, other than perhaps the shunning of other members, they don't feel like their lives are at risk when they leave the

Mormon church, and it doesn't have that heavy -handed authoritarian imagery that you have in some of the more strict authoritarian cults that exist today.

Am I right? Well, it has a very strong emotional tie. When you leave, you're leaving everything.

The reason I feared telling my parents that I became a Christian was because I knew they might do what's called a

Jewish funeral for a Christian, where you basically bury an empty casket.

And my parents actually told me they considered doing that. There was something that happened in my family that prevented it, but I knew that the cost of saying so to my family could cost me my relations with my family.

And that is a big thing when you think about a group of people who work together, live together, all their life is together to be put out of that.

You find that a lot of people that leave certain cults end up taking their own life out of desperation, unless they come to the truth, to Christianity.

That often happens, because they either either return or they go to some other cult, because they're looking to fill that void that was left.

But you mentioned something about them remaking themselves. It's really interesting, because if you look through history, look at Vatican, the

Council at Vatican, and then Vatican II. At Vatican, you and I, Chris, we're anathema, we're destined to hell because we believe in justification by faith alone.

But now, where we used to be destined to hell, now we're just separated brothers. Mormonism used to teach that Joseph Smith came on the scene because he was going to restore the church.

The church had fallen away, so I guess Jesus was wrong, the gates of hell bid for battle against it, and we needed

Joseph Smith to come and restore the church. Now they do these commercials,

I am Christian. Now they want to identify themselves as us, who they were saying we were anathema.

Same thing with Jehovah's Witnesses, because they're in the same boat. They're now trying to revitalize themselves, and they're trying to deceive people to say, we're

Christian. We're just like you. And to the uneducated, nominal

Christian, this sounds really good. It sounds like they have answers, and they have all their ducks in a row.

When they sit down and do these studies, it looks like they really know their stuff. And the biggest problem

I noticed when I was first dealing with Mormonism in college,

I discovered that many of the people that become Mormon or Jehovah's Witness do so because they never understood

Christian doctrine. They either were Catholic, or they went to church, but they never actually were believers.

And they get that knock on their door, and this person who's knocking on their door seems to have all the answers, and can flip through the and bring all these scriptures to make it look like Jesus was never

God, that he never made that claim, and they're believing it because it sounds so good that they have it all tied up together.

And really what it was is that the Christian, the professing Christian, never understood what the

Bible said. And so now the first that they're seeing the Bible is through this cult's mindset, and they believe it because they think they have the answers.

This is the whole reason that at Striving Fraternity we focus on discipleship. We need to raise up generations of people that know the

Word of God, that love the Word of God, and can defend the Word of God. That is so vital in the church today in America.

And as you well know, that's not what we're seeing. We see an empathetic church, an anemic church that has no power or authority to the culture because they want to be like the culture.

And we need to step out of that and say, no, this is what the Word of God says, and we need to know it and stand on it.

We have an anonymous listener in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know if I am a member of one of the organizations that you have identified as a cult.

Should I ever use that term in discussion with my family and friends if I feel that I should leave this group?

And is that just a word that becomes an unnecessary lightning rod?

Should I just deal with the facts at hand and not use labels such as cult?

Yeah, that's a touchy one because, you know, every situation is going to be different. And so with some people, it might be the lightning rod where they just tune you out.

For others, it might be the thing that gets them to listen. I mean, like I said, Chuck, who talked to me about Christ the very first time, said something that was a lightning rod thing, but it got me to stop and listen.

So you really never know. But the thing I tell people to focus on is focus on the issue of salvation.

Don't get into all of the, let's talk about the false prophecies in 1975 and things like that.

We want to focus on the truth because God has written his law on the And so people know the truth.

Give that to them. It's God's Word that has the authority. I'm not big on trying to tear down all of the foundations of a cult, because what good is it if I can prove to you that Jehovah Witnesses was built on a falsehood, but you still go to hell?

Where if you come to an understanding of what God did for you and repent, you're going to walk away from that cult because now you know the truth.

So that's where I focus. I tell people to focus on the deity of Christ and the importance of that, and the importance is in salvation.

That's being an eternal being. He can pay an eternal fine for men. Being a man, he could pay the fine for That's the essential truth they have to understand.

And obviously, we have a challenge ahead of us because of the fact that the evangelical church at large has done great damage to the reputation of the name

Christianity, with all the nonsense that takes place under the heading of evangelicalism, and you have some in cults and false world religions who are conducting themselves in a way much more resembling of the teachings of Jesus Christ in regard to social and moral behavior and so on.

You know, it's amazing. I have gone into mosques. I have gone into services at synagogues after the invention of a cell phone, and every time

I have, I have been stopped by ushers, and I've had to prove that my cell phone is turned off.

Not enough for me to say it. They want me to show that not my phone's on vibrate, off, because you're entering the worship of God, and picture in any church in America, people coming in and having the ushers say, hey, is your phone shut off?

Yeah, that's pretty remarkable. Well, we have to actually go, and we will definitely pick up this discussion and examine each of the religions more thoroughly and in depth, and perhaps in a couple of more broadcasts, if you're willing to come back,

Andrew, and your website is striving for eternity dot org, striving for eternity dot org.

Thanks for joining us today, Andrew Rappaport. Thank you very much for having me, Chris. I'd love to come back. And I hope everybody listening has a wonderful, safe, and blessed weekend and Lord's Day, and I hope you always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. I hope you return to us next week with good questions for our guests on Iron Sharpens Iron.