June 24, 2016 Show with Steven Dilday on “Exegetical and Theological Archaeology”

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

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

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Now here's our host Chris Arnton. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity, humanity, it is humid out, the rest of humanity living on the planet earth listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you a happy Friday on this 24th day of June 2016 and I have a friend named

Jim Garcia who has been urging me for years to get

Dr. Stephen Dilday on my program for an interview. Dr.

Dilday was formerly my friend's pastor and now we finally have the opportunity where our schedules are in harmony and we can conduct this interview and I'm thanking

God for it, especially after all the wonderful things I've heard about Dr. Stephen Dilday.

He holds a BA in religion and philosophy from Campbell University, a master of arts and religion from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and both a master of divinity and a

PhD in Puritan history and literature from Whitfield Theological Seminary. He is also the translator of the

Matthew Poole project which you could learn more about at MatthewPoole .net

and pool is spelt with an e at the end, MatthewPoole .net, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr.

Stephen Dilday. Thank you Chris. Let me also introduce you to my co -host the

Reverend Buzz Taylor. Hello Dr. Stephen Dilday, good to talk with you. It's good to talk to you.

And once again I am outnumbered by Presbyterians being the only Reformed Baptist on the program.

I think it's good for you once in a while. My guest being Presbyterian and my co -host being Presbyterian, but I'd like to also make sure

I get up front our email address if anybody listening would like to ask questions of Dr.

Dilday. Our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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

USA. That's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. What I typically like to do,

Dr. Dilday, before we get into the heart of a subject, by the way to our listeners, our subject today, our primary subject is exegetical and theological archaeology, which is not something you hear a lot about in the media or elsewhere.

Although the foundation and much of the superstructure of the Reformed faith is readily accessible, there are gaps and important information and material remains locked up in Latin books, ultimately to the hurt of the

Church, and Dr. Dilday's project that he is currently working on is designed for the recovery of this material.

So we are going to be delving into that momentarily, but first I'd like to hear something about your own personal

Christian testimony, Dr. Dilday. What kind of an upbringing you had, religiously if any, and how you not only became a believer in our

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but also how you became theologically Reformed.

Right. I was born into a theologically mixed household.

My mother is Roman Catholic, and so I was born into the Roman Church.

My dad is something along the lines of an old world deist, but I'm not sure that he'd recognize that terminology.

I know what a deist is, but I don't know the other adjective you put behind it. The old world, he's a deist along the lines of Thomas Jefferson, I guess.

Now, are you saying theist or deist? Deist, yeah. Deist. Deist with a deist,

David, yes. Basically, is not a deist the view that God created all things, but he is not personally involved in them and basically is a spectator in some sense?

Yes, that's right. Okay. And so, how did that kind of an upbringing eventually lead to you coming to a knowledge and faith in the biblical

Jesus Christ and his gospel? Some of my very first memories are of my mother's conversion.

I was maybe three or four when she came to know the Lord, and what a difference it made in our households.

So, from that tender age, I started to receive from my mother's hand a steady diet of gospel truth.

She took us out of the Roman church to an interdenominational charismatic kind of church where I did the rest of my growing up.

I talk about a culture shock from Rome to the charismatic practices, but I would say my own conversion was to come even a few years later than that.

I was in my early 20s. I had been away from home for a number of years, and I got interested in the study of philosophy.

Through that study of philosophy, it raised to my explicit attention some of the great issues of life.

What sort of person am I to be, and how do I know? So, this raised for me, again, issues pertaining to the religion of my youth.

I purposed to read through the Bible. I gave myself six months to do it, but as I was going,

I became so hungry for it that I finished in, I don't know, just three or four months.

Somewhere along the lines, that changed me and made me different than what

I had been, removing the stony heart and giving me a heart of flesh so that I could be receptive to the gospel that I was reading and that I was hearing.

The change that the Lord made at that time was decisive.

A lot of the sins that I had been involved in marvelously fell away, and I discovered that Jesus was able to distract me from all of my distractions.

I had been running a personal trading business at the time, and then

I found that all I wanted to do was read. When you say personal training, you mean fitness, like physical fitness?

Yes, that's right. I was running a business and doing well, and I was happy enough, but through R .C.

Sproul's ministry, I had discovered Martin Luther. I went to my local public library after hearing

Sproul do the life of Luther as only he can do it. And I don't know if you've ever seen the collected works of Martin Luther in German and Latin, but they fill up a couple of large bookcases.

I found one slim volume. I didn't know it at the time, but they were just small collected works of Martin Luther.

I pulled it down off the shelf. I thought to myself, Eureka! I found the works of Martin Luther. But it was in the scholar's introduction that I was introduced to Augustine.

He was an Augustinian monk. I read about his controversy with Zwingli at Marburg.

Zwingli's a name that'll stick with you. I read about Calvin and his resolution of the debate between Zwingli and Luther, and the whole time

I was furiously writing these names down in a notebook, thinking to myself,

I've got to look into these people. But it was strange.

I had, of course, been in church my entire life, but in reading Luther, I had never heard anybody talk about the

Lord Jesus Christ that way. I was astounded at the beauty with which he describes the passion of Christ, the suffering of the

Savior for sins and for the deliverance of all that would believe.

It was remarkable. It wasn't too long after that that I discovered, again, by Sproul's recommendation,

Jonathan Edwards. He highly commended the

Freedom of the Will, which I ordered a copy. I waited with bated breath for my copy of the

Freedom of the Will to show up. When I got it, I unwrapped it, I started reading, and immediately had trouble.

I'd never read anything where a sentence might run on for a page and a half. I would get to the end of a sentence and have no idea where I had begun.

So that was the beginning of a project that probably took me a year. I had to work very hard on Edwards, but I was very determined.

I can't say that after that year of hard reading and hard going, I've never had that kind of trouble in reading again.

It's, I guess, good training for the mind and for the attention. But also

Edwards, not just the substance of his argument concerning God's sovereignty and human freedom, which is brilliant, but also his methods and his depth of understanding of the entire canon.

Who proof -texts Second Chronicles? I've never experienced a thing like that. So, as I was doing this reading and this reflecting a

I came to know a woman who worked at the gym. She's a Christian. She thought it was about the strangest thing in the world to see this bald -headed, hearing, 250 -pound weightlifter taking his breaks reading theology.

She encouraged me to go back to school and study theology full -time.

I dipped my toes into Southeastern Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I took the systematic theology class there and just absolutely loved it.

So I went back. I went back for 12 years. I loved being a student, and probably in some ways those were the happiest days of my life.

Student life was very nice. It was in the midst of that time that I met my wife,

Amanda, and we have had six children. Our youngest one,

Ruby, was born just five weeks ago. So, yeah, we've got a house full and plenty of work to do.

And in the midst of that also, I was engaged in 15 years with the ministry.

And now giving myself, I was trying to give myself full time to these translation projects that I think to be so important.

Well, how did you eventually discover the writings and the person of Matthew Poole?

And also, perhaps before you even say that, why don't you tell our listeners something about who Matthew Poole was?

Oh, yes. So Matthew Poole is a 17th century

English Puritan. He was coming up to the ministry and was actually ordained in the midst of the

English Civil War in the 1640s. So he was a pastor in London in the midst of that time of tremendous upheaval.

Obviously, he was fully in sympathy with the work that was being done at Westminster.

He would have been, of course, a proponent of the Presbyterian cause.

His English annotations, which were the last work of his life, he died in the midst of them.

When you buy Matthew Poole's English annotations, he actually died in the midst of Isaiah.

So half of them were finished by other hands in a manner similar to the completion of Matthew Henry's work.

So Poole lived through the tumultuous time of the Civil War.

He was ejected from the ministry after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the

Act of Uniformity in 1662. He was ejected. Unlike a lot of his brethren, though, he had a small patrimony, so he was able to survive.

Historical records are sketchy. It does appear that he was married and that he had one son, but it doesn't seem as if his wife survived very long after his ejection.

In 1666, he got the idea to compile a summary of the very best interpreters on every book of the

Scripture. He tried to get other people to write it. He didn't think himself to be as qualified as some others, and he couldn't find anybody that was willing to take up the task.

So he did it. He would work most days from 4 a .m. to 6 p .m.,

a scholar's life. His breakfast and lunch was said to be one raw egg, and then he'd go out for dinner with friends in the evening time.

But during those hours, those 13 or 14 hours a day, he would try to draw together the most important commentators on each book.

The idea was basically, if he said anything important about a particular verse, whether he agreed with you or didn't agree with you, if it was important, if it had a bearing upon the history of interpretation, that he wanted to include you.

So basically, the synopsis is a verse -by -verse history of interpretation, and it's never been translated.

He didn't finish that in 10 years' time, and after that, he started his

English annotations for the common man and only made it about halfway through before he went home to be with the

Lord. That's a brief sketch of Poole.

As far as his importance is concerned, you think about how massively important Matthew Henry has been to English -speaking

Christendom through his commentary. Matthew Henry is

Matthew Henry. He was Matthew Henry's principal resource. Wow.

So what riveted you to Matthew Poole above all the other contemporaries and those that preceded him in the faith that are giants of the faith?

Matthew Poole, although a name recognizable to the more studious Reformed Christian, is virtually unknown to the common

Christian, as you probably realize. And what was so unique about him that it really arrested your attention on him and caused you, basically, to devote much of your life to studying him and his writings?

Right. So my first introduction was in my general studies of the

Westminster Assembly and the Westminster Standards. I had heard frequent criticisms that the proof texts actually didn't approve the doctrines, and so I became very interested in the history of interpretation that had led to that proof texting, which the

Assembly did without very much difficulty. In other words, once they had settled the doctrines in the

Assembly, when the Parliament asked them to affix the proof texts, they did that very quickly and with comparatively little debate, which is a signal that, in their minds, it's already well settled what texts approve these doctrines.

But now, some hundreds of years later, we frequently look at the proof texts and then the doctrines and wonder what the connection is between them.

And that was my first very particular interest. And so, I'd heard about the

English annotations and I got a copy. It was some years later through my friend, he's now gone to be with the

Lord, Dr. William Young. Maybe some of your listeners might know

Dr. Young. He wrote with John Murray that famous minority report in the

OPC concerning psalmody. Dr. Young died just a few years ago.

But I was working my way through a sermon series on First Timothy. I was in the midst of the famous difficulty in First Timothy chapter 2.

Dr. Young mended cool to me and he said, but not the

English annotations, you have to look at the synopsis. And I said, so the synopsis, what is this?

And he began to explain to me very much the way that I have to you.

And I was intrigued. The first thing that came to my mind, if you think about the general milieu with respect to Christianity, there can be a very heavy me and my

Bible approach. I don't need any sort of human teachers. I can do it very well on my own.

And of course, our Ascended Lord Jesus Christ has given us His Word and He has given us

His Holy Spirit to help us understand it, to appropriate it and believe it, love it.

But in Ephesians chapter 4, we're told that the Ascended Lord Jesus Christ, having ascended on high and received gifts for men, turned and poured those gifts out, blessing the church with teaching officers.

And so you get the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers there. And then

He promised to provide a teaching ministry until the church was brought to its perfection at the end of time.

So here we have not just me and my Bible and the

Holy Spirit, but the Ascended Lord Jesus Christ giving another gift, giving a teaching ministry as an aid and a help for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry and so on.

So that's not to be neglected. And if in Poole we do indeed have a verse -by -verse history of interpretation, then we actually have a record of the very best teachers on every single verse.

This is the gift of the Ascended Lord Jesus Christ to us and a thing of surpassing value if we understand what we have in it.

And I want to repeat our email address if anybody would like to join us on the air. Our email address is chrizarnsen at gmail .com.

That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And in the event that you have a question that you would like to ask of our guest,

Dr. Stephen Dilday, and it can be on any broad issue regarding the

Reformed faith or even a broader issue regarding the Christian faith, but obviously you can ask a specific question about Matthew Poole, about the project that Dr.

Dilday is participating in and anything connected with that.

That's chrizarnsen at gmail .com. Have you ever read, just out of curiosity, a book that I had picked up quite a while ago from the

Northampton Press run by Don Kistler? And this is a book titled,

A Dialogue Between a Catholic Priest and a Protestant by Matthew Poole. Yes, yes.

I've not read it in its entirety, but yeah, he had no less than two great polemical works with respect to Roman Catholicism.

So it actually has a companion piece that I don't think has been republished in a number of years.

Yes, and some people in our day and age, they bristle when we basically draw a sharp line between the

Church of Rome and the Reformation and Evangelical Christianity today.

They say that we are being mean -spirited. They say that we're being unloving. A lot of what

I hear is that we are living in the past and that the Church of Rome is no longer welded, if you will, to the

Council of Trent's anathemas and a lot has happened since Vatican II, so basically we should get with the times.

And since Vatican II has extended an olive branch to us and has identified us as separated brethren, we're supposed to reciprocate.

But aren't there unresolved, clear contrasts in regard to the

Gospel and the unique role of Jesus Christ that are at stake when we compare the

Church of Rome with the Protestant Reformation and even Reformed Christians today?

Yeah, the great dividing line between Evangelical Christianity and sacerdotalism is still there and every bit as pronounced as it ever was.

I can be very happy that the violence, for the most part, has not continued.

Right. And with the old Reformers, I would affirm that there are true and sincere believers within her communion, and yet at the same time,

Rome continues to preach and to teach a false gospel of works that cannot save, which is a very serious issue.

We are tricky creatures, aren't we? Because as soon as you say something like that, the temptation is, once the line is drawn, is for enmity and animosity to rise up in the heart, and I hope that we can avoid a thing like that.

But the simple and sober reality is that if a man, woman, or child hears what

Rome is teaching, believes it, and does it, they are likely to open their eyes to the next world in flames.

And so, what is the true office of love in a situation like that?

It seems to me to be sounding the alarms, the thing to do.

Yes, as the book of Proverbs reminds us, that the faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

And we should not be covering up vital truths, salvific truths, just because we want to spare someone's feelings.

I mean, the matter of somebody's eternal life is much more important than sparing their feelings from being hurt.

Yeah, yes. And I'm a fossil there, hardly any of me left,

I think, but I do think in my in my researches into the lost doctrines of the

Reformed faith, I do think that the

Reformers had the strength of the exegetical and historical argument that the

Roman papacy and its hierarchy is that Antichrist that was foretold of old, and still remains a real and present danger to individual souls.

But should it get the ascendancy and the ability, again, to do its dire and even deadly work against evangelical

Christianity? I don't know if you're familiar with David Silversides, but I had him on the program several months ago, and he addressed that very subject.

He wrote a booklet on the papacy being the Antichrist in his summation.

He's a Presbyterian in Northern Ireland, David Silversides. Yes, I know the name, and it makes me think about Jonathan Edwards in his comment from 2

Thessalonians chapter 2, when he talks about one that would seep himself in the temple of God, showing himself to be

God. And Edwards simply says, if we expect prophecy to be fulfilled in actual history, who in the history of the world has ever done that, like the

Roman Catholic Pope? And it is a challenging question.

Amen. And we have to actually go to a break right now, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Don't forget to give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Dr. Stephen Dillday after these messages.

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That's the Thriving Story. Welcome back.

This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today is Dr. Stephen Dilde.

And he is discussing, among other things, the Matthew Poole Project, which you can also learn more about at MatthewPoole .net.

And Poole is spelt with an E as in Edward at the end, an old British spelling.

And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

We do have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who has a question for you,

Dr. Dilde. He said, could you, in summary, contrast what is unique about Reformed theology from Arminianism and Romanism?

Yeah, well, yes, quite. Well, I would think that the difference on the one end of the spectrum, you would have

Augustine, who attributes salvation 100 % to God.

He actually touched off the Pelagian controversy unwittingly by saying,

Lord, require whatever you will, but then give what you require, because I don't have any of it.

On the other end of the spectrum, you had Pelagius, who believed that a human being could pull himself up by his own bootstraps, do the things that are required for salvation, and thus find salvation.

You might call that a 100 % man model. Most of the history of theology has been spent trying to find a mediating position between Augustine and Pelagius.

But ultimately, neither Augustine nor his heirs could ever be satisfied with a compromise.

Man is altogether disabled by his sinfulness to respond positively to the gospel presentation.

And so, God must save, God must give him a new heart so that he can respond positively, affirmatively to that gospel call.

Any sort of compromise in that just puts you right down the road, back towards Pelagianism.

I heard Dr. Sproul say years ago, even if you were really close to Calvinism and you said

God did 99 % of it, the 1 % that actually makes it work is still attributed to the man, and thus we are left with something we're after most.

But if I were to try to do it really simply, I would just say, is salvation to be attributed to God and to God alone, or is it to be attributed to man in whole,

Pelagius, or in part, Arminianism, or even Roman Catholic sacerdotalism?

Yeah, it seems that you have on either end of the spectrum, monergism.

You have the right biblical monergism that attributes all honor and glory and credit to God for salvation.

And you have on the other end of the spectrum, Pelagius also being a monergist, but in the opposite and unbiblical and heretical direction, attributing salvation really in its entirety to man.

And then you have the synergists in the middle who have all different levels of synergism, where they're sharing the credit between man and God.

Would that be accurate? Yeah, precisely. By the way,

Harrison, I don't believe that Harrison has ever won a New American Standard Bible, so we're going to have one shipped to you as soon as possible because of the fact that you have not won one of those yet.

And we'd like to thank our sponsors of the New American Standard Bible for not only supporting

Iron, Sharp, and Desiring, but providing Bibles for our listeners who either contact us for the first time ever or who have never received one of the

Bibles before. So thank you very much, Harrison. Well, let's go into a bit of the heart of what we were discussing before.

And this may seem like a heady topic, but I think that it is something that is worthy of our attention, the exegetical and theological archaeology.

I give a little brief description of that before, but perhaps you can give a little more weighty definition to that.

Yes. So one of the things that I found so interesting about Matthew Poole, as an interpreter, he is a really equal opportunity interpreter.

He specializes in Reformation -era men, but it doesn't matter if you are

Roman Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed. If you have something important to say about a particular verse, he wants to include you.

But through those Reformation men, and using them as something of a lens, he includes everyone else because, of course, those men were giants in the study of antiquities.

So if you were an ancient Jewish rabbi or early church father, if you were a medieval rabbi or a medieval

Christian schoolman, if you said something important, he wants to make sure that you are in there.

His belief was, and interestingly enough, in the synopsis, he doesn't give his own opinion or his own assessment.

His conviction was that if he set the position side -by -side fairly, that the judicious reader would be able to determine which one had the greatest strength of argument on its side.

So you really do get quite an extent of history in covering a single verse.

You could handle a second -century rabbinical

Tanakh. You could have an early church father, and then a citation of Thomas Aquinas, a citation of Stephen Minocchios, a

Roman Catholic, as well as a passing reference to Beza.

And it could all be in the context of the same verse. And what's really interesting, as I've been doing this, and once I got started,

I became more and more convinced of the importance, is we have left a richness of heritage behind us, a material that is either not accessible at all in English, or if it is accessible, you really have to be a specialist who knows where to look for it.

And I do think that this is a shame, and there's a lot of important material.

Maybe an illustration might be helpful. There used to be an entire discipline known as euhemerism, now buried in the past.

I guess the Enlightenment mind had no love for such things. But the general idea was, of course, truth is original, and all false religions and false philosophies, or whatever, are just perversions of the true.

And maybe even more specifically, if you had the great and extraordinary events surrounding the

Flood, including not just the events, but the great age of the men and so on, if that really happens, and then

Babel happens, this relationship between the true religion and knock -offs, close knock -offs, is really not surprising.

So the apologetic point, when I was coming up in the public school, and anything about, say, no one in the

Flood ever came up, people would always say, well, ah, all those ancient peoples had a

Flood narrative, and Moses just ripped it off.

He just stole it from these guys. Well, Plumanist interpreters point out that if you can imagine the

Flood happening, and then they get off the ark, and Noah's still going to live to be 900 years, imagine being a great, great, great, great grandson of Noah, and having about your own lifespan, but bumping into Noah, a 900 -year -old man, that all of this narrative gets confused at Babel.

And so in Genesis chapter 9, his interpreters tried to show and demonstrate the relationship between the divine original history and just one of the mythologies, which was the

Grecian. So, for example, in the Grecian mythology, Saturn, who is a titan, was said to have destroyed all of the children of the earth except for three.

These three he saved as they passed through the waters. His youngest son, which was

Jupiter, or Zeus, both of which in Greek mean heat or fervor, as the chem in Hebrew.

Jupiter castrates his father, so you get a sexual sin against the father, that leads to the cursing, not of Jupiter, but of his son,

Mercury, who is made a servant of the other gods. But let's just put a sketch in the commentary itself.

I think that they do maybe some 30 points of both substantial and linguistic comparison between these things, as well as make a demonstration that the

Hebrew had to be the original, and the Greek version is part of the confusion at Babel.

So you end up with an apologetic point when you're a student out of a public school, and you get the

Babylonian narrative cast up in your teeth. You end up saying, well, isn't that exactly what you would expect to find if the scripture narrative is true?

They really haven't gained any traction or gotten any headway. Some of this does continue to survive in English, but you need to know where to look for it.

But I think that there's another project going on, Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana.

That was Cotton Mather's Bible Commentary is finally being published, in spite of the fact that he was so loved as an author in America, because Henry had just been published upon the back of Poole.

He couldn't find a He couldn't find a publisher that would take a chance on his commentary, until now.

So they've pulled out those two volumes worth of manuscripts, and they're publishing them in pen, but you can find the euhemerism alive and well in the, particularly in the

Genesis volume that's already been completed. It's an excellent project.

Anything else, you'd have to have access to ancient books, almost.

Theophilus Gale's The Court of the Gentiles is the famous work, but I'm not sure if that's been reprinted since the 17th century.

If it has been, it's not readily accessible. But some of these interesting diamonds and jewels that need to be pulled back out and pulled into the foreground, for consideration again, at this particular point,

I do think it's an apologetic use and purpose. We do have a listener in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, CJ, who asks if you have ever heard of the

Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides, who has written extensively on the providence of God.

I have indeed, and Maimonides is heavily referenced.

He was not just a philosophical genius, and he was that, he was a rabbi, but he was also a

Talmudic and biblical scholar in his own right, and you can find some reference to Maimonides in almost every chapter of the synopsis.

He's very heavily referenced for his exegetical contributions.

And CJ, we're going to ship you a free copy of the New American Standard Bible as well, compliments of the publishers of the

New American Standard Bible. And we thank them for renewing their sponsorship of Iron, Sharp, and Zion, as we now celebrate our first anniversary on the air.

It was June of 2015, when Iron, Sharp, and Zion was first relaunched after a four -year absence from the airwaves, and we are delighted that folks such as the

Brothers and Sisters in Christ, who publish the New American Standard Bible, are behind us and are blessed by what we do and support us, so we can never thank you enough.

And our email address, again, for anybody else who would like to join us on the air is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Well, what are some of the, it seems like in looking through book catalogs and stuff,

I've seen Matthew Poole's name come up. What are some of the works, the names of the works that are out there, if we wanted to do a little bit more investigation on him?

Well, let's see. So, his three -volume English annotations are probably the most famous, and they're pretty readily accessible.

I think that, I'm not exactly sure, but I think Hendrickson, maybe it is, that keeps him in print pretty much constantly.

I do know that in recent years, online digital editions have become plentiful.

Right, yeah. There was the republication of the dialogue that we mentioned earlier, which was quite an advance.

A handful of years ago, I republished his short defense of the deity of the

Holy Spirit, which had come highly commended. There were some other works from the period.

John Biddle and some other Unitarians had stirred up a fuss, and so a 24 -year -old

Matthew Poole, recently having entered into the ministry, undertook to answer

Biddle's argument, but in a much briefer and much more popular form than some of the longer treatments.

And so, we published that. And I'm not going to remember the fellow's name at this point, but there was a biography of Poole that was published, it's probably been eight or nine years ago, and it's the most complete biography that's been published.

And I think it's just called Life, maybe Life and Times of Matthew Poole, something like that.

But it specializes on his polemical work with Roman Catholicism, which may very well have led to his death.

Well, it's a long story, but that biography, just for general information about him, of course, on the website, we have a short bio, but it's more like an encyclopedia entry.

The other treatment is book length, and it's good. I've worked through it several times, and it's very full, very complete.

And to get 250 pages or so out of what we know about him was really quite an accomplishment, because we don't know a tremendous amount.

And I'm assuming, since Poole was a more recent figure from history than John Owen, that he is more readable and understandable?

Well, he would have been a rough contemporary of Owen. Okay. Well, you know, in his theological works, he is not as sophisticated as Owen.

So, yes, I would say that he's more readable. His exegetical work, in the

Synopsis in particular, can be either as easy or as difficult as the interpreters that he's citing.

There's actually a humorous part in this preface where he says a lot of times he just reduplicates the very language of his interpreters, and he doesn't wish to be blamed for it if it's obscure.

The obscurity doesn't belong to him, it belongs to his authors. So, I've done everything that I can.

A couple of things that I've done to try to make this as accessible as possible to the readers.

The volumes, I have heavily annotated the volumes that we have produced, and I think we've done 15 or 16

Poole volumes. To give you some idea of scope, he published the

Synopsis, the Summary of Interpreters, in five volumes, but five volumes hardly does it justice.

It's 75 pounds of commentary. So, it's the old 20 -inch tall, 6 -inch deep tones, and the

Genesis portion in translation is about 1 ,500 pages. It's really quite a lot of commentary.

I have annotated anything that I thought wouldn't be readily accessible to an

English reader. For example, his comments on Hebrew and Greek text,

Hebrew and Greek grammar, and so on. I've tried to make that just as accessible as possible.

Obscure names, places, events, and so on.

What I tried to do was put everything right there on the page so that readers wouldn't be tempted to simply read past these things or read over them.

You ever have that experience where you're maybe reading a book of theology, and a scripture text is cited, but you're just too lazy to go look it up?

Of course, Poole would just be full ear -to -ear of that sort of stuff, and not just Bible text, but you'd just be reading along.

Who is Athanasius?

Now, this is not Athanasius, but a Greco -Roman writer of the 3rd century in his

Banquet of the Learned. Who is this? The temptation will simply be to read past him. I've tried to annotate so that everything is there on the page to help the reader.

The second thing that I do is, as I translate, I blog it, because I do think that what might be intimidating as a big, fat poem might be less so as a handful of paragraphs per day or something like that.

I have received reports back from some that that has been very helpful. We're actually sitting through Joshua together at this point in that very interesting narrative concerning Rahab, some of the scholarly discussion about her lie.

Is it possible or not? Is she guilty of treason?

These are the sorts of questions that have come up. Even questions of tactics.

When the pursuers go out, why do they go immediately to try to take the thorns? What's the position of the

Israelite camp as all of that is happening and so on? So we're in the midst of Joshua chapter 2, and for those that want to follow along at the website,

I do think that that helps. Since Poole is not a practical commentary,

I will frequently include either Henry or Calvin by means of practical points to further enrich the website reading.

Then the last thing, I'm very excited about it. I decided to go back through the material that we have already done and excise the very best, whether it's unusual and rare information or particularly important, particularly deep or sweet or whatever it might be, but excise those and publish a series of small booklets with some explanation as to what is presented here, what's the argument, what's the truth here, and why is this important to make this accessible not just to you, not just to eggheads, but to every

Christian. By the way, we have to go to a break right now.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com, and don't go away. We're going to be right back with Dr.

Stephen Dilday and more of our discussion with him on Matthew Poole, the

Reformed faith in general, and other things that you might want to ask about regarding the Christian faith and the

Gospel of Jesus Christ. We'll be right back. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?

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That's wrbc .us. Hi, I'm Chris Arnsen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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Welcome back, and by the way, if you haven't seen our beautiful full -color, full -page ad in World Magazine, get a hold of that as soon as you can.

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So thank you very much, World, and we look forward to many years of a relationship with you.

And this is Chris Arnson. If you just tuned us in for the last hour, and the next hour to come, our guest is

Dr. Stephen Dilday, and we are discussing the Matthew Poole project, which is something that he is devoting a great deal of his life to, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question about the great historic figure,

Matthew Poole, or about Reformed theology in general, or even about Christianity in general. Perhaps you're not even

Christian, and you want to know more about Jesus Christ and his gospel. Well, you can email us a question about any of those things at chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com, and we do have a listener, we have

Christian in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, is the book that you were referring to earlier,

Matthew Poole, his life, his times, his contributions, along with his argument against the infallibility of the

Roman Catholic Church by Thomas Harley, published in 2009 by Universe Publications?

That's the one, yes. Thomas Harley, the fellow. Great. Well, thank you very much,

Christian. And guess what, Christian, you're also getting a free New American Standard Bible today, compliments of the publishers of the

New American Standard Bible as we celebrate Iron, Sharp, and Zion's first anniversary on the air, since we relocated to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that is.

And we hope that you enjoy that for many years to come, Christian. And what, give us some, oh, you had a question?

Well, I was just kind of curious, before we get back into the subject that we're covering, I was just, I couldn't help but notice how similar our backgrounds are.

Dr. Dilday, I also, I didn't come from Catholicism, but I was raised in the

Episcopal Church. I also went through a brief stint of being charismatic, and also ended up Reformed Presbyterian.

But I think Dr. Dilday was actually a Covenanter, weren't you? Not exactly, no, although there's a lot of affinities,

I suppose. Well, wasn't the Reformed Presbyterian Church denomination that you were part of the

Covenanter group? No, it wasn't. Oh, I'm sorry. It wouldn't consider itself to be

Covenanter, no. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. I thought it was an exclusive psalmody group with a cappella.

Am I incorrect on that? No, it was. The question, though, would have to do specifically with adherence to the

British Covenant. Oh, okay. But I'm sorry, Buzz, I interrupted you. Go ahead. Well, that's okay.

I was just kind of curious about the little trip you took through your charismatic beliefs and how you got out of that.

Yeah, well, I think Sproul was a great help. After introducing me to the doctrines of grace,

I eventually thought, well, maybe I need to go try to find some of these. I made my way to a

PCA church while I was at Campbell University, and for the first time,

I heard truly worthwhile preaching. Pastor Trestner was excellent.

If he had asked me at that point if I ever wanted to be a preacher, I would have said, why would

I want to do something like that? I'm not sure I'd ever heard a worthwhile sermon at that point

I'd rather read. But he was preaching through Proverbs and Mark, I still remember.

And I felt like I left the assembly every Lord's Day in tears, just first pricked by God's righteous requirement as the

Proverbs were explained, and then the sweet Sabbath, the Gospel applied in the

Gospel of Mark. So when I went up to Westminster, I was an intern at an

OPC church for a handful of years, but then was called to Presbyterian Reformed Church, which in some ways was a better fit because of my commitment to psalmody.

And so, a winding path. And I'll fill in that gap that Buzz didn't have,

I was a Roman Catholic before becoming a Christian. So I was an altar boy in the whole nine yards.

So tell us more about the actual hands -on work that you are specifically doing with the

Matthew Poole Project, and let me once again repeat that website for those of our listeners who want to get more information.

It's MatthewPoole .net. If you could tell us exactly all of your duties and your activities with this project that you are working on.

Well, currently I'm trying to raise the funds so that I can give myself to it full -time.

I do think if I could give myself to it full -time, both

Poole's Synopsis and DeMoore's Systematic Theology could be done in 10 years' time, but I know that even then it still sounds like a lot.

But what I do is, first I spend a lot of time translating.

At this point, a lot of the time that's spent is actually not so much the translation and translating,

I can read and type, but researching these obscure people, places, events, so that the text is meaningful and open to normal English readers.

And so then beyond making that, making the translation and posting it online, I then get to go back and proofread and edit and try to get as readable a text as possible so that it's ready for publication, both in book format as well as electronic books.

So, I wear all the hats right now, fundraiser, translator, editor, perhaps at some point we'll raise up others.

But part of the trick of raising up others is others have to appreciate the value.

And we don't know that we've lost something until we rediscover something and realize, wow, we've lost things along the way.

So, maybe just another illustration. Once upon a time, there was a

Lutheran theologian by the name of Christopher Helvicus. He wrote a whole book on Genesis 4 .1

entitled Desiderium Matris Dei, The Desire of Mother Eve.

What is it that Eve thought that she was getting in Cain? And so, he defends a proposition, and I'll bring this back to reformed systematics in just a moment, but he defends the proposition that the proper reading of Genesis 4 .1

ought to be, I have gotten a man, comma, the

Lord. In other words, Eve had the doctrine of the incarnation. We might wonder how she had it, but Helvicus has the point that this would be the natural, most natural reading.

The noun, east, where man is in the direct object position, but then you get the at, which is the direct object marker, and then the divine name,

Jehovah. So, I have gotten a man, east, at Jehovah, who is

Jehovah, a double direct object, the two terms standing in apposition one to another.

Calvin doesn't like this reading. He seems to struggle with the fact that Mother Eve might know so much about the doctrine of the incarnation, but in reformed systematics, once upon a time, this idea was powerful.

If you pick up Hermann Wittzius's Economy of the Covenants, and we can be so very grateful that at some point, somebody took

Wittzius's work and translated it into English. I mean, somebody had to do with Wittzius once upon a time.

What I'm trying to do now is pool, but Wittzius talks about Genesis 3 in particular, but also some of chapter 4 as being a short compendium of all of the

Christian religion, that all of the fundamental doctrines are there at the very beginning, and that everything else past that point is just development, elaboration, and application, but that the roots of everything that will follow are right there in the first fall of man, the first preaching of the

Gospel to him in Genesis 3 .15, the response of faith in our first parents, and even their expectation of an incarnate,

Savior God, but again, lost largely, or you have to really know where to go to look for these things, to find these things again.

And what would be the greatest missing piece of the puzzle that you think this project is providing for not only the scholarly realm of Reformed theology, but the body of Christ who will be benefited as a result?

Well, I would have trouble reducing it to one thing.

If there were one thing that I would hope that this would stimulate and stir up is really serious

Bible study again. I do think that in spite of the fact that we have

Bibles aplenty, easy access to Greek and Hebrew, you can access the greatest libraries at the click of a button now, who would be so very jealous for him to collect these books?

You know, we just click on them, that's it. Yeah, I know that you have some friendship with the

Still Waters Revival Books folks, and they've got the massive amounts of the works of the

Puritans available on CD -ROM and so forth. Yes, that's right, that's right.

So we've got all these Bibles, and yet there's pretty clearly a famine at the

Word of God. And a lot of these things that we typically think of as being the province of the pastor or the scholar, we have forgotten that Christianity is not

Gnosticism. There's no secret knowledge that belongs just to our pastors, teachers, and scholars.

We do hope that they're out ahead of us somewhat, but they're supposed to be turning around and handing this out just as quickly as they can to all of us, so that we might all be fed.

So I do hope that this will help pastors in their sermon preparation, but I do think that for the average reader who has a strong motivation, you can learn wonderful things about the

Word of God under fool's tutelage, just as Matthew Henry did.

And just recently, Yale University is going to be publishing a

Jonathan Edwards encyclopedia, and they asked me to write the entry for Matthew Poole, which

I've done. But they wanted an entry on Matthew Poole, because Matthew Poole was by far, in a way,

Edward's favorite exegetical resource. We look at a man like Edwards, and we marvel at his theological acumen, but the material had to come from someplace, and he didn't just cook it up in his own mind.

A lot of this was provided for him by Poole, and he cites Poole by far, in a way,

I think probably, I don't remember the statistics exactly, but I think probably more than all of the others put together.

So Poole's work was very important in its day. Some other side benefits, as far as controversial topics.

So these would be minor and particular benefits. I did translate the Revelation portion in three volumes.

The Futurism, as far as an interpretive approach, plays a very minor role in the book.

It's there in a Jesuit by the name of Francis Rebera, who Poole continues to cite throughout, because he was important.

The Preterism, that is so very popular in separate form circles now, is present, but only you have it a little bit in Alcazar, the

Jesuit, and a little bit in its first Protestant reception in Hugo Grotius and Henry of Hammond in the

British Isles. But the rest of it, so you might see a great deal of the

Roman Catholic, as well as almost uniformly the Reformed position, was

Historicist. That doesn't make it right, but that is very interesting, isn't it?

It helps carry us out of our own time and out of our own place. That doesn't necessarily mean that they always agree on the particulars of the images, but the general hermeneutic approach was widely agreed upon.

And so that's been overthrown. You can hardly find a Historicist anymore, but it does raise the question, has

Historicism been overthrown and largely forgotten justly?

Were there good reasons for it, or were there reasons for it? Another interesting historical note,

Genesis chapter 1, framework hypothesis, so popular, it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone until the rise of the modern science.

Right, yeah, that figures. So, yeah, but isn't it interesting that the natural reading of the text, without the science and the scientific construct affecting interpretation, the strict reading of the text was just a straight history, yielding an

Earth that was between 7 ,000 and 8 ,000, or 6 ,000 or 8 ,000 years old, depending upon whether or not you take the

Hebrew chronology or the Septuagint chronology. But very interesting, right?

So, we do end up with an issue, a broader hermeneutical issue,

I would say that I believe that what God teaches in nature or what God teaches in Scripture are harmonious and are going to harmonize and properly understood.

But should this foreign scientific, and if I might say philosophical, construct control the interpretation of the text?

Something that needs to be thought about. Well, yes, and it seems like one of the nice features here that we're discussing is the fact that we are part of a rich heritage in history, and we're part of those who've gone before us, we are the

Kingdom of Christ, and yeah, we can benefit from those who've gone before us.

And I think there's this tendency today, I think you mentioned it earlier, you know, the

Jesus and me mentality that is so prevalent. This is putting us back where we belong in a long line of people.

Yeah, yeah, and I'm very grateful to be in a long line of people.

It is a rich heritage, that's for sure. And I will admit, though, sometimes, you know, you read some of the older works, it is difficult to understand.

Our English today isn't quite what it used to be. Yes, yeah, and this is probably a discussion for another day, but I do think that there's some indication of a, we're not being prepared for serious thinking.

Right, yeah. And thus we're completely blindsided by serious reading.

That was one of the things that struck me about Edwards all those years ago. To write a sentence that goes for a page and a half, with all of these subordinate clauses, shows a great command of the interrelationship of some very sophisticated ideas.

So, you know, you've got your main proposition, and then all of its other materials subordinated to it.

He was able to think it and write it. Edwards also tended to write without any sort of outline, except what was in his head.

Right, yeah. He was able to think it and write it. Why can't I read it?

Yeah, yeah. We do have a listener in Mastic Beach, Long Island, Tyler, who says, let's see here, was

Matthew Poole unapologetically opposed to Arminian soteriology such as that embraced by Augustus Toplady?

I didn't know that Augustus Toplady was an Arminian, but do you have a response to that? Yes, I would say yes.

He was ordained during the sitting of the

Westminster Assembly, and he would have been examined along the lines of those standards.

I can't remember off the top of my head if there was a work from him where he addresses those particular issues, but his subscription would have been to the

Westminster standards, which are clearly Calvinistic and touch

Arminianism upon all of the source thoughts, so yes. And I know that Tyler already has a

New American Standard Bible, so guess what, Tyler, you're not getting nothing. But we thank

Tyler for being a faithful new listener. We're hearing a lot lately from Tyler, and we really value his contributions to our discussions very often.

He's a bright young man, and thanks for becoming a part of the

Iron Sharpens Iron listening family. Oh, we are going to our final break right now.

If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for our guest,

Stephen Dilday, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com

at c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. And please include your first name, your city and state, your country of residence if you live outside of the good old

USA. And we ask of you not to remain anonymous unless it's about a personal and private matter, which is unlikely during a topic like this, but you never know.

Sometimes people do call up, not call up, but email in because their own pastors maybe are vehemently opposed to Reformed theology, and obviously they don't want to identify themselves, so they have a question in that realm of experience.

So we will honor that if you prefer to remain anonymous. But we're going to be going to the break right now, so don't go away.

We're going to be right back after these messages. Hi, I'm Chris Arnsen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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I gain insight from the analysis, and World provides clarity to the news stories that really matter.

I believe you'll also find World to be an invaluable resource to better understand critical topics with a depth that's simply not found in other media outlets.

Armed with this coverage, World can help you to be a voice of wisdom in your family and your community. This trial includes bi -weekly issues of World Magazine, on -scene reporting from World Radio, and the fully shareable content of World Digital.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, and if you've just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes, our guest has been

Dr. Stephen Dilde. We have been discussing primarily the life and works and relevance of Matthew Poole, 17th century giant of the faith, and we are talking about the

Matthew Poole Project, which our guest has immersed himself into, and that project can be found, or the information on that project can be found at MatthewPoole .net,

Matthew Poole with an e at the end, dot net. It's an old

English spelling of pool, and we hope that you are blessed and perhaps even can help support

Stephen Dilde in these efforts or can pass on the information to somebody who can, who has a deep interest in seeing this work thrive and accomplish what it has set out to do.

Our friend in Mastic Beach, Long Island, Tyler, he actually is vindicating

Augustus Toplady. I thought that he was wrong about Toplady being an Arminian, and he said, sorry about that, brother

Chris. I should have asked my question more clearly. I meant to ask if Poole had the same opinion toward Arminian soteriology as Toplady.

Toplady, interestingly, could not stand synergism or John Wesley.

Well, obviously, even though John Wesley was an Arminian and we would part company with him very seriously in many ways, a great

Calvinist hero of mine, George Whitfield, despite their heated arguments with each other, meaning

Whitfield and Wesley, who were contemporaries, they were friends, and before Whitfield died, he requested that John Wesley preach at his funeral, and when he did die,

Wesley did do that. So there is some things to be learned,

I think, from the humility of our brethren who lived before us and even live today, who take theology very seriously and doctrine very seriously, as it should be, but also approach the situation with humility and grace and recognizing our own weaknesses and the strengths that our brethren have, even if they disagree with us on certain issues.

Do you think, after I just said all that, Dr. Dillday, obviously you are a man who takes his theology and doctrine very seriously, and if Christ is teaching us something in the

Word, we're not to be flippant about it, we're not to take it as if it's unnecessary or trivia, but at the same time, can we not become very haughty and proud and wrongly mock and condemn brethren in Christ who have not yet arrived at the same understanding as we have on certain issues, when the very things that we claim to believe in regard to Reformed theology are supposed to be humbling us, since they exalt the righteousness and glory of God and also humble men and reveal just how wicked we are and how finite and fallible and sinful we are, and that we have nothing innately worthy of redemption and a toll of grace.

So don't we have to be careful not to become proud of the things that are supposed to humble us? Yeah, what do we have that we have not received?

It really is true, and with respect to Wesley and his evangelical

Arminianism, we do have to realize and understand that this was a great improvement from the

Arminianism of Arminius and Episcopius and those initial

Remonstrants, really their assault upon the

Word of God. You know, it's interesting, if you were to present their positions to a moderately informed theological hero without using the word,

I think that your hero would say, Sassinian, that it's Sassinianism.

And you can see why initially the Calvinistic churches reacted so strongly against this teaching that was so...

there was a destructive criticism of the Scripture that was afoot. So they had a theological problem, but they also had a very direct assault upon the

Word that raised a lot of the ire in the churches. I think we can be very happy that Wesley came so far back in our direction.

I think it's one of the reasons why we can sit in... well, it's a lot closer now than what it was.

Yeah, in fact, I've heard quotations by contemporary

Arminian scholars, contemporary to us, people who are alive today, who actually chastise their fellow

Arminians because they realize that many evangelical Arminians are inconsistent with their own theology.

And I remember with horror hearing this Arminian professor at a well -known university,

I'm not going to mention his name or the university's name because I don't have the exact quote in front of me and I don't want to misrepresent him, but the thrust of his comment basically was that he is infuriated with his fellow

Arminians when they say that Christ accomplished the redemption of man on Calvary because he saw the inconsistency of that, that if that actually was true, that every single person that Christ died for would be in heaven, which is what we as Calvinists do believe because we do not believe he died as a sacrifice and as a substitute for every single human that ever did live or ever will live.

But the Arminians do believe that, so therefore they cannot really consistently and logically borrow our term substitutionary atonement, can they?

No, no, I don't suppose they could. And that first generation of Arminians wouldn't have wanted to, and thus

Hugo Grotzi's very famous governmental theory of the atonement and so on, yeah.

That first generation was a lot more consistent. I think we could be happy for the lessening of the consistency of the position.

Well, I want to make sure that you also leave our listeners today, because of the fact of the great depth that is involved in what you're doing,

I want to make sure that we don't overlook important things that you want our listeners to remember about this discussion.

So if you could move on to a topic regarding your work with the Matthew Pool Project that we have not yet spoken about, and I want to make sure that everything that you intended to say is said today.

Okay, sure, and if I might introduce another figure, because I've been working on a companion piece for Pool's synopsis.

I was introduced to a theologian by the name of Bernard Demore, or Bernardinus Demore, Latinized.

He was mid -18th century, so he's a contemporary of, say,

Edwards on the North American continent, John Gill.

I love John Gill. Yeah, so do I. Yeah, John Gill is magnificent.

But John Gill, in the British Isles, at this point, the old

Reformed orthodoxy is dying, and in Edwards, Gill, and Demore, you have really the last lights.

What attracted my attention to Demore was the same thing that attracted my attention to Pool.

What Demore is trying to do, from his commanding position, is summarize what was almost three centuries of Reformed theology at that point.

So what Pool had done for verse -by -verse interpretation,

Demore will do for the theological loci. Basically, if you said something important on a theological topic, he wants to include you.

So Demore's Systematic Theology was published in seven volumes, which makes it sound longer than Pool, but it's really not.

It's seven volumes, quarto, but probably the most extensive about Reformed Systematic Theology ever printed in any language.

So I've been working on that as a companion piece for Pool, and I'm hoping to revive the memory of Demore.

But for your listeners, if you have ever read Francis Turretin or Johannes de

Brockel or Hermann Vitzius, those men are just the tip of the iceberg.

For whatever reason, in the British Isles, the theologians like to write on one topic, like think about William Whitaker and his big book on the

Doctrine of Scripture. But the Continental men tended to write systems, like entire systems, like what you might get, say, in Charles Haught, but a full system that included the

Doctrine of the Church and its worship and so on. That's what you have in Demore, and he's trying to summarize three centuries of Reformed Theology, even as a rising rationalism is extinguishing the light.

That's what those men of that era had to face. What had happened, basically, was rationalism, beginning with Descartes, that was requiring that every

Bible doctrine be brought to the core of human reason. And so if the human peanut could understand it, then we would retain it.

If we can't understand it, then we're going to reject it. So you can see how doctrines like the

Doctrine of the Trinity and Atonement and those sorts of things, because of the mysteries that are involved in the difficulties, these things began to be jettisoned, even in Reformed Theology.

And so Demore was, in some ways, self -consciously erecting a monument for an age that was passing.

And to try to make this as poignant as possible, his teacher was a man, a great theologian by the name of Johanna Amart, and Demore had been with him there at the

University of Leiden. He had been his student. He had been the chemist's colleague. But Amart asked

Demore to complete his work, finish what we had started here.

As Demore watches Reformed Theology getting gobbled up by the rising rationalism, what he did was he, in his lectures to his students, basically wrote a common theory upon Marcius' systematic theology, his compendium of Christian theology, but greatly augmented and enlarged to raise a monument stone.

Well, so, Demore died, and Demore ended up on bookshelves covered by dust.

That's why I called it Theological Archaeology. It's time to blow the dust off and recover something of the fullness of our inheritance.

As you mentioned at the beginning, I do think, of course, all of the fundamentals of the faith have come into the

English language and are readily available in lots of publications, all shape, sizes, and varieties.

Most of the superstructure has come, but there are some topics where there's very little or none at all.

So, for example, the great contentions in the

Reformed Church in the century that had preceded

Demore over the original inspiration of the Hebrew vowel pointing and accenting, what were the arguments that were pertaining to that?

Gil knew, if you can find his dissertation on the antiquity of the Hebrew language, you can see that Gil, because he read everything in the world, was fairly familiar with the literature and the debate.

But when I was a student at Westminster Seminary, it was just kind of taken as a given that the vowel points were not inspired, but that they were added by the

Masoretes, which proposition is altogether impossible.

If they were added, it had to be far earlier than the Masoretes. So, anyway, so a vast body of literature about that, going to be summed up for us by Demore.

In Presbyterian circles, when I was coming up through the

Presbyterian ranks, of course, we had the two -office, three -office debate, which

I think on the grand scale of theology is not one of the things of great importance, but practically can be quite important, right?

Well, once upon a time, all of the Reformed churches believed in four offices. The office of the doctor.

So what happens? What happened to that? You're saying that not two elder and deacon, there were four, you're saying?

Yeah, well, there were two. You had elders and deacons, but then you had three distinct kinds of elders.

And if I might summarize it in the words of Johann Henry Heidegger, he was a colleague of Francis Pereton in Switzerland at the time.

And this is an oversimplification, but it's helpful for memory. He said, the ruling elder rules, but he doesn't teach.

The doctor teaches, but he doesn't rule. The pastor does both. And this was the settled belief of the

French, the Swiss, the Dutch, the

English, the Scots, whether you were Presbyterian or independent, there was a fourfold ministry in the church.

There's a very interesting book. It was written by a

Presbyterian around the turn of the 20th century, I want to say about 1900, and I think his name was

Henderson, titled something along the lines of the Teaching Office of the

Reformed Tradition. But his general thesis was that the loss of the office of doctor was the reason that the relationship between the church and the school in the

Reformed Tradition broke down. That the doctor had been the liaison, as it were, between what was happening at church and what was happening in the schools.

Now, for the most part, the schools are functionally independent.

So, it raises questions about how did we lose it?

Why did we lose it? And were we justified in jettisoning this, or were our fathers in the faith onto something?

And that'll bring you back to Poole and some pretty sophisticated exegesis, not only of Ephesians chapter 4, but Romans chapter 12 and 1

Corinthians chapter 12. But it is interesting that once upon a time, the

Reformed were pretty unified in this position. So, a little bit about my own experience with this particular issue.

I came out, as I was reading and studying, and I read Order in the Offices and had the counsel of my good pastor, and I ended up with a three -office position.

Now I have a four -office position, but I find that my reasons initially for embracing that three -office position don't hold any water.

So, I think I ended up closer to the right position, but for the wrong reasons.

Like, one of the positions that was very persuasive with me at the time was that the three offices of the

New Testament are analogs to three offices of the old, that the Levite was basically the old deacon, elders had been largely unchanged, and the priests had become the preachers.

Well, not knowing very much about ecclesiology, that carried a certain prima facie force with me.

But after 15 years more interest in Jewish antiquities and the study of the

Old Testament, that's a gross oversimplification.

And if adopted, can lead to some confusion, because the Levites were also preachers, as well as caretakers of the house of God and priestly assistants.

What was going on in the synagogues with teaching is a little bit freer than just saying that just priests taught, or even just priests and Levites taught, and so on.

So, the picture is a lot more complicated than that, and it's not going to be settled by anything quite so simplistic.

So, not too long ago, I published—you can find this on Amazon—I published

Heidegger's little section from his theological corpus on the office of doctor as a contribution to the discussion.

But these are the kinds of things—and I don't want to be insulting about this—but because we have lost so much of what's before, we end up debating about we know not what on a lot of these points, because the material for the debate has been lost.

We tried to recreate the material, but we're not always doing so well when it comes to the recreation of the material.

So, the archaeological work is still very, very important. We have

Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, that wants to know, was Matthew Poole in good standing with the

Anglican Church? Was he a nonconformist? And even more specifically, if he was a nonconformist, was he a

Puritan? Well, it depends upon how you use the terms.

Poole was ejected in 1662 because he was unwilling to renounce his

Presbyterian ordination. Now, at this point, we use the term loosely and strictly.

He's a Puritan loosely. In strict historical categories, he'd be considered a nonconformist.

Was he in good standing with the Anglican Church? Kind of. He was involved in several efforts with some of the more

Irenic bishops to come up with some sort of a plan of comprehension so that the

Presbyterian ministers could be brought back in. And so, he was on very friendly terms with Stillen, Cleet, Burnett, Bishop Patrick, some of the famous names of the age.

They were never able to carry off the plan of the comprehension, but he was on good terms with them then.

He doesn't appear to have had any legal troubles or fights.

I don't think he was supposed to teach, but there is evidence that he did that anyway. We've got four sermons from Cripplegate in the report that it was his practice when he would go out in the evenings to meet with friends that it wasn't uncommon for him to teach on this or that subject.

I have a quick question before we go, being the only Baptist on the air right now. I was very delighted that you brought up John Gill, and there seems to be some vehement disagreement amongst

Orthodox Calvinists as to whether he was a hyper -Calvinist. Obviously, you love him, so even if you thought he had on occasion hyper -Calvinistic tendencies,

I'm sure you obviously don't dismiss him entirely as one, but if you could comment on that. Well, the real concern with hyper -Calvinism is always antinomianism, and he's not.

I think he ably defends himself as well as Tobias Crisp from the charge.

If you're going to read anything from this century, probably Richard Mueller's post -Reformation reform dogmatics is worth reading.

Not an easy read, but it's worth reading. One of the things that he says about the old reform position was, it's really not fair in a debate for you to load your opponent with what you imagine to be the logical consequences of his argument, especially if he expressly denies those consequences.

I don't know if you've ever been a victim of that, when somebody says, well, you hold position X, therefore you must also believe

Y. But no, I don't believe Y, but he continues to treat you as if you do.

And by the way, brother, we are out of time now, but we can pick that up the next time we're on the air with you,

God willing. I want to thank you, and I know your website is MatthewPool with an E dot net,

MatthewPool with an E at the N dot net. I really look forward to having you return to the program. And I want everybody to always remember that Jesus Christ is a far greater savior than you are a sinner.