Broadcasting from the west side of Big Brother City, in the heart of Gridlock County, where preaching with impact is like plowing pavement, and people continue to place their hope in unsatisfying things. This is the Frederick Faith Debate on Frederick's News Radio 930 WFMD. It's brought to us by Putman Plumbing and Heating, How Can We Make You Smile?, and BMC Insurance, our newest sponsor to the show. You can visit us online at wfmd.com, keyword faith. There you will find the Faith Debate blog. My blog, or our blog, is YourBlogs. Email me, Troy Skinner, at clearchannel.com. It doesn't even have to do anything with religion or faith or whatever. Whatever you email me, I'm going to put it up there. That's it. Now, it has to be English, because if you send something in a foreign language and it's a swear word and I don't know, that's a problem. Licentious? I figured I'd use a word that many people actually don't know. It's like the Anabaptists in Munster back in the day, right? That's right. Free love, baby, free love. That kind of religion. Put your clothes back on. We're going to back this up and start the show all over again now. We're going to regret the beginning of this show, I'm sure. Anyway, this is Show 4, so we're a little punch-drunk because, you know, we've been arguing with each other for four weeks now. Jonathan Schweitzer, Senior Pastor at Crossroads Valley Chapel, and Dr. Brian Lee, Senior Pastor at Christ Reformed Church in Washington, D.C. Jonathan, you can follow him on Twitter. It's on Twitter. It's at SchweitzerJonathan, and you can follow Brian at... ReformedDC. ReformedDC. Okay, I'll remember that one of these times. And as I said, I think before, don't follow me, please. I'd appreciate that. So we're talking about, are there apostles today? Are there prophets today? What do we mean by apostles and prophets and evangelists? We never got to that, really. What's the distinction between all of these sorts of things? And we've kind of morphed into a discussion about revelation and whether or not, if there are apostles today, that would have to mean that there's revelation today. Jonathan isn't so sure he wants to go quite that far, but he's hedging how he's defining revelation. But I want to ask a question, because I've learned now. After three weeks, I get to ask one question, maybe a follow-up, and then the show ends. If you're lucky. So I'm going to throw this out there. You guys will probably ignore it and talk about what you want to talk about. Do you do this with your wife, too? Try to get something in ahead of time, because you know you're not going to later on. No, it's probably the reverse. She does all the talking and I do all the non-listening at home. That's our role. Nice. I have the office of not listening. And the gifting for that office, too. Yeah. She told me. I feel called to it. So anyway, so if we're going to have a distinction that the Apostles, the capital A, original 12 Apostles plus Paul from the New Testament, that a distinction, an important, critical, perhaps definitive type of distinction, would be that they had revelation that was new in some important way, and they were laying this new foundational thing, and so they were writing Scripture that became part of our canon. The New Covenant. Right. But here's my question. Not all 13 of those men have writings that have survived as part of the New Testament canon. So if that's definitive for them as apostles, did they, like, fail in that somehow? Like, that's a… No, I mean, I would, since you're sort of talking about, or asking a question, I think, of my view more, I would say that what I mean is that an apostle, or what my tradition has meant when they've said that is, And when an apostle writes, it becomes canonical. The fact that we don't have written revelation from those people doesn't mean that they weren't foundation-laying where they went and did their work. And so they were, in fact, laying a foundation where they were working, but the canonical writings of the New Testament are, by and large, either from the pen of the apostles or apostolic in the content of their teaching. But some of the writings we don't have, because there's references to letters that were written that have been lost. So that's an example of something that an apostle wrote that wasn't Revelation. Yeah, and the Spirit didn't choose to preserve and conserve as a part of it. Here's a good example. I can never say that right because I try to roll that r at the end of scriptura These are phrases you sound like like you're trying to be russian or something. I don't know what that is I watched a show the other day where where santa claus was russian because he's a clause And it was a you know, so it was a really good representation of santa I felt like that needed to be said on the show here, you know, just You know just adds to the gravitas of what we're talking about here A little attention deficit disorder? Yeah, yeah. You said Russian, not me. Sure enough, the point is that those phrases are phrases you don't find in scripture, but the way that the phrase came out from Martin Luther defined things in the 1500s in a way that reset the focus of the church. very similar to how Malachi or Micah or Isaiah said certain things that Moses had already said. But when they said them, it refocused everything and it brought people back. This is where our focus should be. Now, I'm saying that there are other things that Isaiah, Malachi, Paul and Peter said that there's meat to it that we're never going to get today. But I'm saying that there's moments of revelation still in the body of Christ where somebody gets it, especially in the context of a brand new culture, where people have never heard the gospel and they're trying to use different words. When you say somebody gets it, you mean the person that's sharing suddenly gets it and is able to share? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, meaning that a modern-day saint— How is that moment of suddenly getting it different from illumination? Well, that's what I'm saying is that the doctrine of illumination is not all that different from the doctrine of being carried along by the Holy Spirit. Except for this, well, I didn't say that illumination wasn't, who knows what, let's not get into being carried along by the Holy Spirit, but you mentioned Luther and Malachi. Luther didn't write Holy Scripture. He didn't add to the canon. But when we read, when we read in 2 Timothy. Much of what you believe and have been talking about the last four weeks is right out of a reformed perspective or interpretation of the New Testament. I prefer biblical, but so when we read in 2 Timothy 3, everybody says that. But it's just our self-righteousness that assumes that mine is more right than yours. I mean, he stepped away from the entire Church of Jesus Christ at the time. and had his private interpretation. Is it any wonder that there are so many private interpretations of scripture right now when Luther led the way, teaching us that we can turn our back on the church of Jesus Christ? Because we did. And after Luther came Calvin and Zwingli, and once it hit the United States, everybody had their own interpretation. I'm just saying that Luther led the way of having our own private interpretation. That's not historically accurate. We've had voices interpreting the scriptures for 2,000 years of church history. But Luther is the one that led the way toward the splintering of the body of Christ in the West, without a doubt. Well, you know, and Luther would say, I think justifiably, that the Pope led the way in splintering the West when he said that you have to believe X and Y and Z, that's not in the scripture. Luther famously at the Diet of Worms said, here I stand, I can do no other, because the word of God compels me. And what is he talking about when he says that? He's talking about what Paul says to Timothy. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings Hagrafe, the written, the scriptures. That's not referring to the New Testament, that's referring to the Old Testament. Exactly, and this is the key point here. Which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. So the writings he's talking about there, the Old Testament scriptures, and this is where the Protestant Reformation against Rome and against the Radical Reformation, the Anabaptists said, Paul says the Scriptures, the written Word of God, is able to make you wise for salvation. That is where they get the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. And so now you've referred to the laying of a foundation, which Paul made, and compared it to the laying of a foundation in another place. I agree with you that there are people who, in a missionary-type role, lay foundations in new places. But that's different from the foundation Paul laid, because what Paul did in writing these words to Timothy was create another haigrafe, because Peter refers to the scriptures written by Paul as those that are difficult to interpret. So we have, at the core of this four-week series, finally arrived at the issue, which is that the scriptures are a revelation of God's Word that the Spirit uses in a particular way. He uses them by illuminating those scriptures to our minds. But that illumination is a work that the Spirit does through the Word. He can't do it without the Word. It's not something He does to me in the pulpit. It's something He does to me as I'm preaching through the Word, or He does to my congregation as they read that Word. So the Reformation says The Spirit is as active in our circles as He is over in Munster where everyone's having free love. But we believe our Spirit has pledged Himself to be heard in the written Word of God in a special way. It doesn't mean the Spirit's not active in other places in the world illuminating, but in a special way. And so, are there apostles, are there prophets today who lay a foundation in that special way? It's crucial that we say, no, not because I think the Spirit's hamstrung, but because He's told us to look a certain place. He's told us this is sufficient. Look here. Here is Christ. Here's the foundation. Here's the comfort you need. And when we start looking somewhere else, It's a gospel issue because we can be led astray really, really easily. And so the Vatican finally has a non-European pope at the top. Why? Because of what you just said, which I agree with, that God chose for the revelation of God to come down through to us through the Jews and then through the Greek Greco Roman world and so so much so that for years until the last century the Vatican wouldn't even do perform mass except in Latin because they wanted to make sure they preserved the original. But there's a recognition that we had to go beyond that, and we had to move out beyond the Latin, beyond, you know, the Aramaic or whatever the original, you know, the Koine Greek that it was written in, and that we need to translate it, we need to lay the foundations in other settings. And so I'm not arguing... But you're using lay the foundations in a different sense when you're talking about translating. No, please listen. Please let me finish. What I'm saying is that there are no apostles like the Twelve and Paul. but that there are apostles and prophets that are still doing the work of laying foundations and still doing the work in our generation of seeing what's going on and hearing from God and saying, oh my goodness, God's going to judge. Are they receiving new revelations? What's that? Are they receiving new revelations? In the sense that they know that God is now going to move in a certain way because people have rejected Him. Or in the sense that they're taking a new culture and they're saying, no, we can't use that word. in the Muslim world. Should we use the word Allah for God? Because this is a pretty big problem. They do in the places where I've been, and it's been a really big discussion about how do you define who God is? Is Allah the moon god that we can't use that word? Or is Allah a word for the God most high that we can use that word? Well, that ends up being a key doctrinal issue that has to be defined. And who's best to define that? Not somebody in Rome. who is surrounded by Rome, not somebody in the United States who's surrounded by the United States, but somebody who grew up in that setting and knows the scriptures as handed down to us by the Koine Greek, or whoever it is that handed it all the way down to us, and that can go into that setting and be immersed in that setting so that when they hear the language, when they hear what's going on, they're saying, no, we can't call it that, we have to call it this. No, we can't call it that, we have to call it this. And they lay the foundation for a church that is in that part of the world. And the same thing happens in India, Russia, China. How does that work in a post-Christian culture? That's particularly interesting because that's what Luther was. Post-Christian Catholicism. Right. And so he had to step out and he had to go back and relay the foundations because they were crumbling. And he did. And he took us back to scripture. He took us back to the word of God. And he built on that patiently, carefully writing extensively. I mean, you guys have read him way more than I have. Why? Because you feel like his interpretation of those scriptures is important for relaying those foundations. Let me reset. Jonathan Schweitzer, Senior Pastor at Crossroads Valley Chapels, the voice you just heard, also joined this week by Dr. Brian Lee, who is the Senior Pastor and Establisher, Planter, of Christ Reformed Church in Washington, D.C. I'm Troy Skinner. This is the Frederick Faith Debate on Frederick's News Radio, 930 WFMD. Jonathan had a long run there. Do you have anything that you wanted to say in response to that? I mean, there have, I think, just to seek as much clarity as possible in the remainder of our time, there have been people throughout the history of the Church that have claimed new revelation, going back to the Montanists, and they claim that that's something else than illumination. There are people today who speak of a word of knowledge, and they say, this is an immediate revelation I got from God, I got from the Holy Spirit. That is something that I would deny. I don't know yet whether Jonathan would affirm it. And I'm trying to use, I have used, and I think in the New Testament when it speaks in Ephesians chapter 2, for instance, about the foundation, building on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. That foundation is scripture. That's inscripturated, God's word inscripturated. And yes, God's word can be used to refer to Jesus Christ himself, can be used to refer to his revelation. But that word in Scripture is the foundation that is laid distinctively, and Jonathan has agreed that there are no longer apostles like those foundation-laying apostles. But then I think you've equivocated and tried to say, referring to translation, referring to application, referring to questions of wisdom regarding what kind of word of Allah we use, whether or not we use that in different missionary contexts. I would agree with all those activities. I'm just saying that those things don't make you an apostle in the only official sense that the New Testament talks about it. Again, there's a broader use and a narrower use. But we started the show by you saying, and your church holds to a five-fold ministry, you have apostle as an office. And I don't think you've described an office. No, that's what I just clarified. We don't call it an office in the church. I'm trying to think of the language. The two offices in the church are DK, but it's a gift, but it is a role that is an ongoing role, that there are apostles that are planting churches and dealing with the doctrinal issues, not just at the local church level. But it's not revelatory in the sense of New Testament revelation. Would you say it's not revelatory? I'll equivocate. If it in any way contradicts the New Testament, then it is false doctrine. Like it says in Revelation 2-2, that the church at Ephesus tested those who claimed to be apostles. It's interesting, they tested them. They didn't just say, well you claim to be an apostle, you're not one of the original twelve, you're out. But they tested them. those that claim to be apostles and those that were false, they called them false and they resisted them. Well, praise God, that's still got to happen today. If somebody claims to be an apostle, let's test them. Is he building what he builds on the foundation of... Well, we don't know how they test them. You could have asked them if they'd ever seen Jesus Christ, which is one of the things the New Testament explicitly says. An apostle has to be a witness of Jesus Christ and of his resurrection. Well, I've met of quite a few ex-Muslims that saw Christ. I mean, I'm just saying that seeing Christ is not that strange a thing in our day and age. It's not that strange of a claim. It hasn't happened to me, but I know hundreds of people, maybe thousands of testimonies of people that saw Christ. He told them... Not in a vision, bodily. Well, what was Christ? I mean, what was Paul's? He met him bodily on the Damascus Road. Everyone else was there. That was the risen Christ. Other people... I agree. It says bodily? I'm just saying, that was your qualification, it was bodily. I'm just saying, I don't understand Paul to have seen Christ bodily. I do know that he was caught up in the seventh heaven. I know that whatever he saw, the others saw, right? I think the distinction here is about whether somebody actually sees him or somebody has a sense of having seen him implanted in their mind kind of a thing. I'm talking in the sense of Acts chapter 1. And I would say that Paul fulfilled the definition of Acts chapter 1 in an extraordinary way, granted, because Christ chose to come bodily to earth and appear to Paul. But Paul fulfills the criteria of Acts chapter 1. He wasn't with him, following him in his ministry, but he is a witness to the resurrection in that sense. And so is there a place in Scripture that it says there will be no more apostles after the original twelve in Paul? Because, interesting, again, Paul seems to indicate that there are more apostles than just him when he showed up in Thessalonica, and there are others that were told Apostola was sent out. And so I'm just saying that- In earlier shows, I've distinguished between the broader use of the word apostle, which just means sent in Greek, and the official use. So my question is, is there a place where the Bible says there will be no more apostles? Yes, because an apostle is a witness to the resurrection, unless Christ comes down to the Damascus road. So show me the passage that says that, please. Acts 121. the test for the people who were going to be chosen to replace Judas, they had to have been a witness of Christ. That was to be one of those twelve to replace the twelve, right? That's the office that I'm referring to. Yeah, and we've made the distinction that I'm not dealing with that, I'm dealing with whether or not there are ongoing apostles in the non-original twelve Paul sense that play the role of laying foundations in preaching the gospel with signs and wonders following. And I don't see anywhere in Scripture that it says those guys are gone. Well, what you are calling those guys, I'm calling pastors and teachers and elders. So no, I don't think they're gone either. People who the church sends to do missionary work are all over the place, self-evidently. Okay, except Scripture does say that the elders and deacons work in the local church. It nowhere says that those guys go beyond the church. In fact, the word for pastor is only translated pastor in Ephesians chapter 4. Everywhere else it's translated shepherd, where the overseers do the work of shepherding. So our pastors in modern-day churches are a non-biblical They should be an elder, if you read Scripture and what Scripture clearly teaches. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church calls them ruling elders and teaching elders. So yeah, that's quibbling about words. There are these offices. Well, we're quibbling about words. The whole discussion is about, what does the Scripture tell us, and what's going on there? I'm not quibbling about words. We're grappling deeply with one another about what's in the text. Do apostles also prophesy? Do they evangelize? Do they pastor people? Do they teach? Is that all-encompassing for an apostle? Or is there a distinction? There does seem to be a sense that they do all those things, but that in particular that they play this initiating role in a local body. It's interesting. Where are the prophets in the New Testament? Because there are some. Apparently, is it Stephen, or somebody had seven daughters that all prophesied? You know, and then there's the one guy that prophesied to Paul and tied him up. He tied himself up, Agabus. Paul uses, the term prophet is used more, again, more narrowly and more broadly. In the broader sense, it's used as a parallel to preaching. Someone who prophesies is someone who brings the Word of God, so teaches from an Old Testament text. And then there are prophets who are, you know, appear to be revealing at an oracular sense, new foundational And you would agree that that was the case in the Old Testament as well? Yeah, in the New and Old Testament, there were prophets. So what does an evangelist do, in your mind, John? What Stephen did, preaches the gospel. What Philip did, preaches the gospel. But I don't see those guys ever establishing churches. But if a prophet is the one speaking and proclaiming the gospel, then what's the difference between a prophet and an evangelist? Well, it seems to me the prophetic role in particular is confronting people that are in power, that are dealing with power about the future and what's about to happen to them if they don't do what's right. according to canonical. So when you're talking about prophets, you're not talking about them having any sort of a revelatory prophetic utterance that would be in addition to the written canon. There's the two levels. Clearly in the Old Testament, there's a bunch of those guys that were not writing canon, but that were acting prophetically. And in fact, we're given the sense that some of those guys are going to prophesy, and then we've got to test what they said. And it doesn't say that if what they said was wrong, kick them out of the church. There's just the sense that in 1 Corinthians 14 that you need to test it and make sure that what they're saying lines up with Scripture. And that on any given Sunday, two or three of those guys are going to get up and speak. I mean, I'm just saying that that's not something that we see today, and there's certainly no indication anywhere in Scripture that that's gone. Well, we definitely have a process through the New Testament in which—and that's why these words are used both loosely and more narrowly, and more specifically of office. Because in the earlier—you know, some people think that in Acts chapter 6 you have the first deacons when Stephen is appointed. But it never calls them deacons. well, they're appointed to serve tables, which is a verbal form of the word diakonos. But, you know, then Stephen, you know, Philip is preaching on the road, working like an evangelist and a missionary. So these things are very fluid, but what you see, you know, so the deacons clearly have both a word and a deed aspect to their ministry. What you see through the process of the New Testament, and one of the reasons it's not, you know, there's so much debate on this issue, frankly, is that you have more clarity in Paul's latter pastoral epistles because he's writing to Paul, to Timothy, and to Titus at his parting, and he did not know how long it would be till Christ returned. He did know that Christ was the fullness and the fulfillment and that a new covenant had been founded with Christ, And then as it became more clear to him and to John, I mean, I think you mentioned in an earlier show, John's epistles, I think are really revealing on this score as John is wrestling within with the fact that he's about to die. And he's saying, what is crucial here is the truth. What is crucial here is the truth of Jesus Christ, that he came in the flesh and he opens that epistle by saying, those who have seen, who have heard, who have beheld him with our eyes. And when John says that, he talks about that word, the proclamation, that then is the basis of the church. He talks about the proclamation of those who saw Christ as a unique content. And so the sufficiency of that apostolic proclamation, I think, is the most important thing for us to preserve. And I would agree. As the Church goes out into the world, we can shake hands and agree on that. The sufficiency of the Scriptures in the world, in any culture today, if someone's going to be a faithful ministry to Islam, to anything, they better be a student of the Word of God. Well, since you agree, we're going to stop. Neither one of you say another word. That's it. We're ending right there because you agree. We had a kind of a golden handshake going on there. Jonathan Schweitzer, Senior Pastor at Crossroads Valley Chapel. Thank you, my friend. Dr. Brian Lee, Senior Pastor at Christ Reformed Church in Washington, D.C. Great being here. Thank you so much. Thank you, my friend. And thank you for listening. And thank you to our sponsors, Putman Plumbing and Heating. How can we make you smile? And BMC Insurance. Again, you can visit us online at WFMD.com. Keyword faith brings you right to the faith debate page. What have I been reading lately? I don't only read books. I read all sorts of stuff. I'm reading a collection of articles on Hebrews. Gerhardus Voss, C.K. Barrett, Daub, Gaffin, Ellingworth, a whole bunch of guys. My doctoral dissertation on the interpretation of Hebrews in the 16th, 17th century. Very important. Oh, I haven't read that yet. I'll have to buy a copy. Probably available for like $75 or something. It's on Amazon. $63.97. Anyway, thanks so much. Until next week, God bless.