Pastoral Theology with Jonathan Master

Life and Books and Everything — Clearly Reformed

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Pastoral Theology with Jonathan Master

April 21, 2025

Life and Books and EverythingClearly Reformed

First published in 1877, Thomas Murphy’s Pastoral Theology: The Pastor in the Various Duties of His Office is one of the absolute best books of its kind. Murphy’s treatise is inspiring, challenging, comprehensive, opinionated, practical, and spiritual in the deepest sense of the word. Listen as Kevin and Jonathan Master, president at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, talk about Thomas Murphy (pastor for 46 years of Frankford Presbyterian Church outside of Philadelphia) and this neglected resource, just recently republished by Log College Press.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Sponsors & Intro

2:37 Who Is Jonathan Master?

5:48 Let’s Dive Into Pastoral Theology

9:23 Kevin Outlines Thomas Murphy Book

10:58 Why Does Jonathan Love The Book?

13:30 Kevin & Jonathan Explore Exemplary Piety

17:18 Sponsor Break / Link For Book

19:22 Vital Role For Women In The Church

23:00 The Work Of God In The Church & Community

24:18 How To Profit My Congregation As A Preacher

27:41 Pastoral Care & Troublemakers In The Church

31:10 Preach, Pray, People AND Patience

32:31 What Else Is Jonathan Working On?

33:53 Kevin’s Book Republishing Thoughts

35:44 Until Next Time…

BOOKS & EVERYTHING

Pastoral Theology by Thomas Murphy

Crossway | The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host

Desiring God | What's the Difference

GPTS | Pastoral Theology

WTS | MATS

Transcript

This episode of Life and Books and Everything is brought to you by Crossway, publisher of The Lord of Psalm 23. Jesus our Shepherd, companion, and host. David Gibson walks through each verse in Psalm 23, thoroughly examining its three depictions of the Believer's Union with Christ as sheep and shepherd, traveler, and companion, guest, and host.

I know David personally am grateful for his ministry, for his work in Scotland, for his writing, and this is an excellent book on a very familiar Psalm, and yet there are lots of good lessons for us and things that David will pull out that you may not have seen before in this warm-hearted, very pastoral, lovely book. So check it out and thankful to Crossway for sponsoring LBE. You can go to Crossway.org slash plus and get 30% off with a free Crossway Plus account.

Also grateful for desiring God. Our friends there have released a new content series on Biblical manhood and womanhood titled What's the Difference? Eight articles. The teachers at DG, along with some guest contributors, aim to explain and celebrate the differences between men and women.

At home in the church and in society. And really there are few contemporary issues that are screaming at us with as much relevance as this one. I often present this issue with this question, which I think I've probably first heard it put this way from John Piper, and that is, how do you answer the question? If you have a young son or daughter, your little boy says to you, Daddy, what does it mean to be a man or your little girl says, Mommy, what does it mean for me to grow up and be a woman? What do you say? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? There's biology, we need to talk about that, but there's more than that.

And this series at DG is going to help explore this important topic of manhood and womanhood. Greetings and salutations. Welcome to Life in Books and Everything.

Kevin D. Young, Senior Pastor of Christ Kevin and Church in Matthews, North Carolina. And I'm joined by my special guest and friend, Dr. Jonathan Master. I have quite the bio here.

We don't have time for it all. He is, of course, the president of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, teaching elder in the PCA. Your PhD from Aberdeen, is that correct? That's correct.

I should know this. What did you do? Your PhD on? I did Anthony Burgess and the Westminster Doctrine of Assurance. And do you still like that? Do you follow me with that? No, it was really profitable.

I learned a ton. I still love reading Burgess and I'm very interested in the Doctrine of Assurance. That's great.

Gospel Reformation Network. Lots of our friends there. You're on the Executive Council.

Since the Board of Directors on the Alliance, how is the Alliance doing? The Alliance is clipping along. The Philadelphia Conference Underform Theology is coming up very soon. And so that's always a big event on the calendar.

And then the normal radio broadcasts and things like that. Of course, Dr. Boyce's Bible Study Hour is still a mainstay of the Alliance's work. I listened to that.

I listened to Eric Alexander. That's right. Which is just great.

I mean, if you could, both of them were blessed with great preaching voices. It's true. Very different.

Eric Alexander is almost sing-songy and how he does it, but it's good. I should know this, but just going through the bio. So, were you Presbyterian when you pastored the Church as in Maryland? The one in Maryland was an independent Reformed Church.

So it was not part of a Presbyterian denomination, but in terms of its local polity. It would be Presbyterian. So you were Presbyterian already? I was.

I mean, again, not officially, but I was. Yeah. And then you also pastored in Pennsylvania? I did.

Although that was more interim. I was really serving at Cairn. I served for a couple of years as the interim pastor of our Church, Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, in Ambler.

And Carl was there. Carl had been there. It was right after Carl left that there was a vacancy.

Okay. So that was, yeah. And they got a great pastor now.

That's right. Yeah. Good.

All right. So, Jonathan Master. And last, most importantly, tell me about your wife and your girls.

My wife Elizabeth is just a great, a great joint encouragement. We have two daughters, one of whom is a teacher, an elementary school teacher in Annapolis, Maryland. And the other of whom is a sophomore at the University of South Carolina.

Okay. Where did she teach in Annapolis? Rockbridge Academy is the name of the school. It's a classical Christian school up there.

Okay. I was going to say my brother-in-law went to Annapolis area Christian. Yeah.

That's a big one right there. She lives right around the corner from that, but Rockbridge is a little bit smaller. And I think Annapolis area has been around longer.

Yeah. Well, we are here with my friend, Jonathan, to talk about a great book. I mean, I am very excited about this.

Thomas Murphy. Now, I have to give you, you've probably known about this book for a long time. I have to give a shout out to also our friend Jason Elopoulos because I asked Jason last year for one of his, he said this was his favorite pastoral theology book.

And maybe I had heard of Thomas Murphy. I didn't know anything about him. I'm now ashamed to say.

So I read it first in this, you know, print on demand, Google books, scan thing. And then I thought if only somebody could reprint this. And amazingly, Log College Press, and you can tell us about the relationship with Greenville and Log College Press here, was already in the works and almost ready.

So just a month ago, this came out, anyone watching, you can see it's a really well done. I mean, just the book republished 550 pages, but don't let that intimidate you. This by Thomas Murphy, and we'll say more about him in a moment, pastoral theology, the pastor in the various duties of his office.

So before we talk a little bit about the book, Jonathan, and about Thomas Murphy, how did you hear about this and talk about Log College and how you came to republish this? I read Thomas Murphy. I read this book by Thomas Murphy in the early 2000s. Again, it wasn't this edition.

It was an older, it wasn't a print on demand, but it was a small publisher. It was hard to find at the time, but I was desperately looking for good resources on pastoral ministry. This was early on in my pastoral work, and I was just looking for things that were biblical, that were solid, that were helpful.

And I don't even remember how I stumbled upon Murphy. I don't think anyone recommended it to me, but I somehow found it. And kind of like Jason, I immediately thought, this is the best thing I've ever read on this subject.

And so I read it, devoured it, probably read it, parts of it at least more than once. And then it went up on the shelf. I would talk about it to people occasionally, if they would ask me for recommendations, but didn't think too much more about it.

But when Greenville Seminary adopted Log College Press, and we were thinking through books that needed to be republished, this was one that was at the forefront of my mind. It fit right into what Log College Press does. Log College Press reprints 18th and 19th century American Presbyterian works.

So it's a sort of a narrow lane, but I think a really important one and underserved. There are some fantastic volumes out there that have not been republished recently, or if they have, it's been sort of a marginal kind of republication. And so we had Murphy in the queue since sometime last year, I can't remember when.

It's a bigger book, so it took a little more time to do all the proofreading and the typesetting and to make sure everything was just right. But yeah, that was an amazing thing, because I saw your list of, I think it was your top 10 of the year, and it was an honorable mention book that you had just read. And so that dovetailed perfectly, because we were just about to print at that point.

So I love the book. I've recommended the book. I think I stopped recommending it as much in the last 10 years, just because it was impossible to find.

But now it's easily accessible, really thankful for how it turned out. So here's what I say. I don't usually read my blurbs, but I just want to tell you much.

I like this book. I love this book and I'm thrilled to see it being reprinted after languishing in obscurity for more than a century. As the pastor of Frankfurt Presbyterian Church, one of the oldest Presbyterian churches in Philadelphia, for 46 years, Thomas Murphy was a leading churchman in the 19th century.

Murphy's book is to pastoral theology, what Martin Lloyd Jones' famous lectures are for preaching. Now I know that's very high praise, but I say inspiring, challenging, comprehensive, opinionated, practical, spiritual and the deepest best sense of the word. It really is.

He's very practical. He tells you, here's how you should structure your session meeting. Here's how much time he's in.

And sometimes he has, like Lloyd Jones does, he has things like, well, I don't know if I'm going to do that. I mean, I put a question mark, he says, maybe sometimes you should forego the sermon before you have communion. Well, that's not a good one, but 99.9% of it.

I, in this edition when I read it last year, just underlining like crazy and I would have, I would stop and I think and ponder. I mean, it was the most heart affecting book I read last year. And Thomas Murphy, 1823, 1900, born in County Antrim and Ireland, comes to the United States, pastors there in Philadelphia for 46 years.

It's just really remarkable. What was it that really struck you when you first read it that you thought I love this book? I think when I first read it, there were two things that stood out. One was one you've already mentioned, which is the spiritual nature of it.

And I agree with you about the Lloyd Jones comparison. I think one of the things about preaching and preachers that's so remarkable that makes the book worth coming back to is he has a, I mean, this sounds obvious. It sounds like it should be true of every book on preaching, but it's not.

He has a spiritual view of preaching. He is a supernaturalist. He believes that God actually is working powerfully by his spirit through the preached word.

And so that comes through on every page. And there's a sense in which that's true of Murphy as well. Even in the mundane aspects of pastoral ministry, even in things like how you run a session meeting or how you run a prayer meeting, it is clear that in his mind, this is something that is impossible.

And so that was probably the first thing that I noticed. I will also say the part that struck me the most both then and then rereading it as we were going to get set for this reprinting is the first section where he talks about personal piety in the pastor, and that sort of sets the tone for the whole book. And just contains line after line paragraph after paragraph that you want is emblazoned in your mind.

And it's just such powerful stuff, deeply affecting. And so that's the first thing. The second thing I think that struck me at the time was just how comprehensive it was.

I mean, again, I was coming to it just looking for guidance, just looking for any kind of counsel about how to do basic things, how to understand what the work of a pastor is supposed to be like. Day after day, week after week, you know, what should I be aiming at? What should I prioritize? What should I spend my time on? And he's detailed. I mean, he really does go through.

It is a fairly comprehensive handbook. Now, again, like you said, you sort of sift the wheat with the chaff. I'm not inclined to start a temperance society.

I know that was another section. But so there are little things like that, and there are a few things that are maybe anachronistic. But by and large, he's just giving you very concrete counsel for how to do all kinds of things in the ministry, but not in a wooden sort of mechanical way, but very much in a biblically grounded, spiritually minded way.

Yeah, I think you find that this is true with the best, most spiritual books, that it's surprising how relevant on page after page. Like you said, I also underline that. Well, I don't think we need to lead the way in doing a temperance society.

And he's got a huge section on the pastor's work in the Sabbath school. And so you see how important that was, and that's going to look a little different. But man, overwhelmingly paragraph after paragraph, you think this still, this is exactly right.

This is what pastoral ministry is about. This is what I need to hear. And has that advantage of being an American author and written 150 years ago.

So it has breeds kind of that spirit of the Puritans, but it's a little easier to understand the language is a little more concise, like we're used to gets to the point, not so many sources. And it reads really well and it has that punchiness. You talk about that chapter, which I was going to say the same thing, that chapter two, he begins by saying, it should be laid down as our first principle, that imminent piety is the indispensable qualification for the ministry of the gospel.

He says, it is before talents or learning or study or favorable circumstances or skill in working or power in sermonizing. And almost everyone is going to say, well, yes and amen, of course. But think about really in our day.

There's a lot of people don't even like the word piety. That's just a, that in itself is kind of a bad word. We all know there's a, you know, a wrong way to be piotistic.

But look, for all the times that there's a wrong way to be piotistic, I see 10 times as many people who could use some more piety in their life. And we see so many examples out there. And I just say to young men in particular, are the people you follow online and the books you're reading and the videos you're watching? Are you struck that this man, this pastoral example is noted for exemplary piety? And Murphy just will not let us off the hook with that.

Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, I think, I think you made a number of points that are worth underlining. First of all, I agree with you about the, this genre of pastoral literature, the 19th century American Presbyterians.

I mean, this is one of the reasons why we want to put more of it out there because I think it is a lot more accessible, given our context and even our use of language. But I think the deeper point you're making about piety is absolutely right. And you know this, but it goes back to some of the basic statements they made at the founding of Princeton Seminary.

And Murphy is clearly, he says this at the beginning and he mentions it throughout, indebted to Archibald Alexander. This is in some respects, the pastoral theology book that Archibald Alexander never wrote. But Thomas Murphy, one of his students wrote on his behalf.

But that language of personal piety being a chief requisite is found throughout the writings of those men. And before the founding of Princeton Seminary, they said, if all we do, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but they said if all we do is simply prepare men with academic rigor without a corresponding measure of personal piety, then we have done a harm to the church. In other words, if we're graduating men who are really well qualified academically and well read, but don't have personal piety, we're not just neutral.

We're not just not helping. We're actually hurting. And so that was a keynote that got struck over and over again in those circles.

And Murphy isn't just an example of that, a product of it. Also want to mention Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Grateful for our friends there.

We've been talking here with Jonathan Master. And we've been talking about the book pastoral theology, the pastor in the various duties of his office by Thomas Murphy. So hopefully you are getting an appetite for this excellent book.

Our friends at GPS are making the book available for 50% off until May 5, what a Cinco de Mayo gift until the 5th of May. And whether you're a pastor or you know a pastor, you've been a pastor a long time or you just want to learn more about what pastors should be doing. This is an excellent book and you should check it out.

There is an expansive blurb from Kevin Deung on the back. And this is one of my absolute favorite books on pastoral theology. So you ought to get it.

There's free audio book also available on Greenville's website where you can also order your copy, gpts.edu slash pastoral theology. And then also want to mention our friends at Westminster Theological Seminary. They are offering a Master of Arts in Theological Studies program.

Now we all want to be self starters. We want to read things and learn on our own, but we need teachers. God gives us the gift of teachers and often the discipline and the classroom setting or a cohort and to learn with others and from others is the best way to understand more about the Bible.

To explore more, want to learn, want to know how to read your Bible better and understand theology and learn subject matter from experts and learn how to grow as a Christian. You can go to wts.edu slash M-A-T-S. I underlined a ton in that first section of piety and then I'm sermonizing and I gave some of those quotes here at the Quorum Deo conference a couple of months ago.

But there's some in the back half of the book and it's so practical and I just want any listeners out there who are not Presbyterian. Yes, this is written for Presbyterians, but 90% of it, you wouldn't have to be Presbyterian. Yes, he has a section on the higher courts and he assumes some Presbyterian particularities, but this is a great book for anyone in pastoral ministry.

Here's one section, I wonder if you remember this, Jonathan, he has the pastor in the activities of the church and he has a whole subsection on women's work. Female prayer meetings, dorkus societies, there's another one. I'm just a champion, I don't think we're going to get the name back, the dorkus societies, you know, that these charitable women.

But this section on pastors' aides, so he talks about the pastors, the ladies, the women's pastors' aides, society in the church. Now that's still probably a mouthful, but you and I know in a lot of our circles, there's a wrestling with what? Okay, we got a group of godly women in the church who want to serve and they want to come alongside. What's the best name for that? And it often gets really dicey.

And I don't know if pastors' aides can make a comeback, but what he's arguing for, I think it's great to see, this is 150 years ago, someone who's not, he's done a feminist bone in his body, not arguing for any kind of women's ordination or going soft in anything. He's simply recognizing what we know to be true about the vital role that women play in the church. So he says, women have the piety, they have the feeling, they have the tact, they have generally the time to do such work, and hence they can do it more efficiently than men.

There are some parts of church work, which they can do better than even the pastor. They can reach families, especially the female portion of them, as the other sects cannot. They can follow up impressions that are made, cultivate the acquaintance of strangers in persevere in efforts to interest them in the church, and the ordinance says men cannot or will not.

It's a wonderful insight and to say here, 150 years ago, North Philadelphia, what do we do to get these godly women involved in the church? And to see that that's in our heritage and tradition, and you can embrace that, and you can have women doing that, and you don't need to go in a egalitarian direction to affirm all of those things. Yeah, that was a great section, and I think if I'm remembering correctly, at the end of the section you just read, I think isn't it there where he gives an example of basically saying to these women who were committed to aiding him in that way, if a visitor would come, hey, you go talk to them, there's a woman who just walked in, it's going to be hard for me to go up and talk to her, but you go up and make sure to talk to her and invite her to your home and those kinds of things. Yeah, I mean, what comes through in that are both the things you mentioned.

First of all, obviously very clear biblical understanding of church office and the function of men and women within the church, but at the same time, a clear notion of the indispensable of godly women in the context of the congregation. There's no hint, as you read it, of him sort of diminishing their role, although clearly their role is very different, but vital to the functioning and the well-being of the church. Do you have any other one or two areas that you particularly remember, and while you're thinking of that, I'll give you one.

So he talks about the pastor in the session, he's talking about the work of the elders, and interestingly, he argues for larger sessions. I know many churches do we go smaller and we can be more tight knit or do do larger, but he says larger and he has a parish kind of model that you should be in charge of a district. But this is just a great one sentence vision, man, out there for your session.

He says this session should be a band of laborers closely knit together and intently bent on doing the work of God in the church in the community. And then he really leans in. Most elders would work willingly in the cause of Christ if the work were given them to do so.

You can see he's telling pastors, you're doing all of the work yourself. You have elders who want to serve if you would just entrust some of the work toward them. There's really a lot of insight.

Any particular sections that stand out that you remember, wow, that was filled with a lot of practical wisdom. Well, again, we've touched on it already. The piety part, just almost every page I could say was memorable, worth rereading, worth underlining.

The part that stuck out to me, because I don't think I agree with it, but I thought it was brilliant and helpful in its own way, was his whole plan of preaching. I'm committed, as I know you are, to essentially the main diet of the church being consecutive, expositional, expository messages from the Bible, going through book by book. I believe that's best for the health of the church.

At the same time, I read that section and profited from it immensely, because what he does is he lays out these ways of over the course of years. Teaching your congregation, either basic doctrines of the faith or basic events in biblical history. He lists out the ones that he would choose, the passages that he would.

He was doing Bible exposition, but it wasn't consecutive exposition through a book. I thought that was so helpful because what it did for me, even though I didn't follow that plan, although I think you could. I think you could do it profitably and maybe in the evening worship, that's a good plan to follow.

But what it did for me, it gave me insight into his mind. He was thinking so continuously about how can I profit my congregation? How can I cause them as a whole to grow in grace and grow in knowledge of the Bible and grow in knowledge of theology? And that kind of systematic thinking was, I thought, that is such a great thing for pastors to cultivate. He had a plan.

He had priorities. He had a clear idea of what he was supposed to do. And I think that comes through even in some of the other sections.

So that's the preaching section, but when he talks about funerals or when he talks about other special events, it's clear that he goes into those as a pastor and has a clear idea of what his biblical priorities ought to be. That doesn't mean he tries to do everything in every occasion. In fact, in the funeral section, he says, you should preach very short sermons.

So it wasn't as if he was overdoing it, but he was thinking carefully about each occasion, each opportunity he had, prayer meeting, funeral, Sunday morning, baptisms, and what it was that he could do to be most useful to his people on that occasion. Yeah, and he is like, we've used a Lloyd Jones example in that he has these strong opinions, but yet every single one of them, you think, yeah, even if I don't agree entirely, he's onto something. You know, he has a section which I love.

He's talking about all of the cheeky titles, sermon titles. He didn't say cheeky, but he says, you know, he's Lloyd Jones asking, calling them abominations and scurrilous and who call them spiders. Most of them I laughed at and then I feel like, well, I don't know.

I mean, a little catchiness would maybe be, you know, the man who knew too little or something. You can tell what really... That's spiders one he hates. Oh, he hated the spiders.

There is in the end, as he's talking about the pastor and his session, he really does some deep pastoral care for the pastor himself and so much wisdom. He says, the pastor need not be surprised if he finds troubleers in his church. Then he says, this often shocks ministers, discourages them, and then he says, but they're going to be in every church.

He will find in every pastor, and fortunately I've served at great churches and I haven't had many people like this, but every pastor will recognize. There are some people, sadly inconsistent. They bring constant reproach.

They're complainers, fault finders. They find and invent things to annoy. They take pleasure in criticizing.

They never are at peace with the pastor. And then he says, well, what to do? And you just think, okay, yeah, what would we do? And this is probably not the answer for everyone in every situation, but it's really fascinating. We would recommend as the sovereign remedy for such troubleers in the church to simply let them alone.

Our advice would be, do not notice them. Do not speak of them. Do not oppose them.

If possible, do not think of them. And they are disarmed for evil. If they cannot excite any commotion, they soon become weary of their fruitless efforts to annoy.

Alexander says, if you could act like an angel, some would blame you. Do your best, and in the long run, you will please more people than you will not. Again, you put caveats and well, Wendy, you need to go after the lost sheep, but he's just thinking of, that is really true.

And there are pastors who probably have a bigger heart than I do that want to just spend all the time they can with folks like that. And sometimes this is exactly what the pastor needs to hear. Just let the squeaky wheel squeak.

Well, that's right. And to me, that's another thing that struck me. I think struck me more this last time I read through it than it did the first time I read through it.

It's clear that he is an experienced pastor. He's not writing in abstractions. He's not writing theoretically.

He has experienced it. And so he was 28 years in, roughly 28 years in when he wrote this or when it was published at least. And then, of course, as you mentioned, he went on for close to 20 after that, not quite.

So he served a long time in one congregation and he had already served a long time in one congregation before he wrote this book. And in addition to his training and the great writers and teachers that he reflects, he is experienced. And it's the kind of counsel you get from someone who had been in it for a long time.

I think it's true. My experience at least is that older ministers who have been in the pastor for a long time, particularly if they've been in one place for a long time, tend to counsel patients. Whereas I think younger men are more prone to want to solve every problem or think they can solve every problem in the first five years.

And my experience is, and Murphy is definitely reflective of this, is that the men who are seasoned and experienced will say, no, be patient in what the apostle Paul says with great patience and careful instruction. And he really does take the long view in everything he does. That's exactly true and very wise.

I remember when I started candidating at churches and I came armed with a very nice 3P statement of my philosophy of pastoral ministry. And I still believe it, but I said, I want to preach, pray, and spend time with people. And that was good.

And I learned after about five years that I was missing a fourth P, which was patience. And by God's grace, people put up with probably an eager, over eager, over zealous, impatient young pastor at times. But it's absolutely true.

We go in there and that's often the fourth missing P is, hey, just be patient. There are some things that you could do the easy way, six years from now, or you could do the incredibly hard way right now. And in fact, sometimes pastors, they like the skill or the wisdom to do things and their ministry blows up and it didn't have to.

And you just look and say, you could have done that a different way. And Thomas Murphy is absolutely a delightful read. I think I'll probably assign it as my main text when I teach pastoral ministry this fall.

I encourage pastors to get it. Thomas Murphy pastoral theology just came out by log college press before I let you go, Jonathan. What other things you got some things in the hopper that you can share with us coming out from our 18th 19th century Presbyterian dead friends.

We have a couple things coming up that were excited about pecs ecclesiology, which you can get the whole three volumes of pec, but we're going to do just his ecclesiology. We've got some more Benjamin Morgan Palmer on the way his work on prayer and on assurance. I'm trying to think what the other ones are that are that are coming next.

I probably have them out of order, but yeah, I think the plan is the plan is to publish about five titles a year. Great. And we're kind of on track with that with that right now.

We just alongside the pastoral theology, I mentioned this because it's out already, but people who are watching this might not have seen it. We also just republished the sermons of the log college, which Archibald Alexander edited back in the 19th century. And there was actually a very, there was a very specific reason why he did that.

But in any case, those are those are 18th century sermons, but republished in the 19th century and then now today. And those are those are very, very useful as well. So yeah, we have a few things headed headed out soon.

Well, three things I have. I'll just throw them out there. You don't have to do anything with them.

Just on my wish list other than Witherspoon, which is always there. Thomas Murphy, I read it in this big thing. This is massive and it probably just needs some editing and it's too much information.

But he wrote a history of the log college. Yes, which is more than just the Presbyterian of the log college. It's really an early Presbyterian history.

This was, you know, he's got more information on like every ruling elder at every church that might be interested to historians and not to the average reader. But he has some things in here about, you know, why Presbyterianism and that are really, really, so this book, the other one is James Alexander thoughts on preaching. That is right up there with Lloyd Jones, my absolute favorite preaching books.

And then someone, this one would need a little editing too at the back end. But I would love to see Asheville Green's autobiography in a usable form. In fact, some student out there who's thinking, I want to do a PhD work on John Witherspoon.

Don't do it. A lot of work done. Do Asheville Green.

I think there's, there is not, I'm not aware of a lot of stuff out there on Asheville Green in depth. Major figure. So go study that and someone can republish his autobiography.

Yeah, that's, those are all three good recommendations. I think the Alexander on preaching might be on the list already. I can't, again, I'm, I don't have it in front of me.

So I can't remember the order of things. I think that one might be there. The other two ones that you mentioned are ones we really should think about.

And I am totally with you, prospective PhD student. Maybe you should turn back now, but if you decide to go through with your PhD. Asheville Green, I, I'm, I heartily co-sign on that.

Jonathan, always good being with you. Thank you for coming up and preaching here at Christ Covenant a few months ago and grateful for the really good work you're doing down at Greenville. So glad we could, we could, we could come together over Thomas Murphy.

I love it. Thank you, Kevin, very much. All right.

Well, thank you to all of our listeners, LBE is a ministry of clearly reformed. You can get episodes like this and other resources at clearlyreform.org. Until next time, glorify God, enjoy him forever and read a good book.