Aquinas Invades the Reformed Baptists, Tim Stratton Continued

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Thursday, and here in Phoenix, Arizona, we are hoping for some rain tonight. We haven't had any rain. It's been a long time. We had a good monsoon.

We are very, very pleased, but so far this winter has been very warm and very dry, and hopefully that will change. And I'm sort of just anticipating it's probably, I don't know, nearly 70 degrees outside, but it's been in the 80s for weeks, so it's not like I need a sweater, but, you know, as I've said, we only have so many weeks, and then they go back, and you put them in those bags, you seal up, and suck all the air out, and you know, until November again.

That's just sort of how it works, but anyway, it is good to be with you today. We have a lot to cover. I would invite you to get a deep seat in the saddle. We're going to be doing Church History and Apologetics.

What a shock that would be. Professor of Church History and Apologetics at GBTS now, and we're doing Church History and Apologetics, but in reality, we're going to be continuing what we've been doing in regards to Molinism.

Don't worry. We have a whole different spectrum of the argument to look at today. I'm also going to be joining Tony Costa this evening, 5 .30 my time, whatever that is, I think 7 .30 eastern time, I think would be, yeah, to talk Molinism this afternoon, and so going to be doing a lot of sitting here in front of the camera for the next number of hours, but important things to be addressing, and I'm going to be talking to my fellow Reformed folks in dealing with the attack on Reformed theology by Molinism, all of my fellow Reformed folks, but at first, need to do some in-house chat, and what I mean by that is, I remember the days when the Reformed Baptist movement was very small, still is, and getting smaller in some ways, but when I, I've said before, my first exposure to Reformed Baptist was in seminary.

I encountered tapes, yes, cassette tapes in a display at Berean Christian Bookstore, and Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, what in the world is that? And I had to get out the Handbook of Denominations.

I never heard of it, and attended, and of course, ended up being at that church for 29 and a half years, so, you know, major portion of my entire adult life, almost exactly half of it, as it sits right now, and when I first became involved, you know, very quickly, I was involved in speaking and teaching, and, you know, I was already, right around that time is when I graduated from seminary, and was, had already been involved in ministry for years, but now, at least consistently so.

Anyways, the point is that back then, there was a major sense of unity. There were already some schools, some divisions between certain aspects of the movement. I guess that's always been there. I've tried to steer clear of that.

I always have. All that political stuff, and this person, that person, this group, that group, I didn't care when I went into a church. I just tried not to on landmines, and move along, but we had something that held us together.

We had a positive, meaningful statement of faith, and we were normally facing the same objections, and the same kind of pressures from outside, and that was helpful as far as keeping us together, but what I've seen over the past decades, and especially over the past maybe five to ten years, is a brittleness, and when I think of something that's brittle, you think of peanut brittle, and what happens if you, if you try to bend peanut brittle?

It snaps. It breaks. There's no flexibility to it. There's no give. When something is hard and brittle, it will crack. It will splinter, shatter when it is put under pressure, and it just seems to me that when you do not have an outward look, in other words, you're looking outward toward the world.

You're looking to make application in the world. You're looking to do apologetics and evangelism, and you're also looking to have a sufficient catholicity to work with others that do not walk in absolute lockstep with you, and I've been attacked for years, and years, and years for daring to cooperate with individuals because there is in amongst Reformed Baptists, even though many Reformed Baptists, in my experience, have come to understand the need for that kind of openness, that kind of cooperation with others, that the fact that you can't demand that everyone follow you at every single point.

Others don't get there. They still have the old-style fundamentalism in them in the sense of a quickness to divide, and we see that amongst fundamentalists, and they don't have a confession of faith.

When you have a confession of faith, what happens is you end up with what I would call hyper-confessionalism, where you spend your day combing through the letters of someone who contributed to the writing of the confession, and you find that they held this view, and that means that's what everybody's got to have now, and if you don't do that, then you're out, and the results are obvious.

Just look around the landscape as to how fractured everything once is again, but like I said, I was involved in traveling and teaching and going from church to church for a long time, and there were certain topics that were not discussed at all the first 15 years I was involved with Reformed Baptists.

No one ever said a word about certain things. I can guarantee you there was never a Thomas Aquinas reading group in my experience amongst Reformed Baptists. It was recognized that Thomas Aquinas was a Roman Catholic, and while a brilliant theologian for his day, the more I read of him, the less I fully understand why that has always been said over and over again, but still, we recognize that on the key issues, the defining issues of scriptural sufficiency and the gospel, that he had missed it, that he put his trust in things that should never be trusted, and so that was the extent of Thomas's involvement, and so here we sit in 2021, and literally, we are looking at situations now where you need to, if you're going to be considered by certain people, now most of these guys, not all, but most of these guys are really young, younger than my youngest kid, young, young kids, and they've got it all figured out.

They haven't been doing much for very long, but they've got it all figured out, and now if you don't embrace really an Aristotelian perspective as mediated through Thomas in your doctrine of God, you're heterodox.

You are no longer a sound Orthodox teacher. You're not really a Reformed Baptist any longer, and so we have a fellow by the name of Josh Sommer. He's a young pastor, obviously well-read, but also, I honestly, my hope is that 20 years from now, Josh is going to be sitting at his desk and just going, oh Lord, I see now, and I've repented, and may I teach others not to do what I did as a young person.

There are so many pitfalls when we're younger that you fall into, and it can be messy, but here's a quote from him. This is actually posted by Corey Allen Byram, so I'm assuming Corey Allen Byram agrees with this.

James White, Owen Strand, and Jeff Johnson, so Jeff Johnson is the founder of GPTS, Owen Strand's now the provost, and I'm now a professor, all depart from the fundamental confession of the Christian faith concerning the doctrine of God.

Now, all three of us are Trinitarians, all three of us defended the idea of Christ, believe in sola scriptura and justification by faith, but we're heterodox now, you see, because there's this new standard.

A confession, the majority of the patristics, the patristics, if you mean the early church fathers, this shows an incredibly shallow understanding of not only patristic literature that I was teaching when you were five, but I don't know what it is, but when people get imbalanced, it is so common for them to buy into a particular theory of church history that gives them a feeling that they're doing something big and cool and they're a part of the ancient church, all the rest of that stuff, and it's, every group does it.

The reality is their church fathers are all over the place, really depends on how you, I mean, who are you going to get to include? Do you include Shepherd of Hermes? Do you include Epistle of Barnabas?

What do you do with the divergences in these issues in the second century, Tertullian and Tatian? What do you do with all that? You just sort of sweep it under the rug? Anyway, I'm sorry, I should just go ahead and read it.

A confession, the majority of the patristics, medieval theologians, oh, there's a grab bag for you, and reformed confessional theologians thought was essential to one's Christian profession. I'll have to remember to go back and talk about that.

Statements such as Actus Purus is not the God of the Bible, I would say that's probably something that Dr. Johnson said, or God has three spheres of consciousness, which is a quote from a debate with a oneness guy who was asking about how to define persons.

We're going to go to Josh's definition of person here in a moment. Or God has three wills are not orthodox statements. There aren't any sources that are given there, but anyways. Consequently, this is the kind of fundamental distortion that will be heralded at GPGS as the biblical position.

As such, will not only exemplify a palpable level of arrogance, and not only represent a blatant dishonesty because they've been corrected countless times, but will also deceive their students. A seminary is a force multiplier because students go on to teach others, and those others, others, and so on.

A shame it is when error, not truth, is what is being multiplied. I hate this debate. I think on some level it's stupid to even have it, but I think of God, and I think of students, and both those things warrant serious attention.

Josh Sommer. Now, a seminary is a force multiplier, but let's see. I was just looking at some of this stuff because I believe I had made reference to this fellow one other time. He had popped off about something, and I hadn't been following him or anything like that.

Never heard him before, but people will send you stuff, and there you go. That's one of the problems with the media, but here is a statement from Josh Sommer. I want you to listen to this. It's very short.

Just one tweet. Regarding the doctrine of God, the One exists in three relational ways. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Everything proper to the divine nature exists in each relation. If authority is proper to the divine nature, it exists in Father, Son, and Spirit.

So, I would assume that this young fellow is making some kind of a statement in regards to maybe ERAS, EFS, ESS, all the different ways that it's expressed. Because it says, if authority is proper to the divine nature, it exists in Father, Son, and Spirit.

So that each has authority? Maybe? I'm not sure, but what struck me was the unwillingness to use the term person. Now, I could sit here and say, who in church history did that? You're just talking about how you're in line with all of church history and all the rest of this stuff, and I'm like, well, that's a term that's been used.

And obviously, anyone who knows history knows that there were great debates concerning the utilization of language. Part of it was due to the division between Latin and Greek in the East and West, and the difficulty that that introduced.

The rejection in the East of civilianism, and hence a concern about the terminology that you would use. There has always been, and I've taught since I was much younger than this fellow, that our great danger is the importation of creaturely categories, because of the limitation of language, into divine applications.

So the term person can definitely carry inappropriate terminology that is connected to our creatureliness. And so if you talk about three persons, it is easy to take that out of the context in which you're using that language, and hence, as a result, lean toward a tritheism, a separation.

And that happens in many people's minds. So we've talked about Gregory's wonderful statement, I cannot contemplate the three without being brought back to the glory of the one, and contemplate the one without being brought to the glory of the three, and all of that in the past.

And it's all true, as long as this remains our fundamental source. Not an overlay of this, not a limitation of what this can say, because of categories established by pagan philosophers such as Aristotle.

Not importing ideas of movement and immobility into this, but instead allowing this revelation in time to be the substance that it is then our job to communicate, really down through the entire history of the church, however long that's going to be.

And so I'm really concerned, I'll be honest with you, the emphasis upon what I'm going to just go ahead and start calling hyper simplicity, that is becoming accepted as a necessary. I've not seen anyone demonstrate the assertion that if you do not hold to hyper simplicity, you're going to eventually be a tritheist and deny monotheism.

I've never heard anyone demonstrate that. I've heard them make the accusation, I've never heard anyone demonstrate that. I just want to go, show me, why? Show me how it works. And it just seems to be an assertion that just lives on its own.

And if you're wondering, what is hyper simplicity? Well, remember, we talked about this a number of months ago, when we were talking about the doctrine of simplicity, the idea that God's being is not complex.

That is, it's not made up of parts. So you can't, you don't have lesser parts that once you somehow get them together, creates God. That is not a philosophical speculation. It flows from the assertion of scripture that Yahweh is self-existent, that he is not, it is the entire presentation, and this was the great offense of biblical revelation in the ancient world, it flows from the entire revelation of Yahweh as being the God who created all things, the gods of the peoples.

See, when you interpret the Tanakh, the Old Testament scriptures, in the context in which they were written, you discover there's a tremendous amount of apologetic involved, even in the languages used.

And though you have to be careful, because some people will create all sorts of complex contextual arguments and things like that, that don't necessarily follow. So you have to, there has to be some level of care.

There is a lot of light that can be shed by looking at how, for example, in Jeremiah chapter 10, God gives Jeremiah the direct words to say to the people around them when they're invited to engage in idolatry and things like that.

It's really beautiful. And I just feel for people who look down on the Hebrew scriptures as if they're lesser than the Greek scriptures, because they're not. That's even the teaching of the Greek scriptures.

All scripture is Theanostos. But anyway, the doctrine of God's uniqueness and his kingship and his creatorship was just outlandishly unusual in that day. The gods of the peoples had certain areas where they ruled and they came out of the creation and the creation predated them.

And the teaching of the scriptures is that Yahweh is the creator of all things. Therefore, he can't be something that is made up of lesser parts, because there's no one to have created the lesser parts to make him up.

If he's eternal, he's the creator of all things. These things follow of necessity. They're not some type of philosophical system you create out here and cram onto the Bible. It flows from what the scripture itself is actually teaching.

And so, I think that it should, if there is going to be any overriding authority in defining for us our understanding of the attributes of God, it's going to be how God demonstrated his uniqueness over against the gods of the peoples.

So Isaiah 40 -48, again, absolutely key, as I said in the debate with Bill Craig. Yes, you can go through Isaiah 40 -48. I think, Rich, do we still, did we, I'm sure we had to have, because you were doing all this stuff.

We should have the doctrine of God in Isaiah 40 -48. It was something, I forget what the title was, but it was one of my papers in seminary. I think I was, I was doing Hebrew, and I think that's on the, yeah, he's getting me the link.

So there is a, you can go back. This is, there's nothing new for us. You know, all of a sudden, I'm the heterodox guy. I probably wrote this when some of my critics, no, I wrote this before my critics were born.

It doesn't make it right. It just means that we've been doing this for a long, long time, and we'll, I'll try to remember, and Rich, try to remind me to link to it when we put the blog together so people can look at it.

So it's, it's there on our blog. You can look it up. That's where you'd find inspired, and I think this is consistent with the apostolic example. This is, this is how the New Testament is written. This is what they're looking at.

Yeah, the theology of God in Isaiah 40 -45, yeah. So the theology of God in Isaiah 40 -45, there's a dash in between each of those words. 1988, yeah. And so that's, that's where we're going to drive things from.

The challenge the church thought was faced is taking that prophetic revelation and communicating it to the broader world. And of course, in the early church, the challenge was dealing with Greek philosophy.

And there were all sorts of different responses to that. There were the just and murder responses, which is utilizing all that Greek philosophy and eventually coming to the conclusion that the Greek philosophers had received revelation from God, in essence, to those who said, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?

To a complete rejection. And, you know, the Alexandrian school, much more of an acceptance and synthesis, and a destructive synthesis in most situations, in regards to these particular subjects. So anyways, the church history on all this stuff is extremely complex.

You can look at almost any of the early fathers and you will, you will find a mixture as to where they come down on these things. And you will even find development within that person if we have sufficient extant writings to be able to follow those things.

So any simplistic reference to the patristics, that's just immediate sign to me that, okay, don't really know what we're talking about, but okay, if it makes you feel good. So the point being that when we come to even the analysis of our confessions and a recognition of all the development and the background and the influences and all the rest of that stuff, I don't know, I'm just a naive guy.

I thought we believed in Semper Reformanda. I thought it was always a matter of continuing that process by this as the primary mechanism, not by the application of external constructs. And then in fact, the process would be filtering out that which is entered in from those external sources.

I thought that's what we were up to. We all seem to agree on it, at least back then. Now, not so much. Now, not so much. So this issue of simplicity, you can read any type of systematic theology, there's going to be a discussion of simplicity and God is not made up of various parts, constituent parts.

But then hyper simplicity is the idea that you have to take this and you have to so emphasize the unitary nature of the essence of God. That all of God's attributes have to become one. Now, again, it's obvious if they're truly attributes of the one God, then they exist in perfect harmony with one another.

Yeah, okay. But that's not what they mean. I mean, that's a true statement. It sounds good. But there's nothing lacking in harmony in God's essence or being. But because of external definitional authority, you have to affirm that for that essence to be truly simple, then you have to believe that God's wrath is the same as God's omniscience and his omnipresence is the same as his mercy.

There is no distinction between the attributes and you just go, well, if we can distinguish between them, I'm sure God can too. God wants to communicate and display. God himself says that he did what he did with Pharaoh, that his wrath and power might be made known.

But there's a different revelation that is made to the vessels of mercy and that's mercy and grace. God seems to want to demonstrate demonstrate the full range of his attributes, but they're not the same thing.

And in fact, if you, I don't understand. And for many people, it's because you're just so dull, you're so stupid, you've got a low IQ. But I don't understand the benefit to God's people to do a series on the attributes of God and then finish it up by saying they're all one.

What do you mean they're all one? Well, they're all one in that they all represent the one being of God. Everybody agrees that. Well, everybody should. That's true. But that there isn't any distinction between them.

And to say that there is, is to start down the road toward polytheism. So did God start us down the road toward polytheism when he demonstrated the differences between his wrath and his mercy? No, of course not.

I've just never seen anyone make a meaningful argument that if you go, yes, God's wrath, pure, holy, just, God's mercy, undeserved, gracious. That if you do that, you're somehow heading toward polytheism.

And I will simply say right now, the reason I've never heard it is because I don't believe it's possible to do. Far too easy to refute that kind of imbalanced diatribe. So the hyper simplicity movement, well, the argument is if you don't do this, you're going to end up moving toward a communal form of the Trinity.

And social Trinitarianism is another term that's used. And there is no question anyone who, again, for the past 30 years, 35 years, has listened to any of the presentations I've done on the doctrine of the Trinity, you well know of the fact that I emphasize the need for balance in the biblical doctrines that give us the doctrine of the Trinity.

I'm a biblical Trinitarian. Monotheism is the foundation. The existence of the three persons, the equality of those persons form the other legs of the triangle. But the ground is monotheism. And so, it's just a matter of remaining balanced.

And the balance has to be provided by this. And so, this testimony, biblically, to absolute monotheism, to the use of Yahweh, of the divine persons, for example, central. But then, this tells us that it's the Son who became flesh, not the Father or the Spirit.

And this tells us that the Son, in His pre-existent state, gave consideration to what the Incarnation would mean, and voluntarily engaged in that activity, and that action. And that there was love between the Father and the Son in eternity past.

Now, can any of us fully comprehend what any of that means in the sense of in eternity? No, but if what we have here is given to us for our advocation that the Holy Spirit of God believed it was appropriate for us to know these things.

And I'm honestly becoming concerned, because this quote from Josh Sommer, he won't use the word person. And there are some absolutely astonishing and amazing statements that I find in history, especially from Aquinas.

Listen to this one. Let me just read this one for you. See if you're edified and built up by Aquinas' brilliance. But the divine intellect has, since God's understanding is His existence, His intellectual conception, which is the intelligible likeness, must be His substance.

You can use this one. It's fun. And the case is similar with affection in God, regarded as loving. Consequently, the representation of the divine intellect, which is God's word, is distinct from Him who produces the word, not with respect to substantial existence, but only according to the procession of one from the other.

And in God considered as loving, the same is true of the affection of love, which pertains to the spirit. Now, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. The London Mass Confession in its definition of the Trinity is significantly clearer than this kind of statement.

Ah, Rich says that I lost the first five seconds of that. Did we have a glitch in the feed or something like that? Is that why we lost the connection? Oh, interesting. Okay. Audio followed video. Well, I don't understand any of that, but I will attempt to, just since it was lost, let me read it again.

But the divine intellect has this exclusive perfection, this is intellectual conception, which is the intelligible likeness must be his substance. And the case is similar with affection in God, regarded as loving.

Consequently, the representation of the divine intellect, which is God's word, is distinct from Him who produces the word, not with respect to substantial existence, but only according to the procession of one from the other.

And in God considered as loving, the same is true of the affection of love, which pertains to the spirit. It is appropriate, since I'm reading Aquinas, that Rich is doing penance via signal, because Aquinas was a Roman Catholic and hence wrote on penance and the sacraments and sacramental forgiveness.

But what Rich will discover is that doing penance toward Aquinas will get you no more peace than it ever got anyone else who ever followed that particular perspective. Now, did any of that make sense to you?

What you've got going on here, I have a number of other quotes that really, well, let me, here's one. The Son of God, according to Aquinas, is the word and concept of God understanding Himself. Therefore, the word of God is rightly called conceived or begotten wisdom as being the wise conception of the divine mind.

Here's another quote. Whenever anyone understands because of his very active understanding, something comes forth from, something comes forth within him, which is the concept of the known thing proceeding from his awareness of it.

Now, I am familiar with religions that view the idea of a deity contemplating himself and the thoughts coming forth, becoming divine without movement. And that is the fundamental concept of Gnosticism.

That's where the Barbello came from and the whole nine yards. But one thing is for certain, I don't believe any prophet and any apostle of Jesus Christ ever dreamed of that kind of conception. This is coming not from Scripture, it's coming from Aristotle.

Now, if you want to come up with a theology, and this is why natural theology is being pushed so much, that gives place to Aristotle or Plato or whatever, you can have fun putting those together, that's what you're going to have to do, but I'm not going with you.

I am confident that the Spirit of God is not going to encourage anybody to go with you outside of the realm of Sola Scriptura. I have lots and lots of material I could read to warn you about these things.

But anyways, we have spent far more time than I thought I would spend on that. So this is the accusation that's being made, is that Jeffrey Johnson has dared to question Aquinas and this natural theology.

The fundamental difference between what would be a biblical natural theology and an unbiblical natural theology is the source of revelation and authority. You have natural revelation in Scripture, but we are told that natural revelation tells us that we should give thanks to God.

We know God exists, we should give thanks to Him. But it doesn't give us all the rest of this stuff. The regenerate mind with the light of Scripture can reflect upon the works of God in wonderful ways, but that will always be limited by the parameters of Scripture itself and will not give us anything new and certainly cannot give us a lens or a set of parameters that must be placed over Scripture.

We're back to some of the same arguments we've had in the past that Van Till was dealing with 60, 70 years ago, 80 years ago. We're back to those issues once again. It just doesn't seem that we learned the lesson.

I suppose every generation has to have its arguments and that's the case. Okay, did I want to? Yeah, because this is, I've already gone 45 minutes and I figured this would be an hour and a half. So, switching gears here, but staying in a lot of the same areas, really, for Reformed folks.

But this is where more of the whole Reformed community, anybody, you know, I think, I'll be honest, I've made this argument for a long, long time. I think the definitional belief that forms a real Reformed community comes from being one of those people that, well, I haven't made this statement in a long, long time come to think of it, but I believe it was Jonathan Edwards.

I'm going to have to double check this. I'm going to have to dig out my paper. I believe it was Jonathan Edwards who made the statement years ago that, well, no, he made a statement last week. Anything Jonathan Edwards says was many years ago.

I do not have any direct contact with Jonathan Edwards at the moment. I just want to make sure everyone understands that. You say anything anymore, it's going to end up as a meme. Look, James White uses his bright coogee to communicate with the dead.

I've got to smile once in a while at all the weirdness. Back when I was talking with Edwards, well, Pastor Luke at Apologia does make the argument that the reason I know church history so well is because I lived through it.

That's what happens when all the other elders in your church are decades younger than you are. Anyway, that's what we're talking about here. Edwards, I think, was the one, I'll have to try to double check this, that made the statement that one of the greatest proofs of regeneration is that we love the attributes of God that are the most loathsome to the natural man.

One of the greatest proofs of regeneration is that we love the attributes of God. They're most loathsome to natural man. I was watching Twitter and someone, I guess there's something, there's some threads going on right now of people, you know, just detesting the Apostle Paul and stuff like that.

And they're, you know, Christians always responding by saying, well, that just shows where you're coming from and what your heart is made of and things like that, which is true. But there it's illustrated.

There are things that Paul said that just simply represent divine revelation. There are aspects of God's holiness. And in our day where your personal experience, your autonomy is the ultimate authority, then sure, go ahead and blast Paul for daring to say that you're not your own.

Your body belongs to the Lord and things like that. There are certain aspects of the divine revelation of who God is that the natural man detests. And I think it's one of the greatest marks of what makes the Reformed community is someone who recognizes, I am not God.

I am a creature. I am so far on the other side of the chasm from God that it's not funny. And therefore I must adore not only his power as my creator, who sustains my every breath, every beat of my heart, but I must love what his word reveals about his freedom to act with his creation as he sees fit to his own glory.

There is a pride crushing realization that God is God and I am not. And I argue that is the most central mark of what it means to be Reformed because everything else flows from it. A proper understanding of soteriology, anthropology, it all flows from that.

And so we can have disagreements and that's what worries me about Reformed folks that place the definition of Reformed in places where we can have disagreements rather than what actually binds us together.

Anyway, the focus of Molina's work was to fundamentally vitiate the freedom of God, to limit it to that which is feasible for him based upon human actions. Because the whole reason that I focused upon what I focused upon with Dr. Craig is that the debate was supposed to be on which is better in explaining evil and my whole point is Molinism doesn't explain evil.

Its central assertion is indefensible and therefore, even though that's what Molinists think makes the system work, it is unworkable. It is an empty promise. And so we've been talking about this and there's been videos going back and forth.

And so I was informed by Dr. Tim Stratton that he and Tyson James had done a response to the little... I did a little dividing line short, remember, from my home. Got a screen flow working again and just threw that up real quick.

It was less than half an hour, barely less than half an hour. I thought it was gonna be like seven minutes, but you know me. And they then got together and did a two-hour response to it. I started listening to it.

I did not listen to all of it and I'll tell you why. It became painfully clear that though in my response I had talked about the hours I had invested in working through on the dividing line, the exegetical issues, we had laid a foundation biblically for reformed understanding of God's decree, but we had done this on the basis of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ephesians and we had worked through it.

We had also been working through Dr. Craig's book, including his biblical argumentation. We had put it up on the screen. Here's what he's saying. Here's the text. Let's look at it. We had done all these things.

And then after the debate, I had done stuff with Eli Ayala where we had gone into more depth on these things and had talked about why I focused upon what I did and went ahead and then discussed the other stuff in regards to God is the author of evil and all that kind of stuff.

Well, it became very plain to me that they had not bothered to look at any of that stuff. So why should I be investing hours of my time listening to them when they're not going to bother to listen to what I've done?

But at the same time still accused me of not understanding and not doing the necessary work and all the rest of that stuff. So I didn't go through the whole thing. But in the first few minutes, there was plenty to deal with that would be of benefit to you, the listeners all around the globe, because it illustrates the fundamental difference between revelationally originated theology and theology that is produced by philosophical mechanisms and then propped up next to scripture as if it is consistent therewith.

It really, really does. And so that's what I want to look at. I want to try to, it's going to try to be brief. I'm not being overly brief today. I apologize. But these are not easy issues. They are important things.

We're not talking about surface level stuff. We're going for the deep stuff. And that's why those of you who watch Dividing Line do. And those of you driving trucks across the US, you listen and you don't mind when I go long because you've got a long way on the road today and God bless you and be safe.

And please truckers, when I get out there with my truck and my RV, please work with me. I'm not trying to get in your way or slow you down at all. Some of you guys. Anyway, it just get a little scary.

I've been driven off the road by a few guys and I'm just sort of wondering if y 'all don't like us, but anyway, that's neither here nor there. Let's just start playing some of this stuff and let's dive into it because I've got, I've literally want to.

I did not throw this at Rich, but do you think there would be some way, Rich? Maybe at the 90 minute mark that we could throw up a splash screen and some music or something like that. If need be, I'm getting to be an older man and you normally take breaks in the class and there's a reason why we take breaks in the class.

Rich says he can make it work. So Rich isn't here today. Rich is doing this remotely. By the way, this is one of the books I want to read from. It's called Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God.

It's one of the quotes that will come up in what we're listening to. And I just wanted you to, do you see the paper? I'm not sure if that comes through for you. That's not dust, it's age. I can tell when that thing right there is in my book, that was the 80s.

So this baby's 40 some odd years. We do not make good books. I'm sorry. I mean, my 1550 Stephanos down there is in better shape page-wise than this paperback is. Yeah, something on screen would be nice so people don't tune out or something.

But you know how I know how long ago I was reading this? Here was my bookmark. And this is the first printing, because I'm going to tell you something, this print's so small, I can't read it. I mean, especially the notes at the bottom, it's like, yeah, I know.

But this is the first printing of the Christian message track. And I was using one as the bookmark in this book. So I have two chapters I want to read in there, plus a bunch of quotes over here. So we got to get into it.

And Storytime with Uncle Jimmy and Professor Jimmy now, I guess is the way we'll have to put it. So let's, oops, sorry, make it big enough so that it looks good for Rich there. And hopefully all the sound's going to work.

We.

Test it beforehand. Let's dive in. But we just got to say that when it comes to Molinism and maybe systematic theology and analytic theology, I don't think that's Dr. White's strength.