Arresting Pastors, NT Wright Badly Wrong, Ken Wilson Interview Started

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is Tuesday, which is normally when we're here, but we were here yesterday.

We'll be here again tomorrow, and that's because, well, I saw someone actually said that one of the state governments on the left coast, seriously, what was it

I just saw, was actually talking about sheltering in place until September.

September. I guess they think that's actually realistic or possible.

It's not, but yeah, so we're all, we're all where we are.

And, oh, I didn't turn off the notifications on that one. My, my phone and everything is going ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

And, well, actually I should have. There shouldn't be anything dinging through right now, because do not disturb is on.

So, oh, well, we'll, we'll see what happens with this. Anyway, I do feel that it's important, before we get back to another topic, to honestly recognize that the conversation is not going well amongst

Christians. Our world has changed fundamentally over a very short period of time in a way that almost no one could foresee, given the circumstances.

I mean, there had been a tremendous amount of preparation, great desire on the part of many for a fundamental change in Western society, which always has, as part of its goal, a doing away with the remnants of a

Christian worldview that are stuck in law and tradition and, and things like that.

And yet the, the, the trigger hadn't quite been pulled. Some things

I think had gotten in the way, and now all of a sudden along comes one of the many corona viri.

Every common cold is produced by a coronavirus, has been forever. And we've never been able to cure the common cold.

I mean, that used to be the thing when I was a kid, you know, the, you know, when will we cure the common cold?

Well, we haven't. And that, and by the way, the reason it's called corona, COVID -19 is from 2019 when it was first identified.

So if there is a variant, a new version this year, it'd be 20, it would be COVID -20 and then 21 and then 22.

And, and the reality is there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of corona viri that could be out there.

I saw one article that said that an ice core samples from Northern China that they had found, you know, all sorts of different types of corona viri that, that if the ice caps melted would be released into the atmosphere and so on and so forth.

So there you go. So yesterday in the morning officials in Florida arrested

Rodney Howard Brown. Now, I was somewhat again reminded of how old

I am when I mentioned this to certain people in my family and they went, who? Had no earthly idea who

Rodney Howard Brown was. I had to go back and a lot of the laughing revival stuff

I found was from 93. So you're talking almost three decades ago. So, okay, 30 year olds would be going, what?

Yeah, I wouldn't have any idea. Rodney Howard Brown made a laughing stock out of the gospel, literally, by being the primary character in what was called the laughing revival where allegedly the spirit of God when he came upon you would cause you to just start laughing at everything.

You just, you would just laugh and laugh and laugh and you'd fall down and roll around and just laugh and laugh and laugh for, for a long period of time.

And this was supposed to be a great move of the spirit of God. And so most of us who have at least a few

Orthodox bones in our bodies have less than warm feelings about Rodney Howard Brown and the disrepute he brought upon the gospel and continues to do so.

He's never repented of that silliness. So for a lot of Christians, it was like, oh,

Rodney Howard Brown, who cares? Doesn't matter because I'm not a heretic like Rodney Howard Brown and he's just getting what he deserves.

Here's the problem. I was recently looking at some police documents that had been released under the

Freedom of Information Act and things like that. And one of the things that I picked up from reading it is they don't care what your theology is.

They do not make theological distinctions between glaringly different perspectives.

They don't care. Never really have. In the book of Acts, you see political leaders who, when faced with the distinctions between Jews and Christians on the person of Jesus or the law or whatever else, you all deal with that yourself.

I'm not interested, but you all do this. So we have a long history of government not caring whatsoever about the theological distinctives.

And so I'm very concerned that there have been many Christians who have just sort of laughed this off like Rodney Howard Brown, who cares?

And Rodney Howard Brown is into conspiracy theories and stuff like that.

And so you have this idea that, well, they may come after Rodney Howard Brown.

I mean, he's got a charismatic megachurch, but he's way off in the bushes theologically.

But he's not going to come after my church or when we gather for Easter worship or something like that.

And that's where I'm concerned, because obviously a lot of people are not seeing that precedents are being set right now.

And the precedents are based upon, well, there's an emergency right now. There's just this huge, massive emergency.

And if this was like the plague and was threatening to wipe out half of humanity, okay, it isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, the plague.

And if you haven't noticed that the narrative is being controlled and directed one particular direction, that you're not allowed to go, you know, there's just all sorts of conflicting information here.

There's a lot of inconsistencies. And, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. So everybody who doesn't just automatically take what

Caesar says at face value and give up your job, give up your savings, give up your house, give up your future, give up your rights, your liberties, your freedoms, everything in the

Constitution, and all for the common good. Or then when

Caesar starts quoting the Second Commandment from the

Holiness Code in Leviticus 19, then you really know something's up.

When Caesar's quoting from anywhere near the same section that says two men shall not lie together as a man lies to a woman, you know something's up.

You know that they've decided, oh, hey, this works. Let's quote this. This works. So if you can't see, because of your detestation of Rodney Howard Brown, that precedents are being set here, and if you can't see that what's being done is a major test, how far will these people let us go?

Voluntarily, based upon our introducing an argument to them that they then buy, then

I just don't think you're seeing what's going on. And you shouldn't let Brown's status hide from you the reality that you have de

Blasio in New York saying, I will close down churches and synagogues permanently.

Not for now. That is the government saying, we will destroy you.

We will take you out permanently. That happens to be then happening at the same time that all around the world, allegedly elected officials are taking this opportunity to do all sorts of other things.

Not just enrich themselves horrifically, like in the United States with funny money. But I had a friend in Australia, right this morning, and already trying to get a gun in Australia is next to impossible.

The ones they've allowed, they're taking them away now too. That'll solve COVID, right? Disarm people.

A bunch of mayors, I think in Illinois, doing the same thing. And why?

Why are they doing this? Well, if you see it, the populace is willing to give up all their rights in promise for some type of safety, which they don't actually promise.

Have you noticed something? There are actually places where they're letting prisoners out of prison.

Have you thought about that for a second? If you can't keep a virus out of a prison where you have 100 % lockdown capacity, what good does it do to put people in houses where you don't have 100 % lockdown capacity?

And isn't it obvious that the worst place you can be is in an enclosed, recirculated air place for viral infection?

I mean, that's why they're letting the prisoners out. This is dangerous. Isn't that what you're doing to us?

And so the British bobbies are using drones to track down people that are going for walks in parks.

And you're like, this is really happening. And there are a lot of people in society going, yes, do it.

Let's encourage this. Let's get behind this. And I just want to go, why do you think this will ever end?

Oh, but it will. The numbers will get out. How do you know? Who's telling you the numbers? And once they've started this, why can't they go, you know, we saw a real drop in violent crimes and stuff like that.

So, you know, we should probably just keep doing this. And you're just left going, yeah.

We finished the show on a sad note last night, and I wanted to recap a little bit what

I learned later on that was actually quite refreshing. Yeah, it was. And that is when

I actually read the governor's stay -at -home order, and it is an order. The state of Arizona.

State of Arizona, through April 30th. Republican governor. Effective 5 o 'clock tonight.

With the exception of essential activities. Under this policy, essential activities, and I'll keep this short.

Yeah, you need to keep this short. Yeah, essential activities include obtaining necessary supplies, engaging in activities essential for health, caring for a family member or a friend, even a pet, engaging in outdoor exercise activities.

I thought that was interesting compared to what's going on in other places. Attending work in or conducting essential services.

But here's the thing that I'm not hearing any other politician in the country standing on.

And this was deliberately put in there by somebody with a constitutional brain.

As few as they may be anymore. Yeah, engaging in constitutionally protected activities such as speech and religion, the democratic process to include voting or any legal or court process provided that such is conducted in a manner that provides appropriate physical distancing to the extent feasible.

In other words, the state of Arizona, the governor of Arizona recognizes that he doesn't have constitutional authority to order us to do anything.

But he's recognizing our rights, and he's asking us to use our heads.

But that's where a lot of people, especially Californians, who are beaten down by the socialist government of California all the time.

There are a lot of Californians and Californian Christians who go, what the

Constitution says is not relevant right now. There's some Stockholm syndrome going on. Yeah, yeah. There really is.

But that doesn't matter. Guys in California, you can get mad at me for saying that, but you need to check your brain and recognize there is a panic that has been imposed upon you that isn't reflecting the reality of the situation.

You may look at us and say, we're not dealing with reality. No, we are. We are. You can't say that right now. I don't want this.

Do you want this? I don't want it. You can't say that right now, though. I don't want it. I'm telling you. You know what?

I also want to be able to use my own mind and thoughts. I don't want the government seen as my babysitter from cradle to grave, because it's not.

It's just unloving. Just unloving. I can hear it now. Well, what are we supposed to do?

I will allow them to go according to their conscience and ask that they do the same with me.

So in the midst of all this, A, I would say the arrest of Rodney Howard Brown should be something that we're taking note of and watching very closely, especially what's going to happen.

I mean, this has to stop eventually. The longer it is promoted, the closer to global depression we go.

And there are people outside the United States. I was reading stuff from outside the United States today. People are already saying, you know, blaming us for the current and coming global depression.

Not recession. Depression. 1930s. Just think 1930s, for the few people who know what the 1930s were.

Yeah, I know. Our parents told us about it. But there are a lot of people in the millennials and younger that don't have a clue what the depression was about.

They will soon, but that's why they've been willing to do this. Anyway, but there's a lot of people outside the

United States that are blaming us for that. The idea of being able to shut down an economy from February to September, as some of the leftists are talking about doing, clearly they don't know where money comes from anyway.

So that's normal for them anyways. But the results will be orders of magnitude greater in damage and lives with a global depression.

Anyway, in the midst of all this, I saw this article initially.

And this is really weird, because the picture that the source gave was a picture of some woman.

Yeah, Reverend Bishop Marianne Edgar Budd holds

Sunday Mass at the National Cathedral. And so when

I saw that, I assumed that this article was by her. So I looked through it, and I was like, okay, leftist liberal woman.

Nothing overly shocking there. And then I saw it posted by somebody else, and they're talking about N .T.

Wright. And I'm like, huh? And so I looked at it again, and for some reason they'd attached this picture with this information, but it wasn't by her, it was an article by N .T.

Wright. And the article in Time .com, Time used to be a magazine, for those of you who...

It used to be a big magazine. Yeah, a magazine. Well, don't bother going to the grocery store, never mind.

Important magazine, one that you actually wanted to read. This was before the internet. The internet killed most of that stuff.

But the article is titled, Christianity Offers No Answers About the

Coronavirus. And I remember it was James Anderson, I think.

I think it was James Anderson, who initially posted it. And that's when I looked at it initially, and I was like,

I don't know who this woman is, so I'm not overly concerned. Then, I find out that it's

N .T. Wright. And, as I've said many times, N .T.

Wright strikes many people in the United States as this conservative -thinking type fellow.

When, in England, he's known as just being your standard Anglican. Bright, insightful, but your standard

Anglican. Who, according to at least one American scholar, identifies inerrancy as that silly

American doctrine. And so, you read this depressing article, and it is depressing.

And you get an idea of just, you know, God was grieved to his heart,

Genesis declares, over the violent wickedness of his human creatures. He was devastated when his own bride, the people of Israel, turned away from him.

And when God came back to his people in person, the story of Jesus is meaningless, unless that's what it's about.

He wept at the tomb of his friend. St. Paul speaks the Holy Spirit groaning within us, and we ourselves groan within the pain of the whole creation.

The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the one God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the

Spirit. It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to explain what's happening and why.

In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain, and to lament instead.

As the Spirit laments within us, so we become, even in our self -isolation, small shrines where the presence and healing love of God can dwell.

And out of that, there can emerge new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific understanding, new hope, new wisdom for our leaders.

Now there is a thought. And, you know, earlier it talks about the category of lament and how there's lament in the

Psalter. And there are psalms where you have lament where there is no resolution, where the psalmist laments evil and does not come to a conclusion because he's still in the situation.

So lament is a valid biblical category. But to say that all that can be said about coronavirus is lament shows that someone does not take major portions of the

Old Testament revelation and the Book of Revelation seriously. Because, clearly, you have presented in the

Old Testament the utilization of disease and plague as judgment from God.

Deuteronomy 28 and 29, it's right there. I think there is a deep discomfort on the part of many people to consider the possibility of judgment.

And we know that it is very common for someone to say, well, if there is an earthquake in such and such a place, it's because the people there were sinning about such and such a thing.

Well, unless you have a prophet from God, in the Old Testament style of a prophet, that would be very difficult to prove.

When God brought plagues upon Egypt, we're told why. When God brought plagues upon the people of Israel, we're told why.

But what we have to try to do is walk that fine line.

And many people have just jumped over to the one side. The Scriptures say that God's wrath is being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, those who suppress the truth and unrighteousness.

That's ongoing. It's happening. So God's wrath is being revealed. There are many, many, many, many, many people who call themselves

Christians that do not and will not believe that God's wrath is being revealed. They will not believe in a wrathful

God. I don't know why you have a cross, but that's another issue. But when people are asking, well, why would

God allow this? The one part of the answer that cannot be presented by many, many people because of their theology is it is the wrath of God against blood guiltiness in Western nations and nations all around the world.

Blood guiltiness, the shedding of innocent blood. And once you arbitrarily shut out so many aspects of God's character, because mankind doesn't like that, they don't want to hear that.

They want to hear that God has wrath. Well, they know that God has wrath. They're just suppressing that knowledge.

This surprised me, honestly, from my conversation, the conversation

I had with N .T. Wright on Unbelievable a number of years ago. This surprised me. I thought he had a somewhat higher view.

It didn't just surprise me, it disappointed me, I guess would be the better way to put it. And as was said by others, it was very, very unhelpful.

I have not, I have only seen a few articles. There are some out there, but I've only seen a few articles that are really recognizing the nature of this situation and striking a proper balance,

I think, in looking at what Scripture says. I am very concerned about what's going to come out of this.

Like I said, it has to end eventually. You're going to have riots in the streets if you do not allow people to work.

Eventually, people go, wait a minute, I have to be able to eat, okay? And I'm not just going to live on the crumbs that you're going to hand to me.

What are you people doing? People have got to figure out there is a limitation on this, a real limitation on this.

But once that, let's say there's a time we actually, quote -unquote, get past that part, though flu season will come next year, and it will come in November, December, and there may be a new coronavirus, because there are many of them, and if we respond the same way, we're done.

Just get used to poverty. Get used to an overtaxed medical system.

No more medical research. No more research in space. Nothing. We're going back to the bring out the dead level of stuff.

It's just not possible to do. But if it ever ends, there are going to be some really challenging conversations within what might have been a somewhat unified evangelical

Christian perspective until the past couple of weeks. And very little of that conversation has been handled real well.

There's a lot of nastiness. And 90 % of it comes from the emotion.

It's emotional thinking, emotional thinking, emotional thinking. It's panic. You don't respond well to being challenged when you're in a state of panic.

When you're in fear of your life, you do not respond well. That's just reality.

All right. Let's move on, because we have things to do. Appreciate very much some of the letters that we get.

We are going to be listening to the interview that I mentioned on the last program between Ken Wilson and Leighton Flowers.

And so we got a note here, and it's dated the 26th.

This was way back when I first started just talking about some general issues and had not gotten into the specifics of the book yet.

March 26th. And today is the 31st. Yeah, so 6 plus 5 is 1.

Yeah, 11. There you go. So anyway, here's a letter just to give you an idea of why invest this time.

Well, first of all, it gets your mind off of everything else. I don't want to be talking about that stuff all day long.

It does give us a real good opportunity to delve into church history and theology.

And I, again, taught church history many times. In fact, the first class

I taught after graduating from seminary was church history at Grand Canyon University.

Taught a number of times. Loved teaching church history. And I've always connected church history to theology, to what we believe today.

I've emphasized the need for understanding the influences that have helped to shape the vocabulary that we use, the terminology that we use.

Very, very important stuff, especially in apologetics. And, as everybody knows, when people ask me, what are the classes that meant the most to you in Bible college and seminary in doing apologetics?

Real easy. Greek and church history. Greek and church history. Those were the two classes, or series of classes, that did the most for me.

So, with that, we have a letter from Susan. Susan writes in, and Susan says,

Dear Brother White, I'm writing after viewing a video that Leighton Flowers featured on YouTube regarding your response to Ken Wilson's short version from his thesis on Augustine's influence on Calvinism.

In other words, she didn't watch what I said, only what Leighton Flowers said that I said.

I'm continuing to wonder why you persist in this false gospel of Calvinism, or as it goes incognito with the title,

Reformed Theology. I'm surprised that you challenge such a scholarly synthesis of Ken Wilson's work.

It should be clear by now that all who embrace Calvinism are partakers of a false gospel. Brother Wilson's work, in my estimation, puts the final nail in the coffin.

Brother White, the debate is over. It was over years ago with the first protests of Arminius.

Unfortunately, the enemy continues to revive it century by century, only to be once again debunked.

Sir, you claim to be a scholar and host a broadcast that continues to support this false doctrine. Therefore, I make an appeal to your intelligence to cease and desist.

Supporting this doctrine is biblical and Christian. Clearly, even a lay person understands the fallacy.

You, sir, should much more as a scholar be able to understand it to be false. A few weeks ago, the

Holy Spirit woke me up in the middle of the night and said that judgment is coming to all schools and churches that continue to embrace this doctrine.

He said this would be in the form of financial depletion. Holy Spirit has used many persons in the body of Christ to push back on this doctrine, however many persist to teach it and infect the schools and churches.

Sir, I exhort you to be a stand -up Christian and to be a leader and to repent and be an example to other brothers and sisters who teach this false gospel.

We can therefore go forward and teach the true gospel, which is God's provision for anyone who chooses

Jesus as his or her Savior to thus be saved and inherit eternal life. Then there's some written stuff.

You're okay on the Trinity, though. Oh, that's nice. I pray that you truly are his elect as you describe it and eat some humble pie on this one.

Admit that you missed it, a true sign of contrition. And that's what Susan Marcus has to say.

So, Rich is telling me there, he keeps telling me Wilson this and Wilson that, and I keep going,

Rich, we have multiple Wilsons in our lives right now. You need to be specific as to which

Wilson we're talking about because it would be very confusing to confuse Doug Wilson and Ken Wilson. Get a soccer ball?

That would be a different Wilson. Are we still? No, we need to. Well, when the

Holy Spirit woke Susan up about the financial depletion, I guess he forgot that all seminaries are going to be financially depleted in the future by the

COVID -19 virus, including the one that Ken Wilson works for as well.

So there you get the idea from what Rich is telling me is that we have stumbled upon the

Holy Grail here. How dare you ever question what a graduate of Oxford said?

Well, do forgive me. But the thesis of this book is marginal.

It's on the outside margins. It is not representative of mainstream

Christian historical scholarship for hundreds of years. He's not the first person to have read through Augustine chronologically by any stretch of the imagination.

Many people have done that in the past. It is well known that there's development in Augustine's material.

It is well known that Augustine and every other early church father was influenced by his context, by his background, by language, and especially by the conflicts that that early church father engaged in.

These are not disputed issues. The disputed issue is the conclusion that Ken Wilson comes to, and a conclusion that I read a couple of programs ago.

The famous Reformed theologian Benjamin Warfield commented the Reformation imperially considered, no, don't worry about it, was just that the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace, it was actually the full statement is

Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church, but anyway. Warfield's statement is pinpoint accurate, but unfortunately due to Luther's and Calvin's reliance upon Augustine, the unmerited grace of the

Christian God did not triumph. In Augustinian Calvinism, Reformed theology, it was the radicalized grace of the

Manichaean God who triumphed. So, Susan says false gospel.

Ken Wilson says different God, Manichaean God. This is radical.

It is utterly unsubstantiated by his argumentation. And we're going to demonstrate that.

And if he wants to debate that, if he dares to put that out there, and then say, yeah,

I will demonstrate, I will prove that because Manichaeans interpreted a verse in a way

I think they interpreted it, that's how everybody else has done it, that there is no grammatical, historical exegesis going on in any of Calvin, any of Luther.

The Bible had nothing to do with this. It's all just Manichaeism.

That is absurd. I can't believe anyone would defend it. But if he wants to defend it, great, fine. If he wants to defend this statement, fine.

But we will have so fully demonstrated the errors, the manifold historical and theological errors in that, that I don't know how anyone could do it.

It would end up being another Tassie debate on that level. So, okay, fine.

So, like I said on the last program, what we need to do, and I think

I muted this thing, I've got to unmute it because there's that, but I haven't seen any more notifications coming through.

There was an interview in 2018, the first interview that Leighton Flowers did with Ken Wilson.

Why listen to this? Because it provides the background of this, which then is the summary of this, and we were told you shouldn't respond to this, you should respond to this.

But everybody's reading this. So if you respond to this, you're not responding to what they're actually reading. So is there some huge difference between these two?

Well, size -wise there is, but if a person is a meaningful author at all, or a meaningful teacher at all, this should be an accurate distillation of this.

Well, this didn't exist when this interview took place. So, if what's in the interview ends up in here, what does that tell us?

That that represents the author's intention. So, you have it all laid out here, and so we're going to go through it, and we're going to listen to portions of it, and use that as an introduction.

And I just figure people find listening a little bit easier than just reading large chunks of text on keynote slides, which we'll have to do some of.

All right, let's finally dive into this thing here. Let's get started.

But he also has a Ph .D. from Oxford. He has a

DPhil. This says DPhil, and in my experience,

DPhil, Doctors of Philosophy, see that as a, especially over in England, something that separates them just a little bit from those who have just a plain old

Ph .D., you know. So, I've encountered people who really did view their

DPhil as more special, than just a plain old

Ph .D. But his own book says DPhil, so maybe, Leighton, you might want to use the terminology that he himself uses.

That might be a good idea. Okay, that's

Ken Wilson. Leighton of Flowers has said, you're a really smart guy, so should we just listen to what you have to say?

And so now he's describing how he engaged in his study. Everybody else, all I did was follow the instructions

Augustine gave on how to find out what he taught. And he said, you need to read it in chronological order.

And it was just surprising, nobody had set out and did that to figure out where he went. So all I did was follow the instructions.

Lots of people have read Augustine in chronological order. He's not the first person that's ever done that. Like I said, there have been tremendous

Augustine scholars down through the centuries. There have been more volumes written on Augustine and in -depth on Augustine than I can imagine.

And it's actually basic fundamental knowledge amongst church historians, people who work in that field, have taught in that field, that there's development in Augustine, there are influences in Augustine.

And especially, like I said, I remember a conference in 93 -ish, somewhere around there here in the valley, where my whole presentation at this conference was what we can learn from the blind spots in Augustine.

Because if someone as brilliant as Augustine could have blind spots and inconsistencies and contradictions in his theology, we can too.

And that the primary reason for those contradictions and blind spots were the conflicts that he had in his life.

So, in other words, the Donatist controversy at the beginning of his ministry, the Pelagian controversy at the end of his ministry, those are the two major ones.

He engaged in all sorts of minor ones too. But those are the ones that really took a great deal of his time and effort.

That's why the Roman Catholics can quote from his anti -Donatist writings, and the

Reformed can quote from his anti -Pelagian writings during the course of the Reformation. That's what

Warfield was talking about. So, this is not some wow, no one's ever thought of this type of thing, at all.

What no one ever thought of before is the idea that you can just simply transfer quote -unquote

Manichean interpretations, as if there was such a thing as a Manichean interpretive hermeneutical principle.

Remember, Mani and his followers, the Manicheans, put together a religion in the middle 200s, so the middle of the 3rd century, that is a mixture of Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, and Christianity.

Now, if you can't tell the difference between Reformed hermeneutics and something that would come out of that mess,

I don't know what to say to you. If you think you can transport Manichean interpretation, lock, stock, and barrel, through Augustine, into Calvin, I don't know what to say to you, because it's absurd.

It makes no sense. But, there you go. So, this is not anything new.

I think, from what I'm hearing, the big thing here is the assertion of an editing process, later on, undertaken by Augustine himself.

I'm hearing a... Ah! Fixed it. I fixed it.

Did you see that? Did you turn it down or did I fix it? Oh. Okay, it's up more now.

I'm not sure if you turned it down at the same moment I turned this. Oh, it's still there. I'm hearing something

I've never heard before. I'm hearing a... Okay, sorry.

We're live. Alright, let's get back to Ken Wilson here. You taught as an adjunct professor there at Gateway Seminary, and so you've been tied into Southern Baptist to some degree.

Okay, Gateway Seminary, former Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. He has a THM from Golden Gate. I taught at Golden Gate during the same time period where he was a student at Golden Gate.

That doesn't mean we would have crossed paths because...

Again, I forgot to look it up, but it had been a while since I had been on the main campus in Mill Valley and did most of my teaching in Scottsdale in the

Arizona campus at GGBTS before it became Gateway and went to Los Angeles or someplace, wherever it went.

I'm not even sure where it's located anymore. Sure. Well, when I went to Oxford, the goal was to study

Augustine and to find out why he changed his views. That's a pretty commonly known fact among the scholars, that he did change his views from a traditional view of free will, and then he went to a more deterministic type of viewpoint.

That is well known, and the standard answer is dealing with Pelagius and arguing the issues with Pelagius.

Now, one thing that is going to come up is the issue of baptism and an understanding...

What you need to understand, again, huge tomes on the subject of baptism have been written.

Massive tomes. And to be honest with you, in my experience, if you're an

Orthodox guy writing on baptism, a Roman Catholic guy writing on baptism, a Lutheran guy writing on baptism, a non -Lutheran

Presbyterian writing on baptism, a Baptist writing on baptism, you're going to end up finding what you want to find.

It's hard to find works on baptism that are unbiased in their final conclusions.

What you end up hearing very often ends up reflecting where you started. But part of the reason for that is that there are a lot of different perspectives on baptism in the early

Church. There really are. I mean, you can go into archaeology, you can demonstrate that there were full -size baptisteries into the 3rd and 4th centuries in certain churches.

All sorts of stuff like that. I put this thing on Do Not Disturb, and I'm still getting stuff like that.

I think maybe if I... Oh, wait a minute. Here we go. Hopefully we'll take care of that part anyways.

We'll see. We'll see. Some of these programs can still send you stuff even when you turn them off.

So, baptism, it's subjects who is to receive it.

Really, it's objects. It's purpose, when, how, three times forward, facing east, one time backwards, delayed until the end of life.

I mean, in the 4th century, one of the common arguments that was going on was do you baptize a convert upon their conversion or wait until they're about to die?

Which is dangerous because if you don't get to them until they're dead, now they're in real trouble. But infants were being baptized but there were different understandings as to why the infants were being baptized and there were people who were promoting infant baptism and others who were saying, no, you should delay it until later in life.

There was a tremendous amount of discussion and a lot of tradition.

A lot of it had to do with where you grew up and what the tradition was in your area. Because remember, you didn't have the internet, you didn't have nearly as much communication of ideas and things like that, so you'd get more localized flavoring, shall we say, on subjects along those lines.

That issue is going to come up as well here a little bit later as to what the alleged almost universal view of the early

Church was, which was not a universal view. And then what Augustine allegedly came up with.

The interesting thing was that almost every scholar will tell you that Augustine changed his mind about 386, writing to Bishop Simplicianus in Milan.

And the reason is he starts off with a traditional view and in the middle of the book he switches to a more serious view of God's sovereignty.

Now, just notice that Wilson will all the time anachronistically read modern categories into ancient categories that don't actually fit.

And he will assume the existence... I mean, he just asserts there is just simply one

Christian view. And in fact, in the back of the book there is an appendix where he says, okay, here are the verses and...

Here are the individuals... Here are the individuals and here's what's going to come out of that.

I think I can get rid of that, too. Unfortunately, Priestly and I will not have anything open but Audio Notetaker on the computer.

Anyways, he's got a list of individuals and then a little symbol as to whether they were specifically expressed the traditional free will view or, and I was appreciative of this in the dissertation anyways, or whether there's not enough data.

And there really should be a whole lot more not enough datas because almost any statement is interpreted as being well, what we believe today when it comes to the issue of free will.

But once again let me point out soteriological issues were not the primary focus of, for example, the early councils.

What were the early councils arguing about? Were they arguing about the time of baptism?

Were they arguing about the nature of the will? Were they arguing about predestination election? No, they were arguing about Christology and theology proper.

Were these things being discussed? Yes, but again, if you don't even have a full treatise on the atonement until the end of, toward the middle end of 4th century, that tells you where the emphasis is.

And so trying to create a unanimous thought through, we've dealt with all this and come to this conclusion, then

Augustine goes, I don't care at all I can go someplace else, is one of the things that Wilson's trying to present, part of his argumentation.

Right. Now, my understanding of him being formerly a Manichean Gnostic, what does that mean for those who don't know what

Manicheanism is, Gnosticism is, I've been accused of being too polemic by referring to Gnosticism as being similar to some of the claims of Calvinists.

I don't think anyone's saying that Calvinists are exactly like the Gnostics of the 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries by any means, but there are some similarities with regard to the concepts of determinism.

Talk about that a little bit. Okay, let me just point something out here. And this could come up a couple of times and toward the end

Wilson will engage in a discussion of how you need to read the early

Church Fathers in context. At that point he's arguing that there is none of them who had any Reformed belief in them at all.

So you've got to read them in context. Well, that's our argument against his entire thesis. And that is aside from the fact that Biblical input is just completely minimized.

It's just like there was nothing about the Bible All there is is this

Manichean interpretation and you just take that Manichean interpretation and that's it. That's all there is to it.

It's you need to understand that if you're going to allege similarity you must take into consideration foundational identifiers.

Why is this important and why might Dr. Wilson not be familiar with this important area?

How many of you have heard of the Zeitgeist movie on YouTube?

Almost everybody has, if you've been online at all. It was very popular a number of years ago.

It's not as popular now, but it unfortunately has influenced many people. But there's a huge amount of information on YouTube and on the

Internet that basically argues that Christianity has borrowed from, and then fill in the blank

Greek religions, Egyptian religions, Roman religions and so you've heard all about Mithras Mithraism You've heard all about Osiris and Isis and these ancient gods who were allegedly virgin born and had 12 disciples and la da da da da da and there are millions millions of people there are millions of people on this planet that believe the story of Jesus was cobbled together from various pagan myths and this is the history of religion school that no one ever really comes up with anything new they just borrow from stuff that came before and cobble it together in their day for something unique that they can sell and so if you have to deal with that if you have to, as I've had to for years go see my debate with Dan Barker on this subject because that was one of Dan Barker's things that Jesus didn't really exist and here's the reasons why you've got

Mithraism and you've got the Osiris and Isis and getting chopped up into 14 parts and one part gets lost and all that silliness and the idea of Dionysus and virgin birth because he's sewn into God's thigh and that's a virgin birth you have to demonstrate that a mere similarity if it is based upon fundamentally different worldviews is not a similarity at all so in the ancient world in ancient religion you have dying and rising motifs tied to what?

agriculture until recent times everybody lived on farms and even people who lived in cities cities were still so small that once you walked outside the city gate you were surrounded by farms you had to have farms real close by because you didn't have trucks to get your food there that was one of the things that kept the size of cities limited transportation of foodstuffs so up until recent times up until industrialization and transport everybody understood the agricultural cycle everybody understood the spring festivals the rising of the sun and the heat and the planting of the crops and the summer festivals and then the harvest time festivals and then the sun getting lower and lower in the sky until it is reborn around December 21st, 22nd and the days start getting longer and it starts all over again and you have to put seeds in the ground and this has to happen all the time and so what we're told is dying and rising that's where Jesus' stuff comes in is

Jesus' resurrection ever likened to an agricultural cycle so it happens over and over again no, the emphasis is upon the once for allness and when you place the resurrection within the context of monotheism and incarnation, a real incarnation not being sewn in the thigh of a god not as in Egyptian magic, magic religion where you take a god who's been cut up into 14 pieces you lose a piece and you revivify this god as a zombie god of the underworld that's not a resurrection and that's not incarnation either incarnation or resurrection the uniqueness of the

Christian message flowing from monotheism a real incarnation, a real resurrection a real resurrection as in the body being raised from the dead that which died coming to life again, anastasis when you recognize the unique worldview elements of the

Christian proclamation then you see that it's trying to simply say that what the Christians did is they borrowed this from paganism and tried to cram it into a monotheistic system is absurd absolutely absurd so if we can see it there then we need to see that when you accuse monotheistic trinitarian reformed theologians steeped in the language of Hebrew in the

Old Testament the prophets, Isaiah the Isaiah who identifies the one

God as the God who knows the beginning from the end who can tell you why things happened in the past and what's going to happen in the future this is how he differentiates himself from the false gods when you recognize those reformed theologians are steeped in the language of the

New Testament and provide in depth consistent exegesis of key texts based upon a belief that they are inspired and inerrant not that you get to mix them with Zoroastrianism or Buddhism or Gnosticism once you recognize that that's the source of reformed theology the idea that that is actually some kind of Gnostic interpretation where the

Gnostic doesn't have a personal god or if it does, it's a demiurge, an evil god that created the physical universe in complete and total contradiction to what the reformed believe to try to connect those things together is infantile it's infantile it is so irrational it is hard to even know how to describe it ok so when you hear someone saying

I've been accused of being too polemic there is nothing in Gnosticism that even comes close the

Gnostic concepts, plural because there is no one

Gnostic concept but the Gnostic concepts of God cannot ground the decree of the triune god of scripture the gods, god principles superior powers known by mystery experiences and ecstatic utterances of all the multi -form various Gnostic cults are utterly insufficient to be the personal

Yahweh who has revealed himself as father, son, spirit who is glorifying himself in and through the redemption of a particular people in Christ Jesus to try to connect those two things together is desperation on a level that is astonishing it's astonishing and you simply either cannot have any idea of just how multi -form remember what year was it when did that's the musical interlude

I actually sound like Superman there ok 2007 2007 oh my goodness this was 13 years ago nobody knows this book because it was a book written for a particular move in a particular time 2007 a lot of you don't remember this but it was on ABC and they claimed they had found first they found the bone box of James and then

Jesus found the tomb of Jesus and this is where Jesus' bones had been it's called an ossuary it was on ABC, good morning and it had

Cameron, the guy that did Titanic and Avatar James Cameron had put money into it and stuff like that huh?

I wrote this book in about two weeks put everything else aside because as soon as I heard what they were saying

I knew what they were doing they were relying completely upon Gnostic Gospels for the connective tissue that held this whole theory together and I don't have them here well

I actually have some here there's the bone box and Jesus dies to Tabor but I've put most here is for example the

Gospel of Mary of Magdala Jesus and the first woman apostle got this in 2007 during that time period and I've got a ton of stuff in my library on the

Gnostic Gospels and so you can't read these things remember we were doing story time with Uncle Jimmy there for a while you cannot read these things without seeing how wacky they are and how the

Gnostics had no systematic theology there is no propositional revelation that you can say this is consistent with that that was not their concern

Gnosticism would morph so Gnosticism most scholars feel came from the east and when it encounters

Christianity it morphs to find a place for Jesus but in the process creates different Jesuses Manny takes that even farther and has multiple

Jesuses fulfilling different roles so the point is that there is no single objective

Gnostic doctrine of determinism that could ever logically or rationally be said to be identical to parental to, ancestor of the personal self -glorifying decree of the triune

God of the Christian scriptures that's the assertion that's being made that's why it's impossible and the more you know about Gnosticism the more you've read books like this the more you know about Reformed theology and I'm sorry, but Leighton Flowers has never understood

Reformed theology people who knew him back when he claimed to be Reformed have confirmed to me he didn't know

Reformed theology then I don't think he does now and I don't think he can hear it any longer to be perfectly honest with you but the more you know about Reformed theology and the more you know about that stuff, the more you realize there is no connection between the two and trying to forge a connection is a fool's errand the 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries by any means, but there are some similarities with regard to the concepts of determinism talk about that a little bit, help our listeners understand what

Gnosticism was in that day and how maybe Augustine was influenced by his former roots in Gnosticism now, by the way,

Gnosticism in that day what day? there was a form of proto -Gnosticism at the time of the

New Testament you have 2nd century, the Martianites Valentinian Gnosticism and again, major variations in understanding, mystery religions

Jewish forms that then becomes background to the context out of which

Manichaeism comes but you're now 150 years down the road from that and when you don't have a propositional revelation, can you imagine all the morphing and changing that takes place so, in what day?

because 20 years can make a huge difference surely, the interesting part of that is that my very first chapter in the thesis goes through all the ancient philosophies and religions on their views on determinism you could not do that in a chapter, not meaningfully not to any depth, not in recognizing the nuances and applications one chapter?

versus free will and the Gnostics were famous because they believed that things were already set that they were dualists, that everything physical is good everything that is spiritual spiritual is good, everything that is physical is bad okay, so immediately if they're dualists, whatever they believe about determinism cannot have anything to do with what

Reformed Christians believe about the decree of God why? because in many forms of Gnosticism the creator of the physical creation is called a demiurge in fact, there were

Gnostics who identified Yahweh as a demiurge because it was very plain when you read the

Hebrew scriptures that Yahweh made the heavens and the earth therefore, he was evil and we had to avoid him and that's where Marcion gets into the canon issues and that's a whole other topic to get into but the point is, a dualistic deity of whatever type could not have a personally self -glorifying decree in the creation of the universe by definition just provided, right?

this is a fundamentally definitional reality is it not?

it is and people were predetermined to heaven or hell the elect versus the non -elect okay here's where we start hearing and this is one of the constant issues you take modern terminology that is found in Reformed theology and in scripture and you transport it directly into another religion given that in most forms of Gnosticism and it really flourished in the 2nd century

Marcion, Valentinian Gnosticism and some of the other major schools I'm going to continue on Rich, I don't know how many times you've heard me say this but if you wanted to write a book in your early church you wrote it against the

Gnostics people for centuries did that everybody wrote a book against Gnostics so in most forms of Gnosticism the idea of salvation is, as it was in most forms of dualism escape from the physical body rather than resurrection so you are a spark of the divine you're not made in the

Imago Dei it would be fraudulent to try to draw a parallel between Imago Dei and the idea of being a spark it's like the divine is a pool of energy and you are a spark that has been separated from the pool of energy trapped in this evil body and your spark wants to get back to be reabsorbed into the pool of energy that's a common

Gnostic concept that's why they mock the idea of a physical resurrection because you're still trapped in the bad stuff if you resurrect the bad stuff so you get rid of the bad stuff, the physical body and then your spark can be reabsorbed and hence, in essence your personality ends in this reabsorption back into the one monism, the one what does that have to do with heaven and hell?

what does that have to do with a biblical usage of heaven and hell? if you do not differentiate if you take

Christian words and then just transport them into Gnosticism Paul would rebuke you why?

read Colossians what does he do there? you have the proto -Gnostics, they're trying to find a place for Jesus and they're calling him an

Eon and the Eons made up what's called the Pleroma and so what does

Paul do? he slaps the Gnostics in the face he slaps the Gnostics in the first chapter when he says that Jesus all the

Pleroma fullness dwells in him in bodily form bodily?

Sarkicos? that's evil and he is the creator of all things all the

Eons so he knows where they're coming from and he uses their language against them and he says no you can't take truth and then just transfer that terminology over you've got a different Jesus and so when you just take words that have a meaning to your audience heaven and hell, the elect and then transfer that into a completely different religion and say well, you had the enlightened ones and the enlightened ones were those who know that they are the spark and that they need to be reabsorbed into the one that's not the same thing as the elect so to use the term elect of the enlightened ones is to create a connection that again the honest student of history is going to go no wait a minute we have to define each religion in its own categories and we've got something as wide a category as Gnosticism certain

Gnostic groups at this period in history said such and so and that may take you an extra sentence to say all the time but it's the only way to do it accurately and what historians try to do is to avoid this very error because it creates so much misunderstanding to just take these words and then plop them all over as if this means the same thing in Manichaeism that it means

Gnosticism that it means the Stoics, that it means the Reformed no, it doesn't and we even have to be careful of that when studying the

Reformed scholastics in comparison to Calvin, there's been development there's been development to this day that's what scholarship does, it tries to be careful not to make those errant connections based upon utilization of terminology rather than an accurate representation of what was meant by someone at a particular point in time in history you're abusing history when you do that same thing with the

Manichaeans now, the Manichaeans have been known as the pinnacle of Gnosticism, they're the greatest group that came out of Gnosticism and remember, so you've got

Gnosticism you have Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Christianity, all having influence in this mishmash now, that makes sense in Gnosticism because Gnosticism does not have a specific revelation that has content to it and so it can morph and hey, let's morph and bring in insights from all these things the resultant perspective is a mishmash of self -contradiction, obviously but that's what

Gnosticism was all about that was its appeal I can see a lot of people today being attracted by something like that well, it's got a little bit of this, a little bit of that why not?

It's great, that's sort of how it works and the Manichaeans taught the similar thing that there were two, a good god and an evil god, the evil god created the world you can have all the sex you want with anybody you want and not be a sin but, if you conceive a child in the womb and bear a child, that's a sin because you've brought evil into the world and that child becomes something physical and that child at birth is damned because he is physical damned is something totally different in a worldview of Gnosticism than it would be in a worldview of Christianity damned is a judicial juridical decision based upon the law of God not damned as in,

I am a divine spark separated from the great pool of energy in a physical body and I need to get out those are very different things massively different things so to compare them creates confusion by the way there is no question

I don't know anybody who questions well, I don't know anybody who questions but I could see how some

Roman Catholic folks would question but it's certainly been a consistent part of my education in church history that this is an area where Augustine's view was influenced by Manichaeism sexuality sexuality because very plainly the view of sexuality of many in the early church, whether it be

Augustine Jerome basically anyone influenced after the period of time of Desert Fathers and the rise of Gnosticism you're going to see an unhealthy, unbiblical un -Hebrew understanding of sexuality and really the nature of man in the sense of the

Greeks divided man up into parts the Hebrews never did that that's why resurrection is so important it's unnatural for the spiritual element of man to be separated from the physical element of man but Augustine is plainly influenced by that and you can see it in his exegesis but see, we can look at Augustine we're not slavishly following him we have a standard it is the standard of having a consistent hermeneutic in the interpretation of the inspired word of God and so you can look at many in the early church and go, where did they get this weird stuff about sexuality?

and they got it from Manichaeism and various of the other religious concepts of the ancient world and certainly the monastic movement when you're living on a pillar or living in a cave you end up with some strange views on sexuality because that's why

God said, don't forbid marriage God knew what he was doing and people messed that up pretty badly

I'm sort of watching you a little bit if you start doing this number I know

I need to wrap up I'm shooting for 3 .30 here and so the good

God has to awaken the dead sinner and then infuse faith into the sinner in order to resurrect them and have them believe infusing faith into them that was the view of the

Manichaeans now I don't think any Manichaean would have had any understanding of what the world has just said because here again you have

Christian terminology especially as developed within the Reformation being read back into an ancient religion that was not utilizing the same conventions for the defining of terms and so you can't have for example, talking about saving faith what is saving faith?

if you have a good God vs. bad God mixture of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism that's going to be a very different faith than faith in the one creator

God of all things who has a name, who has a people who has sent his son, the person of Jesus Christ these are going to be fundamentally different things and yeah,

Manny's trying to throw all this stuff together but when you throw all this stuff together on that level and violate the very nature of who

God is you lose any meaningful connection in the definition of these words but the thing that I've seen over and over again in the book is that connections are made on the assumption of the sameness of the definition of language over a period of over 1100 years without taking into consideration the huge differences in the initial context, later context and what you've gone through in between that's why we're consistent here how many times have

I criticized to our detriment as far as people disliking us and you're arrogant and you're mean how many times have

I said be careful whenever you see books on Roman Catholicism or booklets on Roman Catholicism that have these date lists in them that say this doctrine was developed on this date and this doctrine was developed on that date that's not how doctrine develops in history people don't go to bed on July 21st believing

X and pop out of bed on the morning of July 22nd going we have a new doctrine, that's not how it works you look at any doctrine like purgatory purgatory developed over centuries multiple threads of development came together to the final

Roman Catholic concept of purgatory in about the 14th -15th century but it had threads that went back to the patristic period that didn't mean that they believed the same thing and this is one of the problems

Roman Catholics have, but we have to be consistent and so you can't respond to that by saying well this developed on such and such a date, it doesn't work that way history just doesn't function in that type of simplistic context.

We continue on. So in the early days even as early as 200,

Tertullians said why are we baptizing infants, why don't we wait until they're old enough to believe and so there was baptism that happened we know very early, but nobody knew why even

Augustine about 400 did not know why infants were baptized now this

Augustine didn't know why infants were baptized I think most Augustinian scholars would be pretty stunned by this kind of an assertion you may argue that Augustine adjusted, deepened changed his understanding of certain aspects of baptism, but there are for example, it has been shown by others whose areas of specific proficiency are in this area that there were people before Augustine who held his view of baptismal regeneration and issues related to that.

Obviously it was the question of how this interfaces with the elect that's important but as I mentioned earlier some people want simple answers about ancient history they don't want to have to read a lot of stuff they don't want to have to deal with nuance and development and you see there are a lot of men who we only have writings from certain portions of their lives and so with Augustine because of his great fame in later centuries we have far more of literature for him than we have of most people before him, with the exception of Origen who we haven't even translated all of Origen yet which to me seems like a mass waste of time but anyway with some ancient fathers we only have a single book or maybe a couple of books, a couple of letters we've just got a huge amount of literary output from Augustine that has been preserved for us in the middle ages because of the great respect shown for the name of Augustine and so what that means is you end up serious scholarship has to be tentative in making conclusions about where certain early church fathers stood on particular issues especially when they are only mentioned in passing within their extant corpus of literature or if they are mentioned by somebody else someone says such and such person believed this sound scholarship goes it is possible that early church writer so and so held this perspective in light of these pieces of information but since he never wrote a specific epistle on the subject, only mentioned things in passing and what he said might be interpreted in multiple different ways then we have to be very careful as to the conclusions we come to and baptism for some reason and I think it is because the gospel goes out into a religious context in the

Greco -Roman world that is filled with initiatory rites all kinds of initiatory rites and so the doctrine as it would have been understood and this is something else that is very important at one point

Leighton Flowers says people back then would have had a better understanding of these things so we need to go with those early church fathers

I have argued against that with Hank he made the same argument and what was my response living in southern

Greece in the 3rd century does not place you closer to the apostolic witness written in Greek by Greek speaking

Jews who lived in Israel the cultural context of the 3rd or 4th century in Greece is not only different but the cultural context that existed in Israel would probably be unknown to you you probably would not have access to maybe if you knew

Melito Sartre or something like that but you probably wouldn't have access to the traditions that would be formulated in the middle of the 3rd century into what is called the

Mishnah do you have any idea how often when your pastor is working through parables or working through the gospels that he's drawing from scholarship that has benefited from having access to the

Mishnah, the Gemara what comes together is known as the Talmud you wouldn't have that back then and so the point is that this idea that these people would have had a better understanding they were closer in their time frame and things like that no, that's not true in reality, especially because of a sad diminishment in emphasis upon the

Old Testament and knowledge of the Old Testament scriptures many people back at that particular point in time had greatly errant ideas about those very subjects and that's something to keep in mind so I'm going to mark mark a spot here and try to start start here that is really small print probably wasn't back when

I had better eyes but we'll start at that point as we continue and again, not just because of Susan's letter but we're covering a lot of material in church history here a lot of foundational information that hopefully will be helpful to you in many other areas because it's not just this conflict that raises questions about how to interpret early church fathers and why are there so many differences of opinion amongst them and all the rest of this stuff this comes up in dealing with anything in Roman Catholicism the

Muslims go after these types of things the anti -Trinitarians go after these types of things it is important to know this background information so you can recognize errant utilization of these resources and they are great resources and we are thankful for the people who lived back then but we need to let them be who they were and also recognize the influences that they had upon themselves means we have influences upon us too and that's a good thing to be cognizant of and aware of and so I'm cognizant of and aware of the fact that we are going to be back even yet again tomorrow and so we look forward to that I'm not sure exactly look, the world is a fluid place right now so I'm not exactly sure where we'll be or what we'll be talking about but probably pick up on some of this as well as other things thanks for watching, we'll see you next time,