Road Trip DL: Passing On the Faith

Passing On the Faith Through God’s Law and Scripture Preservation

And welcome to Dividing Line. My name is James White. We are on the road again. I guess there's a song. No, I'm not going to, I would not insult you by doing that. But we are on the road again, still in Golden, Colorado.

And Lord willing, I'll be speaking in Boulder on Sunday night. I was supposed to have lunch today with the pastor there. I put it off, just felt a little off today at one point. And I just didn't want to, you know, I think a lot of us are a little bit hyper sensitive to passing anything along.

If I am fighting something, I don't know. We'll find out. I feel okay at the moment. Got a nice long nap. That's always good when you get older, to get a little extra rest. We'll see. You know, could have been the frozen breakfast sandwich.

You know, I try not to go out. And man, even buying those things is expensive today. It's ridiculous. So we will see. But we're back with you today. I think this is the third program we've done this week.

So it hasn't been too bad. I'm not sure about next week. I've changed my return trip. And my days are really long, long trips each day. So I'm just not 100 certain how that's going to work out. But I'll be back by I think Wednesday of next week.

So if we have to make up a little something, we will when we get back to Phoenix for less than two weeks. And my dear daughter is expecting to give birth during that time period. And so I'll just be perfectly straight up front.

Doing the program is not going to be that high of a priority if somebody's in labor. That's all there is to it. I don't think she's going to do what she did the first time. You know, when you have I've noticed that young ladies, when they have their first baby, they want to do all the natural, no medication.

I'm so woo woo. And for her first child, Summer labored for 44 hours. So when the second one came along, it's like, get this baby out of me. Do whatever you need to do. Not going to worry about it. So yeah, I'm not sure how that'll work out in this situation.

But we're just very excited. And then I go back on the road again, heading for Washington, DC. I've never seen the Museum of the Bible. I think I've seen maybe a video or two, sort of an overview type thing.

I may even try to look a few of those up. But I'm just looking forward to seeing what there is to see and to talk with folks about the divinely, providentially preserved Word of God. But of course, when I say that, I mean that in the context that God has actually, at this very time in history, when the attacks upon Scripture today have more are much more complicated, there's much more data to be brought in to attack the Scriptures than ever before.

Because the same thing that we struggle with, when we look at history, when we look at, say, the Reformation, and we look at the Counter-Reformation, that the reality is, whether Roman Catholics want to admit it or not, the Counter-Reformation and the Jesuits are very much responsible for many of the worst attacks upon Scripture today.

Because the Counter-Reformation attempted to counteract the Reformation by demanding utter fealty to independence upon the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. And so they would attack the veracity of the Greek manuscript tradition over against the Latin Vulgate.

And in many ways, modern Roman Catholic scholarship, at least conservative scholarship, has abandoned all that stuff from the Counter-Reformation. But they did it. And that resulted in responses from the Reformed and defenses of Scripture.

And the fact is, back then, it was challenging. And what I mean by that is, I can pop up on my screen, you can pop up on your screen, you can purchase a book, I can purchase a book that has a tremendous amount of information, a tremendous amount of you know, a catalog of manuscripts.

This manuscript is found in this place, this manuscript is found in that place, and it's from this century, and it contains this number. And we assume that that kind of information has always been available.

But the fact of the matter is, it hasn't. And we are able to mount a significantly deeper, more consistent, broad defense of the text of Scripture today than we ever have been able to in the past. And so there are people who use the term of providential preservation, and they're attaching that to a 16th century Greek manuscript based on a tiny percentage of the manuscripts that are available to us today, and just want to force us to go, well, that's what providential preservation is.

No. God has providentially preserved His Word in wonderful and miraculous fashion. Every time I look at one of the papyri, which are despised by the TR Only guys, by the quote-unquote confessional bibliology guys, they despise the papyri.

I don't know if you remember a few years ago, there was that conference they had, and if you know, we listened to portions, well, I listened to all of it, but we played portions of it here on the program.

And the references to the papyri were just, because the papyri did not exist, well, did not exist, were not known, cataloged, available when the Textus Receptus was formulated. And so when you encounter readings in the papyri that are, in some instances, 1 ,300 years earlier than a reading in the TR, those people who are putting the TR forward as being the apostolic original have to find some way of attacking that papyri.

And so they loathe the papyri. Anything discovered after 1644, or really before that, but technically, is just irrelevant. And so I look at the papyri, and when they're discovered, and the testimony they give to us of the antiquity of the readings in the unseals, and then in the broader manuscript tradition, remember, we're only talking about a small percentage of the text.

This is some of the greatest, this is a great gift given to the church, that at the very time when the enemies of the faith are going to be attacking the veracity of the Bible, we are all of a sudden out of the ground, literally.

Sprout portions of, you know, I've shown you P52, the little credit card fragment from John chapter 18, of the very discussion of what is truth. And it could be the earliest fragment we have of the New Testament.

There's arguments about that, obviously, but it's very, very early. And here it pops out of the ground, ends up in London. And it's a gift given to us. And so, you know, I don't know if they have a facsimile of that.

I've seen a facsimile of it in Dublin, but, you know, the originals in Europe. But maybe they have a facsimile of something like that at the Museum of the Bible. But I have said over and over again, it's sort of gotten lost recently, because there's so much other silliness going on amongst us.

But I have said over and over again, that one of the greatest foundations that you can give to yourself, to your family, to your children, is an understanding of the providential preservation of the text of Scripture.

Because any attacks, I can guarantee you, when the Chinese communists are torturing Christians, one of the ways that they do that is to attack the veracity of the Scriptures, when they're seeking to break them down and to mock them and so on and so forth.

So it's an edifying study. And while you do have some vocabulary to learn, it's not like some of the stuff we're seeing today, where people are saying that we need to people to understand the ramifications of appropriations and inseparable operations and getting farther and farther and farther and farther and farther and farther away from apostolic revelation.

It's not like that. You don't have to be teaching people complex, obtuse philosophical concepts. There's some vocabulary to be learned, as there is in any field. You know, there's vocabulary to be learned in learning how to play video games.

You know, you got to learn what this does and that does that, whatever. But it's edifying, and it's something you can pass on to your children and your grandchildren, that will be very, very important in their continuing service to Christ.

So anyway, that was all just prompted by the fact that we're gonna be home for less than two weeks. I'll be honest with you, you know, I look at this thing and the mindset that I'm operating with right now is, how little can I pull out of this?

How much can I leave in here? It'll still be hot in Phoenix at the end of August. It doesn't cool off until November in Phoenix, so it's still gonna be hot. So there's, you know, there's certain things you just, you can't leave.

But I've been watching the temperatures in Phoenix, it really hasn't been all that bad. So the average temperature is probably somewhere in the mid -90s. So yeah, I'm gonna be going, how little do I have to drag out of this thing and then put back into it, you know, basically nine days later?

That's sort of what the, how can we minimize the expenditure of energy in this situation? Because everything's set up exactly right right now. Exactly right is probably not where my wife would have it.

Exactly right when you're traveling alone in an RV is where you can find it very easily. That's where it needs to be. Efficiency, not looking through every cupboard and drawer to find the one thing you need to fix the one issue you're dealing with.

So anyway, so that's what's coming up. And if you haven't signed up, I think you can still sign up, I don't know, for the conference there in Washington, D .C. Not looking forward to going into Washington, D .C.

I will be perfectly honest with you. But that's where the Museum of the Bible is. So there's the there's the trade-off. There's a trade-off there. I'm definitely gonna have my head on a swivel if I'm out and about.

The videos that you can see, I don't know if you saw the video of the one man just sucker punching this other person and person died. Happens so often and you we as Christians, we understand the culture of death.

There is an intellectual aspect to the culture of death. No question about there is a philosophical aspect to the culture of death. But we recognize there is a spiritual aspect to the culture of death.

And sometimes I think Reformed people, and we'll have a discussion here about whether we even want to keep using that term given the people that claim it, but Reformed people do have somewhat of a hesitation to speak clearly and openly about spiritual forces in our world.

I think part of it is because we recognize those spiritual forces are under the sovereign control of God. And so they are secondary. They're not primary. It's not the Gnostic battle of light and dark where they're equal forces.

They're not equal forces, but that doesn't change the reality that they exist. And Jesus taught and dealt with spiritual forces. And it is interesting to me, it should be interesting to all of us, I think, that as we see these videos, as we see violent young men and women, it's not just men, it's amazing how many women are throwing punches and just engaging in violent behavior.

What we're supposed to do is we're supposed to think only of, well, they're just not properly educated, you're saying. And in many of those instances, there's no family structure, there's no father in the home.

All those things are very, very true. But we tend to just limit it to the explainable without making reference to the fact that when a people is under the judgment of God, when you talk about withdrawing the hand of restraint, that's not just on the evil of man, but on spiritual forces that are a part of that evil.

What possesses a man to literally walk up behind someone he does not know and kill him right then and there? And that's happening all the time. We've gotten used to the gang violence. How many people were killed in Chicago last weekend?

I don't know. But if you put together all of the centers of leftist control, so Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, New York, Detroit, St. Louis, I'm not even sure how many, but it'd be a very large number each weekend, especially during the summer, where people are being murdered in gang violence.

And no one cares about gang violence. When was the last time you heard somebody in the left talking about gang violence? Won't even touch it. It doesn't fit their narrative. It's very clearly related to family.

It's very clearly related to people rejecting God's revelation of how mankind is to live. And the result is murder and mayhem, unrestrained sexual activity. Have you seen these videos of people dancing pretty much naked on cop cars?

And it just so happens that they are simulating sex acts in public, pretty much naked, while threatening violent acts. And a lot of people go, well, I don't see the direct connection to it. It's all connected.

It's connected with abortion. It's connected with transgenderism. It's a culture of death. And that's why we as Christians, whether we're still have children at home or grandchildren, great-grandchildren, we must be investing ourselves in not just explaining to you, but demonstrating to the next generation, not just the necessity, but the joy of being a person who engages in the culture of life.

Jesus said, I am come, that they might have life and they might have it more by them. And one of the most important things you can communicate to your homeschool children, to your neighbor, to the children at your church, whatever the situation might be, is that Jesus has come that we might have life and that we might have it aboundingly, overflowing, not just, well, here's a little life here and here's a little life.

No, daily, abounding in life. And so when you look at a rebellious society that hates God, and you look at what they're calling good, you can be pretty certain that whatever they're calling good is actually a source of death and destruction.

And the opposite will be that which brings you life. So today we have a society that says you make up what you think feels good to you and go with it. So what's the culture of life? I don't look to myself, I look to God.

I look to God and I go, has God given me a revelation of what it means to be his creature? Because once I understand I'm his creature, then I will experience life when I experience, when I obey what God has told me is the right way for me to live as he has designed me, as he has made me.

It is a giving up of my self autonomy to define what is happiness and fulfillment and embrace God's revelation of that. So when you look at Jesus, I've come to him, I have life. He's also the one that says, the person that teaches you to ignore any of God's revelation of what is good in his law is least in the kingdom of heaven.

I've not come to destroy but to fulfill. And he goes to the cross to pay the penalty for the sins of mankind and those sins are defined by God's law. I've been having some conversations, obviously, Right Response Ministries has put out a thing about next May and I need to just, I'm going to try to build a trip around this.

When you're talking about May, that's far enough down the road that it's hard to make specific plans but you have to start trying given that my travel right now, I try to do in this fashion. And so I'm having to bring a lot of people together.

There's a gentleman, a Church of Christ minister in Conway, Arkansas, the home of Grace Bible Theological Seminary that wants to debate reformed issues. He wants to debate the human side of that, which I fully understand.

I need to push back and say, well, the reason I believe these human aspects that a true believer will not lose salvation is because that true believer has been chosen by God. So the ultimate reason for that is God's sovereign decree.

And that's what really needs to be debated. But anyways, point being, try to find a way to tie together going to Texas, just north of Austin, I looked it up. And of course, there's lots of folks in Texas, maybe we'll just make it a Texas run and then over to Conway or maybe Conway first, come back.

I don't know. It'd be nice to do a couple debates. It's just been so long. And I'm getting older and slower. So if we're going to do it, better do it pretty soon. But we'll see. We'll see. And the point is, there are those types of issues that we can be dealing with.

And that's just one of the many aspects at that conference. It's on theonomy and post-millennialism. And immediately people, you know, I was just saddened. I'll be honest with you. I've been very, very saddened by the kind of responses that professing Christians have.

Before I came to understand what the issues were, back when I was still very much prejudiced by highly inaccurate misrepresentations of both of those terms, which is extremely common. And look, if the people you look up to tell you, avoid this, I understand why you might have an emotional reason to do so.

I did. But I never, even at my strongest, I never, as a result, kicked these people out of the kingdom. You know, my first introduction to Greg Bonson was his debate with Gordon Stein. And so, even when I recognized I didn't agree with Bonson on theonomy, I didn't dismiss him as an unbeliever.

I didn't refuse to cooperate with him. I've told people before, the reason I debated Gerry Madetik twice in Nebraska a number of years ago was I took Greg Bonson's place. He contacted me and asked me to take his place so he could debate the two homosexuals that he debated.

You know, Greg was ahead of the curve on seeing what was coming as far as the homosexual movement and things like that. So, I didn't refuse to have cooperation with, I didn't kick these people out of the kingdom.

I'm not going to treat them in that fashion. And yet, this announcement is made, and wow, the nastiness that flows forth from reformed people, that's why I said earlier, you know, I've said in the past, the reformed club, take it or leave it.

As a description, it has historical validity, and therefore sort of needs to be maintained. But I'm going to tell you some of the biggest jerks I know self-identify as reformed. It's sad. It should not be that way.

It should not be that way. But it is. And the, you know, so there were reformed Baptists who, you know, retweeted that tweet or whatever. They're just so disappointed. And there are certain people, certain subjects, whether it's post-millennialism, not quite so much on that.

But man, you mentioned theonomy, you mentioned God's law in almost any positive way. And the funny thing is, I really haven't changed my views since I preached a decade ago through the Holiness Code. I'm just willing to go, yeah, yeah, in any meaningful analysis, the way I approached the law there is a theonomic perspective.

I recognize there are different schools within the theonomic camp, and I'm willing to go, that person goes there, and that person goes there, and that person goes there, and I can appreciate this, this, and this.

And I don't have to, you know, sign on to one particular and kick all the rest of them out of the kingdom. But man, there are some people who've got some really strongly emotional commitments on this subject that just, there is no reasoning at all.

It is just, it's as bad as some of the worst anti-Calvinists out there. They just, they will not, will not listen. And there's not much you can do about it, but that is also the case amongst, these are people who call themselves reformed too.

They just, whoo, really, really go after it. So, all of that going back to, if you want to communicate to the next generation, the culture of life, where are you going to find that? Well, I think this is where some confusion comes in, because we recognize the righteous standard of God's law can only condemn the self-righteous.

Law is not a source of life, but it is a source of a knowledge of what is pleasing to God for those who have received life by grace through faith alone. Anybody who ever ascribes to the law any kind of saving power in and of itself has missed the whole point.

None of us are saying that. I see people saying, oh, the theonomists believe, the theonomists deny sola fide and sola gradia, and it's just like, oh, please. It's just silliness, but they go there. Anybody who ascribes, who says, well, you're actually teaching justification by works, baloney.

What we are saying is that God has revealed his holy character, and we as his creatures want to know his holy character so that we can be holy as he is holy. Now, only the Holy Spirit of God gives us that desire.

Only the Holy Spirit of God can accomplish that within us, but he's not left us just to stick our fingers up in the air and go, well, okay, we'll do this. Okay, we'll do that. There he has provided the general equity.

He has provided us with the general principles, and they are general principles. Why? Because of the fact that they have to be applied across many different kinds of cultures, and what people understand is one of the great blessings of how God has done this is we recognize that there have been times when Christians, especially in the West, have confused their Western understanding with the definition of Christianity itself and tried to force that upon people outside Western cultures.

You have to become like us to be a Christian. That sounds a little bit like, oh, Acts chapter 15. You have to become a Jew before you become a Christian. You have to go into the Old Covenant before you get into the New Covenant, and the church rejected that, but I think there's been a lot of times in church history where especially Christians in the West have said, hey, the only way is to go all the way and become like us, and so what we want is we want those general principles of God's law to be applied, and that will be the source of life and fulfillment, happiness, and everything else.

That's what we want. We reject autonomy. We see what autonomy is creating amongst mankind, we don't find a Noahic covenant to be anywhere near sufficient, and we recognize that natural law requires a recognition of man's fallen state as interpreted by scripture and then the role of his specific law that goes far beyond anything that natural law could ever provide to us, so this is part of how we pass on to the next generation something that they can then pass on to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation.

All that depend upon the providential preservation of scripture which God has provided to us in the manuscript, evidence, so on and so forth, so I've gone 32 minutes on an introductory thought. By the way, I just want to mention, extend our condolences to the Talbot family, Dr. Kenneth Talbot.

I did not know Dr. Talbot personally, but I knew a lot of people that did because of Whitfield Theological Seminary, which again, you know, Whitfield is one of those places that is focused upon producing people who work in the church.

I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this, but so, well, I get in trouble for saying anything. It is, as I get older, it is more and more plain and clear to me the difference between seminaries and colleges that are focused upon the service of the church and those that are focused upon the service of the academy, and I think that has ramifications today in many ways, and Dr. Talbot and Jeff Durbin got his MDiv there.

He described on Facebook today the grueling experience of his final oral exams, the two days, like 16 hours, and which, by the way, is significantly more than what you would face in most quote-unquote ATS-accredited schools.

I know that. I've taught in both contexts, and anyway, I know that Jeff was deeply moved by his passing, but deeply moved more by his ministry, and so our condolences to the Whitfield Seminary family and to Dr. Talbot and his family in his homegoing, but we are Christians, and we grieve not as those who have no hope.

It doesn't mean we don't grieve, but we grieve as those who have hope. There's a vast difference between grieving with and without hope. Huge subject I would like to get into today, but, and again, a situation where, you know, there would have been various theological issues that I would not have been in full agreement with everything Dr. Talbot said, and it doesn't stinking matter if you have some level of Christian maturity, some level of Christian maturity.

There are differences that we would expect in this world, and then there are differences that actually separate, and when you can't tell what the differences are between those, that's a problem. So a couple other things.

I saw a, as I am prepping for my early church history class that I'll be teaching in a couple weeks, Squirrel's coming down. I'll have to admit, Squirrel, when I saw you had gone down for Scott Anuel's class, but I wasn't sure whether you were coming down to mine.

I was sort of sitting there watching Twitter and watching you all sitting around at the seminary and going out to eat and stuff like that. We didn't get to do much going out to eat the last time I was there because I was there in the middle of an ice storm, which is pretty unusual for Conway, but we had an ice storm.

It was interesting, but I'm looking forward to get to do that this time, and in fact, what I want to do is I want to, one of those nights, it's an intensive class, hours and hours, but I'm going to try to have enough physical strength and energy to probably that Friday night, depending if there's something in the way, but do something after class where we sit around in the library there and do some reading.

We're just going to have such limited time to read from many of the early writers, do sort of a story time with Uncle Jimmy thing from the early writers, but anyways, I was really glad to see that Squirrel is going to be coming down to the live class in Conway, and so how to get into that?

In preparation for that, you can't help but once again be revisiting the extremely important discussion in the early church on the subject of what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, Tertullian's phrase, and the fact that there were wide and definitional differences between someone like Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian, Justin Martyr, and Leto Sardis on the role of Greek philosophy in the defining of Christian theology and the explanation of Christian theology and everything that goes along with them, and so Scott Swain, the president of RTS Orlando, tweeted a while back, a while back as in earlier today, I'm not saying Plato stole from Moses, I'm just saying it's the most plausible hypothesis, and if you're familiar with early church history, you know that there were those early Christians who theorized that the good to be found in Greek philosophy was due to a basically a form of plagiarism on the part of people like Plato or Aristotle borrowing from Moses.

Now I'm not sure how widely known Moses would have been, and as far as I know, the vast majority of scholarship scoffs at the idea, but of course there are floods stories and narratives in many, many primitive peoples, and so could there be all sorts of elements of divine truth that are found in Moses?

Wouldn't that include his law? Anyway, in Moses that would be passed on, that would be part of oral history and things along those lines, as close as possible, but I found it interesting, especially with the continuing emphasis upon many in the promotion of Craig Carter's theories, even though there have been plenty of critical reviews, very negative critical reviews, of Carter's thesis, this idea of Christian Platonism as a necessary safeguard.

So I guess Christian Platonism, Christian Aristotelianism, I'm not sure how you put those two together, but these are all, we are being told, necessary and important and good defenses of Christian orthodoxy, and so I find it interesting that in that context, that's the context behind the great tradition stuff and great tradition ex-Jesus and all the rest of this kind of stuff, that clearly a certain group of Christian scholars today have decided is of utmost importance, and they are working together to communicate that concept to the next generation of seminary students, and that's happening all over the place.

I noticed that tweet after seeing yet another person post a, you're blocked from Matthew Barrett, I'm blocked by Matthew Barrett, and I'm a little surprised someone hasn't yet taken the Twitter block screen, because it's got Dr. Barrett's picture, and it's got his, you know, he advertises Simply Trinity, and his CT Book Awards thing, you know, I have a picture of a mountain or something in the background, but you know, it says at Matt M. Barrett, you're blocked, you can't follow.

I have one of those too. I'm blocked too. Of course, that means it takes two more clicks to read what you want to read. You click on the link, open an incognito window, and da-da-da, and it really doesn't do much, but hey, I get it.

I've got a long block list, because that helps me not to have to see the nastiness from folks, but it's not because people are nasty. It's because people disagree. That seems to be Dr. Barrett's basis for blocking, is disagreement.

Not being nasty, it can be respectful disagreement, whatever, but he blocks a lot of folks. So it was in looking at that that I saw the other tweet that we just made reference to regarding Plato, and so that was interesting.

I suppose it's important to look at these threads. Speaking of Dr. Barrett, let me see if I've got two different windows here. Yeah, so I thought, oh, that's not it. Too many, too many, no, that's not it either.

Where did it go? Is it in Dropbox? Nope. Is it in downloads? Nope. Okay, come on. I remember having a 20 meg hard drive, and the problem was, you know, you didn't know where to find stuff, and now you've got eight gigabytes, and it's too big to find anything.

I think somebody posted it in here. Nope, that's R. Scott Clark's loving commentary. We'll get to that in a moment. I thought somebody had posted it in Element, too. Drat, thought I had it all queued up, but it was a, there it is, there it is.

Okay, man, I wish this would only blow it up to a certain point. Dr. Barrett posted a ETS session, a new session at ETS, which will be coming up in a couple months. It's Adonis Vidu and I are teaming up this year at ETS.

We will lead a new session, Holiness Evangelical Theologians in Dialogue with Thomas Aquinas. Do you find that title somewhat strange? Now, the defense will be, well, we're talking, we're in dialogue with, you see.

Remember, this is the same guy who had, who is behind a scholarship for people, and to get the scholarship, you have to write papers that sound as much like Thomas Aquinas as possible, all right? So, define in dialogue with, in light of that.

But, I can remember a time long, long ago, like five months ago, where what we were being told was, we're not promoting Aquinas. We don't care if anybody reads Aquinas. It's just his theology. It's the narrow spectrum of his theology of the Trinity.

It's simplicity. It's ad intra attributional sameness. It's the end result of this 1200 year process, and he finally puts it all together. But, it's just that one thing. You know, we know there's all sorts of problems with Aquinas, right?

Right. So, Holiness Evangelical Theologians in Dialogue with Thomas Aquinas, including Craig Carter. How did that happen? And then, we have the titles of everyone's papers. Holiness, the Christian Life, and Spiritual Marriage in Aquinas.

Barrett's doing the Beatific Vision and the Thomistic Telos of Systematic Theology. Michael Allen, Sacra Doctrina, Thomas Aquinas on Sanctification and Scholastic Practice. Those don't sound like they're anything to do with the narrow focus of Aquinas's doctrine of the Trinity, do they?

In fact, how are you made holy in the theology of the 13th century Roman Church? Because again, any honest historian is going to recognize that Aquinas is in full submission to the magisterium of the Church and to the Pope.

Now, this is post Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. So, you do have dogmatic teaching on transubstantiation, which of course, Aquinas himself adds to. He provides the philosophical foundation, the Aristotelian categories for transubstantiation, and the idea of the sacrifice of the mass as a propitiatory sacrifice.

And I've always argued that, to me, is the central aspect of Roman Catholic worship and theology, and therefore, that's a good place to mark the beginning of what would be consistently Roman Catholic.

But holiness, how do you become holy in Aquinas's theology over against Reformation theology? Huh. So, at the Evangelical Theological Society, holiness, the Christian life, and spiritual marriage in Aquinas, the beatific vision and the Thomistic telos of systematic theology, Thomas Aquinas and sanctification and scholastic sanctification.

There is a confusion in Thomas of sanctification and justification. Does it become more dogmatically defined in later centuries by Rome? Yeah, but the confusion is still there. Huh. I don't know. Has anyone suggested the possibility that maybe this Thomistic revival will have ramifications beyond simply the narrow spectrum of Trinitarian theology?

Has anyone suggested that? We all did. And here we have it, laid out right for us, coming to the Evangelical Theological Society. Hmm. There you go. I just saw the other one here. Yeah. Let's see if there's...

Nope. Okay. Just checking, hoping everything's still cool back there. Dr. Pierce in Phoenix. Um, yep. All right. The phone is doing good. Verizon's making a lot of money off of us. Um, so, someone posted, we all can remember, a guy named Luke, Reformed kid, I think 15, 17, I think, said, a problem I've always had with Reformed theology, even while proclaiming it, and then there's a, someone had made a meme, and it's of me, preaching in Luther's pulpit.

I have to wonder if when people use that particular picture, it's just out of pure jealousy, because you only wish. Um, and it says, source, George Bryson versus James White debate. I'm sure this was not the actual debate, so it's sort of misnomered.

Um, it was the Bible Answer Man broadcast. And, uh, you know who's made that available all these years? We, uh, we arranged in 2010, because that was the last time I was on Bible Answer Man. I knew at the beginning of the program that this could be the last time I was on the Bible Answer Man broadcast, and it was.

Um, but, uh, it wasn't available for quite some time, and we made arrangements in 2010 to be able to, uh, make that available ourselves, which we did. And so, it was a radio program, and the quote is, yes, God is responsible, and he does decree child rape slash James White.

So, here we are again, uh, back to whatever year that was. Was it 2003? I think it was 2003, where this is obviously George Bryson's rejection of Ephesians 111, and then the Reformed statement of that from the Westminster Confession of Faith, God decrees whatsoever comes to pass in time.

So, if you, in any way, shape, or form, hold to Westminster, London Baptist Confession, any kind of Reformed faith, if you've bothered to take the time to read Calvin, um, you know that this is something that every Reformed theologian needs to respond to.

It is obviously just put in the worst possible situation so as to create emotion rather than thought, and you know that Calvin dealt with it, and, uh, every Reformed theologian since then has, but, uh, it is fundamentally a means of rejecting God's sovereignty over what takes place in time.

There are various ways of doing it, simple foreknowledge, open theism, but every, um, single Christian, yeah, 12 -16 -2003, you know, I knew it was 03, it was right when we got back from, uh, the cruise in Florida, um, and I was sick as a dog the few days before that, but anyway, um, I'm not sure I say sick as a dog.