Road Trip DL: Francis, Cernovich, then Back to Carl Trueman and Development of Doctrinal Expression

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. We're going to mess this all up today, I can assure you, because there's just, it's been a long time since I did this. And you got to get it all set up, you got to get it all wired right, and I'll forget something along the way, and Rich will have to text me and go, hey, no one can see you, or they can't hear you, or something, I don't know.

All the little lights up there look right, but we'll do the best we can. We are on the road, I'm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Tomorrow morning, prayers appreciated, starting 10 .30 Central Standard Time.

We'll be doing about, they've said about two hours of recording on the Alley Beth Stucky Show. Myself and, oopsie, let's see, this looks good, sounds good. I'm really nervous right now, so, you know, whatever Rich texts me, I'm just gonna stop and lose my train of thought.

Alley Beth Stucky Show, two hours, Trent Horn and I discussing, I would assume, given the format of the program and the type of listening audience, we're just gonna hit a lot of topics. I don't expect to be going overly in-depth on any particular topic, because how many topics are there to discuss?

I do expect, to be honest with you, that there will be a fair amount of discussion of Pope Francis. I will make sure of that. There has to be. I mean, it would be like the 800-pound elephant in the room never getting mentioned or getting the attention than an 800-pound elephant.

800-pound elephant's actually rather small. Okay, the 18-foot elephant or whatever, however you want to put it, that's what that would be, would be, you know, we're going to ignore the fact that when Roman Catholics attack Sola Scriptura, what they're trying to do is to get you subject to the papacy, but they don't want to talk about this pope for obvious reasons.

You got Duccio Fernandez running around out there and the fun books he's written, and so, yeah, I'm sure it's going to come up, but we're going to be talking about a bunch of stuff, and I hope it's clear and helpful and very interesting to everybody.

That'll be tomorrow, and then Friday and Saturday night will be the debates with Trent Horn in Houston, at First Lutheran in Houston, and first one on Sola Scriptura, the second one on Purgatory. And so, the trip begins.

Pretty much so far, so good. If you want to pray specifically, I really would like to be able to sleep laying down again. I can't right now. I have to, I'm actually rather proud of the arrangement of pillows and blankets I've created on the bench at the kitchen table in the RV to prop myself up so that I can sleep at night.

I just have so much congestion in my lungs. I'm still riding. I still can do that fairly well, but it just won't stop. So, that's impacting your sleep. You're driving hours and hours a day, and then if you can't sleep for a while at night, it can sort of start getting to be a bit of a drag.

So, if you would pray for my health along those lines, and other areas of health issues, would be very, very useful because after the debates, and I will be preaching, I'm sure it's this weekend. It could be the weekend later.

I will have to double check my schedule, in Houston. And then I'm headed for Tullahoma, and the Y-Calvinism conference, the debate with Jason Bretta. Speaking at the conference there, recording some stuff with Jeffrey Rice.

And then I head over to Conway, and I have the Baptist Church intensive. We're gonna be doing a little something with that, the program today. The next weekend, and then back to Houston. Via Lyndale, I get to see Tom Buck briefly there, speaking down in Tyler, South Tyler, on I think it's the Tuesday night, also on the subject of Roman Catholicism.

And then down to Houston, and the debate on John 6, with Leighton Flowers on that Thursday. And then one night off, and then Saturday, the Unitarian debate with Dale Tuggy. And then four days home, probably.

I forget exactly how many days I've made it out to be, but I end up wanting to get home so bad, that I start doing really long trips. Problem is, those really long trips make me really tired, and that's really dangerous, and so I've got to try not to do that.

And so there we go. So long trip, 35 days on the road, we've been going. Most everything's still working real well. I've got one little, there's a couple little things we sort of forgot to either look at, or stuff, or the stuff.

When you're RVing, I'll be real brief. When you're RVing, it's like, whenever you try to fix something that's intermittent, it's really hard to do. So I've got an intermittent leak on the hot water, the instant hot water feature on this unit.

Sometimes it leaks, sometimes it doesn't. We've had a guy come out to fix it, but it wasn't leaking. You can't fix a leak, you can't see, you can't find, you can't locate. And the same way, we've got a little electrical thing for a couple plugs, that one day it will pop off, and you can't use those plugs, and then you drive someplace, and then it's fine.

And it's all the movement, it's all the shaking, it's the banging around. And most people just don't realize how rough the roads are until you're pulling something down those roads, and then you start feeling it in a way that you don't any other way.

So, so far so good. Today I managed to, we have a travel card that allows me to get diesel, along with all the big trucks, a whole lot easier than trying to get into those car lanes, I can guarantee you that.

And I pulled into a TA, which is my favorite place to go, and there were four or five slots wide open. Man, that is so cool, because you get those big old pumps, and those big old nozzles, and you can fill up a 32-gallon gas tank real fast.

Of course, it gets up to 120 bucks real fast too, so you might want to remember the travel fund at aomin .org. But yeah, it was in and out, just like nobody's business. I mean, literally faster than being at the car ones, because the car ones just don't go that fast, they don't have that much pressure.

And so it's always a good day when you get your fill up in, and you're on your way fast. It's just sort of how travel is. Now, it's interesting that I mentioned the stuff with Trent Horn, and talking about, it's going to come up, we're going to be debating Sola Scriptura.

Roman Catholicism, Pope Francis, and the Crisis of Authority

Roman Catholicism is in crisis right now. There is a crisis going on, and believing honest Roman Catholics recognize it, the Pope-splainers are just trying to deny it. But Francis is a crisis for the Church.

Tucho Fernandez is a crisis for the Church. And the real crisis is, this is just the beginning. This isn't going to end. You know, I guess there's some people that sort of think, well, once we get a new Pope, everything's going to be great.

And if he's to the left of this guy, it's only going to accelerate. And all the people put in the key places of authority, they're ready to keep pushing for LGBTQ inclusion, and the whole leftist stuff.

And the problem is, if you own the papacy, then you own the interpretive mechanisms of Roman Catholicism. I've told the story many, many times for years ago, probably 20 years ago. John Paul II said something, and I wrote an article.

It was early, early in the blog days. I think we started blogging in 04, if I recall correctly. I may not have been called that, but that's what it was. We did webcasting and podcasting before there were pods.

And I contrasted what John Paul II said with what a Pope had said, I don't know, in the 1400s, somewhere along those lines. And Bob St. Genes wrote to me, and basically said, who are you to interpret what the church has said in the past?

Only the church can do that. Well, that's real interesting, especially since I'm not sure he'd still believe that, given the perspectives that he has taken on certain issues. But once you go there, there's no turning back.

Once you give to the church that charism of infallibility, to the point where, you know, it's just so painfully clear that from 1100 to 1400, the Roman church was saying, you need to be in communion with the Bishop of Rome to have salvation, period.

Unum Sanctum, said it straight out. Real clear. And now they don't say that. They've changed. They've changed their perspective. They've changed their view. Oh, by the way, the East was saying the same thing about the West at that time, and blah, blah, blah.

But anyway. And once you give that authority to the church, there's no reformation. There can't be. There can't be. You can look back. Rome has taught capital punishment, gift of God to the state to protect people from evildoers.

Years, just a few years ago, Catholic catechism. You know, I'm pretty sure, is this? I need to double check this. Man, that's small print. Yeah, I don't think this is the new one. Bummer. Catholic catechism, I had the absolutely current edition of it, says it's always sinful.

It's always sinful to take human life, even if it's someone who walks into a classroom and blows away 24 eight-year-olds with a handgun. Nope, that person deserves to be taken care of, and who knows, maybe even deserves gender transition surgery, hormone therapies, three squares a day, a whole nine yards.

Just now we get to take care of them. It's ridiculous. It's unbiblical. It's uncivilized, but that's where we are. And so, there is a crisis going on. And so, this is all tied together, believe it or not.

Chris Honholtz is a brother for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect. We will get him to watch Elf someday, but till then, he's a great brother, and he has survived the ribbing that I and others give him, and it's all a sign of love.

He knows that. Of course, after about 18 life-size cutouts of Buddy the Elf, he might start questioning that. But anyway, Chris Honholtz... Oh, man, somebody started cooking food around me. I'm in an RV parking lot.

And someone's making something that smells delicious. There's a Cain's down the road, too. So, when we're done here, see you later. Anyways, love Cain's. Love, love, love Cain's. Chris Honholtz, we'll get back to the story here, wrote a really good article on Twitter, and I imagine he posted it on a blog someplace.

Excuse me. That's the kind of post I would steal with his permission and post on the Theology Matters blog at amn .org, but I haven't asked yet. He addressed the he-gets-us stuff, and everyone's been seeing these he-gets-us things as they started, I don't know, what, about a year and a half ago?

I forget exactly when they started. And I guess the Hobby Lobby people are behind it or something, as well as a lot of people that aren't even Christians, don't even believe Jesus is the Son of God. I'm not sure why they're doing what they're doing, but there you go.

And so, let me see here. We have two cameras, and this camera obviously feels unloved, unwanted, and so I'll use it. What Chris wrote is what I would say, and he said it very, very well, and so I repeated that.

I reposted it and said, hey, here you go. This is exactly what I think about the he-gets-us stuff. It's an unbiblical diminishment of Christ and his claims. It's meant to try to get people to not consider the claims of Christ, but to so water down the claims of Christ that they'll feel more comfortable with Jesus and stuff like that.

I mean, I would, the way I would put it, I would add to the statement, it's a massive demonstration of not trusting the Spirit of God. All these, every time churches go running after the world and running after worldly methodologies and, oh, all this stuff that Protestia has been posting about people kicking the Bible through field goal into the audience and all the Super Bowl stuff.

I didn't even find out till this morning who won the Super Bowl. I went to bed before all that yesterday, though I must say, watching the recap, wow, that was, there have been some real stinkers out there, some real boring ones.

At least it wasn't that, and you gotta say to both sides, wow, what a war. That could have gone either way, and everybody knows this. That was actually quite good. But anyway, all this Super Bowl stuff and what you're doing is you're demonstrating you don't trust the Spirit of God to use the Word of God to accomplish what has been promised in Scripture.

You just don't. You start using all this other stuff that just gets in the way. And so I posted, I reposted Chris Honnold's tweet, long article, and Cernovich, Cernovich, I've had a few back and forth a little bit.

Cernovich responded to what I said, and here's what he said. He said, Protestants believe they read the Bible and can have their own interpretation. They're also sola scriptura. How they can, how they can, I think it's supposed to be then, question the he gets us ad.

Without a pope or other final authority or spiritual father, it's just people quoting Bible verses back and forth. Now, I'm sure I'm not going to get that from Trenthorne, because Trenthorne's a smart guy.

And Trenthorne knows that that is, that Cernovich does not understand sola scriptura, clearly has no knowledge, has never read, for example, Institutes of Christian Religion, anything by Warfield or Machen, anything like this at all.

And so it's embarrassingly bad. Protestants believe they read the Bible. Yes, we do read the Bible and can have their own interpretation. Well, you mean we can do everything in our power to interpret scripture as the authors intended it to be interpreted, which you guys aren't doing anymore.

Okay, give me an example. I'll give you an example. Capital punishment. Okay, capital punishment. There is a clear and compelling biblical case to be made. And you can make the apostolic argument that the apostles, Paul himself said, if I've done anything worthy of death, I'm not going to object to it.

Okay. You guys are the ones not doing it. You want to see another example of that? Bodily assumption. Want another example of that? Infallibility of the Pope. Want another example of that? Immaculate conception.

I can keep going. Indulgences. We can keep going. Okay. So we're the ones who go, we need to believe in scripture alone and all of scripture, Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura. And that means that there are only a small range of interpretive methodologies available to you to honor that text so that when you do stand before the people of God and say, thus sayeth the Lord, it's actually the Lord speaking and not just you.

That's why you have to do serious exegesis. And so then he says they are also Sola Scriptura. Clearly, Cernovich has no idea what Sola Scriptura actually means, which is unfortunate, but not uncommon in any way.

He says, how can they then question the He Gets Us ad? That's simple. We have an unchanging standard of apostolic witness and testimony in the God-inspired scriptures. That's how. And the He Gets Us ads are not limited by that.

Their source and origin is not scripture and certainly not the worldview of the scriptures. Without a Pope or other final authority or spiritual father, it's just people quoting Bible verses back and forth.

Really? Really? Have you read any of the interviews with the bishops who attended the Synod and Synodality recently? Have you read the bishops who've told us that the people the Pope sent to talk to them, to lecture them like they've never studied theology before, and to talk to them about how important it is to embrace LGBTQ inclusivity?

What that was based on wasn't based on scripture. It can't be based on scripture. Scripture is clear on that subject. Or how about the statement, just within the past, I think, 72 hours might have been one day more than that.

Now that I'm traveling, I could be wrong about that. But either the day I left or the day after, I saw a quote from Francis talking about fiducia supplicans. We'll just call it FS, the infamous statement undoubtedly written by Tucho Fernandez, the head of the dicastery, the man who is the modern version of the head of the Inquisition, who himself says he's way to the left of Francis.

Take that and think about that a second. And in the interview, Francis said he's not saying, when he gives a blessing, he's not blessing a homosexual marriage. And of course, if the man has any relationship to the apostles at all, he should say, because there is no such thing as a homosexual marriage.

Marriage is between one man, one woman. And that's not because the church has always said that. It's because Jesus said that. Matthew 19. That's the reason. And when you shift it from Matthew 19 to the church says it, then the church gets to change it.

The church gets to change it. That's the danger. When you reject sola scriptura, that's what happens. But then he said this. He says, I'm not blessing a homosexual marriage. I'm blessing two individuals who are in love with each other.

I was like, there you go. There you go. And when you think about it, this shouldn't shock us. Chris Hans Holtz says he got a bunch of this stuff when he posted his thing. And I've already gotten it some for reposting his thing.

You know, you're a Pharisee and, you know, we're just trying to reach out to people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the rest of it. There are a tremendous number of very biblically weak Christians in the world today.

When I say biblically weak, what I mean is they do not have a foundation in a firm acceptance and belief and submission to scripture. As such, they are susceptible to worldly thinking and worldly ways of doing things.

A person who wishes to operate based upon the fundamental teachings of scripture as a whole cannot identify a homosexual relationship as being loving. Now here's where all sorts of people I know, just, they light their hair on fire and start running around in circles.

Hear me out. Think. See, we have, in our modern context, we have become so romanticized, so emotionalized, that love is simply a feeling. And you cannot dare question that someone has intense feelings for someone else.

Now, there are people who've gotten married to trees and dogs, and they have, well, there's people marrying mannequins, sex dolls, robots, all sorts of stuff like that. And there are literally people who will go, well, why not?

As long as you love, and you would think, you would think that Christians would be people who would go, huh, is there a definition of love maybe in the Bible? Does God give us definitions of love? What's the greatest command?

You're to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love can be commanded. Love is commanded. You are to love your neighbors yourself, husbands that love their wives. And those are covenantal commitments that can result in wonderful feelings.

But anyone who's been married for more than three weeks knows that those emotions wax and wane, and they can become deeper and more abiding and fuller, but they're not nearly as puppyish and palpitating as you get older.

I think you see love very clearly. I love Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye and his wife. And you see that that's not, and this is, of course, what the problem has developed with marriage, is if I don't have those feelings anymore, I'm going to go try to find them someplace else, rather than recognizing what real love is.

And so as Christians, we should recognize that there can be love between two men. You can see love, for example, on the battlefield. The bond that is forged. There's been some great movies and things about what happens when you're facing death with other men, and how people have been bound together in a relationship.

I've only seen parts of it, but this what's called Masters of the Air, right now, is that HBO? I don't know who's putting it out, but anyways, it's about the B -17 bombing of Europe during World War II.

One of my lifelong areas of reading and study, and I built a B -17 once, even put all the little machine guns in there, which for me at that age was amazing. And those bomber crews going up and fighting together, and knowing the tremendous possibilities of their not coming back.

And it can be just instant, just boom. One flak shot, 188 hits right where it needs to, and the whole fortress goes up in flames, and that's it. You're falling to the ground, maybe on fire. I mean, it was amazing what people did back then, and I would say I don't think the United States could ever do that again.

The worldview of those men had way more Christian definition of service to others than anybody's got left today. But there would be situations where there's love, but it's not sexual love, it's not romantic love, it's not marriage love.

That's special, that's different, that's unique, and that is clearly defined for us in Scripture. And Pope Francis is wrong, as can be wrong, to call the lust or the self-serving emotion that exists between two homosexuals, whether male or female, love in a Christian sense.

It's not, it's self-destructive. Read 1 Corinthians 13. If you read Paul's definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13, and then you look at the homosexual relationship, and you realize it's narcissistic, you're loving a mirror image of yourself.

You're not doing what's best for that person, you're doing what's best for you. It's self-motivated, it's self-focused. So it's evil, it's sinful, it's wrong, and the Pope thinks it's love. The Pope is wrong because the Pope's not a Biblicist.

The Pope is not informed by Scripture. He thinks he rules over it. Now, Pope Francis is a liberation theologian, and so I would agree with a conservative Roman Catholic, and I feel sorry for you guys, given what you're facing right now, but I would agree with a conservative Roman Catholic that he's not even at that point following the Church's tradition, to use the Roman Catholic phraseology.

He's not. He's not. And that's why I've said more than once, and will say it again a few times this week, in the year 1600, in Italy, the Roman Catholic Church would have burned Teuto Fernandes and Pope Francis at the stake, for many reasons, for lots of reasons.

It would have. There's no question about it. That's how much has changed, but that's how much there's nothing you can do about it, as a Roman Catholic. So, back to the Cernovich tweet, without a Pope, really?

Or other final authority? Well, he's your final authority, so I guess you've got to roll with whatever he says, right? If Francis lives long enough to take the next step beyond FS, if he lives long enough to make fundamental changes, and it's not like it happens overnight.

It's not like, you know what, we're just going to go ahead and establish same-sex marriage. No, it's done. How has it been done in every Protestant denomination where it's happened? It's taken one step at a time.

You start with the blessings. You start by sneaking open the door, and then it doesn't take long until, yeah, you end up having that acceptance. And look, if he's the final authority, as Cernovich says, and the Pope says, you know what, we've just always misunderstood apostolic tradition.

So, we're going to emphasize these inclusive passages, and then we're going to interpret these others in a different way. It's what he did with capital punishment. And there was a bishop, and I need to find this.

It's going to take forever. I think I know how I can track it down. But back during the synod and synodality, and by the way, this is one thing I will put out the request because I've just got so many other debates and stuff coming up.

If there's somebody out there during the period of the synod and synodality, what was that, October? Was that September, October? It was in that time frame. The week of those meetings and the week after, there was a, and it was, I think it was at the synod itself.

One of the bishops on Francis's side of things, on the progressivist side of things, was being interviewed. And when he was asked, is it even possible that the church could change its stand on LGBTQ inclusion, his response, and I mentioned it at that time.

I quoted it. I've even tried using our transcript thing to see if I could track it down. I couldn't. But his response was to point to the change in the capital punishment concept within Roman Catholicism.

If we can change that, then we can change this. I'd like to know what bishop it was. I'd like to find that quote, because it was out there. I mentioned it, and I can't find it anywhere. And if there's somebody out there that either knows or would be willing to do some digging around, please contact us.

Once you find it or something like that, get ahold of Rich or something, hit me up on Twitter, whatever else it might be, because I want to have that particular quote. I remember it very clearly. It's there.

It's just the difference between sleeping and looking for it, and the sleep I need for other reasons. So when Cernovich tells us these types of things, it just tells me he's not even thinking. He has no earthly idea of what we believe, why we believe it.

And there you go. By the way, the guy who went after me guy named James Meredith, he says, the third commandment exists for a number of reasons. As the prophets taught us, the name of Jesus Christ has been mischaracterized and worse by people who profess him but love the world, trust in politics, etc.

You've got this completely backwards. Well, Mr. Meredith, you're the one that's got completely backwards. If you can look at the stuff these people are putting out and go, yeah, that's biblical, then I don't know what biblical you're looking at.

My standard is the Bible, sir. He says, some of you folks would have condemned Paul on Mars Hill for not explicitly declaring that the gods of the Athenians were false and probably for complimenting their religiosity too.

Stop fighting and start proclaiming Jesus to a hurting world as utterly ignorant of him. You have to tell them the truth about Jesus. When Paul was on Mars Hill, Mr. Meredith, have you read Acts 17, 39?

Have you read what the end of his sermon was? He said that God has fixed a day in which he's going to judge the world in righteousness by a man that he has appointed and he's given evidence to the entire inhabited world by raising him from the dead.

Judgment was where he went and it ended his sermon. They stopped him. They didn't want to hear it. You don't have the apostle's perspective. No, sir. You have been deceived, Mr. Meredith. Whoever you are, I don't know who you are, says Christian writer, editor, runner, North Dakota native, transplanted in Springfield, Missouri.

Well, brother, indefensible. Indefensible. All there is to it. All there is to it. Yeah, he said, this was the first thing he said to me, there's nothing woke or SJW about the green family at the center of this.

It's an effort to connect with the lost in a post-Christian world. Spirit of God can't do that. The word of God is insufficient. There's no word of God in this stuff. Whose only impression of Jesus has been distorted by partisan politics and bad practices.

Don't cast stones, be a light. Well, if you want to show me where the apostles did what you're doing, and we just demonstrated in Acts 17, you've completely misunderstood what the apostle was doing there.

You please go ahead. But we don't need heresy and we don't need a Jesus who is fitting into, well, you know, the ad on the Superbowl, you know, washing everybody's feet. No, that's not what he was doing.

I mean, this is just horrific twisting of scripture. And you can try to claim all the best motives in the world. Fundamentally, you're just not believing the Spirit of God can build the church the way he has all along.

Every gadget idea, that's what it's all about. That's what it's all about. All right. There's some interesting stuff going on on Twitter that I really can't look at right now because then I'll forget how to do all the stuff that I'm doing right now.

All right. I have kept saying we're going to do this. So I've got 20 minutes and every once in a while, I got to sort of put myself back where I need to be. Day before yesterday, I listened to excuse me, Carl Truman.

I didn't bring my cough button, by the way, should have, and I could have used it. I even see how I could have hooked it up. Carl Truman was on with Al Mohler, talking about a revision of a book he's just put out.

Development of Doctrine and the Limits of Theological Terminology

And they're talking about creasing confessionalism. And the vast majority of what was said, I'm like, yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah, we agree about that. But this section that we are actually at in listening to Carl Truman's address to the classical theology society meeting that we started looking at a couple of weeks ago, also came up.

He repeated this exact same material. And I just want to be consistent because now I'm talking about a believing Westminster Presbyterian, but I'm talking about the same stuff I was just talking about in regards to the Pope.

What do I mean? Well, let's listen to this section and you'll see, hopefully, what's going on here. And hopefully, this is going to work. And here we go.

I was very helped in this by the essay by the Catholic theologian, Bernard Lonergan, discussing, mapping out the way theology moves towards the Nicene formulation. And he makes a very interesting point there.

He essentially says, the formulation of doctrine is a dialectical process. Sounds a bit Hegelian. It may well have been influenced a bit by Hegel, I don't know. But what he means by that is that every time the church resolves a theological problem, it puts in place a set of concepts that are then used to solve the next problem, or maybe are then used to solve the problem that those concepts initially throw up.

Good example of this would be the move from the late 4th to the 5th century in terms of discussion of Christology. Once the Council of Constantinople has set the terms of the Nicene Creed, the Christological discussions of the next century operate with those categories.

And every time an ecumenical group make a statement, they kind of reaffirm, all we're teaching is what was actually implicit at Nicaea. It's actually more complicated than they thought. But essentially, doctrine develops, formulations of truth develop dialectically.

Okay. Now, let me give you the classical theology guys, and we're all classical theologians, as long as we're not open theists, but the guys that are pushing the Thomistic resourcement. They want to focus on the theology proper.

They want to focus on simplicity and inseparable operations and a lot of speculative stuff that goes way beyond anything the apostles ever taught. And they want to say, well, this is development of theology.

This is a better expression. Okay. Let's put that aside for the second. When you're looking at the development of the doctrine of purgatory, you have the exact same process. You have purgatory, and during debate at the end of this week on that subject, purgatory is a concept that does not reach its final dogmatic form until about 150 years or so after Aquinas dies.

He certainly believes in purgatory. He supports it, teaches it, all the rest of that stuff. But it is dogmatically defined. The stuff that comes together to form it as it develops over the centuries is fascinating.

I have the book down there somewhere, but I didn't bring it up here. A couple books from Roman Catholic authors on the history of purgatory and the development of eschatology in the early church, stuff like that.

And what you see are many different views expressed by a number of different people, but certain people start bringing things in that at least most Protestants would admit are coming from outside the biblical witness.

So for example, Pope Gregory the Great, very important person in the development of what would become the doctrine of purgatory. Much of his teaching on that subject that becomes foundational came from visions of other people that he himself didn't even have.

His interpretation of visions that other people reported to him. Coming out of Alexandria, you have Clement of Alexandria and then Origen, who have concepts of purgation and cleansing. Now, of course, Origen was an ultimate universalist, but they had real influence, especially in the development of the Desert Fathers and monasticism.

And even someone that we would look up to in so many ways, like Athanasius, was deeply influenced by that Desert Father monasticism, and it influenced his theology. And it was an important element in the development of the doctrine of purgatory.

Now, we as Protestants, we sit back and go, whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute. When you have non-apostolic, clearly separated from any concept of apostolic, a deposit of faith from the apostles. Okay, Rome says there's this stuff the apostles taught.

It's not contained in the New Testament, and that's what we're drawing from. Okay, it's very plain that so much of this stuff had no connection to the apostles at all. None. You just can't make that argument.

And if you do, you're just doing it because you're desperate for something else. Certainly, scripture doesn't teach this stuff, and so you've got to find it someplace. And so we Protestants go, we have no reason to accept that.

We have no reason to accept these concepts whatsoever, and we reject them and therefore reject the theological conclusions that come from it. So we can all sit back and join together and go, yeah, okay.

That's how you have to, if you believe in the Sola Scriptura, this is what Luther's doing in regards to justification and other things. And he didn't finish that work. It's something that people after him had to continue with Calvin and then second generation, third generation, especially the Marian stuff and things like that.

So we recognize that when there are factors that then influenced a council that then made conclusions based upon that input of these external things, that you have to filter that out. You have to be willing to say, no, that's just wrong.

That's inappropriate. But we can't do that in theology. Theology proper, right? Can't do that. It's as if we sit here and go, when it comes to theology proper and Christology, Basil, the Gregories were never influenced by anything outside of Scripture.

And if you know them, look, if you have respect for Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, if you, Athanasius, clearly, and you read them as a Protestant, you will see them saying all sorts of things where you go, well, hmm.

And you recognize that's not coming from Scripture. That's not coming from the apostolic witness. With Athanasius, that's coming from the monastic tradition. You know, he's hiding out with the desert fathers while the Romans are chasing him.