Road Trip Dividing Line from Denver, Colorado

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August 11, 2022

Started off with a little discussion of the lawless Regimes in the West and where all of that must, inevitably, head. Then I played key sections from a webcast hosted by Joe Thorn with special guest Steve Meister where I am accused of, well, all sorts of things. It is truly a mystery why this is happening, but, we press forward all the same!

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00:33: Hello, greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line, road trip, Dividing Line number, I've lost track,
00:39: I don't know, and there's going to be so many over the next couple of months I can't keep track, but it's good,
00:44: I'm enjoying the opportunity of getting this traveling in. Again, just don't know how much longer in the future we're going to be able to do it, but as long as we can, we'll keep doing it.
00:58: Up in Denver, Colorado, as most people know, I've been announcing that starting tomorrow evening, we will be having a, what
01:08: I'm really looking forward to, at Redemption Hills Church, a conference on secularism with myself and Jason Lyle, I am the mental midget of the
01:22: And anytime you speak with Jason Lyle, you recognize that you're a mental midget.
01:30: And so looking forward to that, if you're in the Denver area, come on by, looking forward to that opportunity.
01:39: About killed myself today. I was challenged by a friend who really only does this just so he can bless me and my wife and my family and stuff, but he does challenge me to do some pretty crazy things.
01:59: And today that involved climbing as hard as I could up to the top of Mount Evans.
02:08: Now, you may not know anything about Mount Evans if you don't live in this area, but it is the highest, well, it's called the highest paved road in North America.
02:20: I think it's 10 feet higher than Pikes Peak, but we're still the highest. There are sections that are rightfully called paved.
02:32: And then there's the section around Summit Lake, and let's just say
02:39: I'm not sure I have all my fillings after coming back down, because going up is one thing, you're going slow enough as it is.
02:47: Coming down, every one of those massive chasms just ages you.
02:53: I'm actually only 42. But the finish line is at 14 ,130 feet above sea level, and there are really fascinating things that happen to the human body.
03:09: In fact, my friend told me that he's a private pilot, that if he were to fly as high as the finish line, he's technically supposed to have oxygen available in the plane.
03:24: And you try pedaling as hard as you can, uphill, really starts kicking in around 12, 5,
03:34: I'd say, but especially you get up into the higher 13s. And for the same heart rate,
03:44: I was getting 200 watts down around 10 ,000 feet, and up at 14 ,000 feet, you're getting maybe 140 for the same effort.
03:55: It's fascinating how the body works, and it's beautiful up there.
04:00: I mean, you can literally see the curvature of the earth, you're so high. I'm sorry for all of you flat earthers out there.
04:08: Beautiful place, and I notice I'm wearing a Mount Evans shirt, I just got it, and I'm sort of sad.
04:14: Sorry to start off this way, but I'm sort of sad. As I walked up, I love this little, the
04:21: Echo Lake Lodge, it's just the best gift store in the world, and the little elderly lady that ran it for years and years, she passed away last year.
04:31: She hadn't passed away when I was here last time, but she had now, had since. And just nice folks, and it's a really nice place, it's a nice little restaurant in it, and unfortunately, government's taking it over, and I'm sure they'll ruin it completely, and they're closing at the end of September, so this might be the last shirt that I get to buy at that cute little place that I've been to, been going to since about 2011 now, since I've been coming up here.
05:03: So anyways, managed to get through that without crashing, almost ran into some mountain goats that somebody, and they've got signs everywhere telling you don't feed the mountain goats.
05:16: Well, somebody was, and so traffic was snarled up, and I'm coming down, and traffic was snarled up, and the goats are running around, and it's very strange.
05:25: But anyway, a few storms rolled in after I got off the mountain, which was very nice, because storms can roll into a place like that at an incredible speed, they really can.
05:37: But ever get a chance to head up to the top of Evans, I highly recommend it, it's beautiful, really is, you know, you got
05:46: Alaska, then you got Colorado. Colorado's second to Alaska, but there's more food available in Colorado currently anyways, who knows what the future's going to be on that.
05:58: No, I have not actually had the opportunity, well,
06:04: I'll take that back. There's a video out that Jordan Peterson did with somebody who
06:11: I did not recognize, talking about the possibility or the reality of a coming famine worldwide, and I haven't watched it yet.
06:22: Jeff wants me to watch it, okay, maybe after the events this week. You know,
06:29: I mentioned to Jeff and the other guys, it's like, I've been contemplating a little bit, you know, we have to know what's going on, we can't just stick our heads in the sand,
06:40: I get that. But at the same time, maybe some of you older folks like me will understand this more than some of the younger folks.
06:52: The younger generations have grown up with constant information overload, just every day.
07:01: They don't even know what it's like to have silence. I've noticed that with pretty much millennials on down, silence, that's scary.
07:11: That makes me nervous. But I think some of the older folks will understand when
07:17: I say that I've been contemplating a little bit what Jesus said, when he said, sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.
07:28: And, you know, there's some insight in the Sermon on the Mount and parables that Jesus told that I sometimes wonder if I'm not taking advantage of.
07:43: Because it's so easy, especially if you start off your day. I mean, this one's a no brainer.
07:52: You don't start off your day being exposed to the insanity of the world.
08:01: Many of us do, but we shouldn't. It's obvious. It ends up so deeply impacting your mindset for that entire day.
08:13: I just know that there are many times that... Hi, Marty.
08:21: And yes, I did it. I did the challenge. I barely did the challenge, by the way.
08:29: The challenge was to get up in a certain time. I had like three and a half minutes. I didn't think
08:35: I was gonna make it. Those last switchbacks are just brutal, but we did it.
08:40: Yay. Anyway, I haven't listened to that video yet because basically what
08:50: I was saying was like, I just don't know how much I can handle if your mind is constantly...
09:02: I mean, Jesus talks about worry as a sin, and I think
09:08: I create a lot of my own worry just by how much I expose myself to things that are really beyond my control.
09:20: That's when you really have to learn to trust. And that's not the easiest thing to do.
09:28: So we haven't been on the air since... Well, actually, in the last program,
09:35: I mentioned, popped up on my screen, Mar -a -Lago,
09:41: FBI. And in the days since that has happened,
09:50: I think it was Monday. Yeah. I just can't help but repeat what
09:58: I've said in the past. We have had, in the United States anyways, a great blessing for many, many years that we never gave thanks to God for.
10:09: And that is, you could hear people repeating the line, we are a nation of law, not a nation of men.
10:19: I don't think most people understood what that meant or why it was a blessing or anything like that.
10:28: I just don't. Being a nation of law requires a law giver.
10:42: And our nation has rejected... What was the guy? It looks like a little gnome, the
10:49: Democratic guy. Someone else in the house had said something about God's law.
10:56: And his response was, God has nothing to do with this chamber or this body.
11:05: And he doesn't even realize how completely out of touch with the history of the
11:12: United States and of legislation, presidents, so on and so forth, that statement was.
11:18: But it does represent where we are now. We have rejected the
11:25: God of Scripture. We have rejected the God who gave us the foundation of law. And we've replaced
11:32: God with man. And once you put a bunch of men together, you have something called the state.
11:40: And so when you see institutions that were once the objects of respect and honor and trust quickly becoming the equivalents of the
12:01: Stasi secret police, when the Department of Justice, when the very name itself makes you laugh, you don't know what justice is.
12:10: And you're not doing justice. You're doing injustice. People around the world have lived under that curse for a long, long time.
12:21: And we in America have looked down at them and gone, sorry. But we didn't seem to realize why and what the cost would be of abandoning the principles that gave us those freedoms.
12:35: And so when you see lawlessness, you know that this is an evidence of God's judgment, not of God's blessing.
12:51: And so that's what's taking place around us. I'll be honest with you. The current regime, and I am somewhat encouraged by how many more people
13:02: I am noticing are not talking about an administration. They're talking about a regime because that's what this is.
13:10: From day one, they had zero concern about constitution, nation of laws, any of that kind of stuff.
13:20: They're just going to do what they're going to do. They're going to use their power in an illegal fashion, but they don't care because they get to define what's legal anyways.
13:31: But as I listened to, well, who do you listen to?
13:39: You listen to Biden and just go, what did he just say? You listen to Pelosi and you go, what did she just say?
13:48: You listen to the White House press representative, and you have no clue what she's talking about because she has no clue what she's talking about.
13:58: She is utterly incompetent. That is the clearest example of someone who has put in that position solely because she checks off all the equity boxes, not because she has a clue about what she's doing.
14:12: It's astonishing. But when you do, when some of the other people who actually seemingly know what they're doing and why they're doing it to destroy the nation, when they come on, you listen to them and they don't have any fear of the elections.
14:36: And this reminds me of the run up to 2020 and you see these massive crowds.
14:44: And like I said, in Phoenix, I saw parades of cars.
14:50: I'd never seen anything like it in my life. And then you'd look at Biden and the senile old man meeting with 20 people wearing masks, and yet allegedly he gets 80 million votes.
15:07: These people are not concerned about elections any longer. That's how it strikes me.
15:12: They are not concerned about elections any longer. And if that's true, then the
15:22: United States as a constitutional republic is completely done for. And very quickly, and I don't know what's going to take its place, but I can guarantee you one thing, whatever will take its place will have less food, far more control, and liberty, freedom, all those things will run out the door very, very quickly.
15:48: That's unless something happens.
15:54: And you know what? God's still on his throne. God can do whatever he pleases to do.
16:03: And he may well bring about a tremendous change or he may, this may be the time when secular humanism and its utter foolishness and everything associated with it, from Darwinism all the way through transgenderism and gay mirage and everything else, it all comes apart, explodes, takes a whole lot of people with it.
16:45: And finally, we have that clear, this stuff is insanity, we'll never do it again.
16:53: Never do it again. Now, the only way that a never, we'll never do it again could ever happen is if God by his spirit grants grace and enlightenment,
17:06: I get that. Mankind in sin is stupid enough to repeat the same species destroying insanity over and over and over again.
17:17: I get that, I get that. But there's this stuff in scripture about Christ putting all of his enemies under his feet and this insane evil system, this regime and everything it stands for, it's gotta be put under the feet of Christ.
17:36: No two ways about it, no two ways about it. So, amazing stuff going on in the world today.
17:45: And we, one of our chief prayers should be,
17:57: Lord, as I hear what you by your spirit are doing in the world today.
18:05: And we normally use that only of positive things. But we should recognize that God by his spirit is bringing judgment, he is building his kingdom in the way he chooses to build that kingdom, which in hindsight is going to be glorifying to him, but right now it can look like a complete mess.
18:32: But Lord, as I see what you're doing in the world by your spirit, teach me to respond as you would have me to respond so as to glorify you.
18:46: And teach me in that process to trust and obey.
18:53: To trust you, because a lot of us are very fearful.
19:00: We're very fearful because we love our lives, we love the things that we possess.
19:05: And once again, same old sermon I keep preaching to myself, the only power that tyrannical
19:14: FBI agents have over you is the things they can touch, your possessions, your freedom, your life, they can't touch your soul.
19:24: They can't touch your soul. And so if we love
19:29: God and not the things of this world, they have no power over us. Oh sure, all that other stuff, but that's all passing away anyways.
19:39: I mean, the amount of time left for any one of us is just a brief blink of the eye.
19:48: That should be encouraging. That should be encouraging. I spent two hours breathing really hard.
19:58: Thankfully the air was nice and clean. But when you're racing starts at 10 ,600 feet above sea level, my lung has got to work out today, big time.
20:12: So if I cough once in a while, please forgive me. A few days ago,
20:18: I saw a link to a webcast.
20:25: I was even going to pull up some pictures. I don't know, four or five years ago, I had maybe a little more now, wonderful opportunity of going down to New Zealand.
20:41: The only time I've been to New Zealand, I would never go there again unless they get rid of their tyrannical government.
20:50: But the only time I got to go down, I went to Wellington and spoke at a conference with Jim Ranahan, Joe Thorne and myself.
21:03: And there's some fun pictures. Those are three different kinds of people.
21:12: I had never met Joe Thorne before, but we got along great. And there's pictures of he and I clowning around and it was a fun, fun time.
21:23: It was edifying and useful to folks. And I left encouraged.
21:31: And even though the three of us are rather different from one another, we worked well together.
21:40: There was no discussion. I don't believe the term either Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas was ever mentioned at that particular point in time.
21:51: And it was a good time. And I was on Joe's program. And in the years since then,
22:01: I noticed starting in 2020 when all the stuff started coming loose, that it seemed like Joe was going a certain direction and there were people saying that and sort of going after him about it.
22:17: And I sort of looked at some of the statements, but they were just like a screenshot here or a title of a program over there.
22:27: And I didn't download any of the programs to listen carefully or do anything like that.
22:36: And so I didn't jump in after Joe Thorne or whatever. He's responsible to the
22:43: Lord for his stuff. And God bless you and just go on from there. So starting a couple of months ago,
22:53: I started seeing his name coming up more and more. And what he was doing is he was having various people who are on the other side of the particular discussions that are going on right now amongst the
23:05: Foreign Baptists on the program. And so I did listen when he had Rich Marcellus on. And there wasn't anything overly there, but there was the discussion of the issue of hermeneutics, which is very, very, very important.
23:23: And let me just say in passing, I have not yet heard a single person on the other side, a single person who is a meaningful representative who's over, say, 30, maybe published one or two things, maybe has some teaching experience, something, and is therefore has some weight as possibly being a representative.
23:46: I have not heard anyone on that side flesh out in a meaningful fashion, a criticism of reformed exegesis that has been done over the past 50 years.
24:01: It's always this, well, you're stuck with Schleiermacher and Bultmann. I don't know a single
24:07: Calvinist. I've never known a single Calvinist. Who confessed that, oh,
24:14: I think the best interpretation of the world is what you find in Schleiermacher and Bultmann.
24:20: Not one, I never have. And when I look at the commentaries that I would recommend to people, aside from the ones that were written by people like Calvin, but written over the past 100 years, none of them utilize the methodology of theological liberalism.
24:45: None of them think that Schleiermacher and Bultmann are the greatest things in sliced bread.
24:51: A few of them might like Barth. I don't, I went to Fuller. I detest Barth. And when I say that, it's because I just got force -fed
25:00: Barth constantly in my first master's degree. It's like, ugh, nevermind.
25:08: But the whole, when you hear them talk about hermeneutics, hold their feet to the fire.
25:17: Ask for examples. Ask for examples. This is, that's what you can do during cross -examination and debates.
25:30: And many highfalutin theoretical claims sound great until they have to get specific.
25:44: So long ago, back in the 90s, when I was debating
25:49: Doug Wilson on the textual stuff, sounds great until you get specific.
25:57: Okay, how does your system deal with Luke 2 .22? Well, you know, we need to be a little more gentle.
26:07: No, no, we need to be very specific. And if you're going to say that it's all an issue of hermeneutics and we are rediscovering pre -modern hermeneutics, okay, let's go to the text and see how that works.
26:25: And they won't do it. When I listen to them go to text, they're saying the same stuff we've been saying all along, there's no difference.
26:35: And when I go to pre -modern interpreters, like Thomas Aquinas, we find all sorts of issues.
26:44: And in fact, I mentioned, I'm never going to get to this. No, I'm going to. Last program or the program before last, just in passing,
26:56: I made the statement that I'd be interested in knowing how Thomas Aquinas dealt with John 13, 19.
27:06: And Jesus's citation of Isaiah 43 .10 from the Greek Septuagint himself.
27:13: So after the program, I actually remembered, wow, to do that, to look at it.
27:20: And Aquinas didn't see the connection. He missed the connection. He does not quote from Isaiah 43 .10.
27:29: He does quote Isaiah 41 on another issue, but he missed the key element of what's so important in Jesus's words in John 13, 19.
27:40: Now he's probably not the, he ain't the first one to do that. And one of the reasons might be he's not dealing with the original languages.
27:49: He's not dealing with the Greek New Testament. He's not dealing with the Hebrew. And he's not dealing with the
27:55: Greek Septuagint. And in fact, Septuagintal studies would not be in its fullest sense, a pre -modern thing.
28:09: That's part of modern exegesis, which means it doesn't have anything to do with Schleiermacher, Bultmann, liberalism, or anything else.
28:19: Anyone who presents this simplistic, childish, it's pre -modern exegesis or it's modern exegesis, which is
28:27: Schleiermacher and Bultmann and theological liberalism. There's nothing else. That's just absurd.
28:33: It's childish. It's childish. If you have Douglas Moo's commentary on your shelf, that book right there demonstrates that that's a childish dichotomy.
28:48: If you have John Murray, if you have any of these excellent, believing commentaries, it just demonstrates it's just, it makes no sense, but it just gets repeated over and over and over and over.
29:09: Anyway, I'm sorry. So what happened is there was a podcast and Steve Meister from Sacramento was on with Joe Thornton.
29:24: Now, amazingly, I tweeted one thing. I tweeted to Joe, have you listened to anything that I've said because the straw men in this thing were amazing?
29:32: And all of a sudden, well, you know, Matthew 18 says you should be contacting him personally. What are you talking about?
29:39: They put out a public statement, a public program that used my name and misrepresented me right, left, and center.
29:50: Isn't it their responsibility to be contacting me? First, what is this? It's out there in the public realm.
29:57: I'm going to respond to it. That's not what Matthew 18 is about. That's within a local church for crying out loud. What is wrong with people?
30:04: I don't get it. I don't get it at all. But I was taken aback because I love
30:09: Joe. I thought the last time we were together, things were just hunky dory, but I just couldn't believe the stuff that was being said.
30:18: And so I asked an honest question. Have you listened to anything that I've said? I've done hours.
30:26: We have talked about church history, and we've talked about sola scriptura, and we've talked about tradition. We've gone in depth.
30:38: And I listened to the people criticizing me, and I go, do they know that there is something called the dividing line?
30:46: And maybe they don't. Possible, possible, but highly doubtful.
30:52: Because if they didn't know, why would they be subtweeting about whatever I said on the dividing line within a few hours afterwards?
31:00: So they know that it's there. Maybe they're just relying on a few people to tell them what they think they heard.
31:09: I don't know. I just can't tell. But the straw man misrepresentation, let me tell you, if there ever is a debate, guys, we already have so many examples of misrepresentation from you folks that, yeah, those cross -X periods are gonna be rather interesting.
31:30: So I was taken aback, and so I asked Joe, have you read anything? As far as I know, he's never responded.
31:36: Other people did. So I wanted to listen to a couple of statements here. And if you've been following this and you see the importance of it, you see it has to do with how we do hermeneutics, you see how with relationships, scripture and tradition, scripture and confession, scripture and creeds, you see apologetically, if you want to do apologetics, you can't ignore any of this.
32:05: Because if you're debating someone, especially outside the Christian faith that has any understanding at all, they're gonna require you to address these issues as they should, as is appropriate.
32:23: So this is important stuff, let's dive into it here. Hopefully the sound will work well for us.
32:31: Let's get started. Well, what's going on and how we can begin to think about it and maybe grow together?
32:38: You know, it seems like there's a whole lot of Christians out there that almost don't believe in this idea that we are one church, like at the universal church level, and because of that, do
32:50: I? Seems like there's a whole lot more hostility out there than there should be. Okay, so what
32:57: I keep hearing is this kind... Now eventually, Joe's gonna name me.
33:05: So what I keep hearing is this kind of stuff that...
33:13: Why are you doing that to me? I don't know. Hello, someone there? Oh, okay, nevermind.
33:19: That's how Rich contacts me, so sometimes you gotta check. You get these vague, wild statements.
33:32: There are some people out there who don't seem to think we're part of the church Catholic. What does that mean?
33:39: Who? Could we have a quote, maybe? A quote would be nice. It's always good to quote.
33:45: So who is saying this? And who is getting to define the church
33:52: Catholic? What is that? It sounds bad. Sounds bad, but we don't know what it is.
34:01: It's just this vague type of thing. And it just makes me wonder, are there...
34:08: Do I have so many of my brothers who are willing to listen to gossip and not go to the source?
34:15: People I've ministered with? I won't do that to them. But they do that to me. Why? What's going on here?
34:23: I don't know. But church Catholic, you mean we don't have a history?
34:29: I'm telling people that there is no history to Baptists? No, never said a word like it.
34:37: Remember, it's never mentioned, but I sort of teach church history regularly, professionally, and have taught that for the very people who are now my critics in the past.
34:55: And they didn't have any problem with what I said then. Interesting. We continue on. So, you know, sometimes there's this charge out there that Reformed Baptists are going to slowly evolve or devolve into Roman Catholics because, you know, they read
35:10: Church Fathers or they read Aquinas. Is it the same level of the church? Of concern that you will become a dispensationalist by, you know, fellowshipping with people from Master's Seminary?
35:20: Now, Joe likes to make jokes, but there is a statement. You're going to become a
35:25: Roman Catholic if you read Thomas Aquinas. I've never said that. The concern
35:32: I've expressed is that when you invest in Aquinas, not in the early
35:40: Church Fathers. Again, I teach church history. We're doing, we are going to be reading the
35:45: Epistle to Diognetus. We're going to be reading from Cyprian's epistle to the Christians in the mines.
35:52: We do church history on this program all the stinking time. Anybody who would say that I'm against reading the early
35:58: Church Fathers is just not functioning. Just not functioning. You're disconnected from reality.
36:06: I don't even know what to say. It's just sort of like, well, it's the same thing as the Ososinian. Right. Okay.
36:13: Yeah. And Joe Biden's a brilliant man. Same level of insanity.
36:20: There's no connection here. What I have said is if you invest in Thomas Aquinas, the title of the greatest
36:29: Christian theologian ever, and then you start playing games with Solus Crotora and literally mocking the term, using it as a mocking end of a joke.
36:45: Oh, but Solus Crotora type of a situation. That's when you're going to have problems because if you're a professor and a teacher and you teach your students and you then demonstrate a disrespect for Solus Crotora, um, there you go.
37:10: I'm not sure why Element is now making noises in, I know how to get rid of that though, and quit.
37:20: Okay. If you start doing those things, then your students will follow the natural path and they'll read the rest of Aquinas and they'll go, wow, if he was so brilliant in that area, maybe he's brilliant in this area too.
37:40: And I just wonder how many of these folks are prepared to deal with Aquinas' views in sacramentology, ecclesiology, soteriology, and all the related fields.
37:53: Um, I don't know, but don't read Aquinas. I've never told anyone not to read Aquinas, not once.
38:00: But I have sought to communicate to people the context in which
38:06: Aquinas is speaking and the devolution of Christian epistemology that has taken place in regards to the sufficiency of scripture at that time in church history and that he was very much part of.
38:26: Um, but that's obviously way too complicated to just sort of strawman it.
38:31: So it just, you just throw it out there. So we continue on. Most of our listeners and people that know you and follow you are probably dialed in, you know, somewhat to what's on my mind and some of the things that you've been talking about.
38:46: And that is the sort of the encouragement from some like you to understand what a lot of people call reformed
38:55: Catholicity, to embrace, you know, the church and the history and the heritage that has resulted in reformed thought and ultimately reformed
39:07: Baptist thought involves hermeneutics and everything. So we're, we're hearing that. On the other hand, we're hearing who are sound.
39:14: Okay. Now that's the one, the one hand is informed Catholicity and the historical threads that formed our, our background understanding.
39:25: And that's what you all are about. That's, that's, those are the good guys. Those are the smart guys.
39:31: But then you are sounding alarm bells and saying like, there, there is, there are people who 10 years ago weren't saying these things.
39:40: And now they're saying these things about reading Thomas Aquinas and need to be concerned. Can you just maybe paint a simple picture for our people now who has said the 10 years ago, we weren't talking about this.
39:55: All that would be me because we weren't because we weren't
40:00: Joe. Did we, did we, did any of us in New Zealand in all the things we talked about ever, ever have to bring up Thomas's metaphysics to explain to someone in the audience and answer to a question, anything that they, they, even once did that ever, ever happen?
40:26: No, it didn't. You know that I know that we all know that. And so if this were to be fairly laid out, then the issue is this reformed
40:43: Catholicity and this promotion of the great tradition and this idea of this simplistic bifurcation of either pre -modern or modern ecstatical practice, hermeneutics, so on and so forth.
41:04: These would be the issues that we'd be talking about. Not well, one side is just, just trying to fully understand, you know, and, and the other side is just fearful and, and really seriously.
41:21: Again, no, no meaningful connection to what's really going on in the world today.
41:28: What this back and forth, though there isn't a lot of direct interaction, it seems to me, but what this back and forth is all about, like what this back, there's not a lot of direct interaction.
41:40: Well, Joe, you are providing us with the perfect example of what you just said. Because if you had taken the time to listen accurately and carefully to the dividing line, then you could actually present accurate representations of what our concerns really are.
42:04: But when you listen to the webcasts, who's quoting the other side? I mean, I actually got the feeling that Steve Meister was a little surprised when you used my name because they've attempted to avoid doing that.
42:19: Because once you do that, then you got to answer direct questions, you know, or it becomes real obvious that you're, you know, we're talking about him, but we won't actually deal with what he's saying.
42:30: And people want to ask the honest question, why, why is that?
42:37: And so who's quoting the other side? I'm playing you.
42:44: I've played Steve Meister before. I've played Richard Bursells before. I've played James Dolezal before. I've, Carter, Barrett, quote from the books, quote from talks, quote from tweets, quote, we quote, we interact.
43:02: The other side doesn't. And so I could sit here right now and go through text after text after text that I've gone, hey, how about this?
43:12: How do you guys respond to this? What's the issue here? And it's like, it's either silence or you get some, it's like they trot some of these younger guys out to see what will happen when they will, you know, one guy did this whole response and it was all based on asserting that I believe
43:34: X, Y, and Z. And when I specifically said, I don't believe X, Y, and Z, but he must because he doesn't believe the way we do therefore, and then runs off, you know, for the next 45 minutes.
43:44: I'm not even gonna waste my time because it is a waste of time. That's the only type of thing we get.
43:53: So it really sounded to me like you were saying, there's no meaningful interaction, which means you're not listening.
44:00: You've taken a side, but you're not listening. And that's disappointing, but that's how it goes.
44:10: Yeah, I think it's impossible to discuss this without really just beginning with some of the shifts that happened in the late 18th, 19th centuries and how we approach the
44:21: Bible, how the Bible was moved from serious theology and hermeneutics were moved from the church into the academy.
44:29: A lot of the shifts that came out of the enlightenment, as well as the movements that impacted particularly
44:34: Baptist churches and really all American churches in the 19th century. You had the
44:39: Campbellite movement that was no creed but the Bible. Campbellite movement has something to do with what re -reformed
44:46: Baptists are talking about with each other. We're both quoting from the first chapter of the
44:55: London Exhibition, and the Campbellites have something to do with this? Really private interpretation trumps what anyone had ever said or thought about scripture.
45:05: You have even, you see, I think still today, the impact of the landmark movement and the denial of the universal church still impacting us.
45:14: You have the... Impacting who? It ain't impacting me. I mean,
45:20: I have to take time when teaching church history to debunk landmarkism. So I guess it impacts me in that way because it takes time to do that.
45:29: But that's not what he's saying. Who are these people that are literally being influenced by landmarkism?
45:39: Where have... Read any of the books I've written where I've gone into church history and landmarkism?
45:51: Really? Wow. Biblism and the experiential, maybe even mystical emphasis on the
45:59: Christian faith, excluding the objective faith that we confess. And so you have all of these mixing together that have become intuitive, have become the default presuppositions unexamined by probably the majority of American Christians.
46:15: And... So... So this mishmash of stuff has become unquestioned presuppositions and they're the ones that have recognized it and are freeing us from that?
46:30: Is that literally what's being said? We're really out of step with the stream of church history and how
46:37: Christ approached the Bible and how we understand the stream of history of a church that Christ is building.
46:45: And so you've had generations now of pastors and good brothers, well -intended, who've been reading and thinking with these presuppositions unexamined and ministering that way.
46:58: And in recent years, we've engaged with good historical study, a better understanding of our confessional standards.
47:05: We haven't done good historical study before the past few years. I mean, no one did
47:10: England history instead of Richard Maher. Nobody. Absolutely shocked.
47:18: Nobody. Just... We have a good call to, hey, we're the anomaly in church history here and we need to come back to how
47:28: Christians have understood the relationship of scripture in the church since the days of the apostles.
47:34: We need to come back to how Christians have understood the scriptures in the church since the days of the apostles as if there is one view.
47:44: Really? Really? So much of the most meaningful study of church history, especially as you deal with the period from Constantine through, well,
48:13: Constantine onwards. There's a particular period of development that's extremely important.
48:20: There's all sorts of different understandings. The understanding of the late 4th century is not the understanding of the early 2nd.
48:31: There is no one understanding. That's just naive on a level that's just astonishing.
48:38: I mean, I don't even know how to interact with that. Sounds good, but I don't know how anybody who reads church history can actually come to that particular conclusion.
48:51: And then there was a bunch of discussion about stuff that really didn't have anything to do with the subject specifically, but we press on.
49:05: I don't know. I know some great theologians. I don't know any great theologians that I really admire who is arrogant.
49:13: All the great theologians that I know are humble people who really do look back.
49:19: They look back to our tradition. And so it seems like that kind of gets at what you're talking about here, that there is this individualistic, isolated,
49:30: I'm speaking in generalities here, but there is an individualistic, isolated evangelical or modern evangelical or fundamentalistic approach to understanding the
49:41: Bible and theology that has cut some of the ties to the church that has gone before it and is suspicious of tradition.
49:56: Has absolutely positively nothing to do with me. Has nothing to do with this conversation whatsoever.
50:02: The idea that those of us who are resisting the imposition of a childishly simplistic pre -modern, post -modern hermeneutical discussion, because it's foolish, it's ridiculous, it's so easily refuted, the idea that we are arrogant, that we don't look back in church history.
50:35: Joe, why don't you come down to Grace Bible Theological Seminary in a few weeks.
50:41: I'll be teaching early church history. You wanna see if what you're saying about us is true?
50:47: That we're just gonna, I'm not sure what we're gonna do in early church history because we can't read any of the early church fathers and we can only execute scripture like Schleiermacher and Bultmann.
50:58: I'm not sure what we're gonna do for those days. No, I know exactly what we're gonna be doing for those days. We are gonna be cramming way too much into way too short a period of time.
51:08: And despite how hard it's gonna be, I'm still gonna make sure we spend time digging into the
51:16: Epistle to Diognetus and digging into Clement and talking about Tertullian's comments on baptism.
51:23: And yeah, we're gonna do church history because we do church history. That's not even a part of this.
51:34: It is a complete canard, a complete canard to present this as, well, we're the church history side and they're the old
51:45: Baptists that just they don't look back on their tradition and whatever you wanna call that.
51:55: Since 1990, I remember students in my first church history class in 1990 in tears as I discussed with them the divisions that took place in the
52:12: Reformation between the Radical Reformation and the various forms that Radical Reformation and the
52:20: Magisterial Reformation. Tell you what, Joe, if you don't wanna listen to this program, why don't you go and listen to the two episodes
52:33: I did on Sheologians, my daughter's very popular webcast about Munster.
52:39: See if we don't do church history. I bet you don't know a tenth about Munster of what you'd learn in those two episodes.
52:50: Do it. See if you're, I think you have a responsibility to accurately represent the other side and you ain't accurately representing the other side.
53:00: And that's not the guy that I met in New Zealand. So I don't get it, but a few more important ones here.
53:10: Well, oh, well, there are actually a lot of them. Sorry, I was looking at the clock going, I might get done and no.
53:17: We could go through all the ways that's summarized in the Bible, the whole counsel of God or the faith or the good deposit.
53:24: Paul does not tell Timothy to give the guys he's training Bibles and some grammatical principles and see what they come up with.
53:31: Okay, that is a glowing straw man. Who says that?
53:38: Well, the Campbellites. I'm not a Campbellite. The Campbellites are not a part of this discussion. So why even bring it up?
53:45: No one says that. No one says that. And I and many others, every time that kind of straw man, that misrepresentation is thrown out there, we go, tell us who's doing that.
53:58: And they never can, because we don't. But listen to what that means.
54:05: Let me play that again and follow the idea here. We could go through all the ways that that's summarized in the
54:14: Bible, the whole counsel of God or the faith or the good deposit. Paul does not tell Timothy to give the guys he's training
54:22: Bibles and some grammatical principles and see what they come up with theologically. He tells them to pass on what you've heard from me, that they would be able to teach others also.
54:31: And that apostolic succession of doctrine, not office, that apostolic succession is to be carried through the church.
54:39: And we're to have regard for how God and his spirit has done that very thing and has preserved the fundamental truths of our faith.
54:50: Now, this really then came to the fore in the Reformation. Okay, so when
54:57: I hear all these things, when I hear this idea of, and that's how this has been passed on.
55:05: They're not given a Bible. What did Paul say to Timothy?
55:12: How is the man of God to be thoroughly equipped? It's by that which is the
55:17: Anastos, which were the sacred scriptures, which are able to make you wise unto salvation, right?
55:24: That's the same apostle. That's what he taught. And I just hear where this language is coming from and where it has gone over and over and over again in the history of the church since the
55:41: Reformation. This is not the first time. That there has been this kind of movement.
55:50: It's not a new thing. So we press forward. But what was not being debated, contrary to some caricatures today, was whether or not we have traditions.
56:02: What caricatures? Name them. Name your citations. Who's saying that there was no tradition?
56:10: And who is saying that all tradition is subject to examination by scripture?
56:17: Now, he's going to say that. He's going, oh, yeah, sure, it's always. But how does that work when the tradition becomes a constitutional part of the interpretation of the text?
56:32: If there is an apostolic tradition that exists outside the text that is necessary to accurately understand the text, the text cannot be the ultimate authority.
56:43: And once you open that door, church history says the next generation will run through it with a whole lot more than you ever thought they could carry in their hands.
56:58: It will. It's happened over and over again. What was being debated is whether tradition is a fallible but necessary understanding of scripture in whatever regard, especially where there's been great consensus in church history, like the creeds and significant teachers and writers, or whether tradition is a second source of revelation that is given interpreted by the church.
57:24: That's the Roman Catholic view. Or much more of the case during the
57:29: Reformation, that tradition is the lens that gives you the proper interpretation.
57:36: That's what Luther got hit with, Eck hit him with that early on, and he had to deal with it his entire life, and Calvin did the same thing, and Zwingli did the same thing, et cetera, et cetera.
57:47: The question always is, when we talk about creeds, in our context right now, what we're being told is, well, look, there are some things that are absolutely non -negotiable.
58:02: Yeah, why? Because they're in creeds or because they're so plain in scripture? And if it becomes because they're so plain in the creeds, then we are left, you know,
58:17: I made brief mention of this in the last program, I haven't had time for a while to expand upon it, but again, anybody who reads deeply in church history knows that every council,
58:34: Nicaea as well, though probably to the most minimum element, but I mentioned last time,
58:44: Chalcedon, how comfortable are you with the amount of politics involved in the development of the creeds of Council of Chalcedon?
58:53: Do you know who the various groups are? Most people know a little something about Nicaea, you know, the Homoousians, and the
58:58: Homoousians, and the Heterousians, and all the rest of that kind of stuff, but once you get to Chalcedon, most people are like,
59:04: I don't know, and I don't care, but there is politics involved.
59:14: How comfortable are you with that? How comfortable are you with that?
59:21: And if Chalcedon becomes an integral lens, then what is the mechanism that would allow any future generation to analyze the impact that politics had in the creation of that lens, and hence the interpretation of the text thereafter?
59:49: I'm not hearing you guys asking these questions. We are, and we always have.
59:57: We always have. Now, when I was in seminary, when
01:00:05: I took that first systematic theology class, thankfully,
01:00:12: I had an awesome church history professor, so I already knew from church history some of the context for Chalcedon, but seminary church history classes are way too short as are seminary
01:00:28: Greek classes and Hebrew classes and everything, and so when
01:00:33: I interacted with Chalcedon, I interacted with it with the default of, well, you don't want to question anything from, you know, everybody accepts that, so I need to too, and I then dove into it and provided the biblical defense of the statement and things like that, but that work probably would have been better and more balanced if it had included some background as to the various parties and the political alignments that were a part of that, and I think so,
01:01:17: I think so. And that's what the split was over. The Roman view was novel at that time.
01:01:23: It really comes into greater clarity in the 12th, 13th centuries in the medieval period.
01:01:30: So 200, 300 years is novel, I guess. I mean, there was no one single view of tradition in the early church.
01:01:38: I can show you people in the 5th and 6th centuries that have very different views of that very subject.
01:01:44: Look at Fulgentius of Rus. Excellent, excellent bishop. But you're going to find other people in the same time period that have already moved much farther down the way of the exaltation of tradition.
01:01:57: Again, these are just church history facts, and we're being told we're the ones that are ignorant of church history. I'm sorry, it doesn't seem to be that way.
01:02:05: And so that's really what the debate was over. It was radicals who were arguing for rejecting all of tradition before them, not the reformers.
01:02:15: It was always understood that Christ has one body, has one bride, and we're to understand scripture as Christians have understood it.
01:02:23: And so the charge really, our controversy with Rome. We're to understand scripture as Christians have always understood it.
01:02:29: What in the world is that supposed to mean? I mean, the
01:02:34: Reformation, ecclesiology, sacramentology, soteriology, doctrine of baptism, doctrine of the supper, priesthoods.
01:02:48: Do I need to go on? You don't think Rome had understandings of the scriptures on those things?
01:02:54: They still do to this day. It's not that they regard tradition and we think tradition's bad.
01:03:04: Our really controversy with Rome is that they're presumptuous to call themselves the Catholic church, and that they're to import the
01:03:10: Romish traditions as divinely. How do you get to define Romish?
01:03:17: They can sit in here thinking about sitting,
01:03:25: I think it was in Baldwin, Long Island, debating Jerry Matitick's form of Protestant, PCA minister, ordained,
01:03:34: John Gerstner's favorite student. And it became very clear to me during that debate.
01:03:42: And I even said, Jerry, every time I cite an early church father, you dismiss them.
01:03:49: You say an early church father is tradition because that's how Rome does it. It's called sola ecclesia.
01:03:56: If it substantiates our viewpoint, it's tradition. If it doesn't, it's personal opinion of a father.
01:04:03: How do you get around that? Yeah, they said Romish traditions. They rejected them.
01:04:09: On what basis? Scripture. It's the only basis you can offer because it's the only thing we have from the apostles.
01:04:19: Unless you posit this extra tradition that's passed on in some other mechanism.
01:04:25: And then norming and binding on Christians. That's our controversy. It's not that we have the right and prerogative to interpret the
01:04:34: Bible however way we want and call it Christian. That's not what soul scripture ever meant.
01:04:40: However way we want. Who's saying that? Who is saying that?
01:04:46: I've interacted with Campbellites. I may be doing a debate later on with a Campbellite. Later on, well, probably next year.
01:04:53: Again, depending on travel and whether travel's possible and stuff like that. I've dealt with Campbellites.
01:05:02: How do you deal with them? You don't do it on the basis of tradition. You do it on the basis of the incoherence of their exegesis.
01:05:13: You've got to go to the agreed upon authority. They're not going to listen to what your confessional traditions are or anything else.
01:05:23: Who gets to define it? Rome's got to go. What do you mean Romish tradition? This is apostolic. Now what do you do?
01:05:30: Hero? It would really help. It really would help, but I'm not suggesting you do it.
01:05:36: It would really help if the other side would spend some time actually dealing with believing
01:05:42: Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox apologists. Would help a lot.
01:05:48: It really would. Tradition is good. Tradition's unavoidable. We all have it. Things are passed down to us.
01:05:54: And of course they're all to be submitted to and evaluated according to scripture. That's what we've been saying.
01:06:00: It really shouldn't be, as you mentioned, it shouldn't be this novel thing to us. It should be taken for granted.
01:06:06: Should be taken for granted that we test all traditions by scripture.
01:06:14: And that means you can't make the tradition an integral element of your interpretation of scripture or that becomes a vicious circle, doesn't it?
01:06:27: Yeah, it does. It does. I'm trying to be brief here.
01:06:34: Going back to our forebears, the originators of our particular stream, in their minds, there was no, this was not what we were fighting over and we were not divorcing ourselves from the
01:06:45: Catholic small seed tradition. And I still think that's a good Catholicity. And it's not inconsistent to be
01:06:50: Baptist and Catholic. Catholic small seed tradition regarding what? Bishops, cardinals, very form of worship, baptism, supper.
01:07:09: That sentence in terms of the universal church. By the way, I just sped it up to 1 .2 so we can get down a little bit faster. And that's what we mean.
01:07:15: That's what we're calling Christians to understand. We've neglected these things for a long time for various reasons.
01:07:21: I think in our churches, many pastors are just untrained and ignorant of what we confess according to scripture here and don't understand that our controversies with Rome on the doctrine of salvation and even our controversies as Baptists and our distinctives as Baptists and relates to the church.
01:07:37: We see these as continuous with and consistent with Catholic small seed Christianity. In fact, that's why we hold these positions.
01:07:45: Define then what that means in church history. Who are you pointing to? I mean, we can go back to second century and we can find believers baptism, no question.
01:07:56: And it continues to be the norm for at least two centuries after that too.
01:08:01: But then you get the rise of infant baptism and you had the whole issue of delayed baptism and won't go into all that right now.
01:08:11: But specifics, specifics, where does it fit?
01:08:17: And our charge against Rome is that you actually forget what you confess about God in Christ. When you get to your doctrine of salvation and sacramentalism that you're actually rejecting fundamental truths about the being of God and the person of Christ and his work.
01:08:29: So we're - Well, I would agree with that. And that would be the same with Thomas Aquinas, right?
01:08:38: I mean, he just literally, Steve Meister just literally made the connection between soteriology and theology proper.
01:08:45: And so that means that Aquinas had serious incoherences there, right?
01:08:53: Which we're saying? I think Christians in the standing that we have these controversies and these divides and the corruptions of Christianity have not studied or been just exposed to where our specific controversies are, where we differ.
01:09:07: And that it's not on those things that Christians have been confessing for centuries. Which I am assuming he's referring to theology proper and to the specifics of divine simplicity or several operations, et cetera, et cetera.
01:09:24: Well, we just mean that we're seeing ourselves as reforming the church of Christ, not starting a revolution and making another church or being a schism from it.
01:09:33: And that we have things to learn from the brothers and sisters that preceded us and that we're building trust on their shoulders and what they've seen in God's word and reforming it, certainly, revising it, correcting it according to scripture, but not throwing it out wholesale and starting over again with just us in the
01:09:48: Bible and in a room as we're isolated. That's what the Jehovah's Witnesses do. Okay, again, so the
01:09:55: Jehovah's Witnesses are a part of this conversation now? No one's saying that you ignore church history. No one's even,
01:10:01: I mean, this is the straw man, constant straw man misrepresentation of the other side. But again, I want to push back on, okay, you say that we learn from what these people before us believed, but how does that work then when you then say we can correct what they said by scripture?
01:10:25: Because if we have to take into consideration their interpretation of a passage as part of this tradition provided by the
01:10:31: Holy Spirit so we can have a clear understanding of what scripture actually says, how could scripture ever correct an error that they might make?
01:10:38: How many people in church history? How many people today? I've told the story a thousand times of the guy that came to me and he was going to be preaching soon at a super large church.
01:10:50: He had read a fairly well -known commentator, said something about what Jesus said in Matthew. He said, what do you,
01:10:56: I've never heard anybody say this. Take a look at it for me. I did. It didn't hold water.
01:11:02: It was just some personal thing that this guy came up with and it wasn't valid.
01:11:11: He still preached it, but it wasn't valid. Well, what if that was Augustine? You think that might have a long -term impact upon people afterwards as to how they interpret that passage?
01:11:24: Because you've always got the great authority of Augustine. How does scripture maintain its supremacy in that situation?
01:11:33: It's not easy. It's not simple. But I don't see people really delving into actually how to handle that.
01:11:43: And I think, you know, we're almost there.
01:11:49: Christians are still wrestling with that and unaware of that. We can't hold, we're not going to hold orthodox conclusions in our confession while we're using interpretive methods that are antithetical to it.
01:12:00: And that's really a lot of the divided debate that we're confronting. The divide, the debate that we are confronting.
01:12:07: So this is what we're talking about now is that one side holds to a hermeneutic that can substantiate the confession, the other side does not.
01:12:14: Baloney. Baloney. That is just simply a blatant falsehood.
01:12:23: It may be repeated over and over again, but it's a blatant falsehood. You literally telling me that by following medieval forms of exegesis, you're going to substantiate the assertions of London Baptist Confession of Faith on justification by faith?
01:12:39: No, not going to happen. Not going to happen. Oh, but on theology, that's all y 'all want to talk about, huh?
01:12:48: There's more to the confession. Well, you got to start there. So you're going to tell me that it takes medieval exegesis to establish theology proper.
01:13:02: You can't get that from just scripture. I mean, how old fashioned is that? Because you have hermeneutics that really come out of the
01:13:08: Enlightenment, hermeneutics come out of the academy that come out from Harnack and Schleiermacher and these guys who were dead set on a project to undermine
01:13:16: Christian orthodoxy. Okay, someone's been reading way too much Craig Carter because none of us on our side are promoting
01:13:25: Schleiermacher and Bultmann. None of us. We're not doing it.
01:13:32: Show me where we're doing it. You can't, because we don't. Another straw man. I need,
01:13:38: I haven't found one yet. I'm not going to light up Ultraman. Sorry, Chris, I love you too much to light up Ultraman, but he probably would be flammable.
01:13:47: I need, I really, really need a portable straw man because wow, the internet is now full of them being produced by Reformed Baptists.
01:13:59: And to detach it from the Christian faith, reinventing a new Christianity, really. Even though we reject their conclusions as heterodox, we're still stuck with their methods.
01:14:10: Who, why, where? Document it, show it. Show where anything that I have said in response to you guys, where I've opened up the scriptures,
01:14:22: I was dependent upon Schleiermacher or Bultmann. You can't do it and you know it. You know it.
01:14:29: Why say these things? I don't understand it. It's just, oh yeah.
01:14:36: And even the invention of, sometimes I'll use, you know, as an illustration Schleiermacher's invention of historical theology.
01:14:42: Historical theology is a category, that is ironically used to isolate us from history. It used to be just theology. Those are guys we interacted with.
01:14:48: This was a conversation we were having with Christians who came before us. Now we have it sequestered in this category of, yeah, if you can get around to it, if you have time, maybe if you want to take an elective, you can think about what other
01:14:57: Christians thought about the Bible. But mainly it's about what's happened, you know, recently. And so when
01:15:04: I read historical doctrine by, names escaping me, but standard work.
01:15:14: So that was the panem on Schleiermacher. I don't even, again.
01:15:22: In terms of reformed Catholicity, we're trying to bring that wall down. We're trying to re -engage the church
01:15:28: Catholic, the church universal down through the ages. That doesn't mean imbibing everything that comes down from the past.
01:15:34: Correcting everything according to scripture, but that we're correcting everything according to scripture.
01:15:42: We all believe that. We all believe that. Correcting everything according to scripture, which means those traditions cannot become the lens by which we read scripture, right?
01:15:56: Or then it can't be corrected, right? So the only hermeneutical process that would allow you to correct what has come down to you in tradition is to start with what the apostles intended to communicate to their audience.
01:16:13: Recognize that all scripture is inspired, and so therefore you have the consistency of each author, the consistency of each book, the consistency of each testament.
01:16:23: That's how we used to do theology, and we got along great doing it. And then now we're not.
01:16:32: Engage with the church down through the ages and benefiting and deepening and not just throwing it out because it's old, antiquated, or we don't get it on immediately, intuitively when we read languages foreign to us.
01:16:47: Nobody doing that either, but it's supposed to sound good. Because I know that there are people, like most recently,
01:16:55: James White seems to be a guy that's pretty vocal against the encouragement that some
01:17:00: Baptist seminaries have given for their students to read Thomas Aquinas. So there's finally, and again,
01:17:06: I really think Steve was like, oh, you shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have done that. So Joe, where have
01:17:16: I said you shouldn't read Thomas Aquinas? Because I'm reading
01:17:23: Thomas Aquinas on the program all the time these days, right? Interacting with stuff that he said, you know,
01:17:30: I started on, I forgot to mention the John 13 thing, where he had just, he didn't catch the connection because he wasn't using the original languages and stuff like that.
01:17:40: We're talking about Thomas Aquinas. Have you listened to what we're saying?
01:17:47: What we're saying is, when you have Baptists who put out scholarships and to get the scholarship, you have to write a paper.
01:17:58: And the person that gets scholarship is the person whose paper sounds the most like Thomas Aquinas, follows his methodology, the old scholasticism.
01:18:09: Read what Calvin thought about the scholastics or Luther thought about the scholastics. That's what we're talking about.
01:18:17: We're not talking about reading him. We're talking about exalting him as if he was the final step, the pinnacle in the development of the doctrine of the
01:18:30: Trinity. Didn't that bother you, Joe? Craig Carter said that. He said that in his own
01:18:38: Twitter feed. And all these guys are promoting the same books.
01:18:45: Don't you think that would be, don't you think that's the reason to go, that's different?
01:18:51: It's not what we used to do. And it doesn't seem consistent with what we actually believe, right?
01:18:59: It shouldn't be controversial at all. We were reading the Church Fathers both in Bible College and in seminary.
01:19:05: You do read that stuff, right? So that's a part of it. You think I tell people not to read the early Church Fathers, Joe?
01:19:11: You know better. If you've listened to anything I've said, you know better. And if you haven't listened to anything
01:19:17: I've said, then why are you talking about it? It's one of the two. It's one of the two.
01:19:25: Like, why? I mean, I'm hoping we can actually be charitable. Why is there so much triggering when it comes to Thomas Aquinas?
01:19:33: But then maybe there's a greater pass given to Augustine, right? Or one of the creeds.
01:19:41: Or is there? Because it seems like I'm confused. I'm really confused at the idea.
01:19:47: Like, you're confused because you haven't been listening. You're listening to one side misrepresent the other side and just believing whatever you're told.
01:19:55: That will lead to confusion. That will lead to confusion. We have been consistently critical of both
01:20:03: Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. I started telling the story in the 90s,
01:20:10: Joe, that one of the greatest lessons we can learn from Augustine is the contradictions in his own theology that came about because of the conflicts he was involved with.
01:20:22: First, the Donatist controversy, and then the Pelagian controversy. How many times have
01:20:29: I quoted Warfield? The Reformation inwardly considered is nothing more than the victory of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church.
01:20:39: Been doing this for decades. So why the confusion?
01:20:48: Because you're not listening to the side you're criticizing. Why? I didn't do that to you.
01:20:55: I saw you being criticized for being woke or all the rest of this stuff. I didn't jump on.
01:21:01: I didn't start having people on my program to talk about you without actually mentioning your name. So why do that to me?
01:21:09: What is this? I don't understand it. I don't understand the motivation. Really don't.
01:21:14: Can't read Thomas Aquinas because if you accept one part of his works, you have to accept all of it. That's the impression that I'm getting.
01:21:21: The impression that you're getting. So it sounds like what you're saying is, well, if Aquinas was wrong about one thing, he's wrong about everything.
01:21:31: Have I ever said that? When Aquinas argues for monotheism, I'm saying, well, but because he was wrong about baptism, that means he's wrong about this too.
01:21:40: Never said it. Never got close to saying it. Now, maybe there's some people in your circles that have no integrity or honesty that just misrepresent me to you.
01:21:50: That's a possibility. But it's your responsibility on your own program to be accurate in what you're saying, right?
01:21:58: I've never said any of those things. I have said that Thomas himself would not like the idea of being chopped up into pieces to where, well, what
01:22:11: Thomas said about theology proper, that's the good stuff. And then when he says about the
01:22:19: Lord's Supper, especially that would have freaked him out.
01:22:25: That would, I'm not sure if freaked him out is an appropriate historical description to be used, but he would have rejected that and would have found it highly offensive.
01:22:39: I have never said to anybody, you'd see the taker to leave it, someone's 100 % right or they're 100 % wrong.
01:22:45: That's just so absurd. I don't even know how to respond to it. I don't know how to respond to it. And that's just never,
01:22:53: I mean, goodness sakes, I haven't operated that way. I don't know any church that's operated that way historically. Because not even everybody that put together the
01:23:00: Second London agreed on everything. They put down the things that they did agree on here. Can you unpack this?
01:23:07: Like, what is going on? Why is there such a triggering response in some to Thomas Aquinas right now?
01:23:12: Yeah, so I'm the sum and it's allegedly a triggering response when the reality is we have been reading from Thomas and looking at his commentaries and doing all the rest of this kind of stuff and putting him in his own context and noting that his theology is fundamentally foundational to the
01:23:38: Council of Trent and Roman Catholicism. That's true. That's just a, some of us can observe that and go, that's true, it's the way it is, without going.
01:23:49: And that means that he was wrong about divine simplicity. I've never made that argument. Never made that argument.
01:24:00: Well, I think some of it is just ad hominem and genetic fallacy that, you know, throwing out, you know, everything, someone got something wrong.
01:24:10: As you point out, that's an untenable position. None of us operate that way. None of us do, including me.
01:24:17: So, Steve, stop it. It's not what's going on. Why give an answer that is so obviously untrue?
01:24:24: I don't know. Maybe by ourselves, isolated. And maybe some are thinking that way. They operate in their world, they're ignorant, and they operate in Christianity as a sect and their own gurus, for lack of a better word, and their own little tribe.
01:24:38: What does that have to do with anybody? Is that actually being applied to me? If so, it's pure slander.
01:24:45: And it's absurd. And I just, I can't conceive how anybody could hear that and go, what are you talking about?
01:24:54: Why are these people doing this? There's just so much evidence, published evidence, for decades showing that that's not even close to true.
01:25:04: So why bring it up? These are questions that need to be answered. We can't do that consistently.
01:25:09: And you're right that the issues, if you toss out Aquinas on the doctrine of God and the issues that are particularly being pointed to, you're gonna have to also pull out
01:25:19: Anselm, Augustine. You're gonna have to unmove Nicaea. And eventually you're just throwing out everybody. Nobody's arguing for a wholesale embracing of tradition, as it were, of everything everyone said.
01:25:30: Or that if somebody said something helpful on certain areas of theology or doctrine, that you're now obligated to embrace everything they said or nothing.
01:25:38: And we're not consistent with that, like you said, at all. And as you mentioned, Baptists disagree with each other. That's painfully obvious to all of us.
01:25:44: And that's true of every tradition. And the whole point of confessions were to actually allow for that liberty and for us to have different interpretive takes on passages of scripture while setting out the boundaries and the core truths that Christians haven't agreed on down through the ages.
01:25:58: So I don't know that I can really locate or understand why the animosity about this, what my -
01:26:05: Now remember, this is a false question being answered falsely. Both of you know that.
01:26:14: It was a false question because it's not representative of what I've said or done. And now it's being answered as if it was a valid question, which makes that false as well.
01:26:26: But why is this type of thing happening amongst Reformed Baptists? Locate or understand why the animosity -
01:26:32: Animosity, animosity. What my theory is just that we've been teaching, certain prominent teachers and pastors have been teaching what is contrary to the creedal confessional consensus of the faith.
01:26:49: That is Steve Meister from Sacramento saying that about me.
01:26:55: Okay, so just want - Everybody needs to understand, this side is willing to make this kind of accusation.
01:27:05: Joe mentioned the name. He's not. I'm sorry, Steve. You should have at least had the temerity, have the guts.
01:27:13: If you're gonna make the accusation, then make it straightforward, okay?
01:27:19: I'm saying right now that you all are not dealing with our objections to your positions.
01:27:26: And you all are having meetings in back rooms at seminaries and ministries to try to deal with this stuff rather than doing this the way it should be done.
01:27:37: And that is straightforward. Let's get a Bible open. Let's do this in a meaningful fashion, okay?
01:27:47: But I'm not calling you a heretic. You're calling me that. That's right there. You just said it.
01:27:54: You know, once it's said on the internet, it's there. And so once again, in response to all the people who said, well, you should go to California and sit in a room.
01:28:05: No, we're gonna say it one last time. If you all really believe this, then there needs to be the organization of a conference with papers, presentations, and at least one major debate that will be accurately represented and not filled with straw man misrepresentation.
01:28:29: I don't think you all want that. I'll just be honest with you. Because I, when,
01:28:35: I don't remember what it was. I think someone looked it up. When I first suggested it, I think it was January. And this is
01:28:41: August. I said, this is the only way to really deal with this is to lay it out there, have papers presented, have rebuttals, cross -examination, and debate the issue, but have it fair and square.
01:29:01: Not one person against 10, but five against five. Or maybe five on one side, five on the other side, five in the middle who don't have a clue what's going on.
01:29:12: That might be the best way to do it. And hopefully, since we're reformed Baptists, you don't end up having the decision made in the back lot with fists.
01:29:24: Hopefully, we could avoid that. That does happen a lot in Baptist history. But that's what needs to happen.
01:29:31: You're making the accusations. You're laying them out there. Almost done. Some guys are reformed
01:29:38: Baptists that are teaching things that are inconsistent with them. Purported, purported. So they are saying they're not actually reformed
01:29:46: Baptists. Because we define confessionally. Our understanding defines, they're not actually reformed
01:29:54: Baptists. That's what is being said. That is what is being said. Confession, and it can't be reconciled with it.
01:30:00: And when you point that out to them, they have a decision to make. They can humble themselves and be corrected, or they can call you an incipient
01:30:09: Bapist, or you're going to lead everybody to Rome, or all these kind of crazy things. So who's he talking about?
01:30:14: He's talking about me. When I spoke about incipient
01:30:21: Bapists, I was talking about the mockery of solo scriptura that was going on by Steve Meister himself with Richard Brassellus.
01:30:30: The documentation's right there. It happened over and over again. Oh, but solo scriptura, bro.
01:30:37: You don't mock solo scriptura if you believe solo scriptura. If you've seen how many people's lives have been destroyed when they abandoned solo scriptura, you're not going to mock it.
01:30:49: And that's what they were doing. That's crazy. Steve, if you're going to talk about me,
01:30:56: I will use your name. You use mine, okay? Can you be that honest with me?
01:31:03: If you're going to accuse me of stuff, use my name. Be open about it. Because see, once you're open about your accusations, then we can put that out in the light and demonstrate that it is a complete falsehood, and then you have to try to defend it.
01:31:20: But when you won't use names, then it's, well, yeah, I'm just speaking generally. We just have a little fun here type thing.
01:31:28: No, be specific. Be specific. Almost done.
01:31:33: It's kind of insults that get thrown around purely online or just they have no basis in reality.
01:31:38: I want to take seriously a confession that deliberately rejects Roman and its errors, refers to the Pope as that antichrist.
01:31:45: I'm not in danger of swimming in the tide at all. And Aquinas and anyone else is only helpful insofar as they're consistent with that, in my view.
01:31:53: And so I think it's really just a, honestly, a rhetorical strategy.
01:31:59: It's a sign of a lack of teachability and humility. And we certainly want to pray for a better interaction and discourse from our brothers.
01:32:06: So there is clear statement from Steve Meister, from Sacramento, we are unwilling to be taught.
01:32:14: We're not humble. We engage in ad hominem. And we're the ones sitting over here playing their statements, exposing them to the light, refuting them, and demonstrating that so far, it seems that the biggest thing that these guys have learned from Thomas Aquinas is how to build a straw man.
01:32:38: And that generally wasn't what Thomas Aquinas did. I mean, if you're going to give Aquinas credit for anything, when he would represent it at a site, he'd represent it accurately, sometimes to his own hurt.
01:32:49: So they haven't learned that from him. We have, we have. So when you have, when
01:33:01: I'm hearing from people saying, I heard you believe this, or I heard you believe that.
01:33:06: And it's not even close. It's not even connected. Then I know that there is a, there's a, there's a movement going on.
01:33:17: The reformed Baptist cancel culture. And it's, it's happening.
01:33:23: Is, is that good for our movement? No, it's not. No, it is not. It's very bad.
01:33:31: Can we get through it? Well, I hope so. But the only, only way that's going to happen is there needs to be some public debates.
01:33:40: There needs to be papers written with responses given, interaction, cross -examination.
01:33:46: I think you gentlemen need to sit down and we'll, we'll have plenty of place to write and we'll go, okay, let's look at some passages of scripture.
01:33:55: You put your exegesis up here. I'll put my exegesis up there. You tell me how that's modern. And yours is, yours is pre -modern and therefore is somehow more faithfully apostolic.
01:34:07: And I just think there's a bunch of you, you know, that's not ever going to happen because it can't happen. It sounds great on paper.
01:34:15: You can get lots of books published and that's what's happening. But when it gets specific, let's talk about this text.
01:34:23: Let's dig down on this. Not going to happen, but we'll keep trying.
01:34:29: We'll lay it out there and we will turn the light on. And when you all want to engage in misrepresentation, we're going to expose it.
01:34:40: We're going to, we need to. It's, it's a waste of time unless we remain hopeful that somebody's going to go, here's, here's my gut feeling.
01:34:56: When the culture collapses, none of this is going to, the specifics of the in -depth theological assertions are going to mean nothing.
01:35:08: Whether we stood firm on the ultimate authority of scripture will mean everything.
01:35:17: When the regime tells you that you need to sign a document that celebrates transgenderism, the foundation of your rejection of that, which will result in your imprisonment or maybe your execution, the foundation of your rejection of that, what's it going to be?
01:35:43: Is it going to be the great tradition? Or is it going to be the very speech of God himself in scripture?
01:35:55: So it does matter. It does matter. It's important. Wow. For a road trip dividing line, that was a long one.
01:36:06: Rich is still awake back there. I'm, I'm, I'm afraid that maybe possibly unconsciousness has, uh, yep, still here.
01:36:14: Yep. Still there. And you get to take all the phone calls from now on. Um, actually the phone does not ring from these fellows.
01:36:27: Oh, oh, you know what I'm saying? I do know what you said. No calls. Not yet.
01:36:36: All right. Okay. All right. I got you. I hear you. I hear you. All right.
01:36:41: Well, let's program again. If you're in the Colorado area, well, Denver area,
01:36:47: Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, whatever, uh, Jason Lyle and I will be getting together starting tomorrow night and talking about secularism and all that neat, wonderful, fun stuff and how to respond to it.
01:37:00: And what's the name of the church? What's the name of the church? Redemption Hills Church. Redemption Hills Church.
01:37:07: And I've spoken there a number of times before. So, uh, just look up Redemption Hills Church. The schedule's there on the website and how, you know, how to get there and all the rest of that fun stuff.
01:37:17: And starting tomorrow evening, I don't have the website up in front of me right now, give you a specific time, but Redemption Hills Church, you can get all that stuff for yourself.
01:37:26: So, all right. Thanks for watching the program today. And, uh, let's see, today is Thursday. So yeah,