Road Trip Dividing Line from Denver, Colorado

Greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line, Road Trip Dividing Line. I've lost track, 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. 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. Up in Denver, Colorado, as most people know, I've been announcing that starting tomorrow evening we will be having what 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 group, and anytime you speak with Jason Lyle, you recognize that you're a mental midget. And so looking forward to that. If you're in the Denver area, come on by. Looking forward to that opportunity.

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, and today that involved climbing as hard as I could up to the top of Mount Evans.

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. I think it's 10 feet higher than Pikes Peak, but we're still the highest.

There are sections that are rightfully called paved, and then there's the section around Summit Lake, and let's just say I'm not sure I have all my feelings after coming back down, because going up is one thing.

You're going slow enough as it is. Coming down, every one of those massive chasms just ages you. 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.

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, and you try pedaling as hard as you can uphill.

Really starts kicking in around 12 .5, I'd say, but especially you get up into the higher 13s. For the same heart rate, 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.

It's fascinating how the body works, and it's beautiful up there. You can literally see the curvature of the earth. You're high. I'm sorry for all of you flat earthers out there. It's a beautiful place, and I notice I'm wearing a Mount Evidence shirt.

I just got it, and I'm sort of sad. Sorry to start off this way, but I'm sort of sad. As I walked up, I love this little Echo Lake Lodge. It's just the best gift store in the world. The little elderly lady that ran it for years and years, she passed away last year.

She hadn't passed away when I was here last time, but she had since. Just nice folks, and it's a really nice place. There's a nice little restaurant in it, and unfortunately, government's taking it over.

I'm sure they'll ruin it completely, and they're closing at the end of September, so it's probably the last shirt that I get to buy at that cute little place that I've been going to since about 2011 now, since I've been coming up here.

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. Well, somebody was, and so traffic was snarled up.

I'm coming down, and traffic was snarled up, and the goats were running around, and it's very strange, 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.

It really can, but if you ever get a chance to head up to the top of Evans, I highly recommend it. It's beautiful. It really is, you know, you got Alaska, then you got Colorado. Colorado's second to Alaska, but there's more food available than Colorado currently anyways.

Who knows what the future is going to be on that. No, I have not actually had the opportunity. Well, I'll take that back. There's a video out that Jordan Peterson did with somebody who I did not recognize talking about the possibility or the reality of a coming famine worldwide, and I haven't watched it yet.

Jeff wants me to watch it, okay, maybe after the events this week. You know, 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. 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 that the younger generations have grown up with constant information overload just every day.

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. That makes me nervous, but I think some of the older folks will understand when I say that I've been contemplating a little bit what Jesus said when he said, sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.

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, because it's so easy, especially if you start off your day.

I mean, this one's a no-brainer. You don't start off your day being exposed to the insanity of the world. Many of us do, but we shouldn't. It's obvious. It ends up so deeply impacting your mindset for that entire day.

I just know that there are many times that I'm like, I'm already, and yes, I did it. I did the challenge. I barely did the challenge, by the way. The challenge was to get up in a certain time. I had like three and a half minutes.

I didn't think I was gonna make it. Those last switchbacks are just brutal, but we did it. Yay. Anyway, I haven't listened to that video yet, because basically what I was saying was like, I just don't know how much I can handle if your mind is constantly, I mean, you know, Jesus talks about worry as a sin, and I think I create a lot of my own worry just by how much I expose myself to things that are really beyond my control.

That's when you really have to learn to trust, and that's not the easiest thing to do. So we haven't been on the air since, well, actually on the last program, I mentioned, popped up on my screen, Mar-a-Lago, FBI, and I, in the days since that has happened, I think it was Monday, yeah, I just, I can't help but repeat what 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, and that is, you could hear people repeating the line, we are a nation of law, not a nation of men.

I don't think most people understood what that meant or why it was a blessing or anything like that. I just don't. Being a nation of law would, requires a law giver, and our nation has rejected, what was the guy that looks like a little gnome, the Republican, the Democratic guy, someone else in the house had said something about God's law, and his response was, God has nothing to do with this chamber or this body.

And, you know, he doesn't even realize how completely out of touch with the history of the United States, and of legislation, presidents, so on and so forth, that statement was, but it does represent where we are now.

We have rejected the God of Scripture. We have rejected the God who gave us the foundation of law. And we've replaced God with man. And once you put a bunch of men together, you have something called the state.

And so when you see institutions that were once the objects of respect, and honor, and trust, quickly becoming the equivalents of the Stasi secret police, when the Department of Justice, when the very name itself makes you laugh, you don't know what justice is.

And you're not doing justice, you're doing injustice. People around the world have lived under that curse for a long, long time. 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. And so when you see lawlessness, you know that this is an evidence of God's judgment, not of God's blessing. 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 I am noticing are not talking about an administration. They're talking about a regime, because that's what this is.

From day one, they had zero concern about constitution, nation of laws, any of that kind of stuff. 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.

But as I listen to, well, who do you listen to? You listen to Biden and just go, what did he just say? You listen to Pelosi and you go, what did she just say? 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.

She is utterly incompetent. That is the clearest example of someone who is put in that position solely because she checks off all the equity boxes, not because she has a clue about what she's doing. It's astonishing.

But 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.

And this reminds me of the run up to 2020, and you see these massive crowds. And like I said, in Phoenix, I saw parades of cars. 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. These people are not concerned about elections any longer. That's how it strikes me. They are not concerned about elections any longer. And if that's true, then the United States, as a constitutional republic, is completely done for 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 be run out the door very, very quickly.

That's unless something happens. And you know what? God's still on his throne. God can do whatever he pleases to do. And he may well bring about a tremendous change. 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.

And finally, we have that clear, this stuff is insanity, we'll never do it again. Never do it again. Now, the only way that we'll never do it again could ever happen is if God, by his spirit, grants grace and enlightenment.

I get that. Mankind in sin is stupid enough to repeat the same species-destroying insanity over and over and over again. 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 got to be put under the feet of Christ. No two ways about it. No two ways about it. So, amazing stuff going on in the world today.

And we, one of our chief prayers should be, Lord, as I hear what you, by your spirit, are doing in the world today. 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. 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.

And teach me in that process to trust and obey. To trust you. Because a lot of us are very fearful. We're very fearful because we love our lives. We love the things that we possess. And once again, same old sermon I keep preaching to myself.

The only power that tyrannical FBI agents have over you is the things they can touch. Your possessions, your freedom, your life. They can't touch your soul. They can't touch your soul. And so if we love 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. I mean, the amount of time left for any one of us is just a brief blink of the eye. That should be encouraging. That should be encouraging.

I spent two hours breathing really hard. Thankfully, the air was nice and clean. But when you're racing starts at 10 ,600 feet above sea level, my lungs got a workout today. Big time. So if I cough once in a while, please forgive me.

A few days ago, I saw a link to a webcast. I was even going to pull up some pictures. I don't know, four or five years ago, I had maybe a little more than that. Wonderful opportunity of going down to New Zealand.

Only time I've been to New Zealand, I would never go there again unless they get rid of their tyrannical government. But only time I got to go down, I went to Wellington and spoke at a conference with Jim Ranahan, Joe Thorne and myself.

And there's some fun pictures. You know, those are three different kinds of people. 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.

It was edifying and useful to folks. And I left encouraged. And even though, you know, the three of us are rather different from one another, we worked well together. There was no discussion. I don't believe the term either Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas was ever mentioned at that particular point in time.

And it was a good time. And I was on Joe's program. And in the years since then, I noticed, starting in 2020, when all this 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. And I sort of looked at some of the statements, but they were just, you know, like a screenshot here, or a title of a program over there.

And I didn't, I didn't download any of the programs to listen carefully or do anything like that. And so I didn't jump in after Joe Thorne or whatever, you know, he, he's responsible to the Lord for his stuff.

And, and God bless you, and just go on from there. So starting a couple of months ago, 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 Foreign Baptists on the program.

And so I did listen when he had Rich Marcellus on. And, you know, there wasn't anything overly there. But there was, there was the discussion of the issue of hermeneutics, which is very, very, very important.

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 as possibly being a representative.

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. It's always this, well, you're stuck with Schleiermacher and Bultmann.

I don't know a single Calvinist, I've never known a single Calvinist who confessed that, oh, I think the best interpretation of the world is what you find in Schleiermacher and Bultmann. 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.

None of them think that Schleiermacher and Bultmann are the greatest things in sliced bread. 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 Barth constantly in my first master's degree.

Just like, never mind. But the whole, when you hear them talk about hermeneutics, hold their feet to the fire. Ask for examples. Ask for examples. This is, that's what you can do during cross-examination and debates.

And many highfalutin theoretical claims sound great until they have to get specific. So, long ago, back in the 90s, when I was debating Doug Wilson on the textual stuff, sounds great until you get specific.

Okay, how does your system deal with Luke 2 .22? Well, you know, we need to be a little more gentle. 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.

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, which is no different. And when I go to pre-modern interpreters like Thomas Aquinas, we find all sorts of issues.

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, I made the statement that I'd be interested in knowing how Thomas Aquinas dealt with John 13, 19, and Jesus's citation of Isaiah 43 .10 from the Greek conception of himself.

So after the program, I actually remembered, wow, to do that, to look at it. And Aquinas didn't see the connection. He missed the connection. He does not quote from Isaiah 43 .10. He does quote from Isaiah 41 on another issue, but he missed the key element of what's so important in Jesus's words in John 13, 19.

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. He's not dealing with the Greek New Testament. He's not dealing with Hebrew, and he's not dealing with Greek Septuagint.

In fact, Septuagintal studies would not be in its fullest sense, a pre-modern thing. That's part of modern exegesis, which means it doesn't have anything to do with Schleiermacher, Bultmann, liberalism, or anything else.

Anyone who presents this simplistic, childish, it's pre-modern exegesis, or it's modern exegesis, which is Schleiermacher and Bultmann and theological liberalism, there's nothing else. That's just absurd.

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. 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.

Anyway, I'm sorry. So, what happened is there was a podcast, and Steve Meister from Sacramento was on with Joe Thorne. 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?

All of a sudden, well, you know, Matthew 18 says you should be contacting him personally. What are you talking about? They put out a public statement, a public program that used my name and misrepresented me right, left, and center.

Isn't it their responsibility to be contacting me first? What is this? It's out there in the public realm. I'm going to respond to it. That's not what Matthew 18 is about. That's within a local church, we're crying out loud.

What is wrong with people? I don't get it. I don't get it at all. But I was taken aback because I love 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.

And so, I asked an honest question, have you listened to anything that I've said? I've done hours. We have talked about church history, and we've talked about sola scriptura, and we've talked about tradition.

We've gone in depth. And I listen to the people criticizing me, and I go, do they know that there is something called the dividing line? And maybe they don't. Possible, possible, but highly doubtful. Because if they didn't know, why would they be subtweeting about whatever I said on the dividing line within a few hours afterwards?

So, they know that it's there. Maybe they're relying on a few people to tell them what they think they heard. 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-experience are going to be rather interesting.

So, I was taken aback, and so I asked Joe, have you read anything? As far as I know, nobody's ever responded. 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 what 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. Because if you're debating someone, especially outside the Christian faith, that has any understanding at all, they're going to require you to address these issues, as they should, as is appropriate.

So, this is important stuff. Let's dive into it here. Hopefully, the sound will work well for us. Let's get started. Well, what's going on, and how we can begin to think about it, and maybe grow together?

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, it seems like there's a whole lot more hostility out there than there should be.

Okay. So, what I keep hearing is this kind... Now, eventually, Joe's going to name me. So, what I keep hearing is this kind of stuff that... Why are you doing that to me? I don't know. Hello? Someone there?

Oh, okay. Never mind. That's how Rich contacts me. So, sometimes you gotta check. You get these vague, wild statements. There are some people out there who don't seem to think we're part of the church Catholic.

What does that mean? Who? Could we have a quote, maybe? A quote would be nice. It's always good to quote. So, who is saying this, and who is getting to define the church Catholic? What is that? It sounds bad.

It sounds bad, but we don't know what it is. It's just this vague type of thing. And it just makes me wonder, do I have so many of my brothers who are willing to listen to gossip and not go to the source?

People I've ministered with? I won't do that to them, but they do that to me. Why? What's going on here? I don't know. But church Catholic, you mean we don't have a history? I'm telling people that there is no history to Baptists?

No, never said a word like it. 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.

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 Church Fathers or they read Aquinas.

Is it the same level of concern that you will become a dispensationalist by, you know, fellowshipping with people from Master's Seminary? Now, Joe likes to make jokes, but there is a statement. You're going to become a Roman Catholic if you read Thomas Aquinas.

I've never said that. The concern I have expressed is that when you invest in Aquinas, not in the early Church Fathers. Again, I teach church history. We're doing, we are going to be reading the Epistle to Diognetus.

We're going to be reading from Cyprian's Epistle to the Christians in the Mines. We do church history on this program all the stinking time. Anybody who would say that I'm against reading the early Church Fathers is just not functioning.

Just not functioning. You're disconnected from reality. I don't even know what to say. It's just sort of like, well, it's the same thing as the Old Sosinian. Right. Okay. Yeah. And Joe Biden's a brilliant man.

Same level of insanity. There's no connection here. What I have said is if you invest in Thomas Aquinas, the title of the greatest Christian theologian ever, and then you start playing games with sola scriptura, and literally mocking the term, using it as a mocking end of a joke.

Oh, but sola scriptura 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 sola scriptura, there you go.

I'm not sure why Element is now making noises in, I know how to get rid of that though, and quit. 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. 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.

Don't know. But don't read Aquinas? I've never told anyone not to read Aquinas. Not once. But I have sought to communicate to people the context in which 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.

But that's obviously way too complicated to just sort of strawman it, so you just throw it out there. And so we continue on. Most of our listeners and people that know you and follow you are probably dialed in somewhat to what's on my mind, and some of the things that you've been talking about.

And that is the encouragement from some, like you, to understand what a lot of people call Reformed Catholicity, to embrace the church and the history and the heritage that has resulted in Reformed thought, and ultimately Reformed Baptist thought, which involves hermeneutics and everything.

So we're hearing that. On the other hand, we're hearing people who are sounding... Okay, now, that's the one... The one hand is Reformed Catholicity and the historical threads that formed our background, understanding, and that's what you all are about.

Those are the good guys. Those are the smart guys. But then... People who are sounding alarm bells and saying, like, there are people who 10 years ago weren't saying these things, and now they're saying these things about reading Thomas Aquinas, and we need to be concerned.

Can you just maybe paint a simple picture for our people? Now, who has said that 10 years ago we weren't talking about this? Oh, that would be me, because we weren't. Because we weren't. 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' metaphysics to explain to someone in the audience and answer to a question? Anything that they... Even once.

Did that ever happen? 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 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.

These would be the issues that we'd be talking about. Not, well, one side is just trying to fully understand, you know, and the other side is just fearful and really, seriously, again, no meaningful connection to what's really going on in the world today.

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 and forth... There's not a lot of direct interaction.

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.

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.

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.

And people want to ask the honest question, why? Why is that? And so, who's quoting the other side? I'm playing you. 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. 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?

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 x, y, and z, 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.

I'm not even gonna waste my time. Because it is a waste of time. That's the only type of thing we get. So, it really sounded to me like you were saying, there's no meaningful interaction, which means you're not listening.

You've taken a side, but you're not listening. And that's disappointing. But that's, that's how it goes. 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 Bible, how the Bible was moved from serious theology and hermeneutics were moved from the church to the academy, a lot of shifts that came out of the Enlightenment, as well as the movements that impacted particularly Baptist churches, and really all American churches in the 19th century.

You had the Campbellite movement, that was no creed, but the Bible. Campbellite movement has something to do with what Reformed Baptists are talking about with each other. We're both, we're both quoting from the first chapter of the London Exhibition, and the Campbellites have something to do with this?

Really, private interpretation trumps what anyone had ever said or thought about Scripture. You have, even you see, I think still today, the impact of the landmark movement and the denial of universal church still impacting us.

You have the... Impacting who? It ain't impacting me. I mean, 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, but that's not what he's saying.

Who are these people that are literally being influenced by landmarkism? Where have, read, read any of the books I've written where I've gone into church history and landmarkism? Really? Wow. Bible-ism and the experiential, maybe even mystical emphasis on the 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. So this mishmash of stuff has become unquestioned presuppositions, and they're the ones that have recognized it and are freeing us from that?

Is that literally what's being said? We're really out of step with the stream of church history and how Christians approach the Bible, and how we understand the stream of history of a church that Christ is building.

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 in that way. And in recent years, recent decades, with good historical study, a better understanding of our confessional standard.

We haven't done good historical study before past few years. I mean, no one, no one did England history instead of Richard Maher. Nobody. Absolutely. Schaffner. 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 Christians have understood the relationship of scripture and the church since the days of the apostles.

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. Really? Really? So much of the most meaningful study of church history, especially as you deal with the period from Constantine through, well, Constantine onwards.

There's a particular period of development that's extremely important, but there's all sorts of different understandings. The understanding of the late fourth century is the understanding of the early second.

There is no one understanding. That's just naive on a level that's just astonishing. 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.

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. I know some great theologians. I don't know any great theologian that I really admire who is arrogant.

All the great theologians that I know are humble people who really do look back. 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, I'm speaking in generalities here, but there is an individualistic, isolated evangelical or modern evangelical or fundamentalistic approach to understanding the Bible and theology that has cut some of the ties to the church that has gone before it and is suspicious of tradition.

Has absolutely positively nothing to do with me. Has nothing to do with this conversation whatsoever. The idea that those of us who are resisting the imposition of a childishly simplistic premodern, postmodern, 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. Joe, why don't you come down to Grace Bible Theological Seminary in a few weeks. I'll be teaching early church history. You want to see if what you're saying about us is true?

That we're just going to, I'm not sure what we're going to 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.

I'm not sure what we're going to do for those days. No, I know exactly what we're going to be doing for those days. We are going to be cramming way too much into way too short a period of time and despite how hard it's going to be, I'm still going to make sure we spend time digging into the Epistle to Diognetus and digging into Clement and talking about Tertullian's comments on baptism.

Yeah, we're going to do church history because we do church history. That's not even part of this. It is a complete canard, a complete canard to present this as, well, we're the church history side and they're the old Baptists that just, you know, they don't look back on their tradition and whatever you want to call that.