Talkin' Calvinism with Jason Breda

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Hey guys, it's Keith Foskey again, and we are in our final conversation here at the

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Y -Calvinism Conference in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and I am joined by a man who just went many rounds with Dr.

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James White. This is Jason Brita. He was the one who was debating Dr. White today over the subject, is it the

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Reformed Doctrine of the Atonement biblical and important? Can I ask you a quick question about that, because I was the moderator, which was kind of cool, but I didn't have any specific input on the thesis.

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Obviously, you guys discussed that. What made you come up with that thesis? I was not the one who came up with it, so it was offered to me, and yeah, so it was just kind of given.

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I asked, okay, are we going to a specific text, or are we going to go from a general sense, you know, on the

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Atonement? I was told it was general, so that's makes it a little harder, I think. I've done debate myself, and the broader the thesis, the more difficult the debate.

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Because there's so many different ways you can go about something like that when it's very broad. Now, had you originally planned to do the

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Romans 8 opening statement? Was that your opening statement before you even heard what he was going to say?

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Or did you have several? Oh, I had so many different ways that I was thinking of it, but the big thing that I know that I've watched

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James White for years, I mean, I was, when I became a Calvinist, I was listening to James White debate

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Michael Brown and others over the doctrines of Calvinism, and, you know, learning everything that he adhered to, and I was on his side.

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So that was interesting, but knowing through the years that he has this focus on Trinitarian harmony, and how he brings that out through Romans chapter 8, which

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I don't think is really out of Hebrews 7, that's more of the intercessory work of Christ. So I know he's trying to connect it, and it is connected, but, and that's, so that's where I kind of...

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So you kind of, having your background... I knew I was going to focus on that text, for sure, because I knew that's where he was going to go.

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Just, you know, true to form, and he did. Okay, yeah, well, it's one thing to know your opponent, and that's good.

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It's kind of going in, and when I say opponent, I don't mean like you guys hate one another, and sometimes I think people think if you debate someone, you don't respect them, or you hate them, or something like that, and you know,

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I've tried to work hard to develop relationships with guys that I disagree with, so that we can have those conversations, and it not be, you know, at the end of the day, you got to say, you still know me, you know, and not you, but I mean other guys, and maybe one day you, we could say that, that we know one another.

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Yeah, for sure, absolutely. Yeah, I think disunity is such a devastation to the

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Church, and we need to make sure that we're not divisive, because,

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I mean, that, I think, negatively impacts the Gospel. If we're divisive with one another, there's no fruit behind it.

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It's not the fruit of the Spirit that we're operating if we're divisive, but we can be in unity for the sake that Jesus is the

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Savior. There's a lot of things that we can agree with, yeah, 100%. But, you know, this is where obviously we differ, but we still are called to love each other in Christ.

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Even with substantial differences. Correct. Yeah, absolutely, and we wouldn't deny that they are, but we would say we can still love each other, and call each other brother.

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All right, so with that, you mentioned you were a Calvinist, and beforehand I told you what I was gonna ask you was specifically, can you give us a history of how you became a

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Calvinist, how long you were a Calvinist, and then when you came out of Calvinism? I think that's helpful for people, simply to establish somewhat of a, you know, a pedigree.

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When somebody says, I was a Calvinist, well does that, and I'm not saying this is you, but sometimes that means, you know, well I was a

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Calvinist for five minutes, and I'm certainly not making that as an accusatory statement, but it's just like when

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I hear someone like the head of the Atheist Association say, well

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I was a Calvinist, or I'm sorry, I was a Christian. I say, well as a Baptist, I don't believe you ever really were a

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Christian, and again I'm not saying that about you, I'm saying that about someone. If he's an atheist, if he's repudiated Christ, I don't think his confession was ever really true.

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Yeah. So someone might say, well if you say you're a Calvinist, you know, what's your bona fides, right?

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Yeah. I grew up in the Assemblies of God denominations, from two years old, married, had our first two children there, and you know,

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I think part of the reason why, we were searching for the deeper meat of the Word. Sure.

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You know, I think there's just a lot of churches that are just focused on the Gospel, which is great, but then it's really just soft messages, it's thematic, not that thematic is not good, or a topical sermon can't be good, but we just, the church we were in, we desired the more meat of the

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Word. And so we started searching, and we ended up in a non -denominational

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Reformed church. They held to all five points of TULIP, and really the flavor,

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I guess if you want to go there, is it was a carbon copy of John MacArthur. Yeah, so a dispensational

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Calvinistic church. Correct. Okay. Yep. And so I was, the reason why we left the

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Assemblies of God is because I was pursuing pastoral ministry, and the denomination holds to the fact that you must speak in tongues in order to be a pastor, and I'm like,

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I don't see that in the Scriptures, we need to go find another church. And so we did, this church started, had an apprenticeship program that they trained leaders up, and so I got into,

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I remember going, first time we went there, my wife asked me, she's like, what did you, what'd you think of the message?

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And I said, I think I learned more in this one sermon than probably a year and a half combined, like at the other church.

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And she's so exegetically correct and satisfying. Correct, yes. And we didn't know at the onset,

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I mean, although we were listening to John MacArthur, we're listening to Moody Radio, there was listening to Paul Washer, but not coming to the understanding of like all the ins and outs of what

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Calvinism taught, the five points and everything that way. So that was a process of learning and growing, and you know, these are men that love the

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Lord, and they wanted to lock arms and train brothers in Christ for the purpose of the

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Word, and because I think that they had, I mean, they wanted the

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Word to be proclaimed, they cared about it, getting the text right, it felt right.

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And I'm coming from almost a nothing understanding outside of like spiritual milk of just the Gospel, which, not to discredit the

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Gospel, you know, the Gospel is everything, but to understand things in context and historical background, they're just things

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I just wanted to know that I didn't, and they trained me in that. And so I was there for 11 years, my wife and family and I, we served in a variety of ministries, teaching, preaching, student ministries, children, adults, led small groups, so all of it was there, trying and working for the hope that I would become a pastor.

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I wasn't seeking a paid position, it was just a position I just wanted to hold because I wanted to serve the Church. I then started going through ACBC and getting my certification through Biblical Counseling because I just knew that there were a lot of churches and pastors.

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If you look at the statistics, it's just, it's heartbreaking to see how many people, how many pastors leave the ministry because of how devastating it is, and not feeling like they're equipped enough.

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I think it's like over 80 % of pastors don't feel qualified for the position that they're in. That might be something for you to come back and talk about.

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I mean, honestly, being a counselor, whether you're Calvinist or not, being a pastor,

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I've been a pastor at the same church for 18 years, and it is hard. Yeah. It is a hard job. Yeah. I mean, you see the ugly all over the place, and it's discouraging.

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I think it's like 83 % of pastors' wives wish their husbands were not in the ministry, and those are just terrible statistics.

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And I think the issue is, it's just where we're at in time, what's going on in the culture is that there's a lot of people that they don't read the

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Word, they expect the pastor to do all the serving and all the ministering, and they're not doing what

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Paul said in Romans 15 -14. But he tells the Roman believers that he believes that they are able to admonish, which means to gently correct one another.

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They didn't even have the full canon of Scripture, you know? And he's telling them that they're able to admonish or counsel each other that way, and so how much more do we have now having a full canon that we can now go to and help and love one another?

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So I just think there's a massive need for that, and if more believers were in the Word and seeing how they can apply it to love brothers and sisters in Christ, the pastors wouldn't feel this burden, they'd be able to do what they're called to do,

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I think in a more effective and efficient way. So you were serving in a Calvinistic church for 11 years.

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Did you ever intellectually affirm everything the church taught? And again,

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I'm not questioning you, I'm just literally wanting to make sure that this is what you're saying, okay? I'm assuming that that's correct.

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Yep. Okay, and then how long ago did that change? I don't know how old you are, I could do some math I guess, but...

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February, I think it was January or February of 2021 is when

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I started diving into the scriptures and just validating. My position has always been

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I want to submit to the text. Whatever the text says, I will submit to it. And I had a friend that came out of Calvinism after 20 years, so longer than me, and it was, and I remember just telling them, well what about John 6, what about Acts 13 -48, what about Ephesians 1, and I just started listing all of these passages, and I didn't get a really good answer from them, but it still just made me think, you know what,

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I always want to give a defense for what I believe, and I want to go to the text, and I want to read it in context, and I know one of the principles to hermeneutics is to not come to the text with a presupposition, let the text, you know, draw out what there is.

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So God, if there's any presuppositions I'm holding on to that are not what you want, then I'm going to just read it the best

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I can. And so I did, and the first thing that I came across that shocked me was how

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Regeneration Preceding Faith, I could not find an explicit text that affirmed that.

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Now, it's weird, but the first thing that came to as a result of that was limited atonement.

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So limited atonement was the first point of the tool that kind of fell off for me. I don't know how

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I was thinking through, like Regeneration Preceding Faith just went to there, but that's the first thing it did.

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And my pastors, they came alongside me and they said, well I don't think that's all that that's gonna do. If you don't believe

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Regeneration Precedes Faith, there's gonna be more that obviously I think that affects. And they were true.

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You were still at the Calvinistic Church? I was still at the Calvinistic Church, yes. Okay. Yeah, they still desired,

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I mean, the way that things ended was very sweet and beautiful, although very, very sad and heartbreaking, because...

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It can be both. Yeah, but you know, when we said our goodbyes, the pastors were there, not all of them, but you know, most of them were there, affirming us as brothers and sisters in Christ, me and my wife, and I was affirming them as brothers in Christ, and our equal love for one another, and the church.

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But I told them, I said that I think the right thing to do, because I don't want to create disunity in the church,

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I need to leave, we need to leave, so that we don't create unintended consequences in the church.

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And if we're not holding that anymore, then I would love for there to be a way that we could align together, but they stood where they stood,

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I stood where I stand, and I just made the decision, I think the best thing to do, so that there's no division, there's enough of it already in the church, is for us to leave.

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And I know we said we weren't gonna name the church, but did you end up in a

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SBC style church, or is it a non -denom, we're Big Eva?

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Yeah, it's an Anabaptist Roots Church that we are a part of right now, and so they are...

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That's gonna lead me to another question, and I'm very curious, and I know our time is limited, but finish,

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I'm churches, and their statement of faith is, I mean, it's very general in the sense of like, you know,

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Jesus is the Savior, and it's very standard, you know, one -on -one Christianity, where it comes into like secondary issues is very universal, and they don't hold strong positions on secondary issues.

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So yeah, that's where we're at now. We've been there since June of last year.

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Okay, thank you so much for sharing that, and I'm gonna look into that, but I'm not familiar with that particular group.

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I like to do bowtie dialogues where I interview pastors from other churches, simply to learn about them, and learn about their history.

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I call it bowtie dialogue because I wear a bowtie, not because they do. You know, come in as sort of like an interviewer and do that.

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But my question, and what that led the question to, is, and I'm not sure what your studies are in Baptist history and things like that, would you agree that Anabaptist history and Baptist history do have a diverging line, and they are not unified?

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Correct. From what I have read, and I've not done an exhaustive look, but what

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I have read, yes, there is. Is that the reason why you chose the Anabaptist, or was it just the church was what you wanted?

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Yeah, the church, we knew some people there, so it was one of the churches that we were considering going to, and what we found is that, you know, it's expositional preaching, which is something

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I wanted to keep, and it's hard, I think, at least in our area, it was hard to find a church that did expository preaching that was not

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Calvinistic. I mean, I think that's a great thing that Calvinism, I think, has brought in, is the fact of like the emphasis of going line by line and verse by verse, so I, you know, so that, but we went in, and the people loved on us immediately.

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I don't hear anything from the pulpit. The pastor is very open and humble, and he says, you know, if you hear anything that you think is an error, please come to me and talk, let's have a discussion about that.

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There's a huge focus on discipleship and just sharing the gospel and meeting the needs in the variety of ministries within the, you know, outside the world, but you know, but also in the local community.

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Excellent, excellent. Well Jason, I know you've got places to go and people to see, and I just want to thank you for giving this this short amount of time just to kind of talk about who you are, because I'm sure this debate with James White's gonna get out to a few people, and those people might want to know a little bit about your history and everything, and I know

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I do, and I learned a lot, and I certainly pray for you as a brother, and I'm glad you found a church that's loving on you, because that's important, and I'm the first to say, or maybe not the first to say,

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I'm always willing to say that God's people are in all of these various denominations, and we can love each other, and I do see this as a difference among brothers.

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Yeah. So thank you for coming today and for being a very prepared debater.

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You're ready to go. You're a very sharp young man. I don't know if I should call you a young man. I feel like an old man. I feel like an old man. But thank you for coming and being a part of the show.