1689 2nd London Confession of Faith

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints.

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I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are Michael Deere and Chris Kiesler. We are going to do another round robin of questions dealing with the confessions, and specifically it looks like the 1689

Second London Baptist Confession. The first question reads, why doesn't your church just use the 1689

Second London Confession of Faith since you are clearly a Reformed Baptist church? Michael?

Right, so the 1689 Second London Confession of Faith is

I think a very helpful document. I've read through it. We've actually studied through it in something we call

Timothy School around here, walking through all the different statements and looking up the scripture references that are appended beneath the statements and so forth, doing our best to understand what it is affirming and denying and so forth.

The 1644 slash 1646 First London Confession of Faith, I find to be more accessible.

I find it to be more warm and biblical, and I find that the scripture references in the

First London are much more tied to their statements than in the Second. I think it was one of the surprises that we found as we walked through the

Second London Confession of Faith that the scripture references very often put underneath the various statements.

Sometimes it was hard for us to figure out why they were there, couldn't understand the connection. But we have read through it, we have studied it.

I have several copies on my shelf, and the question is why don't we just use that since we are clearly a Reformed Baptist church?

So we do preach the doctrines of grace. We do preach the sovereignty of God's grace in salvation, and we do stress that.

I think the five points of Calvinism are good as far as their utility, as far as their usefulness to remind us about what does it mean that we are saved by God, by grace alone.

But I think the five solas are probably the five points that are more important. We're saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to scripture alone, to the glory of God alone.

I think those are the five points that are actually more important, and the five points of Calvinism are trying to get at that grace alone part,

I think, at some level, trying to parse out what does that actually mean. And I think that in any kind of effort in doing that, there ought to be a very robust submission to the scripture in trying to say what the scripture is saying.

But to affirm Calvinistic doctrines about salvation does not mean that you're

Reformed. I didn't think you could be Reformed unless you were covenantal and creedal.

And confessional. Yeah, confessional. All right, so I think Sproul was right when he said in his book about what is

Reformed doctrine, what does it mean to be Reformed, and so on. I think he's right with the idea that you have to be confessional,

Calvinistic, and covenantal. I think he's correct. And while we would ascribe to the sovereignty of God and salvation, which would, most people would say, well, that's

Calvinistic. Like, yeah, I would agree. We do not ascribe to a confession. If you go to our website, if you look at our church documents, we have a very basic statement of faith stressing the essentials of what we're to believe.

And we don't go much beyond that. Mainly, we would like people to be members of our church without requiring them to have read a whole bunch of theological works and to be theological sophisticates.

We don't have even spoken with people who have come from confessional churches, 1689 confessional churches, who were members there.

And I asked them what they thought of the confession, and they said, well, I didn't really understand it. But they signed because you had to become part of that church.

I think it's a good thing to have some basic doctrines that are essential, that people should agree to if they're gonna be a member of your church.

But I don't think you should put the bar so high. I mean, just to think about the 1689

Second Lenten Baptist Confession of Faith, a lot has been written about it. In fact, commentaries on it have to be written for people to find out what it actually means.

Massive amounts of debate. Websites, YouTube channels, full -fledged formal debates, warring books that disagree with each other, whole avenues of scholarship to try to figure out what this thing means.

That doesn't make it very useful for the church. It is useful as a reference.

We can go and look and see what our Baptist brethren of that many years ago, centuries ago, said about God, about Christ, about the word.

And there are some helpful formulations of doctrine in that confession.

I find it helpful on some things. I really do. It's a useful document, but to require people to sign it, to sign onto it and say,

I'm in full agreement with it when it's the domain of experts to know and to tell us what it means, seems to me that we are not simply adopting a confession, but adopting a magisterium who appropriately interprets the confession for us.

And I don't agree with that. The question, more broadly, when it says, why doesn't your church just use the 1689

Second Latin Baptist Confession? I think that brings up like, how do you use confessions in general?

If you're trying to be biblical and you've got the five solas, what are the confessions for? How would a church use it?

You're not using it to place it over the congregation? It's a great question.

I'll give you an example. A dear brother in Christ who is pastoring the church I used to pastor, okay?

He is in the process of fully reforming the church that I pastored, okay? He's doing a great job.

He's a faithful man, and in reforming that church and becoming a truly reformed Baptist church, they are reading the confession as part of their worship service.

They will read a portion of it. They will read it together out loud as part of their liturgy. And of course, then they also will read some of the creeds and they will go through some catechisms and they will use this as a part of their discipleship, their weekly discipleship.

And honestly, if you're gonna be a confessional church, it just makes sense to make full use of it and to make it a very big part of the life of your church, to use it in your discipleship, to direct people to the truths of the word of God.

And I'm not saying that people who are confessional put the confession above the scripture. I'm not saying that they do that or that they would even desire to do that.

I don't think so. But to use it as a reformed church, I think the way that this brother is doing that,

I think that that would be a way to do it and an effective way to do it if you're looking to be a truly reformed

Baptist church. But we are not because we're not confessional and we're also not monolithically covenantal.

So it's a situation where we have folks in our church who are more of the dispensational mindset.

We have people in our church who would be happy with the 1689 and like, you know, this is great and just fine with the covenantal structures of covenant of grace, covenant of works, covenant of redemption, and the formulations of what all that means.

And okay, I could understand why because you're trying to see how the Bible fits together in the good news of Jesus Christ.

But I'm not covenantal. None of the elders are, I don't think. I don't think any of us ascribe to covenantalism in toto.

So we're not gonna like say, oh, we're all about that framework. So that's why we don't use it.

I mean, it just, that's not an accurate reflection of who we are. So if someone's gonna try to nail us down, we're not a

Reformed Baptist, we're Sovereign Grace Baptist. And we're not, you know, we're not officially anything. You know, but if you gotta have a title of it, you know, we're gonna be somewhere,

I'm gonna be preaching and you're gonna hear me preach along the lines of New Covenant theology. But even that's not officially a defined position.

Right. Yeah, it's definitely not a Reformed position, right? That's just because someone hasn't written a New Covenant confession.

Well, they have written a New Covenant confession. People have written on it, but as people have tried to write on it over the years, because it's a biblical theological movement.

So it's basically saying we wanna stick with biblical theology, we're not gonna so much invest in systematic theology.

And because of that, a lot of it turns into a correction of systematic theology's edges, right?

So where the systematic theology pushes the believers into the edges that don't really fit well with scripture,

New Covenant theology is saying, okay, hang on guys, we really can't go out that far, it's not necessary for us to.

So you mentioned some of the major disagreements that you would have, I guess, where you wouldn't share the views of the 1689.

That's kind of the major ones that you mentioned, but there are some adiaphora too, right? Well, and essential to being

Reformed is that you are covenantal and then you're confessional. Those things go together because the confessions that go with Reformed churches are all covenantal, right?

So 1689 or Westminster Confession of Faith or Heidelberg Catechism and so forth, those official documents are all covenantal in their framework of understanding the

Bible. None of them are dispensational at all. And so if you ascribe to that, then the one thing that unites them,

I mean, what's similar between the Second Lenten Baptist Confession of Faith and Westminster Confession?

It's like, well, some people say, well, the only thing different is the infant baptism. Actually, there's a lot. There's some significant differences.

But what unites them all is a sense in which the Ten Commandments, if you take them and shake them loose of their context in Sinai, okay, if you shake them loose of Sinai and you're left with Ten Commandments reduced to just those words that you see on the posters on the wall, take that out of context, and I'm using that tongue -in -cheek, you take the

Ten Commandments out of context, then this serves as the eternal moral law of God that covenantalists believe is present at creation, in the garden, given to Adam, that that's the covenant of works that Adam failed to live up to, and therefore that is the righteousness that Christ achieves, and thus the eternal moral law of God expressed in the

Ten Commandments remains the full standard of God's holy righteousness that Christ achieves on our behalf, and thus we are saved.

So I believe that Christ does stand in for us and that his righteousness is by which we are saved, but to take the construct of the eternal moral law of God, that's what's similar between the 1689ers and the

Westminster Confession advocates and so forth. So they have that construct of the law of God, and then they read much more so on the side of the

Presbyterians, but they read the Old Testament on into the New, and there's a lack of satisfying fulfillment in Christ on a lot of levels,

I think, with some of those readings of the text. What they call the 1689 Federalists amongst the

Baptists will see more discontinuity than the Presbyterians are to a great degree, and some of the things that I would affirm about Christ's fulfillment, they would also affirm.

So they're a lot closer to New Covenant theology, but they're still gonna hold onto the covenantal frameworks of covenant of works, covenant of grace, and the eternal moral law of God.

So rather than reading the Ten Commandments, the eternal moral law of God, back into the creation story, you would say we have the creation language, and then that goes forward into the covenant, and we see those elements in the covenants progressively going forward.

Yes, and the standard of God's righteousness is revealed in Christ, and the way that Christ talks about his righteousness is of vast superior nature.

It's of superior nature than what has already yet been revealed. He's far greater, he's far brighter, his righteousness is far more full than that which we've seen in the shadows.

So Ten Commandments, not against any of the Ten Commandments at all, but when we see their fulfillment in Christ, his righteousness is more impressive.

So it's not that he measures up to the Ten Commandments, it's that his righteousness is in agreement, but far better than the

Ten Commandments. He must be more righteous than the scribes and Pharisees. Right, you have heard it said, but I say unto you, and he does quote the

Ten Commandments as he works through that, and not just the Ten Commandments. He walks through ceremonial laws, he walks through civil laws, he walks through moral laws, and says, you have heard it said, but I say unto you.

And so in that, in the scriptures, we also don't have any action. I just used labels of separating the law into three parts, but the holy scriptures do not separate the law into three parts, into moral, civil, and ceremonial.

The Bible doesn't do that. That framework is strange to the text.

It's not there, it's foreign to the text. And so what we find is that Jesus satisfyingly fulfills the entirety of the law, and he stands in as our righteousness, but he is also our lawgiver, and he tells us how to live.

He is our king, he is our authority. And so, yes, sin is lawlessness. And if I rebel against Jesus, I'm being lawless.

All right, well, we can move on to our second question about the 1689. The question reads, in chapter six of the 1689, why does it use the word permit in reference to the fall rather than cause?

Doesn't God have to be the cause of all things? What am I missing here? So the concern in describing the eternal decrees of God, in terms of the sovereignty of God over all things, the concern is to be very cautious when approaching certain areas that we're not declaring

God as the actor of evil, that he's not causing evil.

Okay, so he's not sinning. James tells us that God does not sin, that God does not act in an evil fashion.

God is holy, he is pure, he is right. He's not capricious, he's not like the pagan gods that acts whatever way that they, or just randomly.

But God is pure and he's holy. All that he desires is good. All that he does is good.

So in trying to understand how it is that he's sovereign even over evil, the confessions, like the 1689, tread very carefully.

And they will talk about God being, in one sense, responsible for, but not guilty of evil, of permitting it, not causing it directly.

So in the different orders of logic in trying to describe how this works, that God can use primary means, secondary means, and so forth to ordain and structure everything that goes on so that God is never the author of evil, but that he is ultimately responsible for all things, yes, but is he culpable?

No. Working through all the logical lines on that is, I would say, very unsatisfying, okay?

I have always found it to be unsatisfying as I worked through the concerns. Now, what

I find more satisfying is the way that Paul approaches it in Romans 9, okay? Because Romans 9 says, whoever

God has mercy on, he's gonna have mercy on whom he has mercy, he's gonna harden whom he hardens. It's entirely up to God to save.

So evil people are gonna be evil and they're gonna be hard -hearted and God's the one who hardens their heart.

And here, you know, he has mercy on this person and they repent. And so one is, that's grace, but the other one was judgment and God is righteous in all of it.

He's good in all of it. And then Paul impersonates in his writing the objector and says, well, then why does

God still find fault for who can resist his will? Now, that is the question, right?

And that is the main objection to every robust affirmation of the sovereignty of God.

Everybody who is anti -Calvinist or anti any kind of sovereignty of God, that is the exact objection that they raise.

And it's right there in the Bible. And Paul puts it out there, said, hey, this seems like a pretty good objection.

And then Paul does not then go into a discussion of primary, secondary, tertiary means and the difference between being responsible for versus the author of, he doesn't do that.

He says, who are you, oh man, to answer God that way? Job, that's the whirlwind speech.

And Job had to put his hand over his mouth and he says, you're the clay, you're the pot. God is the potter.

So you don't get to say that kind of stuff to him. And you know what? That is very satisfying to my soul.

That puts me in a humble posture and that leaves me worshiping God. It leaves the mystery right where it's supposed to be and I get to rejoice in him.

It's extremely poetic too. Yeah. What a response. Oh man. Who are you, oh man? Yeah, and it's like, oh right, yeah,

I am the creature. I needed that, thanks. And so someone's gonna say, well, that's very intellectually dissatisfying.

Well, your intellect is for what? What is it for?

For your satisfaction? For the Lord's. For the Lord's, isn't it? Ah, so which direction are we going with our intellect here?

So I think you can be a robust affirmer of the sovereignty of God in all things and then when somebody brings up the classic objection, it's right there in the

Bible and how to answer it's right there in the Bible and isn't that nice? So the confession is going to try to give a voice to some of the systematic theological developments of trying to answer this question with some lines of logic here.

So they use the term permit rather than cause. But people who aren't satisfied with mystery are going to say, no,

God causes evil and it's good. And somebody else is gonna say, well, God permits evil and it's good.

And then they're gonna look at each other and disagree and write books on it. The writing of books, there's no end?

No. Yeah, yeah. I think we can move on to the next one about the 1689.

The next question reads, the 1689 speaks about how some men and angels are foreordained to eternal life, but others are said to be left in their sin justly.

I agree that we are responsible, but is this an attempt to avoid God causing some to be reprobate and others to be saved?

Isn't the logical conclusion that it's his plan for some to live and some to perish eternally? I think this kind of falls in some of the same trap of thinking we were talking about just a second ago.

It does. I wanna ask a question because these are all related to 1689 and we're talking about logic chopping and permits and causes and then this one's kind of the same thing logically.

We've mentioned systematic theology. Would you say that the people who ascribe to the 1689 rely heavily on systematic theology, which is, is systematic theology primarily concerned with checking all the boxes or putting things in the right category?

Well, I don't know. I think that it kind of depends on where your interests are and how you've been discipled and where you feel the need of the hour is.

Sacrifice a lot of time out of their family life and so on to work through these issues and write about them and try to help others and they've got it in their mind that folks need something, you know, a greater fear of the

Lord, a greater reverence, need to be able to worship, have these questions answered and to recover sound doctrine that can really help with the health of the local church and so the way they're wired and what they're interested in,

I think has a lot to say about that. And then some people, of course, depending on how they've been trained, whether a

PhD is in, whether a doctorate is in, historical theology or systematic theology versus biblical theology and so on, it's gonna kind of dictate about how they approach these things.

But I would say that I think there is, if you're going to be extremely interested in the confession, what the confession says and how it all fits together so that you can be confessional in agreement with the confession, that it's a systematic endeavor.

The systematic theology, again, that's not a, systematic theology is simply trying to get a high -level view of how everything fits together at a 30 ,000 -foot level, okay?

Biblical theology is more like a 1 ,000, 2 ,000 -foot level. And since the 1689 is covenantal, there's a system in place so you have to try to work through the system and there's a lot of that.

And what you see at 30 ,000 feet or 40 ,000 feet is not gonna be as clear and the biblical theologian flying over the same area that the systematic theologian, systematic theologian's gonna describe it in some fashion because they're working with a larger picture and system and so on.

And the biblical theologian is saying, hey, up there, that's not what this actually looks like down here, you know?

But it's a good reminder that we were given the word to read, to meditate, to study, and to light in and we should be doing that in the scriptures more than the systems.

Can a system help you stay on track and keep you from getting too far off line?

And hey, GPS system is nice, isn't it? When you're kind of wandering around in the woods, nice if you can get that GPS system working, make sure that you don't get too far off course.

That's nice. But we're not to delight ourselves in the system, right?

But in the scriptures themselves. So that's where I think there's a little bit different.

Now this question about the angels and men, people are like, angels were elected or decreed to be reverberate.

We have some language in the scriptures about elect angels in Timothy and fallen angels reserved for judgment in Jude.

So there's a little bit there. But of course the Bible spends most of the time not talking about angels and demons, but talking about those made in God's image.

And the question really is about why does the confession talk about some where it seems to be actively foreordained to eternal life and then others are said to be left in their sin, like a passing over?

Well, in reformed confessions, they take an approach, they all take that approach.

Generally, I mean, they all affirm the active election of the redeemed, of the saved, God actively chooses them unto salvation because he simply is merciful and kind and gracious.

And when it comes to those who are in their sin, he just passes over those and leaves them there, which is justice.

That is what is fair because they have sinned against God. Okay, the classic term for that is infralapsarian.

And this is talking about the ordering of decrees. Again, trying to understand how it is that God is sovereign and makes his decisions in a logical fashion because we assume, hey,

God is logical. He's not gonna be incoherent. And that's a pretty good thing to assume. But in trying to give expression to it, theologians will talk about something called superlapsarianism versus infralapsarianism.

And they wanna know what are the order of the decrees of God that before time began,

God ordered certain things and ordered the, what did he do first? Did he order all of those who are gonna be saved first?

He decided that. And then he decided all of those who are going to be punished in hell forever.

And then he ordained the manner of their salvation through the cross. That's superlapsarianism. Infralapsarianism is, well, we're gonna order everybody who's gonna be saved first.

And then I'm gonna order the means of their salvation in the cross. And then I'm gonna decide to just pass over all those folks over there.

That's infralapsarianism. It's the nicer Calvinists, essentially. And that's what all of the confessions have chosen is infralapsarian expressions over and against the superlapsarian.

It's like, again, it's like there are passages in the Bible that affirm time and again that the reason why we're saved is because God chose to save us.

And it's just his good pleasure. And that's why I like the Greek word eklektos, eklektoi. It's not elektos, it's eklektos.

And you talk about someone who's eclectic, their style is eclectic. You walk into a room and their style is eclectic.

What brought all of these things together? Just the good pleasure of one person.

And their style is eclectic. Well, that's the style of heaven, it's eclectic.

It's all of the good pleasure of God that he chose this person over there and that person over there and brings them to heaven according to his glory.

It's eklektos. Okay, so it's all of the grace of God. So that's definitely in the Bible. We can rejoice in that.

And then we find the wicked are reserved for the day of judgment or made for the day of judgment. And this is in Proverbs.

You can find passages like this. Are we supposed to develop a system of logical, eternal decrees and figure out how that all fits together?

I think that we should think coherently. But I also think that we should observe mystery and rejoice in mystery and allow mystery to be where it's at.

Now, mystery isn't code word for, this is hard to think about, I'm gonna stop. Mystery isn't, this is controversial to think about, so I'm not going to think about it anymore.

That's not how the Bible uses mystery. Mystery in the scriptures is where God reveals that which he wants us to apprehend and conceals that which he does not want us to comprehend.

And puts us into the middle of the two wonders that we worship. So we are to know things, but we don't exhaust them.

We're not God. And so there's a lot of things that we know without fully comprehending, and that's okay.

And can we say that? And can we affirm that? I'd love to see more systematic theologies acknowledging that. The way you lined that up earlier with superlapsarian and interlapsarian, where it talked about where you kind of lined it up as foreordained means and...

Reprobation. Reprobation. Is some of the imbalance in some of this coming from the fact that if we're taking one of these positions or the other, we're focusing more on the other two things rather than the means by which?

Or is this something that we could take all together? Because the way you kind of put it, it sounded like one group really emphasizes one thing over the other two.

Well, again, remember that this is the efforts of those who hold to covenantalism and systems like it trying to see how they fit together.

So if you affirm the covenant of works and the covenant of grace and the covenant of redemption, when did

God formulate those covenants in the Godhead? When did the triune God communicate intra -Trinity and decide on the covenant of grace and covenant of works, covenant of grace, and covenant of redemption?

How did God do that and when did he do that? In what order did he do that? These are questions that arise because of the way the system seeks to address the scripture.

And other people aren't asking that question because they don't have that system. So that's kind of why they're coming up is they want to see how this all fits.

So would you kind of just reject the, you yourself, would you reject the framing of both positions or do you think the framing's okay?

I think it's important to, we can affirm some things in a systematic, with systematic theology -type language.

We can affirm some things without having to go too far, okay? So ultimately we can say that God creates all men, that God saves some and is determined to do so without respect to their merits, and that God creates all manner of men knowing that they are gonna rebel against him and reject him and that he's going to punish them forever in hell and justice.

We can affirm all of that. And we don't necessarily have to then come up with logical decrees that remove mystery where mystery was left.

So that's the thing, that's the reason why you have to have those logical decrees and know their order is because there's a dissatisfaction with mystery.

And this kind of goes back to your explanation of the biblical theology kind of hemming in the edges of the systematic.

Yes, again, it's saying, yes, of course there's harmony in the Bible. Yes, of course there's agreement in the

Bible and integrity of thought here. But some of the edges of systematics, some of those edges just aren't helpful.

And I would say even the systematic theologians who go through the effort of having to write about those edges, because again, this is part of scholasticism, right?

The previous systematic theologians talked about them, and the ones before them talked about it, and the ones before those talked about it.

They all talked about these very same things, and so the systematic theologians of today are obligated to write about these very same subjects and go out there to the edges where mystery should be allowed to be mystery, and they feel obligated to write about them.

But I would say the best ones out there recognize that we're getting into speculative waters, and they'll acknowledge it, and they will often express, you know, look, they will express humility, and they will express their own doubt, and they'll just kind of lay it out and say, here's the ideas and here's the positions without taking them, but just trying to be informative.

I think of Proverbs 25 too. It's the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings to search out a matter.

It doesn't say it's the glory of kings to reveal a matter. They can search it out, but God may conceal it and leave it a mystery.

Well, it's good to search. And Job talks about wisdom that you have to dig down deep mines to go find certain nuggets of wisdom.

That is rewarding. That is good. So we're not saying that anything deep and hard to think about and hard to parse and ponder should just be left well enough alone.

We're not saying that, but at the same time where the Bible clearly states, hey, here's mystery,

Romans nine, for example, then we should be satisfied with that. Let's spend some time working on that, describing that.

I think this is, again, I'm a homer, but Bavinck does this. Herman Bavinck talks about mystery a great deal.

In every single major section of theology, he takes the time to talk about where the mystery is.

And he says, this is a mystery, this is a mystery, this is a mystery, this, and his Reformed Dogmatics is four volumes long, okay?

And so he had a lot to write about theology, but he made sure to talk about mystery in every single major section of theology, which

I think is good. Was that in a response to others who wouldn't point out mystery, or what do you think that motivated him in there?

I think, well, two things. One, I think it was a response to the modernism that he was facing in the late 1800s, early 1900s in Dutch society and fighting against the modernist rationalist theology coming off the continent.

And I think that he was fighting against that. But also, I think he was fighting against the speculative dissatisfaction with mystery so evident in Kuyper, his contemporary,

Abraham Kuyper. And as Kuyper went off to do other work and Bavinck came in behind him to take up the same post,

Bavinck was far more grounded, and Kuyper was more speculative. Kind of killed two birds with one stone then there.

Yeah. Well, I think we can wrap up with that. Let's move on to our recommendations, Michael. My recommendation is, it's a little bit connected to this topic, but it's a book full of essays.

It came from a conference from Down Under in Australia on revelation and reason.

It's in a series of books where they talk about theology, systematic and historical, but it's called

Revelation and Reason in Christian Theology. Revelation and Reason in Christian Theology.

And I don't know who the painting is of on the front, but it looks like he has a headache, which, you know, I can understand.

It was edited by Christopher C. Green and David L. Starling by Lexham Press.

And it's a part of a series called Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology. So I found it interesting.

I was in the middle of a debate with an atheist, and a lot of it was about epistemology, and so I was reading several different things on epistemology.

I was reading through, and some of the essays were obviously written from people I disagree with. And so it was just kind of like, huh, wow, they feel obligated to say these things because they've already given up on these territories over here.

And the other folks were a lot more helpful, and so it was a good cross -section,

I think. All right, Chris. I would recommend a farmer called a lunatic farmer,

Joel Salatin. He runs a farm called Pollyface Farms. Pollyface, because he uses different breeds of animals all on the farm, chickens and pigs and sheep and goats and all that stuff.

Puts them to work. Puts them to work. Makes them move. Moves them around. And so he's called a lunatic farmer.

He's got a series on, I think, Canon that you can watch. That's pretty fun to watch. But he's got all stuff on YouTube.

You can get to it for free. Lots of good advice. And a lot of it's just entertaining to watch to see what they're doing, how they're trying to build out things.

And he's starting to get more involved in kind of like the political arena, all of the regulations and restrictions that are put on farmers and that type of stuff.

So Joel Salatin is his name. It's like he's using animals the way God intended. Right. Yeah, get them out there.

Get them moving. Let them do their thing. It's good stuff. Yeah. Do you know if he has any connection with the way that they were starting to farm and ranch in Rhodesia with some of the similar, oh,

I guess you would say, tactics? I don't know about him specifically. I know that there's a movement, like regenerative farming.

They'll call it different things, but basically rotational grazing. And that type of stuff. Yep, mob grazing.

Mob grazing, yeah. So there's a lot of different guys. I'm not sure if he's involved in that endeavor or not.

As far as I'm concerned, he's the OG. The OG. The OG, yeah. He makes me want to get like a chicken tractor and start pushing chickens around my yard.

If I had a privacy fence, I probably would have. Yeah. I was worried about people coming by like, hey, look, there's a flogging chicken.

Let's just grab him. There are dogs. Yeah, exactly. All right, well, my recommendation this week is the

Dorian Principle, a biblical response to the commercialization of Christianity by Conley Williams.

Michael has passed that out to a few of us guys to read and peruse. I went through it the first time.

I'm kind of going back through it here and there whenever I get the time to mark up places where I'm finding it to be more helpful or less helpful.

But especially on my understanding of how ministry is to be funded, how we see the principles laid out in scripture, starting with Christ and Paul's arguments for how his ministry is funded because of the way that the

Lord has taught him and shown him to do this in his ministry. Sometimes the reasons he does not or does take funds from specific churches and having theological reasons for that.

But he goes for the first probably three -fourths of the book laying out the principle, which we've discussed.

You probably didn't need that long to do that, but I appreciate hammering that out very thoroughly. But some of the applications that the

Dorian Principle has in funding ministries or funding missions giving or funding parachurch organizations and where it touches on all these things even touches a lot of open -source publication for old theological texts or even apps in use that would be very useful for church ministry or pastors and theologians.

But it was a pretty eye -opening read on a few occasions, especially his explanation of false teachers, which

I wasn't prepared for. But when he pointed it out in the text, I was like, okay, I guess that is added in on that.

But it was a pretty enjoyable read, really short and helpful in understanding where some current ministries today and missions giving can go completely awry and just based upon the principles that they begin with, the first principles that they begin with.

So that is the Dorian Principle, a Biblical Response to the Commercialization of Christianity by Conley Williams.

What do we think before, Michael? I'm thankful that the Lord answers prayer, that we can go to Him and know

Him as our Heavenly Father and because of Jesus and dwelt by the Holy Spirit, we can confidently go and pray and ask our

Heavenly Father for what we need. And I'm so thankful for answered prayers and to see that time and again and to not only have my faith affirmed by that, but the faith of my wife and my children, my brothers and sisters in Christ here at the church.

Thankful that we just have together a collective memory of so many answered prayers and that we can, just given enough time, we can sit and share with one another and just list all these different things that God has done and we can give

Him praise for it. Amen, Chris? I'm thankful for God's steadfastness or constancy when times are changing, seasons of life, people coming into your life, people leaving your life, different circumstances.

God is constant through all of that, that we can constantly go to His word and He sustains us in that.

I've got a lot of things going on right now in lots of different areas with family, extended family, and then looking at moving and things like that.

But just to know that it's God's providence and then it's God's wisdom as I'm seeking to navigate these things.

He's just constantly there and that's a reassuring thing I'm thankful for.

Amen. Well, I'm thankful for a part of the discussion that we had earlier, Mystery, was interacting with a guy online,

I think last week, and we were having these discussions about the Calvinist view of soteriology and he was disagreeing.

I know he's a younger guy than me and hasn't bumped up against it very often. And the most common objections came up and the one that usually comes up eventually is one about infants, right?

Dying without the opportunity to hear the gospel preached and be saved.

And one of the things we've discussed in Timothy's school was the mystery there in that situation.

And a lot of guys within the Reformed world, they want to punch through that and they want to try and have an explanation for it because there's an objection, so you have to have an explanation for it, right?

And I think that's sometimes where we get caught up is we know something to be true. So every objection that comes up, we have to have an answer that satisfies that person or that objection, rather than this is the

Bible's answer to that objection. And so having admitted, hey, that this is a place where there's mystery, he was like, oh, yeah,

I agree with you there. I think there's mystery there. I don't think we can go further than what we've just discussed.

And I'm thankful that there's mystery there that we can agree upon. And he finds me more reasonable arguing from the

Bible than somebody who's gonna try and punch through that and say, well, there's the age of accountability or whatever other position that somebody's gonna take from the

Reformed side of things and just being able to say, the Bible doesn't give us a clear shot at this one, so we're just gonna move on to the next objection.

And it was satisfying to him. I am thankful for mystery and the fact that that mystery is there and it's true, so I can point to it and move along.

And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read.