Mary as Mediatrix in Roman Piety, Comments on Scott Swain's Experimental Idea from James 1:5

Technical Setup, Travel Plans, and the Upcoming Debate

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. Oh, that's echoing really, really badly. I'm in a well, I can't, okay. Welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday, which means I have not experienced the arrival of grandchild number five yet.

Could be due tomorrow, so we will see. It's just one of those things where you just don't make any plans. You just roll with the punches. And Rich is here. Rich didn't have to do what Rich was thinking he was going to have to do, so that's why we're able to do another program this week.

And as you know, next week, we head back out on a long, long trip. Do have an exciting announcement. We're going to be having a debate. Hopefully we'll have a graphic put together before long to put up.

In Pennsylvania, in the general Harrisburg area, which is my old stomping grounds, to be honest with you. I hope to visit once again, my old homes, if they're still there. Google says they are. And man, if my old elementary school was still there, man, that thing would be like, goodness gracious, old as the hills.

We'll see. But certainly the church where I was baptized will still be there. It's no longer, that particular building isn't being used as the church part anymore. So who knows what's in the baptistry there?

That's probably being used for storage, which is a great advantage that Baptists have over Presbyterians. We can store much more in an unused baptistry than the Presbyterians can. You were a strictly Catholic.

That's true. That's right. So anyway, we will be letting everybody know about that and the specifics quickly, but that debate will be going on basically the weekend after G3. So we'll be at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D .C.

And then the next week, not very far away, I'll be staying in that general area. And when I have a little bit of free time, I will be visiting some of the Civil War battle sites that I've not visited before.

Maybe visiting Gettysburg again, if possible. I was looking at the website and discovered that Little Round Top is closed and Devil's Den is closed. So that's a lot of the battlefield right there. But still, to stand where Pickett's Charge took place, that's still an amazing, amazing thing.

And if you don't know about any of that stuff, you haven't read enough American history. You need to do that. So anyway, I don't have any details right now about recording, webcasting. Webcasting is doubtful.

We just need to make sure to get a good recording of this. The subject will be on the ecclesiastical text movement and its claims. And so I'm definitely looking forward to that. And then the weekend after will be early church history class at Grace Bible Theological Seminary and all the other stuff.

So that starts next week, and that means a lot of on-the-road dividing lines back in the Mobile Command Center. And so prayers for safe driving, weather, and your support would be very, very helpful.

The Marian Prayer and Its Claims About Mary’s Intercession

I would have been somewhere around 91, 92, as I recall. I worked as, I had just taken a job as a hospital chaplain. And I figure it's been decades enough now I can start mentioning names, that Thunderbird Samaritan Hospital, that's no longer the name of the hospital.

Every hospital changes names when they get bought out by somebody else. And Thunderbird's still there. It's two, three times the size that it was when I was there. And I was one of the staff chaplains.

I had taken the job out of simple survival. I needed to have another job. We couldn't make ends meet. We had had what we called Black Tuesday, as I recall, where we lost about 70 of our monthly support in one day.

And so I've often commented it was some of the hardest work that I ever did. I am not naturally the kind of person that walks into people's hospital rooms and strikes up conversations. That's, you know, you've seen Scottish hug before.

Here, I'll do a Scottish hug for you. Catch that? That's about as personal as we get. And so, yeah, it was very challenging. One of my jobs was to go into the little chapel and to collect all the Watchtower and Wake magazines that the Jehovah's Witnesses would sneak into the hospital.

And they were doing their field ministry service and were probably claiming the time that it took them to do that. And I ended up, by the time I left, with a stack about yay tall of Watchtower and Wake magazines that I had taken from various rooms in the hospital and packed them all up.

And as I was just looking, it's a very small little room. I mean, there probably wasn't... In fact, it was smaller than this room, now that I think about it. And there were these blue chairs, blue cushioned chairs that you could sit in.

And my eye caught something stuck between the cushions of one of the chairs. And I pulled it out. And this is what I pulled out. This is the exact thing that I pulled out somewhere in the early 90s at Thunderbird Samaritan Hospital.

It's from the Redemptorists. Even has a price on it, $1. Devotions in honor of our Mother of Perpetual Help. And so I sat down, and I started looking through it. And I was stunned. I was simply stunned by what I was reading.

And only about... What was that, 90... Was that 93? I think it was... I think the debate I did with Jerry Matatix at Boston College, two debates we did at Boston College, was sometime around 93. And so I had this with me.

I took this little, this very little one right here with me. And I had it in my book bag. I was gonna find the picture. I do have the picture in my photos. Only problem with having photos on your very large laptop is that there's like 21 ,000 pictures in it.

And unless you spend the time to tag all of them, you'll never find one again without sitting there and scrolling for hours on end. Anyway, I have a picture. I think George Ralene Bonneau snapped the pictures, black and white, inside the studio at WEZE in Boston.

Janine Graf, Graf or Graf? Graf. The Janine Graf Show. And I'm in there with Jerry Matatix, the first ordained PCA minister to convert to the Roman Catholic Church. And we're going at it, as Jerry and I have gone at it for a long, long time.

We hadn't at that point. I mean, we had done our first debate in August of 90. So this was, you know, less than three years after that. And I had this in my book bag and I pulled it out. It's on the screen.

It's a slightly different translation. Very, very slightly different. But this, which is on the screen, has been posted on Twitter a number of times over the past week, maybe 10 days. Somebody took the time to put it up there.

And so a lot of people have been talking about it and the discussion started. Jimmy Akin jumped in on it as well. And when I first read this, when I was in the chapel with this little booklet and I first read this particular prayer that I'm going to read to you, my thought was, and when I pulled it out to read to Jerry on WEZE, my expected response at that time was that Jerry was going to go, oh, Mr. White, Mr. White, Mr. White, you need to understand that there's different kinds of piety and that piety is not necessarily approved by the church and dogmatically taught.

And that's what I expected. So here's the prayer. You've probably seen it if you've been reading social media. But if not, I hope you're sitting down. Oh, mother of perpetual help, thou art the dispenser of all the goods which God grants to us miserable sinners.

And for this reason, he has made thee so powerful, so rich and so bountiful that thou mayst help us in our misery. Thou art the advocate of the most wretched and abandoned sinners who have recourse to thee.

Come then to my help, dearest mother, for I recommend myself to thee. In thy hands I place my eternal salvation and to thee do I entrust my soul. Count me among thy most devoted servants. Take me under thy protection, and it is enough for me.

For if thou protect me, dear mother, I fear nothing, not from my sins, because thou wilt obtain for me the pardon of them, nor from the devils, because thou art more powerful than all hell together, nor even from Jesus, my judge himself, because by one prayer from thee he will be appeased.

But one thing I fear, that in the hour of temptation I may neglect to call on thee and thus perish miserably. Obtain for me then the pardon of my sins, love for Jesus, final perseverance and the grace always to have recourse to thee, oh mother of perpetual help.

Followed by three Hail Marys, the priest is to say, thou hast been made for us, oh lady, a refuge. All are to respond, a helper in need and tribulation. And the priest is to pray, let us pray. Oh Lord Jesus Christ, thou has given us thy mother, Mary, whose renowned image we venerate, to be a mother ever ready to help us, grant we beseech thee that we who constantly implore her help may merit always to experience the fruits of thy redemption, thou who livest and reignest world without end and all are to say amen.

It was like a kick in the gut. Yes, I had already been doing debates with Roman Catholics, but I was raised as a fundamentalist Baptist. And that meant I had never really been exposed to real popular Marian devotion.

And especially when it says the three things that the person prays for protection from, one of them is Jesus, because by one prayer from Mary, he will be appeased. Like I said, I read that on the air on WEZE and I about fell off my chair.

I remember exactly what it looked like. The picture was taken from the opposite side, outside the thing. So my recollection is Jerry over there and the picture is Jerry's facing away, I'm on the other side.

But Jerry looked at me, this former PCA minister, looked at me and said, Mr. White, my prayer is that someday you will be able to pray that prayer with me. He didn't do the, this is excessive piety, nothing.

He fully embraced what I just read to you. Now, some people might say, well, okay, it's one prayer. And yeah, it seems a little excessive. Well, it's not just one. I hold in my hand a book by St. Alphonsus de Liguri, who having written this was made a doctor of the church.

This book has gone through over 800 editions. It is fully representational of Roman Catholic piety on the subject of Mary. I quoted extensively in my book, Mary and Other Redeemer in 1999. I'll just read you one section, page 325 of this particular edition, which even has Latin footnotes.

The second argument by which it is proved that Mary was more holy in the first moment of her existence than all the saints together is found on the great office of Mediatrix of men. Mediatrix would be Mediatrix in the Latin, that would be the feminine Latin form, with which she was charged from the beginning and which made it necessary that she should possess a greater treasure of grace from the beginning than all other men together.

It is well known with what unanimity theologians and holy fathers give Mary this title of Mediatrix on account of her having obtained salvation for all, her powerful intercession and her merit of congruity, thereby procuring the great benefit of redemption for the lost world.

I say by her merit of congruity, for Jesus Christ alone is our mediator by way of justice and by merit, de condigno, as the scholastics say. He having offered his merits to the eternal father who accepted them for our salvation.

Mary, on the other hand, is a Mediatrix of grace by way of simple intercession and merit of congruity. She having offered to God, as theologians say, with Saint Bonaventura, her merits for the salvation of all men, and God as a favor accepted them with the merits of Jesus Christ.

On this account, Arnold de Chartres says that, quote, she affected our salvation in common with Christ, end quote. And Richard of St. Victor says that, quote, Mary desired, sought, and obtained the salvation of all, nay, even she affected the salvation of all, end quote.

That's EFF, not A, just in case you're wondering. So that everything good, and every gift in the order of grace, which each of the saints received from God, Mary obtained for them. Is that not representational of the rest of the book?

Oh, I, there's markings all the way through here. I could, here, I just turned to a page. But if by chance, adds the saint, thou fearest to have recourse to Jesus Christ, because the majesty of God in him over-awes you, for though he became man, he did not cease to be God, and you desire another advocate with this divine mediator, go to Mary.

For she will intercede for you with the Son, who will most certainly hear her, and then he will intercede with the Father, who can deny nothing to such a Son. So it's all the way through, it is constant.

Yeah, since then, like I said, I was one of the most spiritually troubling books to ever read. Since then, O Mary, thy office is to be the peacemaker between God and men. Let your tender compassion, which far exceeds all my sins, move you to succor me.

It's what the whole book's about. 800 editions, Liguori is a doctor of the church. This is real Roman Catholicism. This is the merit and the role, the centrality of Mary. Now, would you see much of this kind of thing at Boston College today?

Amongst the professors and liberals? No, no. Do you see this in Mexico, Central America, South America? In the shrines, in Spain, Portugal? They're not as common in Italy as they used to be, but you can still find them, especially in Southern Italy, not so much Northern Italy.

But Southern Italy, oh yes, all over the place. All over the place. So I saw a lot of people quoting this prayer, and it is perfectly appropriate for any Christian who believes what Scripture teaches to give due consideration to any prayer where an individual would demonstrate that they fear Jesus.

If you fear Jesus, then you don't know Jesus. You say, but he, like it said, he's truly God, so you're to fear God. Okay, that's different. This prayer is seeking deliverance from your sins and from Jesus.

And it has the idea that Jesus needs to be appeased. This is connected, of course, to the fact that there is no finished work of Christ in Roman Catholicism. Well, of course there is. No. If the central act of worship of the Roman Catholic system is the Mass, and you believe in transubstantiation, you believe that the Mass is a perpetuatory sacrifice, even if you say it's unbloody, and even if you say it is re-presenting the one sacrifice of the cross, it's still perpetuatory, but it doesn't actually save.

So there is no finished, accomplished, once-for-all atoning work. That's the problem. And so without that finished atoning work, the vast majority of people, since they don't have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, having been justified by faith, but since they're justified by baptism and then re-justified sacramentally over and over again, they don't have true shalom, true peace.

That was what was so central about the question that I asked Mitch Pacwa in January of 1991 at a church in Southern California. Knowing that Mitch knows like 12 languages, he would know what shalom meant, that shalom is not a temporary ceasefire.

Shalom is a wellness relationship. And yet within Roman Catholicism, you can commit a mortal sin before you go to bed tonight and die as an enemy of God. And so at best, what you have is a temporary ceasefire.

That's not shalom. That's why I asked him the question that I did in regards to the greatest commandment, loving God with our hearts, soul, mind, and strength, which none of us fulfill each and every day.

And so if violating the greatest commandment is not a mortal sin, what is? And to his commendation, his initial response didn't really address my question, but thankfully, the way we were doing it, I had the opportunity of redirecting it.

And so when I really pressed in on it, you can hear him say, there's a long pause, and then he says, I don't know. I don't know. You wouldn't get that from the vast majority of the other Roman Catholic men that I've debated.

But he gave an honest, I don't know. Because that is the question about peace and the ground of peace within the Roman Catholic system. When you have a finished work, when the cross is empty because Christ is raised and is seated at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for his people, we have that anchor that goes into the holy place.

Hebrews chapter 6. By the way, a beautiful text that a lot of people don't even know about because all they think about when they read Hebrews chapter 6 is the beginning of the chapter instead of the incredibly encouraging conclusion of the chapter.

So it was interesting to me to see a new generation, in essence, rediscovering this horrific prayer and considering what it means, considering what it communicates about Roman Catholic understanding of salvation, atonement, the relationship between Mary, the plain, purposeful, obvious paralleling in Mary of the offices of Christ.

He is mediator, she's mediatrix. He is redeemer, she's redemptrix. He's risen from the dead, she's bodily assumed into heaven. It is so obvious when you lay them all out. He's king, she's queen of heaven.

There is a purposeful, intentional paralleling in Mary of all the unique offices of Jesus. No question about it. Now, it didn't happen overnight. And it's sad to watch the zealous servants of Mary, not servants of Christ, servants of Mary, absolutely destroying early church history to try to find ways of getting around the simple reality that the dogmas of Rome today that you have to believe in regard to Mary, they were not passed on by the apostles.

They were not believed on by the early Christians. Rome always wants to sit there and say, we're the 2 ,000-year-old church, but then when faced with the reality that she has developed all sorts of concepts that were utterly unknown in the early church, I've said over and over again, the council fathers at Nicaea did not believe the things that a Roman Catholic today has to believe.

The things that a Roman Catholic today, according to the dogmatic statements of the church, has to believe. Francis doesn't believe the vast majority of them. A number of the cardinals don't believe the vast majority of them.

There is a I don't know where this is going to lead within Roman Catholicism, but Francis is looking old, and I've always had the feeling that he is going to resign like his predecessor did. Benedict is looking really old.

I don't know if you've seen him. I think he's 93, something like that. He's very, very frail. I expect he will die before long. Well, you could say that about anyone that's 93. That's just sort of how it works, but the next pope, wow.

Francis has filled the College of Cardinals with his own acolytes, the people who think like him, and so I'm not going to predict what's going to happen, but any person who is not sold out, your soul and mind to a particular perspective knows that Francis is very different in his views and beliefs from all of those who have come before him, and in all probability, the next guy will be much like him, if not more like him in that sense.

So yeah, I get it. There's this gap that exists between the dogmatic Catholicism that's necessary when you look at all the teachings of the popes up into the modern period and where Francis has gone and what he actually believes.

There's a huge gap, and that's why you can't get Roman Catholic apologists to defend Francis. I don't know what they're going to do when they've got Francis I and Francis II. I'm not saying the next guy is going to take Francis II, but as far as theology and belief goes, you can only blue pill so long if you get the matrix relationship there.

So here's a new generation of folks discovering what we've been talking about. We were talking about 30 years ago and what people were talking about 30 years before me in certain contexts and once again realizing what the real key issues are, even though I'm not sure that everyone really does see what the real key issues are.

We've tried to lay those out in the debates. I think that those debates remain, especially the debates with Mitch, I think they remain extremely valuable. Despite Francis's evolutionary movements, I think they still remain extremely, extremely valuable and explains why we evangelize Roman Catholics.

A person who fears Jesus doesn't know him. Doesn't know him. Does that mean all Roman Catholics are lost? We've said it over and over again. No. But I've said it for decades. A Roman Catholic that is saved is saved in spite of the dogmas of Rome, not because of the dogmas of Rome and is living inconsistently with the dogmatic teachings of the church because their faith has to be focused on something other.

If you're praying these prayers, that's not the faith of the New Testament. Not even close. But some of the people that are cited in here, St. Bonaventura, one of the difficulties of church history is he'll have stuff like those quotes and then he'll have quotes on what's clearly a concept of the sufficiency of Christ and justification by faith.

How do you hold those together? You can't, really, but some people try. What are you going to do in that situation? It means you have to really think seriously about those things. All right. Let me take that down and hopefully that discussion was helpful along those lines.

Divine Simplicity, Monotheism, and the Analogy of Scripture

I think it was yesterday morning, maybe, or maybe the morning before that. I forget exactly when. Dr. Scott Swain from RTS Orlando posted a little argument, a little article, I guess I should say, a biblical argument for divine simplicity, the analogy of Scripture.

When he posted it on Twitter, he did say this was sort of experimental. You know, I'm not sure if I can say there used to be a day when we would have been able to discuss things like this without cancel culture and things like that.

Maybe I'm just engaging in the, man, things were better in the olden days than today thing. But it would be good if theologians could suggest things and they could be discussed without everyone jumping to the heresy word, the unorthodox word, the get-em-fired word, the never-read-any-of-his-books phrases, all the stuff that's being thrown at me by the hyper-orthodox, those who think they are anyways.

But in even looking at portions of Dr. Swain's little article, I am not calling for the board to meet and deal with Dr. Swain. I'm not going to be calling for cancellation of his books. I'm not going to be identifying him as a heretic, anything along those lines.

But I am going to be disagreeing with what he's saying and I'm going to be asking the question, is this great tradition exegesis? Is this the new hermeneutics that we are supposed to be practicing and embracing?

And once again, I admit my bias here. My bias is derived from the fact that I limit my dogmatic assertions to that which I can consistently demonstrate is taught and promoted by and defined by divine scripture.

That is the standard that I have used in debating others, both within and without the faith. So it's one that I have to hold myself to. When people in debates have tried to hold me accountable to non-biblical sources of authority, I've rejected that.

And so once again, I recognize that is not how most Christian scholars in academia think. Most Christian scholars in academia have never done a debate, which I think is obviously a huge detriment. And I would point out that many of the reformed scholastics that they like to cite all the time were trained in debate.

They did debate. It was part of any meaningful scholastic training program in that day involved doing debates. And I think the fact that debates aren't being done is very evident in much of what is being said today.

But that issue to the side, this article seeks to use the analogy of scripture and make an argument for a particular definition of divine simplicity. The particular definition is the doctrine of divine simplicity teaches that God is without parts, i .e., so here's his interpretation of that, that there is no real distinction between God's being, that he is, and essence, what he is.

Or between God's being, that he is, and the various attributes we use to describe his essence. He is this and this and this. Now, for those who have not been following the debates recently, divine simplicity is a part of the doctrine of monotheism.

Monotheism, belief there is only one true God, is the foundation of all theology proper in scripture. Monotheism, together with the existence of three divine persons and the equality of those persons, those are the three sides of the triangle that make up the biblical doctrine of the Trinity.

The reason Christians believe in the Trinity is because the Bible teaches these doctrines. You have to end up denying some aspect of those truths to not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. I have, of course, defended monotheism from Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Muslims, and they're all Unitarians of different stripes.

Mormons aren't technically Unitarians in any sense. There is polytheism you can get, but ironically when applied to this world they end up arguing some of those points. Anyway, so the doctrine of simplicity that God is not made up of parts, there is a biblical doctrine of simplicity and there's a philosophical doctrine of simplicity.

The biblical doctrine of simplicity has a very easily established basis. There is only one God, God's the creator of all things, and therefore God cannot be made up of constituent parts because he is the maker of all things and so he'd have to be the maker of himself if he was made up of constituent parts.

So if God's being is complex so that one aspect of his being is fundamentally different than another aspect, you put the two together and this makes God, or maybe three or four, whatever. He's not made up of lesser parts because if it's a lesser part, God created it.

So monotheism, God's the creator of all things. It's right there in the page of the scripture. There you have a biblical doctrine of simplicity that God is not made up of constituent parts. That does not require the embracing of any particular form of Greek metaphysics and philosophy.

It was revealed in scripture before Aristotle and before Plato and so it is part of the once for all liberty of the saints faith that is definitional of the God that we worship. Now the philosophical doctrine of simplicity as you find in this article brings in especially Thomas's Christianized Aristotelianism and the categories that come from it.

And one aspect of that is the idea that if you can distinguish, if the mind can distinguish between various concepts then those concepts have existence in reality. So you can't just have true statements about one glorious being of God.

If you can distinguish between omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, justice, wrath, mercy, love. If you can distinguish between these things then they become things. And the assertion then is that this would require God to be made up of things that are lesser than the divine being.

And this then leads to the conclusion that well therefore all of those things must not be distinguished at least by God. We can distinguish them but we're doing it wrong. When God considers these things then they're all one.

And so you see this in this definition given by Dr. Swain or between God's being that he is and the various attributes we use to describe his essence he is this and this and this. So this and this and this all become one this as we will see as we look at the article.

And this has been the issue. We have read before whenever I queue up this one particular resource I have as long as somebody posts something everything scrolls you never get to see anything again it's terrible.

Went the other direction. There have been people who have warned about becoming balanced in this area. Gerhardus Voss in his reform dogmatics has said may we also say that God's attributes are not distinguished from one another.

He says this is extremely risky. We may be content to say that all God's attributes are related most closely to each other and penetrate each other in the most intimate unity. Okay. We're only describing the very being of God and so there can be no disharmony and there is an intimate unity definitely.

However this is in no way to say that they are to be identified with each other. Also in God for example love and righteousness are not the same. Although they function together perfectly in complete harmony.

We may not let everything intermingle in a pantheistic way because that would be the end of our objective knowledge of God. Likewise Charles Hodge said to say as the schoolman and so many even of Protestant theologians ancient and modern were accustomed to say that the divine attributes differ only in name or in our conceptions or in their effects is to destroy all true knowledge of God.

It is obvious that according to this view God is simply a force of which we know nothing but its effects. If in God eternity is identical with knowledge knowledge with power, power with ubiquity and ubiquity with holiness.

We are using words without meaning when we attribute any perfection to God. We must therefore either give up the attempt to determine the divine attributes from our speculative idea of an infinite essence or renounce all knowledge of God and all faith and revelation of himself which he has made in the constitution of our nature in the external word and in his word.

So there was a time a few years ago when it was recognized this is an area of speculation disagreement and there were those who were warning you take this far enough you're going to end up with pantheism.

You're going to end up with a God who's everything and nothing. And I don't think that any of my brothers who are so intent upon this one topic now have any intention of going there or will ever go there.

But the warning is still a proper warning. It's still a proper thing to say this seems to be the direction that this goes because they'll say well it seems the direction you're going is toward tritheism.

If you don't believe in our philosophically defined doctrine of simplicity your biblically defined doctrine of simplicity just isn't enough. Without these metaphysical considerations that are post-biblical and this is what has led to all the discussion of natural theology and what can we come to understand in this way, et cetera, et cetera.

But without our definition then you're going to end up with three gods. Well, that's just simply not true. There's plenty in scripture to keep us from adopting the idea of having three gods. The apostles didn't have your metaphysical pre-commitments and they didn't end up with three gods.

Feel free to express your concern. Always good to have warning. Consider these things. But then here on the other side the concern of Reformed theologians who would say yeah, that tends to be going that direction.

So with that in the background Dr. Swain again, I linked to the article and invited people to read it. Some of us, that's how we do it. Rather than warning people and saying don't listen to this person as one guy said three or four months ago I don't want any of the people in my church listening to the dividing line.

Cancel culture. There's a fear. There's a fear of not being able to really respond, I think. So anyway, we're not going to do that. What I want people to look at was something really interesting. First of all, one quote from the article that I thought was interesting.

Because it is God's written word Holy Scripture is the source and norm for sound theology. Our theology, our discourse concerning God is judged fitting or unfitting to the degree that it faithfully represents divine discourse and Holy Scripture.

Does that apply to the Council of Nicaea as well? To all creasing confessions? Are all creasing confessions to be judged by Holy Scripture, which is the source and norm for sound theology? Or is it just our thinking?

I would say everything. I would say it's God's word written Holy Scripture is the source and norm for sound theology. Our theology, our discourse concerning God, our confessions, our creeds should be judged fitting or unfitting to the degree that they faithfully represent divine discourse and Holy Scripture.

I agree with that. Just a few years ago, that would have been utterly unremarkable. It would have been met with snores. Not so much anymore. Okay, so the first thing that is said in this attempt to use the analogy of Scripture.

So an overarching testimony of Scripture. Not so much looking at text in context, but overarching. Quote, it might seem that the doctrine of divine simplicity contradicts the logic of biblical discourse.

For example, Psalm 145 .3 lays down a clear rule for God honoring speech. Great is the Lord and abundantly to be praised. Hear the indicative. The Lord is great entails an imperative. The Lord is to be praised in an abundant manner.

The Psalm goes on to indicate exactly what such abundance entails. Psalm 145 is an acrostic poem that fulfills its own rule by extolling God through a wide array of divine attributes. By praising God from A to Z.

Psalm 145 extolls the Lord's greatness, majesty, goodness, righteousness, power, kingship, eternity, faithfulness, kindness and holiness. According to Psalm 145 it takes many names to praise the Lord according to His excellent greatness.

Then he quotes from Psalm 150 verse 2. So yes, Psalm 145 does do that. I have it up here under the Old Testament text banner. There it is. Great is Yahweh and highly to be praised. His greatness is unsearchable.

One generation shall praise thy works to another and shall declare thy mighty acts. On the glorious splendor of thy majesty, on thy wonderful works I will meditate. And men shall speak of the power of thine awesome acts and I will tell of thy greatness.

They shall utter the memory of thine abundant goodness and shall shout joyfully of thy righteousness. Okay, there's a bunch of terms used right there. Majesty, wonderful works, power, awesome acts, greatness, abundant goodness, righteousness, Yahweh is gracious and merciful.

I just realized that I'm still using NASB in the Old Testament section. I need to switch that over to the LSB. It would say Yahweh is gracious and merciful, but we'll worry about that a little bit later.

So the question that's being asked, here's what he says. With respect to the question at hand, does Psalm 145's invitation to an example describing many different names to God, a linguistic reality, suggest that there are many different things in God, an ontological reality?

What is the assumption being made? What's the background here? You see, that would never cross my mind as a question or an issue. Because when I hear everything that's being said, these are all, I won't use the term attributes, the Eastern Church uses the Energia as the term.

But these are all true descriptions of the one being of God. Because there's only one Yahweh. So it would never cross my mind to go, well, if I use many different, if I talk about all the things that God has done, and his righteousness and his power and his goodness and his mercy, then am I suggesting that God's made up of parts?

Because that's not the metaphysical concept of the psalmist. That's not the metaphysical concept of Isaiah or Jeremiah. It's not mine either. So it never crossed my mind. And so it's a question that is only relevant to people who are willing to embrace certain metaphysical presuppositions that exist outside of Scripture and then answer questions about Scripture based upon those external metaphysical considerations.