REFORMCON2016 | Live Stream | Dr. Scott Oliphint

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Dr. Scott Oliphint is talking about Revelation of God and it's implications on culture. Tune in live. Please support our Kauai Church plant by donating at http://apologiakauai.com

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A lot of people haven't gotten out of bed yet, but you guys are the committed, dedicated, hardcore
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Calvinists. Praise God. So did you guys get some sleep? No?
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Okay. Well, welcome back to ReformCon 2016. If you guys are joining us on the live stream, make sure you guys share it.
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We've released a live stream worldwide, so everyone can be watching it, and a lot of people actually are.
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So, by the way, if you guys are here and you guys are wanting to know what the hashtag is, it's just hashtag
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ReformCon, and that way you guys can connect to one another and share content and pictures.
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Just a quick announcement. We are closing up the breakfast this morning in just a few minutes here, so there's stuff left.
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So if you still wanna grab some stuff, just head on over there. I think in about five more minutes they're gonna close up. Yesterday was a real blessing and a treat for me.
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I don't even know if I'm holding this conference for you and everyone else or for me. So, you guys are just kind of hanging out with me.
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This is just a gift. So, this week has been, I think, in our mind, an important event in terms of reaching out to this broad
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Reformed community, particularly the younger Reformed community, and teaching and heralding, defending some of the essential truths and doctrines of the
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Reformed faith. But also, we're hoping that it's been an encouragement to you to get out into your communities and into the world and to start talking about these truths and to spread them.
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And it's important for us, in our mind, to get out of our Reformed ghetto and to really get into the world and start communicating and start sharing and talking.
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And so, it's a tremendous honor this morning to have our next speaker,
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Dr. K. Scott Oliphant. Dr. Oliphant is somebody that, when
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I want to know something, when I have questions, somebody that I go to to get answers. If you don't have
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Dr. Oliphant's works on apologetics and theology, I encourage you guys to do so.
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Dr. Oliphant is the Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology. Reverend Dr. K.
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Scott Oliphant is Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.
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Dr. Oliphant is a direct student of Cornelius Van Til. So, if you guys are big fans of presuppositional apologetics.
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Actually, last year at the Bonson Conference, his lecture was one of my favorite lectures
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I've ever heard on presuppositional or covenantal apologetics. And he shared a lot of his experience with Dr.
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Van Til. Dr. Oliphant is going to talk to us today about revelation and its implications.
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It's a real treat and a treasure and a blessing and honor to have him. So, if you would, welcome to the stage,
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Dr. K. Scott Oliphant. Thank you,
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Jeff. Nice to see you all here in June in Phoenix.
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January's a good time to be here, I think. No, it's a treat for my wife and I to be here.
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Happy to be with you. I wanted to talk to you this morning, specifically about something that has come to my attention again through a particular book that I just recently read and have written a review for.
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A book that emphasized, to me again, the absolute importance and also, in some cases, the neglect of scripture's self -authentication.
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Now, maybe you know what that means. Maybe that's a new word to you. I hope we'll begin to understand that as we move along here.
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Let me just say here, initially, that my intent in the discussion that we're going to have is not to undermine or impugn any person's
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Christian integrity. All right, this is not meant to be a critique of particular people, but it has to do with the glory of God.
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And God is most glorified when truth is most clarified. So I'm interested in the issues that I'm gonna be bringing up, even though, inevitably, there will be some personalities involved here.
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I've entitled this talk, trying to give some alliteration here,
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Reformed or Romanist? And I couldn't decide, what about Protestant or Papist? So I'll pick one.
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And then the subtitle is Why Scripture Must Be Self -Authenticating.
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The book that I read recently is entitled Evangelical Exodus. Maybe you know of the book.
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It's just been out maybe a month or two or three. And it has to do with nine chapters written by nine different authors, all of whom have had some connection with Southern Evangelical Seminary.
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This is the way that they present the book. All of them have been either students or maybe faculty at Southern Evangelical Seminary.
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All of them, all nine of them, have converted to Roman Catholicism.
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And so the book, Evangelical Exodus, is each of these authors' accounts of why it is that they decided, as Evangelical Christians, that the best route for them, the best road for them was to become
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Romanist. I was fascinated in the book for a number of reasons. Number one,
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I was raised a Roman Catholic, a strict Roman Catholic in my home. My mother came from a strong Irish Catholic family.
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I was involved in a Catholic school in my early years. I trained to be an altar boy pre -Vatican
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II, which means you had to memorize the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed in Latin, and then along comes
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John Paul XXIII, he changes all that. So that was a waste of time for us. We didn't have to do that after Vatican II.
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But I was raised in that tradition and then converted in my late teens into an
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Evangelical context. So I've been Catholic, I've been Evangelical, and then later in God's providence and by His grace,
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I learned the great truths of Reformed Christianity. So I was interested in the book because it said something about my own biography, although the direction of these authors was decidedly different from mine.
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As I read through these nine accounts, three things stood out to me.
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I don't wanna highlight or emphasize all three of them, but I at least want to draw them to your attention.
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Three things stood out to me that were, I think, causes of the conversion, as they put it, from Evangelical to Catholicism.
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The first two are a bit more tentative in the book, but I see them as more significant, perhaps, than even the authors do.
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The third one I'll want to spend a bit more time on. Three things. Number one, these authors mentioned that what they learn at Southern Evangelical Seminary, by the way,
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I know a few people there, Christian brothers, so let me just emphasize, this is not about people, it's about what they're teaching there, but one of the things that these authors emphasize is that they're taught, must agree to, a dispensational view of the church, dispensationalism.
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Most of you know what that means, at least generally. I think foundationally what it means to these people who were converting to Catholicism is that they moved away from the church in God's plan as something of a parenthesis in God's plan.
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It's kind of an interruption in a dispensational theology. God had one thing going, things didn't work out so well, parenthetically, now here comes the church, and then later,
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God will deal again with ethnic Israel. That's dispensationalism, and these authors were saying that didn't seem right to them.
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Well, it shouldn't. Secondly, they're all taught and believe, faculty and students, in what they call free grace theology.
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Free grace theology, it's been called wardship salvation, all kinds of labels attached to it, but fundamentally what it does in our
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Christian experience and in our theology is that it separates
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Jesus as Savior from Jesus as Lord so that you can believe in Jesus and just believe, be justified without any view toward or connection with sanctification and holiness, free grace theology.
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That's what they're taught, that's what they believe. That too is a modern aberration, I think a significant aberration from biblical
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Christianity. The third thing that I wanna spend a bit more time on, all of these authors, in one way or another, tell of their commitment to Thomas Aquinas.
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The book is dedicated to the dumb ox. That was the phrase given to him, not because he was stupid, but because he didn't say much.
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Dumb ox, and he was large. Now, there's a good bit of discussion in Reformed circles about Thomas Aquinas, and I wanna preface this by saying to you, it's not my view, personally, that Thomas wears a black hat, all right?
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We have white hat people, we have black hat people. Thomas wears a gray hat. Most of us do, all of us do.
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Then the question is, how gray is it? How dark is the gray? But Thomas has some very good things to say in many of his writings.
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He wrote so much. He was, in any estimation, a genius in the history of the church.
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But there are some significant things that can be a problem if you adopt them as a
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Reformed Christian, and there is a movement now of many in the Reformed context who want to be
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Reformed Thomists. I think you've got to be very, very careful if that's what you're thinking.
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Just to be clear on the implications of Thomas, just one of those, you can see it in Vatican I, 1868, which says, if anyone says that the one true
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God, our creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made by the natural light of human reason, let him be anathema, all right?
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That's an implication of Thomas's philosophical theology.
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The thing that Thomas got wrong was the first step in theology, which was a step of natural reason, which has the ability in and of itself to demonstrate conclusively for the existence of God in and of itself.
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It's one of the reasons, for example, that in the Roman Catholic catechism, it says that Muslims and Christians worship the same
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God. So you begin with this God of natural reason.
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Now, that has implications across the spectrum of our theology. For example, what does it mean in relation to our doctrine of God?
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Well, for Thomas, since God is necessarily immutable and unchangeable, the relation of the creature to God, Thomas says, is a real relation, whereas the relation of God to the creature is not a real relation.
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Now, there is a host of things that could be said, probably should be said in this context about what a real relation is in medieval philosophical theology.
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We don't have time to get into that. It wouldn't interest most of you. But let me just give you what one philosopher's summation is to this idea.
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He says, if the relation of God to the world is not a real relation, but is only a relation of reason,
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Thomas's idea, then Thomas's view, this philosopher says, has the awkward consequence that things can be related even if their relations do not exist.
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That's awkward, isn't it? Things are related even if there's no relation.
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Now again, Thomas is wanting to protect the right thing, God's immutability. That has to be affirmed by every
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Christian. I think it's most consistently affirmed in Reformed Christianity. But in order to do that, he erects a philosophical structure that I think begins to destroy it.
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What are the implications of this? Let's bring it into theology. Paul Helm, in his book on John Calvin's ideas, where he wants to set forth
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Calvin's view, I think that's highly debatable, whether or not it is
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Calvin's view. But he says this, for example, Paul Helm, a Reformed, you know, a
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Reformed philosopher and Thomistic. He says, perhaps Calvin's view amounts to this.
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In the incarnation, there is a uniquely powerful and loving and gracious, notice this, focusing of the divine nature upon the human nature rather than a transfer of the
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Son of God to a spatio -temporal location. This focusing makes it possible for us to say that God the
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Son is so present with human nature that there is a union of natures in Jesus Christ.
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Have you ever read that anywhere in the history of theology? And the answer is no. Not in Calvin, not anywhere else.
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A focusing, what does it mean for God to focus in such a way that there's a kind of, what is it, presence?
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Rather than, rather than the transfer of the
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Son of God to a spatio -temporal location. What's Helm trying to do?
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Again, he's doing what all of us would want to do in the sense that we want to protect God's eternity, his immutability, but not this way, not this way.
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Another example, again from Professor Helm. He says, so the truth about atonement, about reconciliation, again he thinks he's offering
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Calvin's view here, has to be represented to us as if it implied a change in God, and so an inconsistency and apparent contradiction in his actions toward us.
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But in fact, there is no change in God. We would all say amen to that. He loves us from eternity, he's talking about the elect.
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We would all say that, amen to that. But Helm goes on, there is, however, a change in us, a change that occurs as by faith
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Christ's work is appropriated. The change, the change is not from wrath to grace, but from our belief that we are under wrath to our belief that we are under grace.
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So when you read passages in Scripture that say God is wrathful toward some, toward you, perhaps, toward unbelief, what you're meant to think is not really, but you ought to believe it.
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Because there's no real relation from that direction. You see how it works?
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You see how it begins to change your theology? Now, I'm not pretending that it's an easy thing to begin to think about how an immutable, unchangeable, eternal
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God actually interacts with those of us in history and in creation. But I am here to say this is not the way to think about it, and this is not the way that theology,
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Reformed theology, has thought about it in the main. Some have, but not as many.
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So what's the point about this? Why these conclusions? Because when you begin to think that everything that you believe has to fit in to the way in which your mind, my mind, all minds typically think, when you begin to think that way, then reason, which is always used in theology, the point is not here, no reason, but reason, instead of being the instrument of our theology, becomes the foundation, the source, even the cause of what we are allowed to believe.
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As Eddington put it, what my net can't catch isn't fish, meaning what my mind can't grasp can't be true.
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We can put it that way. This is why Arminian theology exists.
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If we want to understand why people would be Arminian rather than Reformed, this is the reason, the reason is reason, that's the reason.
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They can't make sense of a notion wherein God is sovereign and decrees and ordains whatsoever comes to pass, is meticulously sovereign and providential in the entirety of creation on the one hand and also what you decide is your responsibility and not
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God's. They can't make sense of that. So what do you do? Well, if you're a brilliant mind like Melina, Lise de
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Melina, you know that name, you begin to make sense of that by inventing a category, call it middle knowledge, where God has to begin to negotiate and navigate what he sees taking place in all of the counterfactual situations that would happen in any possible world that might come to be.
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And then based on what he sees in his middle knowledge, then based on that, listen to me, based on that, then he chooses people.
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What does that sound like to you? Here's what it sounds like to you.
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You're thinking to yourself, that sounds like we choose and then God chooses. Yeah, right.
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Because that makes sense, doesn't it? Okay, now I got it. What God's doing in eternity is he's watching what
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I will freely do freely without any control whatsoever of God, what I will do.
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And based on that knowledge of all the counterfactuals, he picks one possible world, actualizes that world, sets the world in motion.
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We freely choose. And what does God do? He's already elected us in eternity based on what he knows we'll freely do in history.
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Now, finally, it makes sense. Now it makes sense. That's why Arminianism exists, so that God will make sense.
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When I first became interested in Reformed theology, somebody said to me, you're gonna have a problem because what these
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Calvinists do is they put God in a box, lock him up. You gotta be there, and that's the way you gotta.
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But I found exactly the opposite. What I believe doesn't evangelical put
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God in a box. God can't do what I can't think. And all of a sudden,
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Calvinism says, God can do so far beyond what your pea brain can even conceive.
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Who do you think you are? Here's what one philosopher says, philosopher theologian.
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He's purporting to set forth a view. He called, these are his words, not mine, philosophical Arminianism.
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He says, rampant and facile appeals to the mysteries of the faith when paradox threatens.
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It's a horrible thing for Arminian. When paradox threatens is just, he says, is just anti -intellectualism in sophist drag.
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That's clever. That's an interesting way to write. In contrast, he says, the defense of philosophical
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Arminianism, which is his view, arises in the context of a full commitment to pursue understanding than to settle for appeals to mystery.
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How dare you settle for appeals to mystery. Professor Kwanvig, I wonder if he's ever read
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Romans 11, 33. Oh, the depth of the riches, the wisdom, knowledge of God.
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Here's the apostle Paul under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit writing about one of the most difficult doctrines. And he recognizes that even as the
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Holy Spirit inspires him and he explodes in doxology in praise of what? In praise of the mystery of God.
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I can't figure him out. His judgments are beyond finding out.
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You can't Google the judgments of God and get an answer. It's a blank page. His ways cannot be traced.
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You can't follow him all the way to what he's up to. He won't give you that as a creature. You couldn't understand it anyway, and you don't need it because God's sovereign and you're not.
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I wonder if he's ever read that. I'm sure he has. Contrast that with Herman Bovink.
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Let this motivate your Christianity. Mystery is the lifeblood of theology.
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The lifeblood of, without the blood of mystery, your theology is dead. It's not there.
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It's in the grave. It's not dead orthodoxy. It's dead rationality.
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But when you see mystery as the lifeblood, you begin to pursue your theology in such a way that God is glorified because you understand at every step and at every point, you're a creature and always will be.
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You won't get to the new heaven and new earth and say, oh, finally, comprehensive knowledge. That's what I've been waiting for.
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You will never get that. God alone has it. You will know God more and more and more in eternity, for eternity, never ending, and you will never plumb the depths of his character.
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You won't and I won't because we'll always be creatures. Do you see that? Get that in your blood.
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Without it, you lose reformed theology. All right, that's just a side note.
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Back to the book. We have nine converts from evangelicalism to Catholicism.
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All of them at Southern Evangelical Seminary. And I wanna tell you what these authors have said, and I'm quoting them here, almost verbatim.
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The first one that surprised me at the end of the book. One author said, from 2004 to 2014, over two dozen
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SES students, faculty, and alumni have converted to Catholicism.
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He says, there are enough converts just at Southern Evangelical to fill two more books.
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Just at that one seminary. I mean, what's going on there?
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Another one says, through Norman Geisler, founder, I think provost now, former president.
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Through Norman Geisler, we became Thomists. Works of Aquinas are assigned in far greater number than works of the reformers.
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For all intents and purposes, St. Thomas Aquinas was the seminary's patron saint. The school's emphasis on and profound respect for the thought of St.
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Thomas Aquinas would later be of great significance to my entering into full communion with the Catholic church.
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Another author says, at SES, reason was on prominent display.
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No questions of theology or morals were left untouched by the power of apologetics and rational demonstration.
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So, with reason as the principium, the foundation, the source, one author says, we were taught that God's grace is cooperative.
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Not merely operative. Synergism, not monergism. You know those terms? Synergism, working together,
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God and me. We're working this out. God's my co -pilot, here we go. Monergism, God alone works.
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Synergism, not monergism. He says, this author says, as one professor crassly put it, God is not a divine rapist.
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That's what they think. That's the way they characterize, caricature, reformed thinking.
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That if God has the audacity to enter into your pagan soul and change your heart of stone to a heart of flesh, that's divine rape.
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Which assumes, doesn't it, that God doesn't have a right over what he created. That's a despicable way to caricature any theology, much less reformed theology.
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I don't like that one. This other author says, the assumption of Mary is evidenced in that no body parts of Mary have ever been found.
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Other famous people are found, not Mary. All right, listen to it though.
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See, they're taught rationalism, evidentialism, and so why would you believe that Mary didn't die, but was just taken up?
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Well, show me the grave. No grave? The assumption of Mary. Another author,
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I was interested in this. He said, the reason I was fine, okay with, converted to the idea that we pray to the saints, which he does regularly now, is because, he said, when
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I was at SES, I'd ask fellow Christians to pray for me. Okay? So I'm just asking other
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Christians there to pray for me. So what do these faculty and students do?
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They are committed to reason as their principium, but this was fascinating to me.
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I thought about doing the whole talk on this, decided not to. They begin to detect problems. Listen to what this author says in the book.
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Even if arguments for the existence of God and Jesus' resurrection succeed, he says, probability arguments that Christianity is true are not sufficient to ground
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Christian faith. I had been trained at SES to think that faith was bound up with inferences in such a way that the arguments were what secured faith.
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You see it? That's the principium problem. That's the rationalism problem.
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That's the evidential problem. So they're getting wise to a couple of conundrums, conundrums causing
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Catholic conversions, all right? They're recognizing that the patronage of Aquinas at SES was arbitrarily restrictive.
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That's a paraphrase, but that's what some of the authors were saying. It's too restrictive. If Thomas is so good in epistemology, what's wrong with his theology?
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Where does he go wrong? They're reading him and they say, wait a minute, Thomas has a high view of the church.
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I'm told the church is a parenthesis, but it doesn't appear that way to me. I like the high view better.
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Thomas has a view of sanctification. One author says with Thomas, you can take Paul and James.
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So yes, justification by faith, but not faith alone because James says justification by faith and works.
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So we've got both guys by way of Thomas in our understanding of justification. There's no free grace theology.
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Now we know what to do with sanctification. It's part of your salvation process.
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They're seeing that. Secondly, they begin to see that the laws of reason as a principium now, as a principium, a foundation, the source can only lead to probability.
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So what do you do? The seminary is committed to Arminian theology. They're clear about that.
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Those are their words, not mine. What do you do if you're an Arminian evangelical and you're in this context now?
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Well, here's the way one author puts it. Here's the way he was able to gain certainty out of the probability arguments that he had learned.
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He says, one could object that the Catholic convert is in the same predicament as the
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Protestant for he seems to be doing the same thing he accuses the Protestant of doing. That is interpreting the scriptures and then deciding that the
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Catholic church is interpreting the scriptures correctly. In reality, listen to this carefully, put on your thinking caps, it's early.
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In reality, however, the Catholic convert is not doing what the Protestant does.
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The Catholic church does not ask converts to read the scriptures and decide for themselves if Catholic teaching is true.
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Rather, listen, the Catholic church makes a historical claim that the interpretive authority she has is clearly evident from a study of church history.
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How do you get your certainty? Fides implicita, do you know the phrase?
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Implicit faith in what? In the church that whatever the church says must be the case.
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I need something to ground my faith. My probability arguments aren't doing it.
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I've got this notion of neutral reason that doesn't get me as far as I need to go or want to go, so where do
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I go to get that certainty? I jump over to see what the Catholic church has been saying and the
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Catholic church says, trust me, trust me. All right, folks,
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I was raised in this. I can testify this is the way it goes, trust me.
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I got a Bible, my first Bible on Holy Communion Day which happens when you're in first grade.
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The Bible was never opened, didn't need to be as long as I did my duty and went to my services.
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These authors quote Newman a good bit. To be deep in history, they say, is to cease to be
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Protestant. That's not true, but that's what they think.
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All right, so you accept the church on faith. Fides implicita, implicit faith.
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I will trust what you say. You tell me you've got the history down, okay, I trust that, I'm going with you.
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See how it goes? Now, let's contrast that.
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That's the bad news. Let's contrast that with what I call the truly Protestant principium, principium, foundation, source.
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Here's Richard Muller. Now, let me just, if you don't know Richard Muller, he has a spiritual gift of omniscience when it comes to 17th century
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Protestant scholasticism. But he has no interest in apologetic that I'm interested in.
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I think he would oppose it. So this is not coming from someone who's, by any stretch, hurray for Van Til, not at all.
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But here's his assessment of the reformers. He said, these early reform statements concerning theological presuppositions focus virtually without exception, without exception, he says, virtually, on the problem of the knowledge of God, given the fact not only of human finitude, that's acknowledged by everyone, but also of human sin.
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The critique leveled by the Reformation at medieval theological presuppositions added a soteriological dimension to the epistemological problem.
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Whereas the medieval doctors had assumed that the fall affected primarily the will and its affections and not the reason, there's
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S -E -S, the reformers assumed also the fallenness of the rational faculty.
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Our minds are sinful. Have you read that anywhere? I have.
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Cannot submit to the law of God, neither are they able to do so. Muller continues, a generalized or pagan natural theology, according to the reformers, was not merely limited to non -saving knowledge of God, it was also bound in idolatry.
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Listen to what Muller says. This is fascinating to me, given all that he's written. He says, this view of the problem of knowledge is the single most important contribution of the early reformed writers to the theological prolegomena of Orthodox Protestantism.
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The single most important contribution of the reformed writers to theological prolegomena, that is theological doctrine of scripture, doctrine of revelation.
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Problem of knowledge, epistemology, because what did they do? They began to see again, to emphasize again, as the church had done previously and lost it, that we are, all of us in every faculty, fallen everywhere.
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Yes, our wills. Yes, our affections, but absolutely our minds are fallen as well.
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That is the contribution. That's why the reformers had to say sola scriptura, not sola scriptura et ratione.
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Sola scriptura, Bible alone. And so you begin to see this worked out in the context of the
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Reformation. And since I teach at Westminster, you know I have to do this.
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It's not inspired, but it's close. Westminster Confession of Faith, section four of chapter one.
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The authority, the authority of the Holy Scripture for which it ought to be believed and obeyed.
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Depends, depends, you get it? What's the foundation of the authority of Holy Scripture?
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What's it resting on? Depends not upon the testimony of any man or church.
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That's the negative. It's written in the 1640s. After Catholic Church had militated against the reformers,
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Council of Trent, Westminster Confession comes along. Other Baptist confessions have said exactly the same thing, that the authority of Holy Scripture depends not on me or on the church.
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Why not? Because if the church says, hey, that's your authority, guess what?
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Where's the authority? It's in the church. And the church can turn around and say, you know, maybe that's not.
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Or that's kind of your authority, as long as we're the real authority. Or that's your authority, but we're gonna take out a couple things or maybe add a few things.
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Or some person may say, I've decided by virtue of all of these arguments, that's the authority.
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Then who's the authority? Maybe the arguments fail. Maybe there are other arguments or better arguments given. Then what?
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Then the authority is gone. So the reformers were saying, the confession is saying, the authority of Scripture cannot be secondary.
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It has to be primary. Not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God who is truth itself, the author thereof, and therefore it is to be received.
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Why do you receive the Bible? The verb is important. You don't determine the Bible's authority.
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You receive the Bible's authority passively because it is the word of God.
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That's self -authentication. You wanna know what it means? That's the best paragraph you're ever gonna read in the history of theology on self -authentication right there.
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Depends wholly upon God who is truth itself. And you receive it. Don't you as a Christian? Because it's the word of God.
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You don't become a Christian and say, I'm gonna see what I think God says, what I think He doesn't say.
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Just gonna kinda judge for myself now that I'm a Christian. Some of this I might like, some of it not so much.
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You don't do that if you're a Christian. You do that if you're a liberal. You cut and paste your way through the
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Bible because it's just another book of literature and you're the final authority. But if you're a true
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Christian, you take the Bible and you open it up and you say, speak Lord, I'm listening. You've made me your servant.
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That's self -authentication. Here's the way Calvin put it.
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He says, it is utterly vain than to pretend that the power of judging
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Scripture so lies with the church that its certainty depends, there it is again, depends upon what?
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Churchly assent. Thus while the church receives and gives its seal of approval to the
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Scripture is it does not thereby render authentic what is otherwise doubtful or controversial.
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But because the church recognizes Scripture to be the truth of its own God as a pious duty, it unhesitatingly venerates
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Scripture. As to their question, my parenthesis, how can we be assured that this has sprung from God unless we have recourse to the degree of the church?
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Calvin, we don't have any certain. Calvin says, it is as if someone asked whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter.
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Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.
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That's self -authentication. That's what Calvin said. It's embedded in the Bible itself.
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You want certainty, there it is because it's the word of God. And you receive it in order to have that certainty.
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Hence, says Calvin, it is not right to subject it to proof or to reasoning.
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Now, there are a number of ways to begin to show this. In Scripture, I just picked out one.
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You're familiar with the parable, the rich man and Lazarus, this discussion going on, Jesus is telling, I beg you,
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Father Abraham, send Lazarus to my family for I have five brothers. Let him warn them so that they will not also come to this place of torment.
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Abraham replied, they have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them. No, no, you're not listening. No, Father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.
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They'll see a resurrection. What happens when you see a resurrection? Anybody who sees a resurrection will automatically repent, won't they?
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We've seen it, haven't we? As soon as Jesus rose from the dead, what happened? Everybody repented.
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Did you not read, was that not in your? But if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.
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He said to them, if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
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It was, you've got what you need. I can give you 50 miracles before breakfast and you're gonna explain them away because you're a pagan.
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What you need is what Moses and the prophets, notice it's the Old Testament, what you need is what
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Moses and the prophets have said. That's all you need. And you've got it.
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God has given the world all the world needs in order to trust the
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Lord Jesus Christ. That's self -authentication. Miracles won't do it.
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The word of God has the power alone to do it. Now, how does
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Narminian think about self -authentication? I'm gonna give you a direct quote, again from Dr. Geisler, who
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I wanna emphasize again, I think is a true believing Christian, all right? But this is just the way he thinks.
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Geisler says, presupposition is claimed that the word of God is self -authenticating. Yes, we do. So does the rest of the reformed world.
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It needs no proof. It is the basis for all other conclusions, but it has no basis beyond itself.
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But what they fail to see, he says, is that while all of this is true of the word of God, nonetheless, it is not thereby true of the
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Bible. For there must be some evidence or good reasons for believing that the Bible is the word of God as opposed to contrary views.
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That's the way Narminians try to negotiate a lack of self -authentication because they don't wanna be
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Catholic. It is. In other words, one way you negotiate is you say, well,
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I've gotta find certainty somewhere. It's over here in the church, and history shows that because they told me history shows that, and they're all about history, and so I'm gonna trust them.
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Or you can say, well, of course the word of God is self -authenticating, but I wonder what the word of God is.
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Maybe it's the Bible. How would you know? I've gotta mount up some evidences and some proofs in order to show that this book
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I have is the word of God, and then, okay, now it's self -authenticating only because of the proofs and the evidences.
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Do you see that? Do you see it? That's the logic of it. That's what they're saying. I know it sounds humorous.
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I'm not just trying to make it, but that's the way they have to think about this if they're not gonna be fully and truly
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Protestant about it. That's the problem. It's a midway between Catholicism and Reformed Protestant thinking.
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So you've gotta go one of two directions if you're gonna be consistent. And now there are over two dozen people going back to Rome.
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That's the tragedy. All right, so you're thinking to yourself, now, wait a minute.
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I'm almost through. You're thinking to yourself, wait a minute. Does that mean all you say is the Bible's the word of God because the
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Bible's the word of God? No, there's more to say in the Westminster Confession. Thought about that question before you did, before I did, and they say this, we may be moved and induced.
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Notice how the church plays the role here. We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church to a high and reverent esteem of the
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Holy Scripture. True enough, right? When you become a Christian, you join yourself to a
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Bible -believing church, hopefully to a Reformed church. That church is gonna say to you week after week, day after day, this is the word of God.
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This is the word of God. Look what God has said. This is God's word. He is speaking to His people in the church.
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That's a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. The church does play a role, but the church does not determine that it is the word of God.
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So they continue, and the heavenliness of the matter, listen to the description here of the Bible.
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The heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God, the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof are arguments, whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God.
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You want arguments? Here they are. Let's open the Bible. Wait a minute, I don't believe the Bible. Exactly, that's why we're having our discussion.
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Let's open the Bible. I wanna show you why I believe it and why you must believe it. But here's the thing.
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Once you begin to read it with me, you're duty -bound as a creature of God to believe what it says. Just wanna warn you, that's what's gonna happen, okay?
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That's what they're saying. If you don't believe the Bible, and you're an Arminian, what do you do?
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You try to get over on their ground and stand there and say, let's do an argument together, kind of mutually.
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Let's think about this in the same way so that we can maybe get ourselves eventually over to where we can say, okay, maybe, maybe this is the word of God.
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And then we'll need some more arguments. And then after those arguments, we'll say, okay, okay, now I think it is the word of God. That doesn't, that's not the way it works, folks.
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It works like this. Someone says, I don't believe the Bible. You say, exactly, and I didn't either.
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I didn't, I could say. And what changed me was I opened it and I read it, and the power of God was in it.
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It was self -authenticating even when I didn't believe it. And then God changed me and I saw for what it was.
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Because look what it says. Has anybody ever thought of a religion remotely close to what
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Christianity is? Absolutely not. Pick a cult, any cult. Pick a religion, any religion.
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They don't have a clue what Christianity teaches, really and true. Only God could think of this.
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Only God could say, you know what I'm gonna do? In the second person of my son,
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I'm gonna condescend and I'm gonna take on a human nature in one person with two natures, and he's gonna do what you can't do.
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And he's gonna fix what you broke. Find me one other religion that says that.
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And he's gonna do that while he remains God and is also man. Find one religion that says that.
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You won't find it. But when you come to Christ, you say, that's what I believe. I trust in him. God is the only one who can solve my problem.
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I can't solve it. It's in the Bible. Who would make this up? You don't have the brains to make this up.
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We don't. This comes from God. And that's what the confession is saying, the heavenliness of the matter.
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Can you see that when you open the Bible? Show it to your unbelieving friends. And then the confession says, and we know this, don't we?
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Yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the
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Holy Spirit. Notice what the Spirit does. Bearing witness by and with the
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Word in our hearts. The Spirit's not over here just sort of acting on his own and thinking, hey, there's somebody.
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I think I'll change that person. Whap! Changed heart. No, the Spirit is working by and with the
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Word. In your heart, if you're a Christian, he changed you that way, didn't he?
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That's what God is doing. But it's the Word of God, it's the power of God that the
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Spirit of God takes to make the people of God. Do you see that? That's the way it's supposed to operate in God's economy.
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That's why when somebody doesn't believe the Bible, we show them the Bible. All right, a couple concluding quotations.
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You knew I would do this. I have to do this, from Dr.
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Van Til. On the surface, he says, it seems strange that the reformed doctrine of Scripture should be charged both with irrationalism and with rationalism.
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And on the surface, it also seems strange that the two seemingly exclusive charges spring from the same source, namely from evangelicalism.
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Yet there's really nothing else that we could expect from evangelicalism. The root error of evangelicalism as noted earlier is it's a scription of a measure of ultimacy to man.
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That is, reason as a principian. This partly ultimate man only claims its rights when it charges the idea of the absolute self -authenticating authority of Scripture with irrationalism.
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It says it's irrational, evangelicalism. Why is it irrational? You gotta give me reason, you gotta give me proof.
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You have to make it fit my thinking. And when it charges the idea of the absolute self -consistent
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God with rationalism, the idea of an infallible
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Bible cannot long be retained, this is so important, if the theology that one holds is inherently destructive of this very idea.
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The idea of an infallible Bible is not to be derived from a philosophy or a theology that starts independently of the
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Bible, reason as the principian. The Bible, he says, must be self -authenticating.
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The idea of a self -authenticating Bible is expressive of a certain theology, namely,
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Reformed theology. Now, much fundamentalist theology is
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Arminian in character. For this reason, it cannot do justice to the idea of an infallible Bible, although it surely intends to do so.
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But its idea that man has power to do that which is independent of the plan of God is inherently destructive of the idea that God can infallibly interpret to man the whole process of cosmic and human history.
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When, therefore, Arminian theologians believe in an infallible Bible, they do so largely in a rational fashion because it doesn't fit their system.
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It doesn't fit the Christian context. So my conclusion, it's very simple.
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The most natural conversion for an evangelical is not to Romanism, but to the truth and beauty of Reformed theology which alone can inform and animate a truly
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Reformed apologetic. Thank you. Wow.
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Praise God. So for those of you guys that are watching the live stream, encourage you guys to share that.
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That will still be on our Apologia Studios YouTube channel. Let people know important stuff, right?
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Now you know why I love Dr. Oliphant. So this is a tough moment for us next.
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I know you have to forgive us for doing this to you guys, but we have two breakout sessions to choose from.
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And I know it's super difficult. The blessing in all of this is that all of this is being recorded, including the breakout sessions, and those will be available later.
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So if you miss one today, you will be able to go and get it later. The next session we have for breakouts is
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Darren Doan and Dr. James White. Actually, this is sort of a little bit of a reunion,
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I suppose. Darren Doan did the film, some of you guys have maybe seen, Collision with Douglas Wilson versus Christopher Hitchens.
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How many of you guys have seen that film? Raise your hand. Wow, okay. You guys need to get that film.
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So I encourage you guys, as soon as this is over, you go and you download, you start watching right away.
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Collision was following Christopher Hitchens, who died, famous atheist, and Douglas Wilson on a debate tour.
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I think the title of the book was, Is Christianity Good for the World? That's the name of the book. Fantastic film.
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It was really my introduction to Darren Doan. And again, encourage you guys to take a look at it. But in that film, there's a little scene you may have missed,
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Dr. Oliphant, but the sharp eye will see him. There's a scene where they're in a pub, where you have
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Douglas Wilson, Dr. Oliphant, and Christopher Hitchens in a pub, having a conversation, and absolutely love that scene, because the conversation that happens is so good.
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But Dr. Oliphant is in there, so they know each other. And so a little bit of a reunion. You're welcome, gentlemen.
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So Darren Doan is a filmmaker, Collision, also the Free Speech Apocalypse, fairly recently came out, and just a bunch of other films,
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Saving Christmas with Kirk Cameron, remember that? Went to the theaters? No? Why not? Why not?
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Okay, so have Darren talk to you about that. So Darren Doan, G Building, Dr.
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James White, G Building, same thing as yesterday, head out these doors, turn left, head down there. We're gonna do about an hour over there, meet back here, and then
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Nate Wilson is gonna be up on the main stage, and then we will have lunch together.
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And so that's the plan. Let's pray, and let's thank God for all he's doing. Father, I wanna thank you so much for what you have given to Dr.
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Oliphant by way of his experience, his life, his ministry, what you have taught him, and thank you for the gifts that you've given to him to teach us and to communicate to us these fundamental truths and vitally important things.
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God, thank you for your goodness to us this week in this conference. Pray you continue to bless us, Lord, with eyes that see, ears that hear, and we're just grateful for all that you've done, especially,
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Father, for Jesus Christ and the gift of eternal life that we have in him through faith. God, thank you also for your word and the gift of it.