The Freedom to Blame the Potter: Steve Tassi’s Video Reviewed

Romans 9 Debate Preview and the Need for Careful Categories

Well, greetings. Welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. I was just, I hate when a, something popped up when I opened up Gmail in my browser, and it said, it was saying something about, oh, what was that?

It said something about, now you can do this with Evernote. And it disappeared before I could see what I could do with Evernote. And then I was sitting here going, I'd really like to put this email message in Evernote so I could read it if I have time later in the program, but I have no idea where that went.

And I'm sitting here looking around going, well, what was that thing? I have no earthly idea. So I, maybe I have to shut it down. Maybe it'll pop up again. I don't know. But it would be nice to be able to do that.

Hey, welcome anyways, first world problems. Is that, is that how they put it? Yeah. Actually, our first world problems are named Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That's our first world problems. Oh my, don't even get me going there.

So let's start off with tomorrow evening. Lord willing, and, you know, things happen. Things, something happened last time, which could still happen again. A couple weeks ago, my wife ended up being really delayed in getting to something I really wanted to get to by flight because Southwest Airlines had, and they rarely have this happen, but they had a computer meltdown.

So if everything works out correctly, we will be in Southern California tomorrow evening for a debate on Romans nine. You might say, didn't you already do one of those? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are a lot of, a lot of views on Romans nine out there.

I'm going to be presenting pretty much the identical opening statement that I did, because it's an exegesis of Romans nine. And I can guarantee you something, absolutely nothing has changed in the past year to change what Romans nine is actually talking about.

And so I'm going to do my best in only 20 minutes to walk through Romans nine. If you want to skip my opening statement, come to the debate late, save yourself some time. Just listen to what I said last time, because there really isn't anything for me to change.

When you're being asked to do the same thing twice in a row, you do the same thing twice in a row. The, now, of course, I'm not exactly sure what Brother Tassie believes about Romans nine. Like I said, I put together an hour and a half long audio thing on, you know, putting together presentations he had done.

But these presentations were from many, many years ago. And last evening, I was shown a video that was done more recently, only four years ago, instead of like seven years ago. And it was directed to me and I had not seen it before.

So what I'd like to do today is, my hope is that the debate will remain focused on Romans nine. That's my hope, anyway. But once we've made our presentations, then there has to be an application. So I understand that some other issues are going to, of necessity, come up, especially in answering audience questions and things like that.

I want to express my desire that Brother Tassie would be willing to possibly consider the possibility that maybe some of the conclusions he has drawn might not accurately represent the position that he's denying.

Let me play for you, and this isn't the video. You've put that screen back on the screen over here, by the way. Let me just provide you, there you go. First thing is audio clip. This is just one portion of that multiple video audio that I put together.

And I've listened to a number of times. Just to give you a sense of the older videos, which again, I've expressed the hope that maybe this was just a long time ago, and that there's been some reading done and things like that since then.

But here's just an example of some of the perspective that Brother.

Critique of Misrepresenting Calvinism as Fatalism

Tassie has presented publicly. Not the Calvinistic rational spontaneity that makes the human will not free at all. So there is no free will in Calvinism. Therefore, it logically follows your sin and evil is God's will.

All glory to the Calvinist God. Calvinism is fatalism. In Calvinist sovereignty, God gives man unconditional reprobation, as he is totally sovereign over the affairs of man. God did not merely permit sin in Calvinism, but it is God's will.

And he is the cause of your sin, as he could not merely foresee it. Therefore, man in Calvinism disguised in false humility is merely an attempt to make themselves innocent and blame God for their sin and all of the atrocities of the world.

Calvinism is the deification of man, as man in Calvinism is transformed into righteousness, as he has done no evil of his own free will, or what you could call unmerited evil, as man could not receive evil by faith, as man is only a free agent without free will.

I am not appealing to your emotions. I'm appealing to your conscience. Calvinism is truly fatalism, and all Calvinists.

Must hold to double predestination. Now, I struggle as well to really understand all of that. But the claim that Calvinism is fatalism is just constant over and over and over again. And of course, fatalism is impersonal, therefore, making the connection.

There are many, many, many category errors. And in everything that I've listened to over the past couple of months, I've never heard Brother Tassie actually quote any written source. All of his sources of Reformed theology have been internet Calvinists.

I was talking to a Calvinist on the internet. Well, we all know what that means, and we all know that we shouldn't take Facebook, Twitter, or internet chat rooms as some type of scholarly standard. But the categories of what synergism is, what monergism is, things like that, numerous claims made about logical errors, but never once a citation of any source anywhere.

No Reformed writings, no backing up the assertion that this is what synergism means, or this is what monergism means, or this is the logical basis. This textbook on logic substantiates my accusation. This is a logical contradiction.

Nothing like that. It's just pure assertion without any scholarly foundation ever brought in anything that I've heard. There may be stuff out there, and maybe when I was grabbing videos, I just grabbed all the wrong ones.

But it's probably unlikely because there was real consistency and a lot of overlap in what I was listening to. So you get that kind of thing. And you get the Calvinist God. The Calvinist God is Satan.

Satan and the Calvinist God are indistinguishable. And I'll be honest with you. One of the questions I was going to ask before we get started, because I can't, you know, again, these were 2009, 2010, number of years ago, maybe things have changed, I hope.

But from my perspective, it did not seem to me that Brother Tassie believes that Calvinists are actually Christians because of the things that he said. Now, maybe I'm wrong about that, but maybe it was back then, maybe he's changed.

I don't know. So my hope was, it was a long time ago, people grow, they do more reading, they realize, you know, maybe my arguments weren't all that good back then and I misrepresented some things. So then I was directed to this video.

And it's from, I believe, 2012. So it's only four years old. And it's specifically about me. Well, about the potter's freedom. And there is a connection to Romans 9 later on. So it's somewhat relevant, but might give us an idea of the categories, the things that need to be discussed tomorrow evening, possibly.

And everybody keeps asking, is there a live stream? No, not a live stream. Sorry. We keep saying no, there's not a live stream. It'll be posted when it gets posted. Sorry. It's just the way it is. So here's Brother Tassie.

And he titled the video James White, Freedom to Blame the Potter. Freedom to Blame the Potter. So let's review it.

Divine Sovereignty, Creaturely Freedom, and the Role of Tradition

Use a term called universal determinism says that God causes everything. And yet they equivocate by going back and forth between this universal determinism. And they say, God does everything. There was caused everything.

It's late Augustine and John Calvin. It wasn't before Augustine that.

This was taught in the church. It took three centuries. A common claim, a bogus one, but a common claim. You'll find it in lots of books. Just last Sunday, I read from the Epistle of Diognetius. Some people call it Moth A Taste.

We're not sure of the exact date, but it's second century, probably. Strong assertion of not only Orthodox eteriology, but you can find both in Clement and Diognetius, very strong references to God's sovereignty, God's power.

And of course, these things come from what's called the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim, where God over and over again, remember Nebuchadnezzar? Nebuchadnezzar was long before the New Testament church.

Nebuchadnezzar himself very clearly laid out in Daniel chapter four, the absolute sovereignty of God. The Psalmist, Psalm 135, Psalm 33. The book of Isaiah, numerous texts a week ago too, between 40 and 48 especially, that present the absolute sovereignty of God over all things.

And the fact that there is only one autonomous will. One of the problems with Brother Tassie is he seems to assume that free will and autonomous will are identical things and does not recognize a category difference.

All meaningful theological discussion has required a category difference because the Bible presents them in different categories. And so, if you conflate them, then you're left not being really able to discuss anything.

But I have argued and will argue again, that there can only be one autonomous will. But that doesn't mean that creaturely free will does not exist. It just has to be defined within the context in which it was created.

And that's why we have to go to Isaiah 10, Genesis 50, Acts 4, and the biblical testimony to these specific things. But anyway, that's a common, I think, very inappropriate claim that is very frequently repeated out there on the internet.

And it just simply doesn't hold up. Before it was taught in late Augustine, early Augustine believed what the early Church Fathers.

Did in free will. But the idea of what the early Church Fathers believed, there is no monogamous, monogamous, right? There is no single understanding of these issues within patristic sources. I'm sorry, anyone who's, again, if you read only secondary sources, I can see how you come up with that.

If you read the actual early Church Fathers, you recognize the diversity of perspectives and opinions that are expressed therein.

Augustine changed and became, he embraced the Stoic philosophy of universal determinism.

Being a Neoplatonist, that would be rather interesting. That's a, again, I think that is a kind of observation that sounds interesting. I doubt most people in the audience would understand Stoicism enough to recognize the differences between Augustine and Stoicism, and then similarities and things like that.

But again, these assertions, no citations are given, it's just sort of thrown out there. And they're not assertions that I think would survive real scholarly examination real well.

And then they equivocate. If you say, well, I synergistically just received salvation, it's all the work of God, but I received it by cooperating on knowing I'm going to hell if I don't, and I received it, then they go, well, no, God universally determined it, you didn't have any choice.

I say

Now, see, this will probably come up over and over again, but the refusal to allow for proper categories just shuts down all meaningful communication. And the idea of regeneration, the idea of secondary causes, Brother Tassie just pretty much dismisses those as equivocation.

And I don't know how he deals with the many places in Scripture where those very concepts are plainly presented to us, but that's what happens. And the result is this, well, you know, I said last time, this is the view of, I wouldn't even recognize my faith if I didn't know that that was what was being described.

I mean, the straw man misrepresentations just over and over and over again, and it doesn't advance the conversation to just simply say, I will not allow you to have the categories that you have established via biblical exegesis.

And it is interesting that by the end of this clip, I really do believe that what we'll hear is the exact same argument of the objector in Romans chapter 9, which that's what will make this relevant, I think, to tomorrow evening's discussion.

So God causes my evil. That's universal determinism, too. I didn't have a choice in my.

Evil. Now, of course, you know, Brother Tassie knows that we say that to say cause in this fashion, in the sense of primary causes and secondary causes is invalid. But he just simply dismisses the existence of primary and secondary causes.

If God has a sovereign decree that includes the existence of evil, then God is the author of evil. That's just it. There can be, again, this is a really extreme example of compressing the full-orbed biblical view of God's relationship with his creation down into a one-dimensional flat pancake where you just squish all the biblical revelation out of it and all the depth of revelation, and you just make everything equal to everything else and try to simplify it to a point that it just becomes a canard.

It becomes just a horrific misrepresentation of the reality. And, of course, I think we can validly ask, why would you do that? And it would seem that the answer is because that's the best argument I can come up against it.

But again, that's not the way we should be doing things. That's not how the dialogue should actually take place.

That's through secondary causes. What? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? It's a contradiction.

No, it's not a contradiction. Over and over again, Brother Tassie will talk about contradiction. Without accurately using the term in any meaningful philosophical sense, when someone provides a coherent, consistent methodology for defining the categories in which they're speaking, for example, the categories of divine autonomy versus creaturely freedom, these have been established for the Reformed person from biblical exegesis, from example.

If you simply deny them by saying, that's ridiculous, and then turn around and say, see, you're contradicting yourself, that's not a valid argument. That, unfortunately, is extremely common in our day in most public discourse.

But as Christian people, we are to be people of truth and people of integrity in our argumentation. It's not a valid argument. Simply saying, well, I deny your categories, even though you've established the proper grounds of those categories and have given examples of those categories, that's trying to win by changing the definitions of words rather than seeking a common ground and then, as Christians, arguing from the Word of God.

That's not a proper approach.

But people are flocking to it. Why? Because they love that concept of my sin was caused by God.

I've never heard a single Reformed person in my entire life ever say anything that absurd. Never. I've never, I've been in Reformed churches for decades now, and I have met with tens of thousands of Reformed people, and not one of them has ever indicated, thought, given any idea whatsoever that that is even the beginning of an attractive idea.

First of all, we don't believe it. We deny it. We've denied it from the very beginning. So, to say this is why people are flocking to Reformed theology is just, again, it's hard to understand why such a statement would ever be made.

There's no foundation for it within Reformed writing, within Reformed thought. It's just a straw man on a level that's difficult, really, to begin to comprehend. And I'm really hoping that Brother Tassi has abandoned all of this, but the videos are still up.

So, you know, I was able to get hold of them. So, common sense would be, yes, this is still my perspective. I'm just being hopeful that maybe it isn't. But that type of a statement is just unworthy of anyone because it really is worse than almost anything I've ever heard a Reformed person say about the Armenians.

They want to be Armenians because, and then some, I've heard some really weird things, but that one goes beyond anything I've heard going the other direction.

They're flocking to it. Evil becomes good and convolutes between is evil evil or is evil good? Because God caused my evil. It's got to be good. That's what I'm thinking. And I'm attracted to.

That. You know, again, complete canard. No one says that. No one believes that. I would love to see Brother Tassi provide a single example of this from anyone. From my books, my writings, R .C. Sproul, John Piper.

Who are you going to come up with? It's such a fundamental misunderstanding that it simply has to be abandoned. It simply has to be abandoned for any kind of meaningful.

Conversation to take place. And they equivocate and they move with grace and beauty between these two contradictions and people are like, wow, that's cool. And it's a total blatant logical fallacy. But if it's played carefully, like a card dealer moving the cards around carefully, it sounds pretty good.

James White's one of the best at this. He wrote a book called Potter's Freedom. It's a response to Geisler's book, Chosen But Free. Now, Chosen But Free, it's an honest title. It says, I'm chosen, but I'm free.

And the rest of Norman Geisler's book goes to explain how it's chosen but free. And James White's response title was Potter's Freedom, Universal Determinism. In a title called Potter's Freedom, that means there's no other freedom but God's freedom.

And in James White's book, Debating Calvinism with Dave Hunt, it starts with the premise, the Bible speaks much of free will, he says, God's free will. In a universal deterministic statement like that, there is no other room but God's free will.

And then how does he defend it in the rest of the book? He goes into natural theology.

Now, I just have to stop immediately there. First of all, again, what we're saying is that if you have one autonomous divine will, there is not room for a second autonomous divine will. That there is a difference between the autonomous will of the creator and the derivative, non-eternal, creaturely will of the human being.

And that's not even bringing into consideration the clear fact that the Bible presents something called federal headship and the fact that we have fallen in Adam. I get the feeling that Brother Tassid does not actually believe in that from some of the comments he's made, but I'm not 100 certain on that.

So, what's being presented to the people is, I don't believe that man has a will. And what I explain repetitively and with a fair amount of clarity in both books that have just been referenced is the fact that the creaturely will is different than the divine will.

And that the fallen creaturely will is even more limited than the unfallen creaturely will, but that no creaturely will is ever autonomous or can be autonomous in the sense of being equal to the divine will.

So, these are categories that must be allowed. If you do not allow them, then you are so simplifying Christianity as to turn it into a kindergarten-level exercise. And this simply cannot be. It simply isn't a possibility.

Secondly, the idea that I then defended my position from natural theology would be offensive if I really believed that there was an attempt being made here to accurately represent what I said. Throughout this, you'll notice something.

There will not be a single quotation from either of my books. There are assertions, but never quotations. And this has been consistent throughout everything that I have listened to. No citations. Just, I think he's saying this.

And generally, that conclusion is an erroneous one. And so, anyone who has read The Potter's Freedom knows that I established both the teaching of the sovereignty of God, his autonomous will, and man's depravity, and his enslavement to sin and his fallen Adam, not by reference to natural theology, but through exegesis.

That is what has made the book so successful and powerful, I think, in many people's lives. And having a lasting impact upon someone is because when you ground your argument upon Scripture itself, then it has a lasting capacity and ability amongst the people of God.

And so, it is about as accurate to say that King James is a black man as to say that my grounds for arguing with these things is natural theology. Again, I guess if you want to completely redefine what natural theology is, but as a Reformed presuppositionalist, there's all sorts of issues that we have with the concept of natural theology in the first place.

It does say something about the lenses through which Brother Tassie is viewing even that which he reads, and hence that which he sees in the text. And it brings us back to that issue of the overriding authority and power of tradition.

In the lives of many people. Says he opposes. He's a presuppositionalist. And he says he rejects classical apologetics or evidential theology or classical theology. And yet he argues compatibilism and secondary causes right under the Reformed confessions of faith, secondary causes.

Pete. And of course, I actually argued them right out of the original language text of the scriptures. Really spent a great deal of time establishing these categories directly from the inspired text itself.

If someone actually read the book, that's what they would see. I'm not really sure where some of this is actually coming.

From. And that is right out of the playbook of Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas.

Yeah, Aquinas. Yeah, I'm following Aquinas. Right. Now remember, Geisler would be complimented by that. That insults me and leaves me going, what are you talking about?

It's right out of the discussion of natural theology, and he does it poorly. So he goes with the premise. He starts with there's a free will and it's all God's, and then he contradicts it the rest of the way by saying compatibilist free will.

Again, it's not a contradiction. You are creating a false contradiction by just simply dismissing without providing any argumentation the categories that you reject. There is something called creaturely freedom.

It is not autonomous. And I provided clear biblical argumentation on this. And if it comes up, then I will ask you to explain those biblical texts, such as Genesis 50, Isaiah 10, Acts chapter 4, where you clearly have the relationship between, you know, in one act, God's acting for his holy goodness, and man is acting for his sinful purpose.

One act, two different intentions. God's intention's good. Man's intention's evil. God is just to judge the man for acting upon the intentions of his heart. That's the biblical teaching. You may not like it.

You may reject it. But you just need to be open about the fact that your ultimate authority there is not biblical teaching, and that I'm attempting to present that kind of biblical presentation.

Wait a minute. That's a synergism. And he's a monergist.

Now, of course, this is one of the more common arguments, but it's not from scholarly Arminians, but from those who just don't do a lot of reading in it, is if you, in any element of discussion of theology, recognize the existence of more than one force, then you're violating your commitment to monergism.

This is the same level as Ahmed Didat's argumentation, hence the trinity. The difference between monergism and synergism is that in bringing about the act of regeneration and bringing about the salvation of an individual, now, of course, salvation can refer to a lot of things.

It can refer to the entire process, so on and so forth. But in actually bringing about regeneration, that this is a monergistic act. It is not a cooperative act because regeneration brings spiritual life.

And the Bible is very, very plain, very, very clear. Those who are according to the flesh cannot submit themselves to the law of God. They cannot do what is pleasing to God. Repentance and faith is pleasing to God.

The Bible is plain. It's clear. I've never heard anybody, I've heard lots of folks deny this, but I've never heard anyone provide a meaningful interpretation of Romans chapter eight to get around the plain statement that is being made there.

And so, when we're talking about monergism and synergism, we're talking about that initial act of bringing about the spiritual life of God's elect people. We're not saying that in sanctification, there is not the activity of the spirit of God within the spirit of man, causing us to want to love the things of God all the rest of that kind of stuff.

Again, rejection of categories that allow for meaningful theological communication that have been established for centuries and centuries, just simply to create such a simplified and silly presentation that it's easy to mock.

That's all you have here. Now, if your purpose is mockery, then that's what you're going to do. If your purpose is the glorification of God and the presentation of his truth, then you're not going to do that.

And we've been consistent. No matter what anybody says, the potter's freedom accurately, fully represented Norman Geisler's perspective without question. No one has ever, I've been accused many times, but not anyone who's ever accused me of misrepresenting Geisler when faced with me could come up with anything.

They just would melt into a puddle. It's really easy to say, but the reality is that those who've read both books know that I bend over backwards to accurately represent the other side. That's that. Out of respect for Norman Geisler is also that when you accurately represent the other side, when you then refute their arguments, that refutation is extremely strong.

If you do not represent the other side accurately, then your refutation of their lesser arguments can be greatly weakened by someone who actually knows what their best arguments were. So if you really do believe what you're saying is the truth, then represent the other side's strongest arguments, not their weakest ones.

Just how we've operated for a long time.

Yet he plays, he goes and makes a universal determinism, and then he starts to backpedal by saying he's a compatibilist. That's right out of the philosophers, not all Christian, but that's right out of the philosophy of the middle of the second millennium.

And these philosophers debated compatibilism, and it's right out of classical apologetics, the natural theology. And that's the contradiction. I'm a presuppositionalist, but to prove to you I am, I'm going to use natural theology to prove it.

Now, of course, once again, Brother Tassie has completely failed at this point. That's not natural theology. He has mystified monergism, mystified synergism, he's mystified all the categories in which he's spoken, and has not once quoted my book to establish any of these things, ignoring the fact that my argumentation was actually extremely biblical at this point, and I established this through exegesis, which is what has made the book have lasting impact.

The book's, what, 15 years old now, 15, 16 years old, and it's still having an impact along these lines. They're just, you know, he may be smiling and the people in the audience may be going, yeah, James White's a real idiot.

The problem is, if they actually read the book, they're going to discover that Brother Tassie wasn't even representing what I was saying, even with a smidgen of accuracy, not even a little teeny iota.

And anyone who's read the book knows.

That. And he goes, and the Westminster and Reformed confessions of faith say God causes everything but not the author of evil, and it establishes secondary causes. Secondary causes is a science called efficacy, and it is studied to determine the cause and effect of everything, and it is a scientific method in natural theology.

But it's also a biblical category that long preceded any modern philosophical discussion of the issue. Do philosophers discuss these things? Yes. Are you falling into the trap of so many Arminians, it seems, of drawing connections without providing the foundation for those connections?

It seems very much that that is the case. And again, there wasn't any need for this if a fair reading of the Potter's Freedom would have been undertaken. Can't you see the blatant contradictions? It's dishonest.

Blatant contradictions. We've discovered that there have been none. There have been numerous errors made on Brother Tassie's part. And then we move from the allegation of contradiction based upon his own redefinition of terms to the accusation of dishonesty on my part.

And you never get used to it, but after a while, it's just sort of like, there we go again. And people say, does it ever bother you how many people will go personal and start the ad hominem and stuff like that?

And I don't ever want to become accustomed to it, but at the same time, I only give the weight that the argumentation deserves. And this argumentation is non-existent, so it deserves no weight. So it's just sort of like, I'm really sorry you feel that way, but the fact of the matter is you haven't established any of the foundations that you think you've established.

And so my hope is that there can be movement forward and learning in regards to these issues. Because if you say, okay,.

The Meaning of Monergism, Synergism, and Secondary Causes

If you want to talk about natural theology, James White, you do it poorly. First of all, you're wrong about it. But since you played that card, let's talk about it. And it doesn't establish true secondary causes the way they define how God knows.

But that's the trick. That's the sleight of hand. It's the movement of the card that causes you to go, oh, okay, because we never studied it. People like me don't talk about it very much. And we're all caught in these confusions and contradictions.

And pretty soon, you're going, wow, I like that. God caused my evil. That's pretty cool. The name of James White's book, instead of Potter's Freedom, it should be entitled Freedom to Blame the Potter.

Because he moves from statements of universal determinism. And then without blinking an eye, he invokes compatibilism and secondary causes, which are synergism. And now man is cooperating with God. And what he's doing is he's, when it comes to his sin, he blames God for it.

Now, numerous things here. Again, to those who've actually read the book, you're going, what is he talking about? It's not even touching on reality. This is where you need to have Frasier Crane potted up and ready to go with, what color is the sky in your world?

Because what color was the sky while you were reading the Potter's Freedom is really the question here. The allegation of contradiction is because he completely obliterates meaningful utilization of the term compatibilism, removes it from the category in which it's being used, applies it to everything else.

Again, no citations from original sources. He can't demonstrate any of this from reform writers because reform writers don't do these things. It's a complete straw man, once again. But then here, let me replay that here.

Without blinking an eye, he invokes compatibilism and secondary causes, which are synergism. And now man is cooperating with God. And what he's doing is he's, when it comes to his sin, he blames God for it.

He blames God for it. Now, if I were ever to review someone's book and put that review out publicly, if I were to make a statement, especially about a fellow Christian, that strong, I would feel a fundamental requirement to back up what I say.

Because anyone who's read the book, and I seem to recall it very well, I wrote it. That is just absurd. There's no other word to use than that's ridiculous. I did no such thing. I made no such statement.

And anyone who has spent almost any meaningful time at all in reading reformed writings knows that no reformed person does that. This is just, you'd have to really believe that your people that you're talking to here, and he's in his church, are never ever going to encounter a Calvinist who has ever read anything, who has any knowledge of their faith whatsoever, because this is just such a wild misrepresentation.

It's horrible. I do not blame God for my evil. I do believe that God foreordained all that takes place. I just do not engage in the absurdity of crushing the full-orbed revelation of God's relationship with his creatures in time, including the incarnation, down into a one-dimensional kindergarten-level explanation.

And if you'll allow the scriptures to speak, they will introduce categories to you that you're just simply refusing to allow. And it's beautiful. Not what you're doing. The truth of God is beautiful. It requires the greatest thought and reflection and meditation of the mind.

But this kind of presentation, this kind of, you know, I'm blaming God for my sin. Brother Tassie, I've never blamed God for my sin. You may say that, well, you can, given what you believe. And I say, no, I can't, given what I believe.

And stop editing what I believe. Stop ignoring it. Stop twisting it. Stop misrepresenting it. If you want to make an argument that I shouldn't believe what I believe, or that I can't believe what I believe, then do so based upon my presentation, not your boiled down, stripped down, every category and every bit of logic presented, stripped out, and turned into a kindergarten-level presentation type thing.

This is not how to do it. This is not how to do it in any way, shape, or form. Because if God knows what he causes,.

Then all of the sin in the world was caused by God. And man is just an unwilling recipient of it.

Man is an unwilling recipient of it. Now, the fundamental assertion of Reformed Theology is that in his fallen state, man is incapable of doing that which is pleasing in God's sight, and that man wills in his fallen state to do that which pleases himself, and that which is selfish and self-centered rather than God glorifying and in service to others.

And so, we make that plain statement, but because you have your traditions and you have what you've developed you think is just the absolute best argument against Reformed Theology ever made, every element of our direct teaching, which is a part of every book that we publish and the sermons that we preach and the confessions that have been ours long before you and I were born, anything that doesn't fit into your argument just gets dismissed as a contradiction.

Well, that doesn't mean anything. That doesn't fit what I think synergism means or what I think compatibilism means or whatever else. It would be so easy for me to engage in this type of strawman-filled misrepresentation of your own position.

I can't do that because I believe as a Christian man that I am prohibited from doing so. I would be interested as a pastor of a church why you believe you're allowed to do this, but I can't do it as a pastor of a Christian church, an elder in a Christian church.

I am restricted by following he who is the truth from using untruth. It just doesn't work. And if you believe it, you're going to have a problem in your life.

Too as you try to apply that as principles to your life. Secondary causes aren't established in the way that it's used and by the Reformers, the Reformed Theology camp. Then he goes on in the book debating Calvinism with Dave Hunt and he says, God frees the will once you're saved.

Wait a minute. Your premise, the title of your book for Geisler and the premise in your book that you started with in this exact same book was.

The Bible says much about free will of gods. And again, here we go. Here is a sadly classic example of how tradition can become a lens that allows you to just see words, but not see words. Because anyone who's read my book knows that, yes, I very strongly emphasized the autonomous divine will of God, but I also very clearly indicated man's will.

I even argued against those who say that Calvinists say that man has no will because Norman Geisler said that. And I specifically discussed the difference between a fallen will, an enslaved will, and an autonomous will.

I talked in categories of creature the will, but see, once you, once you collapse everything down and you will not allow meaningful categories to exist that allow communication to take place, then you can make all sorts of accusations of contradiction.

Now, sadly, Brother Tassie would find himself hoisted on his own petard if he were to ever attempt to defend the deity of Christ, the two natures of Christ, any other element of meaningful Christian theology, the whole concept of the atonement, things like that require the utilization of categories.

And I have a feeling that Brother Tassie would use those categories. But when it comes dealing with Calvinism, well, we don't have to, we don't have to extend that, that grace to someone else, but we'll demand it of ourselves when we get around to discussing these other issues.