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

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 that something happened last time, which could still happen again. A couple of 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 9.

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 9 out there.

I'm going to be presenting pretty much the identical opening statement that I did because it's an exegesis of Romans 9.

And I can guarantee you something, absolutely nothing has changed in the past year to change what

Romans 9 is actually talking about. And so I'm going to do my best in only 20 minutes to walk through Romans 9.

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.

Now of course, I'm not exactly sure what Brother Tassi believes about Romans 9.

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 9.

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 Tassi 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.

The, let me just provide you, there you go, with, this is, 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 Tassi 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 am 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.

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 Tassi 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, that's, 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, so on, nothing like that.

It's just pure assertion without any scholarly foundation ever right. 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, there's 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. 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 Tassi 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. The idea of what the early church fathers believed, there is no 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. 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,

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, 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.

David 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 Tassie 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 Tassie provide a single example of this from anyone.

But 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 was a black man as to say that my grounds for arguing with these things is natural theology, because, 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. 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. The reason I did 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 philosopher's, 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, or 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 is mystifying monergism, mystifying synergism, he's mystifying 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? It's 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, you know, 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 titled

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 sort of need to have

Fraser 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 which is 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 reform writings knows that no reform 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. You know, 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 Tassi, 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 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 discuss 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 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 to dealing with Calvinism, well, we don't have to extend that grace to someone else, but we'll demand it of ourselves when we get around to discussing these other issues.

This leads to a level of incoherence and inconsistency that, again, should cause the follower of Christ to recoil in horror if we're being forced to consider whether we want to glorify

God by our consistency or dishonor him by our inconsistency. That really becomes part of the question.

Then he goes on to say, God frees the will so that people can believe. Really? Yes.

Yes. Really. Really. That's exactly what I said. Because, again, that makes perfect sense in the context in which

I said it. And in the context, it allows for man's will to be a creaturely will, for there to be a new creature in Christ, for there to be freedom from sin and bondage and all of those things, which are biblical teachings.

It makes perfect sense there. It's only within a universe where you have decided that these other necessary categories cannot exist that it becomes at all problematic.

And you just have to understand, that wasn't my presentation. So, what you're saying is, well, if you accept my boiled -down presentation, then his makes no sense.

Well, yeah, that's exactly right. But your boiled -down presentation likewise would not allow you to defend pretty much almost anything else you believe.

I'm not sure if you've ever been pressed to think about that before. So, God freed the will so that man can choose?

No, they don't believe that. But if it's played carefully, it sounds pretty good. And it's just a logical policy.

Either there's no free will or there is. Come on. Now, I hope you're catching this now.

Free will equals autonomous will. No other categories allowed. Creaturely will, nothing.

It's not allowed. It's part and parcel of everything that has ever been written on this.

But it's not allowed. Can't have it. God's will, the very term

God's will, presupposes that there's other wills than God's.

We wouldn't even have a term God's will doing God's will if there was no other will in the universe, like they claim.

And they play this game of free will. They'll start to say, well, we don't have free will, but we have volition.

Now, if you study forensics of any kind, if you've ever seen Law and Order or CSI... Okay, now,

I did... I was writing when I was listening to this. I wrote inside today, but I fired this up at the beginning of a

Zwift ride inside. Killer ride, man. Anyway, and despite the fact that my heart rate was rather elevated at that point,

I did manage to chuckle that at one point I've been accused of relying upon natural theology.

And now to define will, we're going to CSI. Yeah, okay.

I felt like saying it depends on which CSI series we're talking about here because I sense some differences between them.

But anyway, there you go. Crime show. What does volition mean?

Well, it just means that you are acting based on the causing of someone else.

And what happens in a trial... In fact, the district attorney will come to the criminal that's committed the crime and he'll say, if you give up someone else, we'll give you a break.

And the worst a person could be charged with in Calvinism for their evil would be involuntary manslaughter.

You couldn't have done other than what God decreed for you to do. And the truth is,

Calvinism on trial... It's going to be another title of a video

I do. You put Calvinism on trial and the worst you could be charged for in your evil, if you murdered someone, if you raped someone, the worst you could be charged for is involuntary manslaughter in Calvinism because everything's caused by God.

You don't have a free will. In fact, James White, he says, if everything's evil is not caused by God, there's no meaning behind evil.

Oh, really, James White? You can't think of meaning behind evil that you did in your life unless God caused it?

What I actually said, of course, is that I do not believe there is any such thing as meaningless evil.

And if God is not sovereign over man's evil, and if God does not have a decree, then there is such thing as meaningless evil, that God, knowing it would exist, purposely brought into existence a universe where his law would be violated to no end for no purpose.

That is what I was talking about. And evidently, that's what Brother Tassie believes, is that though God knew, because I have specifically heard him say he rejects open theism.

Good. Even though that's the only consistent Arminianism, he rejects it. Good. So, from his perspective, when

God created, he knew every act of evil was going to exist, but he had no purpose for it.

So, he brought all this into existence, all the evil, God created it, knew it was going to happen, could have stopped it, but chose not to for no purpose, because there's no purpose to it.

That's what you're defending. That's the incoherence of the argument being presented.

Sadly, almost never are these folks actually challenged to recognize that by affirming

God's knowledge of the existence of all evil acts, and then removing from him the sovereign freedom to have a purpose in these acts, you have to affirm that God brought these things into existence and he did so specifically without any purpose.

And so, in the instance of dealing with horrific human evil, you either have to look at people and say,

God didn't see it coming and there wasn't anything to do about it, open theism. God saw it coming and didn't care, this form of Arminianism.

God decreed it was going to happen. He has a purpose, you're to trust him and to follow his prescriptive will, which is his law, in how we respond to evil in seeking to glorify

God. And you're saying my position is the one that doesn't make any sense?

That's kind of weird. Maybe James White should have a ministry where he goes to all just, just let's pick one group of evil victims, all the young, the parents of young daughters that were raped and murdered.

That's graphic. But let's just take that. Maybe James White should start a ministry where he goes to those families and he says,

God caused that to give it meaning. And they're thinking that...

Now, did you catch, did you catch the fundamental problem there? God caused that to give it meaning.

See, this gentleman has no earthly idea, we believe. And that's why, you know, some of you are just freaking out.

I just can't believe anybody would say these things. And I'm not. I'm not.

These types of objections exist out there. They need to be shown for what they are. They need to be answered. They're standing in the way of people coming to a full understanding of what the scripture says it needs to be responded to.

As distasteful as it may be, it still needs to be done. But if he had any idea what we really believe, that's not what he would have said.

Well, okay, I'll take that back. If he had any idea we believed and combine that with a desire to accurately represent what we believe, then he would not have said that.

Why? Because he's objectifying the evil and then pretending that God is filling it with meaning.

That's not what we believe. We believe when God created,

He did so with purpose, with an end. And that end is specifically the glorification of the triune

God. And as difficult as that is in this man -centered, secularized, almost everybody, including

Christians, have their eyes glued to the ground and almost never look upward toward eternal things culture, where man is the center.

And of course, in most churches, man is the center there too. It is horrifically offensive to be reminded that the reason we exist is for the pleasure of God.

And it's not God's reason for existence to be our pleasure.

I realize that that's a fundamental difference between Reformed Christianity and many other forms, but I don't think that one's even arguable.

And I realize the vast majority of human beings have never read Edward's relatively small book on the sovereignty of God.

It's, I think it's in the second volume of the two volumes back there, right over, actually, it's right over my fist right now.

There. I can't read it anymore because the font in that particular set is so small that it just looks like a bunch of dirt on the page now, but it's available electronically, so I can blow the fonts up.

I would highly recommend it to people. It will go against everything that our current culture seeks to impress upon your mind.

And when we have people who are fundamentally dedicated to the centrality of humanity rather than the centrality of God, you know, you've heard me say it before, theocentric versus anthropocentric.

If you have a God -centered view, it's going to be very different if you have a man -centered view. But to have a God -centered view means you really do have to have a

God -centered view. And a God is, God is the center of all things, and he gets to do with his creation as he sees fit.

And a lot of people don't like that. They don't like that at all. If you have, however, that God -centered view, then you recognize that God has created all things with an end to that glory.

And the means by which so much of that glory takes place is the gospel. And you see, the sad thing about all this, folks, in dealing with such a inaccurate criticism of Reformed theology,

I don't do this out of some dedication to the

Calvinist club. To be perfectly honest with you, over the past number of years, I've become pretty sick and tired of the

Calvinist club, to be perfectly honest with you. If I didn't, if the phrase and the descriptor was not an accurate one and a necessary one to be able to differentiate between beliefs,

I don't know how to even use it. I was just looking at a comment from a quote -unquote

Calvinist, a TR, a truly Reformed guy last night. Somebody had said something kind about Jeff Durbin on Facebook and was just giving praise to God for the things that he had learned from Apologia and from the ministry there and from witnessing the

Mormons and all sorts of stuff like that. That's all it was about. It wasn't putting anybody else down.

It was just, you know, I'm really thankful for what the Lord's done through them for me. And I think

I got mentioned in passing as well. And this

TR guy comes along and just illustrated for me just what really turns me off about a lot of Calvinists today and just plows into, well, he decided to take this opportunity to plow into Marcus Pitman on a completely different issue.

And I read it and I clicked on the reply thing and I had my fingers poised over the keyboard and I just said,

I just can't do it. But what

I wanted to say was, you, sir, just gave the best illustration of not only why

I don't even want to be a part of this club. I've never wanted to be a part of a club.

I believe these things because the very same exegesis that I use to defend the

Trinity and the deity of Christ and the death, birth, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to the Muslims forces me to believe these things because it's the same

Bible and it's the same way of interpreting it. And of course, I find it grossly inconsistent that those who claim to embrace this theology could at the same time be arrogant, ungracious, unloving, unkind, and constantly drawing their swords and lopping people's

Arminian ears off just for the blood sport of it. Those of you on Facebook and Twitter and chat rooms and things like that that call yourself

Calvinist, if you can't start acting with grace, get back in your cage, please, for the good of the rest of us and for the good of everybody that you're ripping their ears off.

Go find yourself that book, a little booklet, it's just a little booklet, Banner of Truth, The Practical Implications of Calvinism.

Read it 10 times over before you post anything else anywhere on Facebook, okay? Please. That sermon was for free.

No charge for that at all. Sorry.

But I'm going to tell you folks, I just, and one of the reasons that we're doing the topic we're doing on the cruise, apologetics in the sight of God, is

I'm sick and tired of apologetics being done where you talk about the grace of God alone and then you can't say anything with grace.

What? Okay, I was only going to go an hour today and I've gone over time, so let me press on here.

I did want to finish this. If Brother Tassie had any understanding of what we believe, and see, one of the reasons that I can listen to this, and yeah, am

I being attacked? Am I being misrepresented? Yeah, of course, of course. Have I just become jaded to that over the years?

No. I haven't become just accustomed to things. The man does not know what

I believe, does not understand it, and is misrepresenting it. But I stand before my

Lord and I feel for the man and I want him to hear the truth.

It's up to God whether he's going to open his heart and his mind to recognize the overriding power of the traditions that he has imbibed.

But I also know how many other people over the years have been tremendously assisted.

What was the Potter's Freedom about? The Potter's Freedom was, by God's grace, a gracious and accurate response to an often ungracious, but certainly inaccurate, attack upon Reformed theology.

Look at the effect it had. Look at the effect it had. Brother Tassie's presentation is different than that of other people.

Blatant flowers? No, not the same understanding of Romans 9. All right, I hope we can stay focused on Romans 9, but something tells me once we, minimally, minimally, once we get into the audience questions, and much more probably once we get into the rebuttal periods, these issues will come up in the form of application.

Okay, I get that. As long as Romans 9 is actually dealt with and remains the focus, cool.

These other things will come up. Okay, there needs to be an answer given.

If it could be done graciously, then I have seen over and over and over again, people's hearts and minds opened, changed,

God's people blessed. And all I can do is control my side of things and try to be as accurate as I possibly can be.

Now, if I had to say that some of the things that Brother Tassie said were absurd, yes. But was that an ad hominem? No, it wasn't.

If you're saying that I defended my views of God's sovereignty and man's depravity on the basis of natural theology, and then you utterly failed to understand what those categories are, yeah, that's absurd.

And I demonstrated that, and I did not say that with malice in my heart. One of the problems these days in trying to do serious debate in theology is that we live in a society where people are so emotive before they engage their intellect that any kind of statement of someone's being wrong is automatically taken as an insult.

And sadly, I'll be perfectly honest with you, certain sectors in our society have a vested interest in making sure that people continue to think in a very confused way.

That's how you control people is you don't want them thinking clearly.

You want them thinking emotionally. So that way you can sell anything by saying it's for the children.

It works. It works. It's not supposed to work in the church. We're supposed to have the mind of Christ. We're not supposed to be conformed into the world.

But how many times have people heard me preach over the years, over the decades now, and talk about how

I really wish we could install something, you know, the front door of the church that would rip the secular mindset out of people and give them a biblical worldview and a biblical way of thinking when they come in, but it hasn't been designed.

That's the work of the Spirit. That's the constant exposure to the Word of God, things like that. All right. Anyway, those sermons were for free.

There's still five minutes left to go, so let's see if we can get this done. We'll make it a jumbo. Notice, you're taking away from the crime that person committed.

In Acts chapter 4, the early believers recognize that what Pontius Pilate, Herod, the

Romans, and the Jews had done in the death of Jesus Christ occurred because God's hand predestined for it to occur.

Do you think that's in any way, shape, or form took away from the guilt of the

Jewish people, the guilt of the Romans, the guilt of Herod, the guilt of Pontius Pilate?

When Joseph recognized the sin of his brothers in selling them into slavery, but that God had intended that to save many people?

Do you think that somehow made their sin less in God's sight? Upon what basis do you make that assertion?

These are biblical categories. You've got to deal with those texts and what they say. This is, again, a misrepresentation.

I should start a ministry doing these things. I don't think Brother Tassie realizes I was a hospital chaplain for a number of years and have written a book on death and grieving that's been found very useful by many people.

A number of people have testified that it saved their life. When you make this kind of less than serious presentation, sometimes you really stick your foot way down your throat.

Yeah, well, sorry. Do you feel me on that? Do you see what they're saying? That's exactly the worst crime you could have committed in Calvinism is involuntary manslaughter, because you only have a volition and not a free will.

There's a term in criminal justice called diminished capacity. The way

Calvinists view the fall, you're just a victim of your fallen nature, and you can't do other than evil.

And the truth is diminished capacity, which is also part of an insanity plea, is a plea that you couldn't have done other than what you did because there's something wrong with you.

Now, again, here we have biblical theology being done by CSI categories.

It's just, you know, apply this to Isaiah 10.

Apply this to the king of Assyria. And it just, it falls apart so fast that, again,

I hope this isn't the subject of discussion tomorrow night. It's supposed to be Erwin's nine. If it were, cross -examination would be very, very interesting.

Exactly what Calvinism says. You have a sin nature in such a way that God imputed evil to you at conception and you could do nothing but evil continually.

And the truth is you have a plea called diminished capacity. Um, really?

Whoever makes that argument? Who has ever made that argument? I mean, I guess what you're saying is that theoretically, before the judgment throne of God, that argument is to be made.

Are you saying it's a valid argument? What is your belief? What do you do with Romans five? What do you do with the universal existence of sin?

What do you do with babies who die? How can you explain this? You know, some of us want to have a full orbed

Christian theology. And that is why we can't jump onto these hobby horses and ride them off into the sunset, into these completely imbalanced presentations.

You know, it may get some people all excited, but if you want, you know, if you really, if your fundamental purpose is to honor the totality of God's truth, you just, you just can't become imbalanced like this.

It's. You didn't even have a free will when you did your wicked acts.

And now you think you have freedom to blame the potter? Shame on you.

You're just giving up. I'm from the streets and what you were doing, you're just giving up someone else for your crime.

And Calvinists are giving up God for their crimes. God made me do it.

God causes everything that comes to pass. And men are just unwilling recipients of what occurs in the mind of God.

The worst it could be is an insanity plea. It just puts you in a place where a bunch of people, they can't do other than what they do.

And the truth is in this doctrine, what James White is doing is he's giving up God for his evil and he's putting

God on trial for his evil. Can't you see that? In a sovereignty that you can't do other than what

God knows, you're putting God on trial for your evil. Um, does this sound familiar?

Does this sound familiar? This is where the connection is. This is the objection of Romans 9.

Who resists his will? This is the objection. In the preceding verses, the constant emphasis and the apostolic interpretation of the exercise of God's absolute sovereignty in the preceding verses, the objector says, then who resists his will?

You're giving God up. You're blaming him. Oh, wait a minute. I'm the one objecting to the apostle

Paul. Yeah, there you go. Um, I doubt that he realized this when he decided to use this illustration and say,

I'm blaming God for my evil when I don't. You know, it would have been pretty cool to have some citations from the book where I blamed

God for my evil, but we all know that there aren't any such citations. But this is the objection of Romans 9.

And how many times have we said that if you find yourself on the side of the objector to the apostle, that probably means you missed something along the line?

Because the response of the apostle is, who are you, oh man, who answers back to God, the thing formed, we'll not say the one who formed it, why did you make me like this?

And so, there is a fundamental impropriety of that which is created pretending to be able to judge he who created him.

That's the essence of the response. And I don't know which of the many escape routes brother

Tassie is going to finally choose to use. But as we saw with Layton Flowers, none of the escape routes work.

Remember with Flowers, he was talking about, you know, this is talking about the great call to be used to spread the gospel and this is about hardened

Jews. And then I pointed out, so when it talks about the clay, these are the hardened Jews.

Yeah. So, when it says later on and defines that as Jews and Gentiles, how does that fit?

And his response, I changed context. No, it's the exact same context. You know, the whole argument just went, you know, total face plant.

Whether he realized it at that time or not, I don't know. I don't think he does. But from any exegetical perspective, that's it.

You know, it's shove the dirt in, put the headstone up and leave flowers once in a while.

That was the end of that. Probably not going to go that direction in the past. He's talking about dispensations, obviously a dispensationalist.

He's talked about nations. Hey, go for it. I think

I've heard them. You know, I've heard a lot of these things before. You know, you've got the big long explanations or the shorter, whatever.

Pretty confident that the text says what the text says. And, you know, the neat thing about doing debates for me is

God has his people. If we're talking about his word, his people are going to be blessed.

That's the neat thing about it when you boil it all down. It's the oldest trick in the book.

No, literally, it's the oldest trick in this book, in the Bible.

It's the oldest trick in this book. In Genesis chapter 3.

Calvinism isn't new. It's the first trick in the book.

In Genesis chapter 3, in verse 12, after the fall,

God talking to Adam and Eve, says in verse 10, so he said, I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and hid myself.

This is Adam and Eve. And he said, God, who told you that you were naked?

You have, have you eaten from the tree which I commanded that you should not eat? Then the man said, it's the woman you gave me.

It's exactly what Calvinism says. It's the sin you gave me. Or it's that sin nature that Adam caused and all my evil comes from Adam.

It's the oldest trick in this book, the Bible. Jared So, you know, once again, those of us who actually are

Reformed, sit there and go, I wonder where he got this idea that that's what we say.

You know, I'm thinking about, I don't have a copy of it in here. I have one on my desk in the other room, but there's this, a pretty fair statement has been made that if you really want to know what someone believes, look at their liturgy and their prayers.

And I think about the consistency of historically

Reformed liturgy. And there's very much an emphasis upon confession and repentance, sorrow for sin.

And I'm thinking of that little book, The Valley of Vision. And probably not something that Brother Tassie would have read.

But, and if you haven't read it, may I suggest it to you? It's not something to be read at one sitting.

No, no, it's to be read slowly and pondered and appreciated.

But anyone who's read The Valley of Vision listens to this and just sort of hard not to chuckle because the idea that we're sitting around going, we've, we've got

God blamed for our, for our sin. It's just, again, what color is the sky in your world?

Because no connection, none whatsoever, just total canard.

This straw man Maximus, it's just so far out there. It's hard to even describe it.

First trick that they tried to argue against God, and it's being promoted as the most popular theology and Protestantism today.

And we can't learn from the very first chapters of the Bible that this is what they did. They said, it's you,

God. It's a woman you gave me. And Calvinists, they say, it's the sin you gave me.

You cause all the sin in the world. I just am reacting. It's, it's the nature that Adam gave me.

And here you've got Adam saying it's the woman you gave me blaming God and blaming man.

And that's what Calvinism does. It blames God. You've caused all the sin in the universe and it blames man.

It's the sin nature that Adam caused to all humanity. And it's literally the oldest trick in this book.

Don't be fooled. The enemy repackages these teachings and they come in higher thinking.

And if you don't be careful, you're going to fall for it. Oh, but it's secondary causes.

Oh, so you're just a secondary sinner then. Paul was lying when he said,

I'm the chief of sinners because the truth is God was the chief of sinners in Calvinism. God was the chief of sinners in Calvinism.

When you can't even recognize your own faith in what's being said, either you've been extremely blind or someone has completely missed a turn somewhere and ended up out in, in the bushes someplace.

But this is what happens again, when, when tradition becomes the lens.

It'll, you know, I, I would like to think that Brother Tassie would not even be this cavalier and inaccurate in descriptions of what

Mormons believe or Jehovah's Witnesses or others. Though, to be honest with you, that particular mindset does seem to be the same type that buys into the more sensationalistic arguments against non -Christian groups as well, unfortunately.

Come on, man. It's not hidden that much. They say it's the word of God.

Well, no, it's not. It's full of contradictions and equivocation. And if it's played carefully, it sounds good, but don't be deceived.

Don't be deceived. There's the warning of the James White, freedom to blame the potter was the, the video that was presented there.

I've got someone asking a question and since I don't have to listen to anything anymore, it's

Arizona, Arizona. Oh, good grief, man. Even the table of contents, have you seen the font size on this thing?

I'm not, I'm not even sure if these are going to work to be perfectly honest with you. I need a magnifying glass. Oh, wow.

If you really want to have your lips ripped off, volume, volume two, 15 sermons on various subjects, hypocrites deficient in the duty of prayer.

It's only three pages, which of course in this book, three pages of font that small is probably longer than most sermons are today.

But that's, okay. It's section four, volume two, seven sermons on important topics.

Sermon one, divine sovereignty on page 107. Actually, that's not it.

That's one of them. That's one of them, but that's not, that's not it.

There is one on page 838, God's sovereignty and the salvation of men, but I'm not sure that that's it either.

Let me look at volume one. Just, I know I have it marked somewhere. Of course, you know how, you know, when you're getting older, the yellow markings you made in seminary starting to fade.

Yeah, it's starting to fade just a little bit. Okay, here we go. Yeah. All right.

Here it is. Volume one, part four, no, part five, dissertation on the end for which

God created the world. That's what I was referring to. Starts on page 94, only goes to page 119.

But again, that's 20 to 26 pages, which in here is huge as a full book.

So, dissertation on the end for which God created the world, the banner set, volume one, and there you go.

And then if the other one, I need to bring it in someday, but the little booklet, the banner of truth booklet, really, really important.

The practical implications of Calvinism. A lot of folks, a lot of folks, a lot of TR folks, package coming in from UPS there,

Rich. I can, we're smart enough. Yeah, we're smart enough to have video.

In this neighborhood, you need to have video if we want to still have the tires and rims on our cars when we get them.

Anyway, for a lot of folks, you need to read the practical implications of Calvinism.

I think if everybody online, I think, here's my suggestion.

Anyone who is going to call themselves a Calvinist in any discussion on Facebook, Twitter, any of the many, many online forums should have to read that booklet three times through each year to be able to maintain their

Calvinist card to comment on online.

How's that? I think that would probably remove 75 % of the unnecessary, unmitigated offense that Calvinists tend to communicate.

A lot of the accusations are false because people just don't like anyone who believes that there's something clear about Scripture.

I get that. But that is not the real problem amongst Reformed folks. It's just not.

It's just not. Anyway, hey, see you all in Southern California tomorrow evening,

Lord willing, and pray that the Lord would be glorified in the conversation and that God's people would be blessed.