John 3:13, Turretin, Pop Thomists

Well, Rich kept saying, I don't know if I remember how to do this. And now that it's six minutes after, that was proof that maybe he doesn't. It's been a long time, been a while since we've been in the big studio.

I actually had someone, believe it or not, it's been an interesting day in social media. There's there's a guy who decided to take a take a shot at how much traveling I do. I shouldn't be an elder in the church if I'm traveling so much.

He seems to not be aware of the fact that I'm I am the only elder at my church that is not full time with the church. We have three elders that are full time with the church, and I've always been full time with Alpha and Omega Ministries.

That did not stop when I became an elder there. And part of my job is to travel. And in fact, in 2019, I traveled 165 ,000 miles around the world at that particular point in time. Now it's around the nation.

It's not quite as fast, though. I did just have a dear friend and his wife, who are more than 10 years older than I am, trying to fly yesterday. And they ended up sleeping six hours on the floor behind a rental car counter at an airport someplace.

So, yeah, lots of lots of fun there. I'm not looking forward to anything like that. I'll put up with the the rainstorms and having to get my electricity hooked up in a lake at a KOA rather than rather than doing that.

But anyway, here we are. And we're in the big studio because we've got a lot to talk about today and a lot of things to cover. I did just want to mention real, real briefly. I I said I announced Sunday night.

Just what a glorious day. Glorious evening we had at church. I've been looking forward to this for a long, long time. In fact, little Jannie, my granddaughter, had been looking forward to this for even longer.

We had put this off so that both mom and Ransom, my daughter, Summer and my grandson, Ransom, who was born early September, would be able to be there for her her baptism. And so one of the reasons that I put in such long hours driving back last week after picking up our new tow vehicle was so I could be here not only to preach on Romans 11, preach on Romans 11 as it is used in the baptism debate that.

No one could ever preach Romans 11 in a single sermon and do any justice to almost anything. It is, I think, one of the most challenging chapters in the New Testament simply because of all the background issues that have to be brought in to really interpret the olive tree and the branches and the horticultural stuff and all the covenantal stuff and everything else.

Anyway, preached on and it may be the last of the baptism series. We may do one more to sort of wrap things up if if we feel the need to do so. But had that going on, had a really good group there. Janie was one of 15 baptisms I did, and I will confess I'm hurting.

48 hours later, I'm in pain. And but my fellow pastors will understand why we don't put as much water in our baptistry as many other people do, because we have apology has lots of young kids who are making professions of faith and we encourage them in that way.

And so there was one fellow that I literally held until time for the baptism, just so people could see him. I, I remember very clearly when I was baptized. I remember that night. I remember people saying, well, the only thing we can see of you is your head.

The top of your head, the very top of my head. That's all I can see. And I get that. But what that means is when you baptize the adults, you don't have as much water in that tank. And that means you've got to get them way farther down before the water starts helping to bear their weight.

Let's just say that when I get up in the morning right now, I'm looking a little bit older than my years. Anyways, it was a it was a glorious evening. It was Mike Hendrickson's kids played in the service the first time.

He's musically wise. And they're the they're the two kids that have done all those skillet covers and and skillet knows who they are. They got to meet him last year. It was just a wonderful, wonderful evening.

I'm very thankful for those who prayed that I would get back to be able to do that service. And I just want to say publicly that to the one guy who commented on my tweet that this was bragging on my part.

I forgive you. I really you need forgiveness and I forgive you. And and I hope you will find your way someday. Anyway, with all that said, it's been an incredible day on social media. We'll get to that toward the end of the program because there's so many things to be talking about first.

And the first thing we're going to be doing, do Rich, do you remember how to to do the big board thing? This is this is a big board thing. And do you know how it is hooked up? And oh, very good. Very nice.

Very nice. Big. But OK, I just want to make sure that's the whole reason we're in here is so that we can we'll just leave it. OK, well, I do. Actually, you know what? First of all, that camera is. What's what's all the space over here?

I mean, there's nobody over here. Yeah, but there's there's not supposed to be that much space behind me. Yeah, that's much better. Yeah, that's OK. Now here's now here's here's the real tricky thing.

Oh, that will work. Look at that. Now, is that when you when you switch to it, go ahead and switch to the thing, I want to make sure this is there. Ah, isn't that glorious? Isn't that wonderful? We will actually be able to see things now.

That is very, very good. I I don't know what made me think about this today, but I have this, you know, I think it's called zoom loop or something. I don't know that. I thought, you know, we're going to be looking at some textual stuff.

So let's let's see if we can get it big enough for the people my age can see. So that's what we're going to do. John, chapter three, verse 13, if you want to. If you want to go there, what I would like to do is address an issue, and I think you'll find it interesting and hopefully it'll be edifying and helpful to folks.

Over the past past week or so, there have been comments that have come up in regards to the. Well, evidently, I guess next month there's going to be some. Christology conference someplace. And there have been comments in regards to the nature of the incarnation, which, of course, is important.

We have discussions about all the time when we are bringing the gospel outside of Christian faith to people outside. But this is more in the context of inside and the current controversies and things that are going on and, you know, all the silly accusations of canonic theology and Sassanianism and all that kind of silly stuff.

But anyway, some conversation has been had, and it's a lot of people do think about this. What do you do? What do you do with the concept of omnipresence in speaking of the son in his divinity and the son in in his humanity?

And it really has to do with all of the attributes of the glory of Christ. And we're going to be looking at after this, we're going to look at a quotation from Francis Turreton that I think is really relevant to these things.

But a lot of people aren't aware of the debate and the background of the debate concerning one particular text. And this is one of the situations where if you have the King James and New King James and you have one reading and if you have the ESV, NASB, NIV, LSB, etc., etc., you'll have another reading.

And that can lead to confusion. And uncertainty and things like that. And so we want to try to help with things like that. And that is John chapter three, verse 13. So let's look at the at the text here.

And I suppose let's see, how do I do that again? Well, there's multiple buttons down here.

And I'm just trying to find the only way.

To get this thing to reappear at a certain point. So in John 3, 13. No one has come down from heaven, except no one has gone up into heaven, except the son of man who has come down. So this is all right.

Part of what you're going to see here, I should have gone over to. Hold on a second. Before we look at that, let's don't do that. Let's look at. OK, so. The NASB. Has no one ascended into heaven, but he who descended from heaven, the son of man.

And then if we. Grab text and. There it is. No one hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the son of man, which is in heaven. So the so so the there's some confusion and some of the variants as to where to attach the variant, whether it's what it's referring to, whether it's the ascended part and the descended part.

So the King James Version has even the son of man, which is in heaven. So and no man has sent up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the son of man, which is in heaven. The NASB has no one has ascended in heaven, but he who descended from heaven, the son of man.

So the the which is in heaven is not in the modern translations because it is not in the text that is being translated. So you can see here, you can see this little symbol which corresponds to this symbol here, which means there are words added at this point in the text.

So the son of man. And then the first reading that is given, this is the Nessie Island. We will look down here at the bottom of the UBS fifth in a moment. But haon ento oreno. So the son of man, the one being in heaven is the other reading.

And then the text which is which deletes does not have that phraseology. These are the manuscripts that contain that. So. What you have in the longer reading is the son of man who is in heaven. Now, that's how would you understand that?

Because it's saying no one has gone up into heaven except the one who came down from heaven. The son of man who is in heaven. So you have you have the you know, there's one who's who's come down from heaven.

But then this longer reading says, but he's in heaven. So not overly surprisingly, then you will note down here in the UBS fifth, which gives a wider number. A wider. You're given more information when the UBS fifth gives a variant.

It gives much more information than that Nessie Island does. And that's the only gives many more variants. The UBS focuses upon variants that would specifically influence the translation. So they are doing, you know, their their focus is upon people doing Bible translation work.

So they have they give. On Thropu, the reading up here, and then you have the same witnesses, though many, many more listed out for you here. And so you would have P66, P75, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus. And so those those are your two earliest papyri manuscripts of the Gospel of John, your two earliest unsealed manuscripts of the Gospel of John, all.

And the way that the Nessie Island has it and continues on with. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent. But then you have many others. BLT, Washingtonianus in supplemental form there. Other unseals, miniscules, Sahittic Coptic, part of the Boheric, some of the Georgian, the Diatessaron origin.

And then something that if you see, this is the text that a lot of people get when they are in taking first year Greek. But very often the textual footnotes are not explained in first year Greek. That's normally a second year Greek subject.

And so a lot of people will have all this stuff down here, but they've never been instructed as to what it means, which can be confusing because, for example, look at here. You have origin. LAT 2 slash 4.

2 slash 4 origin. Yes, Latin version of origin, 2 of 4 times. Which means it's not this way. 2 of 4 times. Well, half. You'll see that with a lot. Epiphanius down here is 3 slash 4. So 3 out of 4 times, 75 of the time, Epiphanius has it one way.

That means once he has it another way. And sometimes that you'll find, which you can find the other way he has it. And that is right here. There is Epiphanius one out of four. And he now is giving this other reading.

Now, the other reading, which we have more clearly presented to us here in the Nessie Olin. This reading, son of man who is in heaven. You'll notice there are a number of variants in it. So in other words, Codex Alexandrinus seemingly omitted own initially, and then that was fixed by a corrector.

You've got some of the main Byzantine unseals, family one, family 13, lots of minuscule texts, many, many, many. The BYZ symbol, meaning the Byzantine symbol right there. Lectionaries, even though some of them still have a one, one or two.

So there's some changes. Some of them have son of God for son of man. You have Latin, numerous of the Latin manuscripts, the Vulgate, Curatorium Syriac. Some have who was in heaven, not who is in heaven.

So maybe scribes struggling with that variant there. And that does make sense that there would be. We saw up above that, you know, part of the Boheric Coptic reads one way and part the other way. Cyril, 14 out of 16 times, one out of 16 times he has the ewe.

So you see the complication that comes when you have the early church fathers thrown in here. Ethiopic, Georgian, Slavian, Hippolytus. We saw origin Latin two out of four times goes on down. You can see a large number of here's the other one out of 16 for Cyril.

We have got all 60. You can figure out what all 16 references in Cyril were. That's pretty cool. Out of a single footnote, Theodoret, three out of four, John Damascus, et cetera, et cetera. And so it is widely testified amongst the fathers both ways.

Both ways, having the longer ending and not having the longer ending. Augustine knows of it in in this particular form. And then you have son of man, the one who is from heaven, not who was in heaven, the son of man who what who is from heaven, not is in heaven right now, but is from heaven.

And then you have that in zero one, four, one certain a number of lectionaries and at least one form of the Syriac text. So all that sounds wonderful, doesn't it? I mean, that wasn't an exciting thing to go through.

Yeah, sorry about that. Especially if you're listening to this on the road. I put some of our divine line truckers to sleep on that one. But the whole reason for doing this is it is a complicated variant.

There is no question that it's a complicated variant. And fundamentally, the variant is between, though there are sub variants. Fundamentally, the variant is between saying the one who no one has gone up into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, that is the son of man.

Or the son of man who is in heaven. Now, one last thing on the textual stuff before we talk about some of the possible theological ramifications. I'm going to be really interested, and it should be coming soon.

In fact, I was going to check on it because I haven't checked for a few weeks. I would expect, given the feeds that I follow, that I would have seen the announcement of the Gospel of John coming out in the CBGM.

But I really hope it comes out pretty soon, because the most, certainly in my opinion, the most interesting variants until they get to Romans will be in the Gospel of John. And I'm just going to take a wild guess.

I mean, there's no way without access to a very wide amount of information. You can't really know what the coherence decisions are going to be, the textual flow decisions. And anything until you have that information is just an educated guess at best.

But I'm just willing to go out on a limb and say I've got this strange feeling that CBGM might just say that the longer ending has higher coherence. I don't know, it's a lot of data to be crunching. And something else to keep in mind is CBGM is not looking at the vast majority of the stuff that's down here.

All these early Church Fathers, CBGM doesn't look at that. Not yet, anyways. There may be, I'm not exactly sure how you would even make that work, to be honest with you. But just looking manuscript-wise, I'm just wondering which direction the CBGM will go.

And I'm sort of wondering, hmm, I wonder if it's going to say that there is a higher likelihood, there's a higher coherence among the witnesses that say, who is in heaven? But how would we understand that?

How would we understand? Let's say, for the sake of argumentation, that we take the reading, the Son of Man, who is in heaven. What does that mean? At least one commentator has pointed out that you could look at that in the context of John, the standpoint of John at the time of John's writing.

Hence, the Son of Man, who now, as resurrected Lord, is in heaven. That's a possibility. The majority of the discussion down through the ages has been, if you take it as no one has ascended into heaven except the Son, except the one who came down from heaven, that is the Son of Man who is in heaven.

Is this a statement relevant to the continued omnipresence of the second person of the Trinity, even in the point of incarnation? Because I really can't think of many other texts that would have a really direct reference to even asking the question.

And I would think that most of us would recognize that this could be one of those places where the real argument is joined that's going to determine how we end up viewing certain things, and that is, do we follow Calvin and say where God has made an end of speaking, so should we?

Or do we follow Edwards, at least in his discussion of Adam and his will, and go well beyond where God has made an end of speaking? That is the question. And that also raises, for many of us, the question of how far are we willing to go to satisfy the curiosity of man?

Is there any limitation? Is there any limitation to what questions we should even be willing to seek to offer an answer to? In our modern day, where there is no concept whatsoever of boundaries, of propriety, and certainly no concept of kingly honor, creaturely humility, man believes that the universe is his oyster, and he can do with it as he wishes, and he can probe its secrets without any limitation.

Could I suggest that outside of Christian theology, there's just a really clear illustration, I think, many areas, really, where a Christian view of creation and a Christian view of science would give us barriers as to what we would and would not do as Christians in dealing with God's creation?

I'm not saying that Christians have always been consistent in this, I'm simply saying you could make a very strong case. That messing with DNA, that seeking to engage in eugenics, these would be places where modern man demonstrates a fundamental lack of boundaries because there is no view of man as being created in the image of God, and hence there is no glory of God to be concerned about.

There is no purpose of God to be concerned about. And it can even happen within the context of the theological development of the church over time. I think most of us are aware, and if not, let me just mention to you, the early enemies of the Christian faith called the Gnostics did not have any barriers as to what they would probe into, and so the wild, heretical, damaging Gnostic Gospels and the stories they told, some of which are found in the Quran, some of which are foundational to Roman Catholic theology to this day on Mary, those Gnostic Gospels would speculate on the early life of Jesus.

Now, the scriptures tell us almost nothing about the early life of Jesus. We are given one brief glimpse of Jesus in the temple, not with Mary, but you know which story I'm talking about, speaking with the elders.

That's all we're told, and the Gnostics were not satisfied with that. That was not enough. And so they speculated, and the Jesus that they came up with, by the way, was an absolute misgrant, a divinely powerful, unbridled, uncontrolled misgrant, and that's not who Jesus was, but the point is there was this human desire to answer questions that, simply put, we have to go, God has chosen not to give us that information.

And is there a willingness on the part of Christians and Christian theologians and Christian philosophers and historians, everything else, to stop and to say, there are questions that are not to be considered important for life and godliness, because the Holy Spirit has not engaged these things, has not addressed these issues.

And what's more, if there has been speculation in the past by theologians and leaders who ended up having a major impact upon those who came after them, does that mean that, since they were willing to speculate, that their speculation should be given a level of religious and theological authority, and on what basis, and as in all things, by what standard are these things to be tested?

Once you have gone outside the realm of what Scripture actually reveals, you no longer have recourse to Scripture as the corrective, and so you can't ask by what standard. Your standard's going to have to change once you get to that point, and a lot of people just don't seem to realize how many times in church history a belief has risen that has been rejected by us in the modern period.

For all our respect for Augustine, Augustine said things that were foundational to the development of the doctrine of purgatory. Now, he did not have a doctrine of purgatory, but he did make statements about a post-death cleansing that are unbiblical, and anyone who reads anybody on Augustine knows that Augustine was influenced by a number of platonic categories in the development of his theology, which is why you can make the argument that to maintain post-Nicene orthodoxy, specifically as it becomes formulated in Augustine, requires platonic categories because he himself was influenced by that.

So, by what standard do you then judge even someone like Augustine, or do you even judge Augustine? These are questions that certainly I've had to deal with for many years in dealing with Roman Catholicism, because the magisterium becomes your standard there.

The magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church becomes the standard by which those judgments are made, though they are loathe to make them themselves. I've always found that interesting. They could have given us an entire listing of the inspired oral traditions by now, but just never had time to get around to it in all those years.

But anyway, for those outside of Rome, you can go to Eastern Orthodoxy. Many of them would point to the practices and liturgy of the church as a means of providing that kind of interpretation, though I think they really struggle for consistency there.

But for those of us who are Reformed Baptists, there shouldn't be any question here. This should not be a difficult issue to address, but it's becoming difficult because of the fundamental shifting of the grounds of ultimate authority and interpretation that is taking place in our midst and causing the divisions that we are seeing today.

So, those are really important issues to address. So, here's a text, and there are certain guys I happen to notice that one of the two guys that did the wild and crazy debate in Houston a few years ago with Leighton Flowers and Pritchett, Hernandez and Zacariades.

Zacariades is real, this is one of his big things. This is John 3, 13, and all those issues related there, too. And up until recently, most of us could just go, well, it's interesting speculation, but no one was holding a theological knife to our throat.

Well, he would. He holds a theological knife to everybody's throats, while he's pretty much on his own. But for the rest of us, like, well, we can sit around, we can talk about it, we can think about it.

You know, when you're preaching through John 3, you might want to come up with a consensus understanding amongst the elders of your church as to how you're going to handle this, and I think especially a text like this does illustrate the importance of looking at these variants and dealing with them when you're preaching through a text, because whether you like it or not, and whether you lament it or not, the fact is you're going to have people sitting in front of you.

They're going to have a wide variety of translations, and people are going to notice, you know, if you spend five minutes talking about who is in heaven and their Bible doesn't have who is in heaven, they're going to be really confused, and if it is in heaven and you don't even mention it, they're going to be really confused, too, and you can lament that and say it would all be much better if we just used the King James Version, but the fact of the matter is Erasmus probably didn't even know that this variant existed.

I mean, I don't know. I haven't read his annotation at this point. I'd like to look him up. It would be interesting, but he probably didn't even know. I doubt, I don't believe that any of the manuscripts he had access to would have had that reading, so the fact is if you just simply went with the King James, then you wouldn't even know what the most primitive reading of John 3 was, because it is the most primitive reading.

I mean, when you have P66, P75, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus together, that's very, very, very early. That's very, very, very early, no matter how you push it, and I'm looking here real quickly. Well, this is interesting.

I'm looking down. Now, I just ran over it quickly, and my eyesight's not the way that it once was, but what's interesting to me is I do not see, I'm sure I'm glad we fixed the resolution on this so I can see this now.

Well, I fixed the resolution, but you know what I mean. I don't see Irenaeus. I wonder, that raises the question, did Irenaeus not cite John 3 .13 in any of his writings? Interesting factoid to want to look up.

I was just trying to look at what some of the earliest sources would be outside of, well, see, Alexandrinus is corrected and has variants in it. It almost looks like the as just scanning through the things here.

So, we want to know, it is absolutely relevant to know how the church has read this text down through the ages, and the Diatestron, Origen, Eusebius, Adamantius, Gregory Nazianzus, Apollinaris, Gregory Nyssa, Didymus, Epiphanius, Cyril most of the times, and that's interesting to me, by the way.

That's interesting to me, that Cyril, 14 out of 16 times, reads in that particular fashion, because that's Cyril of Alexandria, that's the Alexandrian group versus the folks from Antioch and their different emphases, and that all comes out in the Council of Chalcedon that we've talked about before, and we'll talk about again more in the future.

And even who's citing what in the footnotes of textual data can have interesting ramifications as far as things like that are concerned, but it is vitally important to know what the earliest reading was, and I would say you would, if you're doing a serious study of John chapter 3, you need to have that information.

We have it today. You would not have had it. You would not have had it easily any earlier than 60, 70 years ago, but you have it now, and that's actually a blessing. I know a lot of folks like, no, no, it's actually a blessing to know what the earliest reading at this text was.

I think that's exceptionally important, and so there you go. So there's John chapter 3, and the point, quick application is, we used to be able to talk about these things and do so without fearing that whichever side we came down on, on a textual variant or on speculative theology that goes beyond what the apostles evidently thought we needed to know with clarity, that you wouldn't have your head handed to you on a platter, depending on how you came down on it.

It is not a good thing that that's not the case right now, especially amongst certain elements of the reformed world. Really shouldn't be that way, sadly. So let me drop that down, and we will take all the little markings off.

No, we don't want to save that, and move on to our next subject for the day. Have a nice little background there. Oh, I do want to, I'm sorry, there was, I did say that we would have another, okay, which one is it?

Oh, we have many of them open right now, and of course it won't be, it'll be the last one that I choose. Well, second to last. This is a citation I wanted to mention to you from Francis Turretin, who of course is lauded as, and was, just, Francis Turretin defines reformed scholastic orthodoxy, and that doesn't mean that he was infallible or anything of the kind.

He was a brilliant theologian. I obviously, I use him as an example when he, for example, says that the Kamiohonium in 1 John 5 -7 was in the majority of the Greek manuscripts. He was wrong, but how could he have known differently?

Until the modern period, how would anyone have known differently? There weren't any card catalogs. There was no interlibrary loan. There wasn't any way to know, one way or the other, and so he had some flawed information, and hence some flawed conclusions, and big deal.

That's the same with everybody that we read in history, as long as we don't elevate them to the position of having final authority, and so, you know, when I first ran into Molinism and Middle Knowledge, one of the first people I read was Turretin, and I was very blessed by it, but I also remember, I mean, this is so long ago.

This was back in, this was back in our old apartment. Rich remembers our old apartment, because I have this clear, I have this clear memory of you coming up the stairs there, and I don't remember whether it was Josh or Summer.

Was it Josh that said, oh, okay, all right, and what did Josh call you? You're remembering it too, so you'd have a different perspective in your mind, but I think he was running toward you, if I recall, and he goes, oh, is he in my arms?

Yes, yes, he's already loaded with the wine.

Oh, oh, and Josh goes, look, it's Rich the tingle, which meant single, because there was a period of time that I'm not going to go into right now, when it did look like Rich was going, could have joined a cenobitic monastery and would have done just fine there, but the Lord was gracious.

Okay, we could talk about how many women Rich drove away by starting off with Romans 9, but we won't get into that right now. That's for a dividing line, you know, 10, 15 years from now, when Rich and I will be sitting back, rocking back and forth, and somebody else will be taking care of all of the technical stuff, and we'll just be sitting there reminiscing about everything, and hopefully we'll still remember stuff like that.

What did that have to do with Turretin? Oh, yes, because it was in that apartment. I remember sitting there with Turretin, reading. It was right across the table. You're older than I am, buddy, and better be careful about that.

Oh, I'm hoping my microphone's picking all this up, so you know what's coming the other direction, because he says you can't tell by looking, and I will admit that's true. I think most people would look at us, they'd figure I'm older than you.

One of us has been taking all the shots, all the damage, and okay. Anyway, I remember reading Turretin, and I had to read him two or three times. I'd have to read paragraphs more than once. He's not easy reading, but I had run into the concept of middle knowledge, I think in seminary, and I was very blessed, and I still think today that Turretin's criticism of the grounding objection has not been answered by Molinus, since obviously I brought it up when talking to William Lane Craig.

With all that said, Turretin is a fascinating resource, and so I saw a quote, and I looked it up, and came across this section from Turretin talking about the two natures of Christ, and if I am to be put out to pastor, if I am to be canceled, if I am to no longer be considered a reliable source of information, I just want to point out to everybody who's making these claims to you professors at certain seminaries who are saying this to your students, saying that I hold to a canonic Christology, or I'm a Sassinian, or things like that, that if I had read these words from Turretin in the year 2010, in any one of your churches, every single one of you not only would agree, but you would have understood what I was saying, and we all would have been together, and I'm not the one that's changed.

You are, and you know it. Every single one of you knows it, and I don't know how you keep that voice quiet, but I pray that that voice will keep talking to you. What does Turretin say? If it is asked, according to what nature are humiliation, and you know, I'm gonna go ahead and pop up the, let's go ahead and and get a different color here.

I don't like, let's make it something other than that. Okay, if it is asked, according to what nature are humiliation and exaltation to be ascribed to Christ, we answer that this is properly said of the person, and is to refer to both natures, but with a great difference, but with a great difference.

To the human nature, and so notice the very first sentence, what is he saying? That we can properly speak of humiliation and exaltation of the person of Christ, and I think that's vitally important. My concern is that we have this, we are demonstrating a absolute drive to do what the scholastics did, whether the reformed scholastics, which I obviously think are far better than the scholastics of the medieval period, and that is, again, to think that we have to come up with answers to every question, especially when those questions go beyond what scripture gives to us.

Now, what I love here is we've got John 17 and 5, Philippians 2, 6, John 5, 17, 18, Matthew 8, 20, Ephesians 3, 4, 9, and 2 Corinthians 8, 9, all within this section. I'm very thankful for that. I'm very thankful.

That's one of the differences you'll see between Protestant scholastics and medieval scholastics in the sense that these will actually be relevant to the subject. How many times over the past year or so have we gone to Aquinas, for example, and found so many passages from the Psalter being cited that had absolutely nothing to do except in great tradition exegesis, so in Origen's way of viewing things, had nothing to do with the subject at hand.

These guys want the subject to be there. So, with that, here you have the question being answered, exaltation, humiliation being ascribed to the one person, to both natures, but with a great difference, and he's answering a theological question, but there are places in the New Testament where you simply can't answer the question in this particular text.

You can make overarching theological assertions, but I suggest to you that there are places in the New Testament where it was not the intention of the author to answer those kinds of questions, and only scholasticism says, ah, but we have the answer.

We can go deeper. No. So, I go back to Turretin. So, there's a great difference in the ascription of humiliation, exaltation, the person, both natures, to the human nature, indeed, as to real depression and exaltation in itself.