Provisionist Marshmallow Missiles Incoming! Thinking About Church History and Tradition.

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Looked a bit at the soon to be released Provisionist book against Calvinism, and then considered more about church history, exegesis, tradition, and orthodoxy. Next program will be another Road Trip Dividing Line!

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Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. We're going to try to sneak a program in here at an unusual time.
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And the reason for that is I'm pulling out tomorrow. Sort of the beginning, but not completely the beginning of a long trip.
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We'll be doing some programs from the road. And then
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I'll be home for a few days, and then a big trip up to Colorado. We're doing the conference with Jason Lyle up at Redemption Hills Church.
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And I'm not sure where else I'm speaking yet. I haven't heard back from a few folks. But I imagine I will be in the
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Denver area, probably I think on the 22nd, maybe, somewhere around there.
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Anyways, I don't have a calendar in front of me. But we're going to throw a program in here while we can.
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Figured I'd wear my Tour de France shirt one last time. It ends this weekend.
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The 2022 edition has been pretty exciting, actually. I don't know who's going to win yet.
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It looks pretty good for Jonas Vingegaard. But Tadej Pogacar isn't going to give up yet.
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Both their teams are decimated. I hate when stuff like COVID and COVID rules sort of end up impacting entire athletic competitions that people have trained for their entire lives.
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Speaking of which, by the way, I hate to do this. But once again, over the past number of months, there's been a lot of people who have been looking at me going, you know, this traveling by road stuff, you know, you don't even have to wear a mask on planes anymore.
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It's only been a few weeks, but you don't have to wear a mask on planes anymore. And, you know, you might as well just be going back to the way you were doing things before.
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And I've explained that actually, no, I've lost all my status, and it would be quite different, actually, to be flying around.
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But the main thing that I said from the start was, yes, it's temporary.
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This reduction of mandates and things like, it's temporary.
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These folks, it was never done because of the virus to begin with. So when they want to clamp down, when they want to do the next step of weeding out, you know, weeding people out from police forces, weeding people out from the military, they're the people who, you know, you want to have the people in those positions that will do whatever they're told.
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They don't have a set of convictions that would keep them from harming themselves or harming others and things like that.
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I said, it's going to happen again. And so LA, I think today, didn't they, or yesterday, indoor mask mandates, of course, people on the left are going to ignore all that anyways.
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They always do. But in, I think, starting Monday, the San Diego school district, back to masking, despite, and I know,
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I know, we've all seen them. Our feeds have been flooded with studies demonstrating this failed, this failed, this failed, this failed.
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This put our students, years behind, young kids, years behind in developmental abilities as far as speech and cognition and just all the negative quackery.
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Yeah, all the documentations out there, you bet. Do they care? No. Are the current mRNA vaccines at all relevant to the current virus?
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No, they're not. But they have to maintain fear, to maintain control, and they have to get you used to just simply doing, just jumping whenever Big Brother says to jump.
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The only question is how far. And in this situation, it's, how many shots do you want me to take?
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And if I die, God bless you, Big Brother, you have, I will die well. Because I have died at your hand.
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That really is where all this ends up going. And so yeah, the mandates come back, and how long until you're back to masking on the planes and then vaccine mandates and the whole, they didn't give up.
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It's not like they, we didn't, we didn't even have a truckers thing in the United States.
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No, they were just, it's a matter of timing. It's just a matter of timing.
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And the same thing with the elections coming up. It's just a matter of timing. That's all it is.
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So anyway, hey, I don't know if you saw this, but the book on Calvinism edited by David Allen and Steve Lemke.
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Now, everybody knows Allen and Lemke, provisionist, Southern Baptist leaders.
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So you know exactly where this is coming from. I really would be stunned if there is anything in this book that has not been thoroughly debunked and refuted over and over again, over the past number of years by myself and many others.
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I don't, you know, was it, what? I didn't look it up.
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But there was a period of time where there was an attempt on David Allen's part to respond to some of my, you know,
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I took his, printed his published materials. This is what the other side doesn't do with me that we do all the time.
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I took their published materials and we went on this program and we documented from the commentaries that Dr.
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Allen cited from, went into the Greek text. This is all within the context of the challenge that remains unfulfilled, that I will come to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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I will debate him in his classroom, in front of his students, and I'll bring nothing but a Greek New Testament.
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The challenge is still there, but it'll never be fulfilled.
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And we all know that. But it's there. Have RV, we'll travel.
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Have plenty of places in Texas that I can pull into and hook up.
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And I got my little house right there, ready to go. Anyway, we went through, especially that focus was on the golden chain of redemption and the verses that follow that, which
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I believe very plainly present not only the sovereignty of God, predestination, and election, but the necessity of particular redemption as well.
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And we went in depth in responding to everything
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Dr. Allen had published at that point. And then he did an article and we responded to that.
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And so I'll be really interested in seeing if there's even an attempt. I do not expect there to be an attempt to respond to those things.
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I really do not. But just so you know where this is coming from, we've got
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Allen and Lemke. We know where they're coming. Adam Harwood, we know where he's coming from. He has a critique of total depravity.
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And I've said a long time ago, if I recall correctly, when I did that one program where we did, what, about 40 minutes, 45 minutes on Romans chapter 5, and specifically the material in reference to federal headship, original sin, if I recall correctly, what prompted that was an
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Adam Harwood article. It may have been an audio thing, but I think it was an article, as I recall.
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And so a critique of total depravity, Adam Harwood, a critique of unconditional election by Leighton Flowers.
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So I wouldn't be surprised if you get at least a footnote trying to spin the choice meets stuff.
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I would love to see choice meets in a 527 -page long book.
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That'd be good. Number three, a critique of limited atonement, David Allen, of course. Expect that.
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And again, we already know exactly what it's going to say. Exactly what it's going to say. I don't know why they bought this book, but they like to do big books because it makes it look like we've answered everything, when the reality is they haven't answered a whole bunch of stuff.
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Is God's grace irresistible? A critique of irresistible grace by Steve Lemke. A critique of perseverance of the saints by Ken Keithley.
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Now, Keithley is the Molinist, if I recall correctly. The weak Molinist. Again, if I'm putting the names together, my recollection was
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I picked up his book and basically he said, I'm just going to use this as a guide and I'm not really going to bother to defend it.
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So I'm like, okay, put that one aside. Section two, historical issues of Calvinism.
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Here we go. Calvinism is Augustinianism by Kenneth Wilson. So we're going to get a little doopied in here.
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If you don't know what doopied is, that means you were not listening to this program in March of 2020, when we spent an inordinate number of hours on response to Kenneth Wilson and his amazing statements about church history and dug into just all sorts of sources demonstrating that he hadn't, in essence.
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But seven, descent from Calvinism to Baptist tradition by Pinson. Well, that shouldn't be difficult to do.
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And then Ben Witherington III jumped in here with a Wesleyan critique of Calvinism. So he's sort of the outlier here because he's coming from a very different background as the provisionist
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Baptist. And then Abbaciano does his Romans 9 thing. Again, nothing new there. Corporate and personal election,
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William Klein. Character of God in Calvinism, Roger Olson. We know about that one. Determinism and human freedom,
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Lange. Evil and God's sovereignty, Bruce Little. I think we've responded to something, maybe.
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Name rings the bell as far as that topic goes. And then the public invitation and altar call by Mark Tolbert.
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That may be something we haven't discussed in a long, long time. But basically, when you've got
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Flowers, Allen, and Wilson, then you know what this book is going to be about.
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And I put it on pre -order a long time ago. You got to have your original sources and things like that, and we will do so.
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But we go from there. I noticed that yesterday,
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Scott Swain of RTS posted a picture of Craig Carter, and it says,
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We are blessed to have Craig Carter on campus this week leading our morning chapel and teaching a
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DEMIN seminar on what? Interpreting Scripture and the Great Tradition. And no matter what we do these days, we cannot avoid dealing with the issue of hermeneutics.
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Dr. Barsalas is going to be teaching a hermeneutics class for founders. And Dr. Barsalas has openly said that the hermeneutics he was taught makes a mishmash out of the confessions.
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And therefore, there needs to be this new method of exegesis.
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And you hear the defense of this from that side of the controversy.
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And unfortunately, the defense of it is always a straw man. I have never seen an accurate. So far, no one, including
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Richard, has provided a meaningful critique of a balanced, reformed biblicism of the kind of exegesis that you will find in John Murray's work on Romans.
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That you'll find in Hughes's work on Hebrews.
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Now, there's a fair difference between Murray and Hughes. But both,
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I think, are excellent examples of exegetical commentaries written in the last century that exemplify reformed biblicism.
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That exemplify starting with the text and recognizing that unless you start with the text, you will never end up at the text.
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That recognize that the text is supernatural. That there is a supernatural unity to scripture as a whole.
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And yet, you do not start with some type of traditional formulation and then just collapse that onto the text.
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You begin with the text. You accept the text teachings about itself.
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But your first priority in handling the text of scripture is to accurately understand what the author was communicating to the audience.
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That does not in any way, shape, or form, despite all the straw men, despite all the misrepresentation and everything else, that does not mean that the spirit of God is not involved.
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That does not mean that you are rejecting that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the
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Holy Spirit. That's the whole point of it, is that you do believe that. But none of that changes the fact that when men spoke, they spoke in human language.
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And therefore, we need to understand what they said in human language.
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To give an example, I've given you many, obviously. And I still find it just astonishing that I'm sitting here in 2022 explaining this in regards to ostensibly reformed people who have gone another direction.
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But if you want an example of exactly how this works,
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I got to preach at Apologia on Sunday. And I'm so thankful that it was seven degrees cooler in the sanctuary.
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We can put too many people in that sanctuary. It's not used to having that many people in there. And it struggles during the summer.
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It really, really struggles. So it had gotten up to 87 by the end of the service two weeks ago.
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It's only 80 at the end of this one. So yay, air conditioners. Ancient aging air conditioners.
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Anyway, and I decided to do a sermon on the letter to the church of Smyrnians in Revelation chapter two.
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Part of the reason being that, I don't know, two, three years ago, we were attacked as a church by someone who said they were gonna burn us down.
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Not burn us down physically, but burn us down, destroy us as a church. Those particular folks themselves have been destroyed by their own actions.
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But anyway, they picked on, they attacked the fact that our members certificate quotes from Revelation chapter two, be faithful until death and you will receive the crown of life is what
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Jesus said to the Smyrnians after telling them, I know what you're about to suffer.
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And I know your tribulation. I know your poverty, but you're rich. The slanders, the blasphemies of those who call themselves
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Jews, but are not. And that the devil is going to cast some of you into prison and you're gonna suffer tribulation 10 days, probably hearkening back to Daniel chapter one.
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And anyway, I started off the sermon by inviting everybody to come with me and to consider what it was like to live in Smyrna in the middle of the first century.
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And a little bit about the history of the city. In fact, the reality is that if you speak on any of the seven churches, it is painfully obvious that the text intends you to know something about those cities.
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In one of the cities, I remember off the top of my head, I wasn't looking at that particular city this time around, but in one of them, it talks about Isav.
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Well, everybody in the ancient world knew that that was one of the most famous places where you could obtain
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Isav that was supposed to have healing properties in the ancient world.
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It's just obvious that you're intended to take that kind of information in and interpret what is being said in light of that.
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And so I invited everybody to just come along. You know, Smyrna had this long history of being extremely loyal to Rome, called herself the first amongst
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Asia, and Jesus identified himself as the first and last in his introduction to the church.
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And that they had a very large Jewish population this evidently had something to do with the strained relationship that had developed and that the persecution of the
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Christians there in Smyrna had something to do with the accusations and blasphemies of the Jews who were falsely
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Jews. They're not real Jews. We did make brief application to how the early church understood the relationship between Israel and the church.
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It's sort of clear there in, well, it's clear all through the New Testament, but book of Revelation especially.
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Anyway, point being, before we got to any application, we got to application.
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We got to a lot of applications. Look it up, Apologia Studios.
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Just go to videos. It'll be one of the most recent ones, obviously. All sorts of application.
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Application to the church through the ages. Application in our personal lives today.
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I mean, I got, I wanted the text to be challenging as well as encouraging. We got to all of that, but we got there first by handling the text as it was written in the first century.
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Who was it written to? What was their context? What's the background? What's being communicated?
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And now that we have an accurate knowledge of that, then let's make application in our day, at our time.
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Are there meaningful parallels that we can draw? Could there be any situation where our neighbors might be turning us into the governmental authorities that don't like us?
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Has that ever happened? Yeah, it has and it will again.
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And we could see that happening in our own day. You know, you've got neighbors all around you. That if they thought you were doing something that the government told you not to do as far as meeting together,
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I look through their window and they're not wearing their triple masks inside the house. They, you know, you know exactly which ones on your block could be the ones turning you in or your apartment complex or whatever else it might be.
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But we got the application after doing the necessary groundwork to be able to say, this is what if you had walked in, and in fact,
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I use this illustration, if you had walked in to the fellowship of the
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Christians and you probably would have had to have been risking possibly at least your safety to do that, to go to that meeting, to inquire as to where, whose house it would be at, because there weren't any church buildings at the time.
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And if you had walked in that day and that short, very brief letter, just a short number of words really, had been read in your midst, you start off seeking to understand what would the original audience have learned, understood these words to mean.
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Then I can make connection to other passages of scripture. And then, and even when
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I make a connection to other passages of scripture, I need to know what other scriptures did they have. Example that a lot of people found really useful about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, when
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I pointed out that in Isaiah chapter six, there's a textual variant between the
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Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew text, remember? And when I preached on Isaiah six at the
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G3 conference, I emphasized that in John chapter 12, when
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John says he saw his glory and he spoke about him, the
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Greek translation that his audience would have been reading, specifically in Isaiah six one, spoke of the glory of God.
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That's not in the Hebrew Masoretic text. Now, those of you who are big into TR -only -ism and MT -only -ism or whatever else,
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I'll let you deal with when the New Testament writers went a different direction. You've got to deal with that.
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I'm not getting into it right now. But there's another example where the meaning of the text is clarified and illustrated by doing historical grammatical interpretation, recognizing what those contexts were.
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Now, let me run with this for a second. What happens when in the
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West, Latin becomes not only predominant, but it becomes an article of faith that Latin is the text?
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Because that happened. When you have Pope Sixtus producing an infallible
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Vulgate, which was filled with errors, but an infallible Vulgate, when you have the
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West, when you have a fear amongst theologians in the West to even make reference to the
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Greek, because that's the language of the heretics, the result of that is going to be that there will be many who will read
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John 1241 in the Latin and will not see, because they're not even looking at the
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Greek Septuagint any longer. They will not see the variant. They will not see that the glory in John 1241 is taken straight out of the
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Greek Septuagint. That weakens the identification of Jesus as Yahweh in that text.
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It does. But what if that interpretation then becomes the great tradition interpretation because of the loss of the connection to the
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Greek? What do you do now, Superman? What do you do now?
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I can think of all sorts of traditional interpretations of texts that missed an important part of the historical background or the linguistic background due to developments over time.
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And one of the glorious things about the Reformation is we went ad fontes to the sources.
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Oh, that's a humanist saying. Yeah, it was. And Luther accepted it, and Calvin accepted it, and they practiced it.
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So, and as a result, we rediscovered so much of the beauty of the
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Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures, that had been veiled from us by, let's be honest, hey, here's something for you, great tradition
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Baptists. The great tradition is as anti -Semitic as it comes.
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Yeah, it is. Well, we just filter that out. Well, if you're filtering it out, that's the whole point.
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What's the standard? Anyway, do you see my point, though?
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There are so many places where atonement issues and kaphar and penal substitutionary atonement and the personal nature of that, we were able to return to an apostolic foundation for those realities, and they had become encrusted by centuries of tradition, and especially in the
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West, a Latin -based tradition. Justificare in Latin is not the same thing as dikayo in Greek.
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And Augustine's errors, and he had plenty of errors, but especially on the doctrine of justification, were primarily due to his reliance upon Latin and his ignorance of Greek.
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So what do you do? No one has put more foundational cement into the great tradition than Augustine.
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And if you believe in justification by faith alone, by the grace of God alone, that's not the great tradition, because Augustine believed you could be justified and lose your justification.
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Only the elect receive the gift of perseverance, but you can be justified and lose the grace of justification.
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Now, he was wrong about that, but on what basis can I possibly say that once you buy the great tradition stuff?
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I don't have a basis to say that. What basis would I have? And so if you are a
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Reformed Baptist, you must be a biblicist in the analysis of the great tradition on key issues such as justification, baptism, the nature of the church, the offices of the church.
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I mean, the list goes on and on. The list goes on and on. You have to be.
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And you're doing it. And we all sit back and go, y 'all see what you're doing there?
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What you try to beat us over the head with these guys for in one area, you're doing every place else.
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You're doing it yourself. And you don't see that? What's going on?
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I mean, is it really so central to theology proper that you absolutely positively must believe that considered inwardly, ad intra,
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God views his attributes as identical to one another?
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I mean, in what other area do we have to know how
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God considers himself? And even though we aren't to consider him in that way, because we can't, in fact, we'll glorify him by not considering him that way.
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We still have to know that he considers himself that way and we'll divide over it.
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Really? Really? If you want to believe that that's what
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God thinks internally to himself, brother, I got no problem. But what
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I don't understand is why you think that A, the Bible forces you to believe that and B, that therefore
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I must believe that and C, therefore you'll cancel me if I don't. Because that's what it's all about.
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That's the only thing all this traditional stuff is all about. It's just the theology proper stuff.
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And it's not everything else. The nature of the church and soteriology and atonement and everything else, we go, yeah, post -Tenebrous
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Lux. Post -Tenebrous Lux. Anyway, I just, right as the theme song was coming up, seriously,
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I hadn't looked at this yet. So we're doing something on the, this is on the fly stuff here, okay?
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Got a wild hair, not up here, but got a wild hair and I thought, what does
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Thomas say about Romans 5 .1? Because I want to look, I want to get back to, I got distracted from the
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Van Drunen article. We really should call it the Lance English article because I would say
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Lance English of Crudo Magazine formed this article to go the direction he wanted it to go.
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And remember when we talked, we looked at all the click -to -tweet things. So this is the message that you want people to be sending out to all the rest of the world.
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For example, the first click -to -tweet, oh, part of the straw man, get vacuumed up eventually.
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Thomas was undeniably one of the most brilliant and influential theologians in the entire history of the church. That's the first click -to -tweet.
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That's, and like I said, this article, why Protestants have always stood on the shoulders of Thomas Aquinas and still do, it's just, it is a massive advertising puff piece for Thomism in our day.
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It's nothing more than that. To call it imbalanced is to be kind, is to be very, very kind.
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There isn't even an attempt to be balanced as to how we should get these things.
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I want to get back to this and look at it. But in light of that, if Thomas was undeniably, undeniably one of the most brilliant and influential theologians in the entire history of the church, then do you think when that person looks at one of the clearest testimonies to how you have peace with God in inspired scripture, do you think maybe they should be able to get it?
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Should, should catch it? Should understand it? That's all sort of been my standard.
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And look, I taught church history for years and years and years, and I somehow have the ability to teach students to deeply appreciate so many of those who've come before us without idolizing, without idolizing, and to recognize, okay, here's, here's a place that there's real weakness.
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In fact, there's, that's really problematic. And in fact, taking that position will eventually lead to this down the road without going and therefore just dismiss him as irrelevant, dismiss him as a unbeliever, blah, blah, blah, never have any thanks for what
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God did in this person's life. No, been doing that for a long, long time. But if you're, if you're the greatest, some of these people, greatest theologian ever lived, um, do you think you should get the gospel straight?
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I mean, when you're looking at it, so I was thinking about Romans 5 .1.
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You know Romans 5 .1, right? I'm thinking about 1990, and I am thinking about my debates with Mitch Pacwa.
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I hope Mitch is doing well. In fact, I talked with a friend for about half an hour today, and I'm not going to say who that is because he does watch this program, and so he'll know exactly who it was.
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And so I'm going to ask my friend to see if maybe
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I could pass on a word of greeting and felicitations to Father Mitch.
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He had a bad heart attack a number of years ago, and I haven't seen him much. But, you know, he wanted to go out get a drink after one of our debates.
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It was after midnight on Long Island, and I was just way, way, way too
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Baptist back then, and I declined. That's one of those things where I wish I hadn't now that I think about it.
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I would like to have dinner with Mitch Pacwa. I really would. That would be, that'd be really cool.
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I'm not sure that I would drive into California to do it. I'm not sure I'd drive into California for anything to be perfectly honest with you.
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I don't, I don't trust the authorities there as far as I can throw them. And I feel for those of you who are there.
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I'm just going to say I got a text and dude, you are so cool. You really are.
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You just most unusual guy I've ever met, but you are cool. That's all there is to it. Anyways, how did
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I get there? I don't know. I, the nice thing about getting older is you can, it's, it was everybody and you're all going to have to testify to this because you, those of you there, you knew it.
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The saying was back in the olden days when I would speak at the same conferences with Dave Hunt before Dave Hunt came to detest me.
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So this is the 1990s. We all said the same thing. Dave Hunt never finished a talk on the same subject that he started on.
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It's just, if he had an assigned subject, he would finish at least four subjects away.
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Sometimes on your subject, you're supposed to speak on later in the day. You know, it didn't matter. But Dave was a little elderly.
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So you let folks with this much white hair just wander where they want to and start telling stories and do whatever they want because that's how it works.
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Once you, I mean, I've been doing that with Rich forever. I mean, wow, that guy will just all over the place.
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Okay, so Cornelius Van Till was taken out of the Nile by the
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Pharaohs. What were we talking about? Okay, yes. All right, Thomas Aquinas.
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Romans 5 .1, Romans 5 .1. First, therefore, he says, it has been stated that faith will be reputed as justice.
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Now, reputed as justice. Remember, these are translations from Latin.
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And imputation, legitimae, has aspects to it that the
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Latin does not fully express. And so reputed as justice can carry a concept that is below the fullness of the
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Greek expression. He says, it has been said that faith will be reputed as justice to all who believe in Christ's resurrection, which is the cause of our justification.
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Okay, that's true. Without the resurrection, there could be no justification. But the object of faith is
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Christ himself. Yes, the risen Christ, you can't separate that out. But I am uncomfortable with the idea that there would be any element of saving faith that would be laid aside.
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Being justified thereby for by faith, the quotation from Romans 5 .1, inasmuch as through faith in the resurrection, we participate in its effect, let us have peace with God, namely by submitting ourselves and obeying him.
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Agree with God and be at peace, Job 22 .21, who has hardened himself against him and been at peace,
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Job 9 .4. And this through our Lord Jesus Christ, who has led us to that peace, he is our peace,
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Ephesians 2 .14. That's it. That's it.
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There's nothing more. The key issue of what it means to be justified, the key issue, the whole idea, let us have peace with God.
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Now, May, June, July, somewhere
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May, June, July of 2020, I preached on Romans 5 .1 at Apologia, is when we were at a different church because of the
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COVID stuff. But it's still up there. And I did a sermon on the textual variant.
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I didn't do the sermon on the textual variant, but I addressed the issue of the textual variant at Romans 5 .1. And really,
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I think, whether it's the indicative or the subjunctive, ends up coming to the same issue.
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The issue is, do we have peace? Do we possess peace?
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And on what grounds? The grounds that Thomas Aquinas sees is by submitting ourselves and obeying him.
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Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. So what's the automatic essence for Thomas?
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Now, again, Luther is still many years in the future.
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And even though there are clear statements, Clement of Rome, for example, clear statements on the nature of what justifying faith actually is.
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Once you get to where Thomas is, you have so many centuries of a traditional understanding.
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Now, I don't know if anybody knows, because I don't know. And I would be very interested in knowing.
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I've never even heard anyone even ask this question. But I will throw it out there for the fun of it, because we have some really interesting people that watch this program.
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Has anyone ever done a study or just,
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I suppose I could just do a search of all my Thomas stuff for myself.
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Did Thomas know Fulgentius of Rusp? And you all just got a glazed look in your eyes.
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But Fulgentius of Rusp was just a fantastic writer.
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Again, a shining light, half a millennium after the time of the birth of Christ.
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Giving the lie again to those silly booklets and pamphlets that try to say once Constantine came along, then the true church died and blah, blah, blah, all the rest of that silliness.
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Fulgentius is a shining light. I've just never seen him cited in anything that I've read in Thomas.
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And what if Thomas had been more influenced by someone like Fulgentius?
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What if later tradition was more influenced by that?
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Would you have had the Radburnus -Ratramnus controversy later on?
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Would you have, would Gottschalk have suffered the way that he did for taking the positions he did?
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We don't know. The point is that the guidepost for what is true in any century is always what
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God has said, not what someone said in the previous century. But once what someone said in the previous century is repeated for enough centuries, it can become such a thick lens that even an insightful mind can look at Romans 5 .1
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and not see what it's saying. Therefore, having been justified by faith, what was all of Romans 4 about?
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Abraham's made righteous in God's sight by faith before circumcision comes along. It can't be as a result of these works.
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It can't be a result of his faithfulness. It has to be faith. That's all it was. In Genesis 15 .6,
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it's the empty hand of faith grasping the sufficient hand of grace.
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If you've got something in that hand, you're never going to be able to grasp that grace. So it has to be the empty hand of faith.
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Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God.
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That becomes the introduction. That's the whole issue. It's how you have peace with God.
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And for Thomas, we have peace with God by submitting ourselves and obeying him.
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And that's exactly what Luther believed, which is why he never had peace because he knew he was never perfectly submitted.
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And he knew he did. Every day he disobeyed as hard as he tried not to. That was the whole point.
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So when someone says, here's the greatest theologian. And when the greatest theologian looks at a text like this and doesn't see it,
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I don't do the Dave Hunt thing and just never read another word the man says and he's just the worst thing that ever happened.
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But what I'm asking is, why is there this sudden influx of advertisements for Thomas?
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I don't get it. I just don't get it. Okay, I didn't mean to spend all that time.
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I really, really was going to do that first stuff in just a matter of minutes. And it's like, all right, so let me just dive into some of this.
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I'm not gonna get very far because, well, I've got a lot to do today. RVing is great.
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I love getting the opportunity of being in the churches and stuff like that. I'm gonna be in a lot of churches, especially in the trip back to G3 and things like that.
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But it takes some time. You gotta have what you need, but only what you need in that van and in that fifth wheel for me.
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And I will be loading a lot of stuff in there. And it's about 109 degrees outside right now.
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So yeah, you sweat a lot. And it is the humidity's way up here for us anyways. All right, again, the
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Credo article, Why Protestants Have Always Stood on the Shoulders of Thomas Aquinas and Still Do.
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We looked at the call -outs, the tweets, which would not have come from Dr.
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Van Duren. They would have come from Lance English, I would assume.
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So they were, Thomas was undeniably one of the most brilliant influential theologians in entire history of the church. Most Protestants, even those theological training, have read little or none of Thomas.
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Many early Protestant theologians studied Thomas, engaged his work respectfully, and often embraced the very position Thomas defended.
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Kant played an important role in the development of anti -Thomas Protestantism. On some occasions,
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Reform theologians agreed with Thomas over against Roman Catholics. I love when it says on some occasions, because in the vast majority, it would be the exact opposite.
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Obviously, unless we want to say that the church began in the 16th century, which we don't, then we
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Reformation Christians need to claim the medieval church as our history. You know, there's a lot behind that.
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And there's a lot that I would want to ask questions about in regards to the Reformation itself. But that was the call -out.
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Church in regard to Thomas is an important, eminent theologian in the Christian church, worthy of engagement, and didn't just dismiss him as a
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Roman Catholic. And again, this is the straw man stuff. Again, I have not yet seen the
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Thomists make a serious attempt to convince those of us who are going, wait, wait, wait a minute.
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We were all on the same page 10 years ago. Now we're on different pages. Why? Who changed?
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Oh, we did. Okay, why? And then we don't get the type of meaningful interaction that would be helpful.
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This is a good example of it. And then the last one was,
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Thomas was a defender of Christian orthodoxy. It's the same orthodoxy that the Reformers taught and that the great
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Protestant confessions and catechisms expressed. And what that means is we're only talking about theology proper.
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We're not talking about Christian orthodoxy, which includes the gospel, which includes bibliology, ecclesiology, sacramentology, and everything else.
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We're not talking about any of those things. So when you say that Thomas was a defender of Christian orthodoxy, you are so narrowing that definition that you're leaving the subject matter of the majority of the
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New Testament out. When you got to do that, and they're not, aren't the first people to do this.
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I've criticized the mere Christianity movement for a long, long time. Well, as long as we believe in the
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Trinity and the death, burial, resurrection of Jesus, that's about all we can do.
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We can't ask much in the way of like, what does the death, burial, resurrection of Jesus do?
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What was its intention? We can't answer stuff like that. But if we agree on the big stuff, then we're all good.
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So why do we have the New Testament? If that's all we needed, could have been a lot shorter.
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And why is Galatians in there? Why, man, Paul, you're sure we're being rather divisive.
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Okay. So those are the call -outs. And we saw the first question.
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David, no doubt you have heard Ezealous say to you, Aquinas is not only irrelevant to Protestantism, but dangerous, threatening everything the
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Reformation stood for. You are a Reformed theologian, so let's set the record straight. Why is that popular angry rant so misguided and misinformed?
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And I just want to ask Mr. English, why? Why go there?
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Who? There are, yeah. You really responding to the Dave Hunts of the world? No, you're not.
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No, you're not. So again, let's just, since this is his article, we'll let him stand out here and hopefully, again, his hair won't start on fire from the warp core.
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Geordie has it well -tuned, so it's not really hot. So we're good. Why the straw man?
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Why not ask a meaningful question? Why not go, no doubt you have heard
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Ezealous say to you, the Reformers emphasize the supremacy of Scripture over the traditions of men.
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And Thomas Aquinas is one of the greatest schoolmen, gives us numerous examples of exegesis of Scripture and even theologizing based upon the influence of tradition.
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Why then should we go through the effort of sifting through all of the
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Peter Lombard sentences like scholasticism to find pearls of wisdom buried underneath all of that that you can find much easier in numerous other writers?
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That really wouldn't have started off the, wouldn't have really accomplished the purposes. But that would be a better question.
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Van Drunen's response, there's a lot one could say here, but I'll mention a few points briefly. One is that Thomas, whatever we think of as theology, theology proper, theology as a whole, theology of the gospel, theology of the church, theology of the
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Jews, was undeniably one of the most brilliant and influential theologians of the entire history of the church.
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No one can doubt that the sheer amount of closely argued literature that Thomas produced in a relatively small number of decades, is mighty impressive.
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But again, and when you say influential, where was that influence primarily felt?
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Well, this raises another issue. And this is from today.
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There was a tweet from Andrew Beckham that says,
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Baroque Thomism in the mid -century irritated
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Van Til. He thinks their work is representative of Thomism, a false inference.
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Etienne Gilson says, for example, the long and short of it is simply that in matters of theology, one cannot be right against St.
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Thomas Aquinas. A surprising statement, situate Cornelius Van Til's work historically seeing it calibrate to the issues of his day.
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Catch this. He lived in the pre -Müller theological milieu.
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Wow. Only at that point can a legitimate critique be advanced.
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Let's not worry about Reformation, pre -Reformation, post -Reformation. The greatest division now is the pre - or post -Müller theological milieu.
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I just hope I live long enough to see the swing back the other direction.
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When people start writing the critiques of Müller, because it will happen.
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If you are church historians, you know it will happen. Müller knows it'll happen.
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Well, he does know it'll happen. Because it's happened over and over again. It's inevitable.
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But when you're in it, some people just go with the flow, I guess. Anyways, the point being,
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Etienne Gilson, there are all sorts of different schools.
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Two primary, but then there are as long as you have scholars who are still alive, they need to publish.
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And so you will get people publishing and hence coming up with new takes and new perspectives all the time.
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And for Thomas, you have two major schools and then all sorts of divisions within those schools.
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And so if you make Thomas greatest theologian of all time, and more importantly, if you say that Thomas is the endpoint in a divinely ordained chain of doctrinal development, which is where Thomistic Baptists are going, for only the benefit of that much, that's where they're going.
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If you make him that, then the divisions in the interpretation of him become vitally important.
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And you end up having to exegete, not the text of scripture, but all of the multiple tomes of interpretations of the multiple, multiple, multiple tomes of Thomas Aquinas.
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You think that actually works? That actually clarifies something? Clarifies nothing. But it does keep the printing presses running.
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It does keep the printing presses running. And that's the problem. That's the problem.
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Which school are you going to adopt? Which set of scholars concerning Thomas?
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Because I've been watching a lot of these guys who are all of a sudden quoting
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Thomas all the time. I don't see them doing what I do, actually read, you know, read from it and go, here's what he says.
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But they're reading the secondary sources and they immediately line up with their particular schools, almost all with the new school.
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Because that makes Thomas cooler. Because the old school is Thomas was what Rome thought
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Thomas was for centuries. And the new school is, ah, they blew it.
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They missed him all along. Trent blew it. That's not what he meant. Um, and I don't think, obviously there's, there's no way of knowing, really, honestly, in that type of situation.
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Especially because you have to assume, you know, Thomas was more consistent. A lot of people are, that's for sure.
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But there's development in Thomas as well, isn't there? So who's, who's interpreting
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Thomas correctly? Who's to say? But if you make him the greatest theologian in the history of the church, and you make him the final phase in the development of what you are going to demand everyone else believes is absolute
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Orthodox doctrine, the doctrine of the Trinity, took 1 ,200 years to figure it out.
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Um, then you've got to, you've got to play those games. You've, you've got to, you've got to do the debates and read the books and do all the rest of that kind of stuff.
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And, um, I don't think that adds, adds any clarity to anything.
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To be honest with you, uh, at all. Uh, okay.
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So was going to spend a whole lot more time on that. Didn't get very far, but there's a lot more that's worthwhile to go there.
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And maybe I'll remember on Thursday, um, to be able to do that.
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And, uh, but that will be from the mobile command center.
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Uh, we'll be on the road. And hopefully everything will be working and our connections will be working right.
01:01:18
I've done programs from where I'm going to be before. And it wasn't a, in fact,
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I've got a good, strong, solid 5g signal there. So, um, we should be all right.
01:01:29
We should be all right. So thank you for listening to the program today. Uh, pray for traveling mercies and, uh,