The Aquinification of MBTS, Philosophical Trinitarianism, Responses to Soteriology 101

Alright, well, we're getting started a little bit late. We'll just cut that part off. Rich is going to have to do the editing on that one. I was watching... I was actually watching some friends of mine talking about Islam while I was riding today, and it's a video series, and they start having problems with one of the slides, and I can start hearing their Rich, you know, the guy behind the camera talking, you know, and that one's messed up.

I can guarantee you that one's messed up. Because the light is ten times brighter than it's supposed to be. So that's really... in fact, it's so bright it's annoying. So you might want to switch... whatever you just did that made that the ISO or the next one up, turn it back off.

That light is literally bright. Thank you. You gotta fix that one before we use it again. Anyway, so the guy's sitting there talking to them and says, okay, alright, I'll do these slides. Okay, ready?

Action! And they forgot to edit that part out. So, hey, it happens, and we're live, so it just works that way. So welcome to 2024! Something tells me that is somewhat of an indication of what's coming in 2024.

Just sort of generally, I mean Japan has a huge earthquake, and then they they're live with a plane landing in an airport. Did you see that? It only happened a few hours ago. There's a plane landing in Japan, and they're, for some reason, they have live coverage, and it explodes upon landing.

I mean, just boom! I mean, okay. Yeah, welcome to 2024. You know, people reminded me back in late 2019, I had said I foresaw 2020 was going to be a weird year. And I'm not talking about any type of prophetic thing or anything like that.

It just seemed like there were a lot of people saying the same things. And, of course, 2020 ended up being one of the weirdest years ever. And now we've got 2024. It does not take a prophet to go Oh! Presidential election year in the United States.

Okay. All this wild, insane, crazy stuff about carbon neutral by 2030, and all this utterly impossible stuff that cannot possibly be done that will destroy the United States economy, and hence the world's economy.

Because, you know, it's real easy for us to sit here and go, well, you know, our economy could collapse. Our money's worthless. It's true. That's true. If China wanted to collapse our economy, they could.

Tomorrow. Only problem is, there's no way for them to do that without taking themselves out, too. And everybody else along with it. I mean, they are in no better shape than we are. I mean, we owe so much more, but they're very weak.

A lot of it's demographics. They're aging, just like the Koreas are in Japan and everything else. So there's just, there are so many trends and so many things going on in the world right now. And most of us don't have any clue what's really going on.

We think we do, because we have our sources that we trust and that we look at. And as, I just want everybody to know, by the way, my sweater is not nearly as bright as it looks like on the screen. I mean, it's three times brighter on the screen than this actually is.

I mean, it's bright, but it's not that bright. I can't even look at myself up there right now. It's just wow. Anyway, 2024, it's starting off great.

And we all.

Live in our own little echo chambers and we choose what we'll hear and what we'll not hear. And the fact of the matter is, I do not have any trust whatsoever any longer in almost anything that can be called media.

There aren't any journalists left except outside the mainstream media. And even then, just because it's outside the mainstream doesn't make it accurate or truthful or right. I don't trust what my eyes see on the internet because I can watch entire movies with CGI characters.

The wife was watching something and I walked in, I think it was New Year's Eve, I'm ready to vote against fireworks from now on to be perfectly honest with you, or at least limit them to a couple of hours.

But New Year's Eve, I had to go shooting home right after church because it sounds like downtown Hanoi in my neighborhood and our cats are going to end up 10 miles away, running away from all this stuff.

My wife was watching something and honestly, I'm watching and I'm going, is this CGI? No, no, those are real actors. Are you sure? I mean, I just honestly could not tell. Something didn't seem right to me.

And that's where the technology is. We see videos of things that have happened overseas, stuff like that. Do I know that it actually happened that way? No. I don't. I come from a generation where you could trust that what you were seeing generally had to have happened, at least somewhat the way that it was being portrayed, but that's not the case anymore.

And do I have, what level of confidence do I have that the 2024 election will be fair and unhindered and unrigged? Zero. We already see it happening. Colorado, was it Maine? It was Maine. And I think there's like 14 other states that this could all happen.

I think they're all going to get quashed by the Supreme Court, but that's only for now. The very fact that they're willing to do what they're doing certainly and I live in Maricopa County, which I'll just be honest with you, I would say we have just as much chance of a fair counting of the ballots in Maricopa County as in Chicago.

Which means everybody in any of our cemeteries will be voting too. Our borders are wide open. We have military age. We have an army invading and I said on Twitter our nation's been taken over by traitors.

That's where we are. So you look at 2024 and I said yesterday morning, I just got the idea and I posted something on Twitter. It got a lot of, in a matter of hours it got like 30 ,000 views and things like that.

Basically talking about what I would predict for 2024 and what I said was I just have a feeling that things will be more different for everyone in the United States a year from now than during any similar period of time.

People said, oh, you're forgetting about the Civil War and stuff like that. No. The culture in 1859 and 1866 really wasn't all that changed. There were a lot of dead people, a lot of maimed people cities lying in ruins, but the culture that really didn't change in that time period.

The war was a huge upheaval but to have the kind of change I'm thinking about requires a tremendous amount of technology and they didn't have that type of technology at that time period. I could really foresee January 1st, 2025 being a period of incredible upheaval, martial law maybe constitution suspended violence in the streets depending on who's won the election or didn't win the election or obviously didn't win the election but it's going to be said to have won the election anyways I don't know.

I don't know, but I can certainly see it happening. I can't understand how anybody would say no, no, no you're getting too excited again that could never happen after COVID in 2020 and 2021 that could never happen yeah, no, anything can happen as far as that's concerned I closed it off by saying hey same thing I was saying during 2020 2021 when vaccine stuff's happening the seals are getting kicked out and all that stuff that was going on.

I said then it's all a matter of the world having its hooks in us because of our stuff, because of our love of the things of the world and if we don't have that love of the things of the world then the world won't have any control over us and we will find the secret of being content even if we lose most of our earthly possessions so yeah, I'm not sitting here saying that I know all this type of stuff's going to happen.

I just know that it seems to me that the people who want to make fundamental change in vastly diminishing freedom and liberty in the world initiating a massive wealth transfer from the west, outside to something, somewhere that these individuals have the power they're in the positions to do this and they will not allow anyone to take that power away from them they are entrenched and they're going to do what they need to do likewise, did you see what happened with what's it, Bankman Freed?

Is that the guy's name? The guy who stole billions of dollars from people defrauded them and used that money to buy political influence. He donated over a hundred million dollars to Democrats. I believe in 2020 might have been 2022, but I believe it was in 2020 over a hundred million dollars and it was all a Ponzi scheme, it was all fraud and the government the regime has dropped the election fraud charges against him because the government is run by the same people who benefited from the hundred million dollars that he gave them the level of, not incompetence but just straightforward, we don't care we are corrupt, we have been purchased and we used to look at banana republics and go, you should be like us, and now the banana republics are looking at us going, we never dreamed up what you've come up with it is truly disgusting.

You just reminded me, I've been asking the question of some of my. We're all spending time with family members that we don't spend a whole lot of time with.

I've just been spending time with my wife and my cats.

And I asked the question so you think that was an insurrection? So what do they call it when Democrats do it? The double standard is tremendous because as I recall we've only had maybe two true insurrections in this country, that's the one that founded it and then the one that caused the civil war.

And that's at best, because you know, arms and fighting and a lot of people dying is what that is. But same goes here, it's like you know what, if it's the democrats doing it it's fine, nothing to see here, move along.

Yeah, there's absolutely no question that the rule of law has ended. And what's that going to mean, and who are the people in charge now the wheels are coming off fast and once that first wheel comes off it's going to get ugly, it truly truly is.

And I had people saying yesterday, so what do we do? And you know since none of us know exactly which direction is going to go first and things like that, no one can answer that question until things start actually happening and then we're going to have to be somewhat doesn't seem to be a lot of people willing to be this way but somewhat gracious at that point in time because we've never faced this in our lifetimes.

Nobody in the generations before faced this type of societal meltdown to where you have the video that we all saw yesterday of a lieutenant colonel in the space force, I have not met anyone in the space force personally, first of all I suppose they're out there somewhere, but a lieutenant colonel and there's the picture, two pictures, dude chick, well actually dude and ugly fake chick in drag, yeah and we're all supposed to just salute and say this is wonderful, and the sad thing is Christians in the military are told to salute and to lie to that person and to say ma 'am when it's a dude you're just supposed to and I can't help but think of Solzhenitsyn, live not according to lies and that's what's going on 2024 is going to challenge the stability of our foundations of faith, let's just put it that way and we are going to have to be thinking about things and facing issues that we've just never thought we'd be facing in the context that we are it's going to be a challenge.

Aquinification and the Drift Toward Thomism

Okay, where do we go first. I'll go ahead and talk about this first, well first, we're not quite 20 minutes in because I'm not counting the first few minutes we're going to have to cut off. I reposted a I don't know if this is a tweet or a Facebook thing, I can't always tell the difference from Matthew Barrett from December 27th as normal, he is promoting a book by a Roman Catholic, Matthew Levering.

I remember, boy, it was two years ago this January, when Levering's name came up in the Reformed Baptist conversations that were going on, sort of started all this stuff for us anyways, January of 2021 Matthew Barrett, obviously teaching at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I'll get to this in a second, but it was interesting it might have even been this morning I saw a tweet, or last night, I forget which one it was where someone was saying, you know, I've read your book, Scripture Alone.

I've read his book on Sola Scriptura. I think it's God's Word Alone, and I just don't see that you all are in disagreement at all and I said, you'd be right, because in 2016 we're on the same page you read that book, his book and there's two references of Thomas Aquinas, and they're basically neutral they're just in passing.

I don't believe Matthew Barrett would write that book today it would be very, very different, there would be at least an entire chapter on Aquinas and Aquinas' contributions to the understanding of Scripture and blah blah blah blah.

I just don't think he could write a book on that subject without including that but 2016 was prior to his we need to come up with a word what term should we use for when you, you don't Pope you don't Aquinas you don't Thomas.

I don't know, we'll think of something, but it's when you fall in love with scholasticism and the whole idea that if you're really going to be a good Christian scholastic then you need to have your pictures of Thomas Aquinas on your wall.

Maybe your students will be drawing you pictures of Aquinas and giving you little Aquinas bobbleheads. But there's this when you ask Thomas into your heart and become a true born-again scholastic it changes everything and it changes how you look at things and Thomas all of a sudden finds a way into everything.

And so yeah, there wasn't much of a difference in the perspectives and things like that in 2016. Same thing with the large majority of my Reformed Baptist brethren we were pretty much on the same page.

2015 is where you can mark the Southern California Pastors Conference and that's when a lot of stuff was going on but yeah, we were still pretty much going the same direction at that point. And so, Matthew Barrett is promoting Matthew Levering's book Reconfiguring Thomistic Christology.

Thomistic Christology. Isn't it funny at first, it's Thomas's theology proper. It's Thomas's understanding of simplicity. It's Thomas in these areas and now it's Thomistic Christology. So now there's a specific Christology and if you know anything about Thomas and the problem is, even if you do if you don't agree with the scholastics on everything then you just haven't read enough Thomas.

No one could ever read enough Thomas. But it doesn't take a degree in scholastic history to recognize that within Roman Catholicism once you start talking about Christology the pathway is clear and inevitable into a discussion of Eucharistic theology.

And if you know anything about Thomas then you know he has a deep, mystical Eucharistic theology that is inevitably connected to his Christology. You can't escape it. And so what this does, again, is raise the reality that a person who mocks Biblicism and who mocks the idea of the sufficiency of Scripture to function as the norm by which we measure everything, including Thomas' metaphysics his theology proper and the entire realm of his theological perspectives.

Where do you draw the line? Where does this stop? So I'm sure that if you go to the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary bookstore you're gonna find copies of Reconfiguring Thomistic Christology because it says here this book has won one of Credo Magazine's book awards and so I mentioned, what it said was, this book is the most important contribution in years for too long, dogmatics and Biblical theology are worlds apart but this is not necessary, we can bring the good work we are doing retrieving Aquinas into orbit with the findings of evangelical Biblical theology now, again, good luck meaningfully in application, differentiating between Biblical theology and being a Biblicist conversant with both fields, levering Roman Catholic, is hope that we will one day move past naive Biblicism to a land where the Lamb of Biblical theology and the line of dogmatics dwell together to learn more, see why this book was won of the Credo Magazine book awards and then you've got the link to the book awards you can go read from Matthew Barrett and I reposted this graphic and I said I just want to make sure that the board of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary whoever they may be, I don't even know who they are.

I haven't taken the time to look them up, I'm not contacting them I don't have any connections, I just happened to speak in Kansas City and hence met graduates of MBTS who attended my talks and we had some interesting conversations about this stuff.

I don't know anybody at MBTS but I do believe that the board should be aware of where the school is headed and what all this means and that people like levering and white, different white obviously, Roman Catholic priests and monks all that their books and their writings are being mainstreamed mainlined right into the classrooms at MBTS and in this context they obviously Barrett obviously feels like he is a part of this resourcement movement, which obviously these guys feel like we are doing something for the church, you just can't appreciate how much we're doing for the church in helping to move us past naive biblicism.

You wonder why these guys are so brittle so easily offended, why they block everybody right, left and center because they really think that we are a bunch of naive biblicists, that we just have the IQ of a wet shoelace and so they really do believe I mean scholastics, I've told you about the horrible feeling that I got at the 1998 ETS meeting of the academy and its infinite wisdom of the guiding lights to the benighted church, the idea of academics in service to the church, in humble service to the church and it really turned me off it really, really, really did they do believe that anyone criticizing them is just a naive biblicist.

So what that very interestingly leads me to is oh, I just hopped in there can't talk about that on the air, but that'll be interesting to see we got a word? Aquinification? Ok, look guys, look, who?

Oh, well I'm not in the chat. Ok, so we gotta give credit to Nick Riker for that one in the chat, so we gotta make sure we give him a shout out. Ok, look, Nick.

He said Nick, ok Nick, Nick, listen to me now, ok when we're trying to find pithy little terms for like, oh he poped, you know it rolls off the tongue, you know, poped is easy if you have to, aquinification.

Ok, six syllables is about four and a half syllables long for something like that. I'm not sure I can say that three times fast. Someone in chat says aquinification. Yeah, there you go. That does work.

Obviously Matthew Barrett experienced aquinification. We may be stuck with it. Yep, we may be stuck with it. Yeah, now we have to start talking about is there a cure for aquinification. Yeah, ok, we might roll with it.

So yeah, there you go. How did I get to that? I don't know I have the file up but I didn't get to the point in it that I wanted to play, so it would take too long to find that I listened to a discussion.

A, um, where'd it go? Well maybe I don't have it up, oh, never mind. Use a different program. I listened to the man that I'm going to be debating one of four men I will be debating one I'm debating twice in the upcoming marathon trip is Dr. Dale Tuggy now we have played Tuggy's discussion portions of Tuggy's discussion with William Lane Craig we've read some of his what he obviously thinks are his best arguments against the Trinity, he is a Unitarian, he is a philosophical Unitarian, analytical philosopher he's not a theologian, he's not an exegete and so we've engaged with him, we're going to be debating the last debate of the five that we're going to be doing in February and March on the same trip and so I was listening to, he has something called the Trinity's podcast and his whole thing is about all the differing Trinitarian theories that exist out there really I think one of his arguments would be there are so many that it renders the whole subject as nothing more than the speculations of philosophers and there's some level of truth to that if you approach the doctrine from the wrong perspective and that's what we're talking about when we talk about grounding our Christian understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity in Thomas and in Thomas's theology we put ourselves in this boat we put ourselves in this situation, there's nothing we can do about it and he is, in this particular episode that I was listening to, episode number 370 he is interviewing Dr. Stephen Nemesh who's a graduate of Fuller Seminary, fairly recent graduate of Fuller Seminary who is clearly wildly unorthodox, he's cranking books out right, left and center and it's all analytical, philosophical analysis of post-Catholic theology and he's not using the term Catholic as in Roman Catholic at all but basically 4th century onward and so he's making objections to the doctrine of the Trinity that are directly relevant the conversation starts off, and I may play portions of this we'll see, at least it's one of the topics I'm dealing with, I only have a month, I leave in one month and six days and I have to have my opening statement for that debate done in less than a month because part of the contractual obligation to get Dale Tuggy to even debate was that I provide him with my opening statement as he'll provide me with his and no, that is the only time I've ever done that, and he demanded it so, um, as I said Dr. Tuggy is extremely textually oriented, not textually as in scripture, textually as in a manuscript, as something that's written out and so he wants that he wants to know where I'm going from the start so he can respond to it and since I'm doing the positive, that's a huge advantage to him, but that's fine, we'll do it.

So I have to be very much focused on the content of those five debates and presentations that I'm making um, and I have a Baptist church history class to teach in the process, which I don't even know how I'm going to get to all that.

In fact, I just realized I need to send an email to the seminary that I was supposed to get to today and I didn't. Anyway this conversation starts off by defining particular aspects of Trinitarian theology focusing upon the doctrine of simplicity.

Interesting some of the comments that he has on that recognizing that there are strict forms of simplicity and less strict forms of simplicity. And by the way I am hoping that Dr. Jeffrey Johnson will be able to join us on Thursday I don't know that right now he hit the brakes wrong on a mountain trail on a mountain bike and went over the handlebars and did what most cyclists when you crash, there is one injury that you will sustain when you crash on a bike and that is you'll break your collarbone.

Lance Armstrong had a carbon fiber collarbone installed at one point. He had broken it so many times and so he broke his collarbone and he likewise broke three ribs and here's the problem, I'm sure Brother Johnson will do his best to join us I just don't want him to be on drugs when he comes on and I don't know about you but if I had three broken ribs for only a few days later yeah, yeah, yeah and besides that, when you've got three broken ribs the last thing you want to do is laugh and I suppose we could try to keep things as serious as possible but still, when you're on pain meds, things become happy and funny, so you never know.

Right now, the plan is that I will contact him tomorrow and we'll make a decision as to whether we want to put that off or just what. It takes a while to recover from something like that but that's a big bang bang so we will see but what made me think about that was one element of the conversation that we will be having with Dr. Johnson in light of his book.

His book is out for delivery for me today. It's not that I haven't already read it I have read it more than once, but the physical copy is due at my house, I believe, this afternoon. There is discussion a fair amount of discussion in the book on a philosophical classical theism versus a biblical classical theism and it has to do with origins.

Where do you derive your fundamental categories of thought and expression and there are people who fundamentally derive their Trinitarian theology from a form of philosophical speculation and that's problematic and so this conversation with Stephen Nimish starts off talking about simplicity and the divine processions the Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit is spirated and the idea that the only way you can distinguish between Father, Son, and Spirit is by the divine processions and we've heard a lot of people saying that as well post-Nicene orthodoxy.

I do not recall in the hour and six minutes of the episode that I listened to, the citation of a single text of scripture what was very very obvious when you get at least two analytical philosophers together and listen to them talking with one another they all end up sounding the same.

I remember listening to a Roman Catholic interviewing James Dolezal on similar issues and there were a couple Bible verses cited but they were never exegeted. It was just mentioned in passing for the language but much of the conversation was very very similar as far as the categories of thought that were being utilized.

Nemesh provides four arguments that he says fundamentally make the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity which he's just using that again as a very vague post 4th century view of the Trinity, incoherent and he basically bases this on the difference between uggia the essence of God and the divine persons and what is prior to what in analytical philosophy, priority doesn't mean temporal priority, but that which explains the existence of something else and so he makes the argument that if the uggia if the essence, now there was development historically in the understanding of those terms uggia, hypostasis there was confusion between east and west.

The east had fought against modalism and monarchism and had developed language to do that and unfortunately that language runs into translational issues in the Latin for the west and there was a lot of confusion at that particular point in time and there was development even between 325 and 381.

That's something I want to bring up at another point in time and talk about even what that means to us as well, but he makes the argument that if the uggia comes first and there's a contradiction with the priority of the father if the hypostasis comes first and you end up with 4 things and all the conversation, all the 4 different arguments are based upon philosophical categories and if you remember listening, if you remember back during the summer when I played portions I just realized I didn't play these portions I directed you to them, but I didn't play these portions of the conversation between William Lane Craig and Dale Tuggy in the first half, where Tuggy is going after Craig, the conversation is well, I am not convinced of that argument.

I do not necessarily utilize that category, I don't necessarily believe that term means this, and that's all that philosophers do, is have arguments like that that never end up coming to any type of conclusion because if you did, then they'd have to stop publishing and that's death it was the same kind of round and round and I'm not sure that I necessarily accept that definition and everybody gets to just sort of accept what they want to accept and the idea is to try to push the other guy into making contradictory statements, but once you claim the right to define everything as you feel like defining it, you're never really going to be pushed into that position anyway, so that's the stuff that's going on and I still might do this, but you play something like this for most people, and what it did for me was to verify once again the importance of recognizing from whence the doctrine of the trinity comes.

If the doctrine of the trinity is an a priori creedal reality that must be held so as to properly interpret scripture, then you cannot say that it's coming from the witness of scripture. If you say you have to start with our conclusion to be able to rightly handle scripture, now you're going to have to explain where your conclusion came from, and it can't be from scripture because it can't rightly handle scripture without your conclusion.

So, I was going to grab this. I haven't grabbed this one in a while still smells good. Still see the page edging still looks good. I dyed the page edges on this one, this is the ESV creeds and confessions one that I got from Jeffrey Rice and I did the page edging myself.

It all comes down to what I've said before. I've used illustration, I've shown it to you. I'm sitting here in this very seat and I've said where is the revelation of the doctrine of the trinity. Well it's right there in the gutter between Malachi and Matthew it happened in history and this is the God breathed testimony to it so that what you have here is you have the, and actually a smaller portion, only about revelation, what you have are Trinitarians teaching Trinitarianly in the New Testament and so the doctrine becomes a biblical doctrine because the historical revelation of it is only revealed to us prophetically in the Tanakh what we call the Old Testament and then lived out in the New and so if that's the source and origin of the doctrine then anything that comes after this we can be thankful.

I'm very very thankful for the insights into the doctrine of the trinity provided by B .B. Warfield doesn't make B .B. Warfield inspired, doesn't make him a standard outside of scripture. But we can be thankful for those who in the past either recent or ancient have reflected properly upon what is found in scripture and we can, you can look at a Gregory of Nyssa Gregory Nazianzus you can look at Basil or an Athanasius or an Augustine and in each one you are going to have to wrestle with the reality that you can learn things from them without accepting everything they have to say because almost no one today does accept everything that they have to say.

So I can't think of a single one of those men that I just mentioned, including Warfield that I would not have biblical disagreements with Warfield was a Presbyterian obviously on matters of church governance and sacraments and even an understanding of justification.

I would have differences with every one of the ancient men that I mentioned I've talked about Augustine and his I think self-contradictory view of justification and the contradictions that exist in his theology due to the Donatus Controversy, the Plagian Controversy, the context in which he lived and I apply the same standards to Augustine or to Gregory either the Gregories or to Basil or whatever Ambrose, everybody and that makes me a Biblicist.

I think any Baptist is a Biblicist because my final authority is Scripture and ontologically as to the nature of Scripture, it has a unique essence it is the Word of God written it is given to the church to have a specific function and purpose that nothing else is in the same class and category as what you have in Scripture now for some reason when it comes to those post-Nicene writers or even contemporaneous with Nicaea, Athanasius when it comes to theology proper, you just simply have to accept whatever they had to say.

The problem is, as I said, there's development from Athanasius to Gregory. There's development in the decades after Nicaea and what's the standard by which development must be tested? Scripture. And so what I would love to do is I would love to.

Challenge our.

Classical theism and of course that's a term created by the open theists to describe all of us but our philosophical classical theists, I would like to challenge them to listen to that podcast and to tell me how would you respond to Stephen Nemitch how would you respond to his arguments where he says look, if you try to hold on to divine simplicity and processions and the distinction of usia and hypothesis you can't do it.

You have to give something up to come up with any type of workable conclusion. I'd like to know how you respond because I know how I respond to that and since I'll be debating him I would assume some of this is going to come up and so I know how I would respond.

The problem is you all don't seem to think that my grounding the trinity as the biblical trinity as a biblical revelation is a coherent or possible thing to do so we're not going to respond the same way you've accepted the validity of the categories that he's utilizing so how do you get around the resultant objection?

I'd really love to see how that would be done. I really really would because this is one of the issues I'm debating him, not Nemitch but Tuggy in March and it's on a very closely related topic and so it's something I'm definitely thinking about and so my question is how would the rest of you do it?

Since you have such insights, how would the rest of you do it? I will try to remember to blog a link to it and see if anyone... I haven't heard anybody answering the other question I asked last week about how to respond to people regarding Matthew 24 -36.

I haven't heard any answers to that but anyway okay now we got started a little bit late and we'll go a few minutes over I wanted to respond to and what we've done up to this point in time has been rather heavy and difficult to follow.

The Will of God: Decretive and Prescriptive

Soteriology 101 posted a tweet and I just want to briefly respond to it that's not even spelled correctly it says hallowed by thy name thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Oh wait, your will is already always being done exactly as you determined so just keep doing that, amen.

Now there have been a number of times that I have muted Soteriology 101 in fact I think I may have even blocked him for a while and part of the reason is just the frustration I don't like to hear people constantly mocking God's truth who clearly have no ears to hear no matter how many times they are corrected that they are mocking God's truth.

No one who is ever any kind of Calvinist and again I've met lots of former Calvinists and when you start pushing on them you discover I don't know what they think they were but they had no knowledge of the basics of the system.

And here's a good example. But likewise the willingness to engage in this kind of thing this constant willingness to mock God's decree even if you come to the conclusion that the Bible doesn't teach there is a decree of God.

I would think there would be some hesitation to engage in this kind of behavior. It is childish and self-destructive but in this instance thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven as latent flowers should know but clearly doesn't.

Because if he does know then he is being dishonest. And if we are going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he is not being dishonest then he just never knew. But when we talk about the will of God we have over the years more than once gone rather in depth into a discussion of the fact that there is in scripture of necessity in the Bible a revelation of God's will expressing his character his holiness expressing his law for mankind and this is his prescriptive will.

So we know that in the law you are not to murder. We know that you are not to cheat others that you are not to lie. And these represent the creator's character and hence impact how the creature is to live in God's world.

But we also know that there is a decretive will that is the will that forms the very fabric of time when God says he is going to accomplish his purposes he is going to do as he pleases. We looked only a few weeks ago at Daniel chapter 4 testimony to God's utter freedom to act not only in heaven but upon earth so as to accomplish his purpose.

There is no one who can ward off his hand and say to him why have you done this. And we recognize that the fundamental error of latent flowers over and over and over again is the same thing he will not allow for these two divine realities to exist side by side.

So you listen to his attempt to deal with Genesis 50 for example and it's incoherent, it has to be because in Genesis 50 you have the prescriptive will, don't kill your brother and the decretive will, your brother has to go to Egypt and he's got to go there in a certain way and biblically you accept both and you function in light of both.