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Folks, these are wolves. Truth be told, I oftentimes lay awake at night trying to figure out how I can get rid of wolves.
We are unabashedly, unashamedly Clarkian. And so, the next few statements that I'm going to make, I'm probably going to step on all of the Vantillian toes at the same time. And this is what we do at Simple Riff around the radio, you know.
We are polemical and polarizing Jesus style.
I would first say that to characterize what we do as fashion is itself fashion. It's not hate. It's history. It's not fashion. It's the Bible. Jesus said, Woe to you when men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.
As opposed to, blessed are you when you have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness.
It is on. We're taking the gloves off. It's time to battle.
Yeah, let's get this show going. My name is Tim and this is Simple Riff from on the radio. So, today I have with me Joseph Rios, one of our co-hosts, and Carlos Montijo, our other co-host. And today is going to be sort of a catch-all episode.
This is a last minute episode. We have a lot of things that we want to address.
And.
It's going to be interesting when this episode gets released. But we are going to, well, first of all, let me just give it over to Carlos because he's got some public service announcements. And then after that we will hear a word from our sponsors.
So, Carlos, take it away.
Yeah, so, the theme of the show is going to be apologetics in general. But, you know, we've got so much going on here at Simple Riff from on the radio. We were talking about the lordship controversy, the new covenant theology stuff, the, you know, like, we've got so much going on with the Gordon Clark stuff, scripturalism.
I mean, we have several streams.
Of.
Themes that we want to pursue, apologetics and things like that. So, we're trying to get everything, you know, tie everything together. So, that being said, we haven't had time to address some things that have been kind of piling up.
So, we're going to try to make that pile go away. And we've had a lot of public service announcements that we wanted to make. And one of those is that Andrew Rappaport was featured on the Theology Gals not too long ago doing an episode on dispensationalism.
And in that episode he made mention of the fact, or he claimed, rather, that covenant theology originated with Thomas Aquinas. And that's actually quite wrong and misleading on two accounts at least. So, the first problem is that he was sort of equating the three-fold division of the law with covenant theology itself.
And that's, like, very misleading. That's not even half of what covenant theology is. And the three-fold division of the law, for one thing, is not even exclusive to covenant theology. Because, obviously, the Catholic Church also holds to it.
There's other people, other Christians in the past who have held to it. Justin Martyr had a similar view. A tri-fold division of the law as well. Several Christians have. And I'm pretty sure other denominations have a similar view as well.
They probably, you know, like Methodist or Baptist. I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's a fairly common thing. And that being said, however, he claimed that covenant theology was started with Aquinas, and yet by that, I guess he meant, really, he meant the three-fold division of the law.
So, the Catholic Church does not at all hold to covenant theology. There is no covenant of works. There's no covenant of grace, redemption. There's none of that stuff. There is no, there really is, it's not reformed.
I mean, the Protestant Reform Movement came as a reaction to the Catholic Church, which is, it's grossly inaccurate to say that. So, just wanted to clarify that. And also,.
Going.
Back to the issue of, you know, actually, that's what I was going to say. If you go back to episode six, I think, is when we actually talked about, you know, the three-fold division of the law and how it came from, you know, other Christians in the past have held to similar views.
Augustine, also being one of them, he had a similar, he also held to certain distinctions in the law.
And,.
Also, when we responded to the Porch Guys, that's what I was trying to remember. When we responded to the Porch Guys in our, in the two episodes with, that were also tied into the interview, or the discussion that I had with Louis Lyons, we also dealt with that, I think, there.
And with, when we answered Chris Fales' challenge on, you know, on the law. And so, we've dealt with this several times. You know, people, if people have been kind of listening to our shows and keeping track of what we've been talking about, we've corrected this, we've addressed this issue several times already.
So, any comment on that?
No, you've been waiting quite a while to get that out. Get that off your chest. So, let me, let me just back up here. I believe it was Paul Kaiser was kind of saying that we weren't going to correct Andrew.
Right. Well, he was saying that because we've called the Porch Guys out on that for making that similar claim. And, but I assured him, I assured him that we were going to get around to it. It's just, there's only so much time in the day for us to get to these things.
So, we didn't want to disappoint, and here it is. So, that's your first public service announcement.
On that, you know, it's funny because one of the pastors in my church is the Progressive Dispensational, which is the closest thing that I personally subscribe to. And he was talking about how there isn't one.
There isn't a three-fold division of the law. But he had a really hard time dealing with the same verse that I post to the New Covenant Theology Guys, which was the, which was Psalm 119, 160. Right? So, some of the, some of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous ordinances is everlasting.
He was saying that, you know, the Scripture doesn't explicitly teach on a three-fold division of the law. And my argument was that, well, it's done by implication, just like the Trinity is done by implication.
And so, you can't say that because it's not specifically, explicitly stated that it's not there. And so, I thought that was interesting also because I've actually ended up defending that. The guy, the pastor's awesome.
He actually invited me and another guy because we use the law and evangelism to the class where he was teaching on that because he thought we would disagree.
With him.
So that we could disagree with him. And so, that's not something you see every day. The guy, he's amazing. But that still was the question that couldn't be answered. If God's law is everlasting, how do you not, how do you not somehow divide it in regards to what still exists because it's everlasting and what is not presently active or rather ratified by the New Covenant?
Yeah, good points.
I mean,.
We've dealt with this a lot of, you know, several times and it's a very common dispensationalist share that with New Covenant theology. They reject the threefold division or distinction of the law and you do run into several problems when you do that.
And actually, they do it implicitly. They don't actually realize that they do it implicitly, but we're going to cover that in more detail in our show where we deal more when we revisit New Covenant theology.
But, that being said, there was also something else that we wanted to kind of comment on with regards to the fairly recent discussion that was held on Conversations from the Porch where they had a discussion similar to the one that I had with Lewis Lyons, with Jason Mullett from Logical Belief Ministries and Dustin Seegers who is New Covenant.
Well, what's his name? Jason is actually Reformed Baptist, but he doesn't hold to the Sabbath, so that's kind of qualified there. Did you all get a chance to listen to that?
Yeah, I did. Let me ask you, man. Are your feelings hurt? That Jason got invited onto the Porch and you still haven't?
No, not at all.
Okay, because I know we've been here for a while and we had offered to have that conversation with them a long time ago, especially you. So I just wanted to make sure that you weren't that you didn't get hurt feelings.
No, no, I'm not disappointed because unfortunately Jason was largely very ignorant of New Covenant theology and he admitted as much because he said that the only book he had really read was part way, he had started reading a part of Charles Leiter's The Law of Christ and that's not even a fully New Covenant theology perspective.
So that's another kind of misleading thing that you can't, you get the impression from some of these NCT guys, like I know the Porch has, they've been promoting Charles Leiter's book as NCT and it's really not.
It's, they do have a similar view with respect to certain aspects of the law, but in Charles Leiter and one of the brothers from my church actually lent me the book so I've been going through it and they don't actually completely disregard the threefold division of the law.
They say that it is useful, that it can be useful. It's just that it can only go so far. So they don't completely throw it away like you hear a lot of NCT guys who are on the more extreme side, they tend to try to completely throw it away or disregard it and things like that.
So yeah, that was very disappointing because Jason unfortunately was not very well prepared and he was mainly asking questions so he wasn't really able to give any like that good.
Comments or feedback to Dustin and Dustin you could tell was way more experienced, he's way more knowledgeable than he was with respect to NCT and so.
That being said,.
Go ahead. Yeah, well maybe I don't know, maybe Jason. I think that might be Jason's style to just ask questions and dialogue in that way. I mean I'm not really sure. What I've noticed is that a lot of times then he'll address points later on his own show.
So.
But yeah, I thought it was a good discussion. I want to say that and I thought it was very civil, everybody survived. It could have been us, it could have been you Carlos but it wasn't so.
Sure yeah, I think no and he does, he's a very good debater. I've heard some of his debates with Layton Flowers and some of his other stuff and he defends Calvinism excellently and when he knows his stuff he does it very well and that's why I was a little disappointed because he wasn't, he just I guess he was kind of jumping into it more to learn about it rather than to really actually try to, you know, give some criticism or refute certain aspects of New Covenant theology.
So and that being said, there was an issue there that came up and it's happened before already on the porch and we've already addressed it on our show I think more than once where there seems to be a very big misunderstanding as to what the moral law actually is and that's been a big problem and unfortunately Dustin Seegers I guess he hasn't listened to our episode so he ended up kind of perpetuating the same misunderstanding about the moral law being equated with the Ten Commandments and so that is not true, that is the moral law includes the Ten Commandments but it is not exclusively the Ten Commandments and so he said something, he made a comment like all of the Reform guys I've talked to have pretty much equated or said that the Ten Commandments are the moral law and it's like, well, that's not correct they are included but it's not exclusively that and all you have to do is look at the Westminster Larger Catechism it defines the moral law in Question 93 it says, what is the moral law?
The answer is, the moral law is a declaration of the will of God to mankind directing and binding everyone to personal perfect and perpetual conformity and obedience thereunto in the frame and disposition of the whole man, soul, and body, and in performance of all those duties of holiness and righteousness which he oweth to God and man promising life upon the fulfilling and threatening death upon the breach of it so there you can see, the theme is that it's an eternal law it's perpetual, it's always binding and so, further on in Question 98 it says, wherein is the moral law summarily comprehended?
Answer, the moral law is summarily comprehended in the Ten Commandments which were delivered by the voice of God upon Mount Sinai and written by him on two tables of stone, and are recorded in the 20th chapter of Exodus the first four commandments containing our duty to God and the other six, our duty to man so there you have it folks, this is probably the second or third time we've addressed this on the show but at least now we gave you a more clear definition and I think, one thing that kind of also disappointed me about Jason is that he was sort of being a little bit he was using his own definitions when I don't think he really had to I mean, he said that he didn't really like using the term Christian Sabbath, he rather used the Lord's Day but actually, like I don't think there's anything wrong with using the Christian Sabbath because in Hebrews 4 it says that the remains of Sabbath rest for the people of God, so you know there's nothing wrong with calling it the Christian Sabbath to distinguish it from the Old Testament Jewish Sabbath so, you know, there was just things like that he was kind of being, providing his own definitions like, well, if you just really, you don't need to change these much I mean, if at all, you don't really need to change this it's already well established theological definitions and terminology that have really withstood the test of time and are pretty consistent with the Bible with what the Bible teaches.
So you would say just for clarity's sake that the moral law also includes other I guess, commandments in the New Testament which would be moral?
Yeah, like I mean, it's obviously they relate to the Ten Commandments in some way because they're summarizing the Ten Commandments so like bestiality, for example that's part of the moral law. It's never okay to have sex with animals.
It's never okay to commit certain forms of incest. We'll deal with that later. We have a very good discussion on incest that we're going to get into when we talk about NCT in more detail. But yeah, the moral law is not exclusively the Ten Commandments, there's other things involved there that are included by way of, not just by way of implication, but also by virtue of the fact that God prohibits certain things in both the Old and the New Testament as well.
Yeah, you just reminded me, man. We need to take up the LGBTQ.
I.
Issue again.
Dot dot dot Z.
Yeah, I mean it's just it's getting so ridiculous but you know what, somebody posted a funny meme, I forgot who it was but it said, it was that philosopher dinosaur. And it said, doesn't the B in LGBT imply that there's only two genders.
I thought that was pretty interesting.
I asked a couple of people about that.
And they're like, oh yeah so, alright, so you got that off your chest, glad to hear it.
You wanted to give Paul Kaiser some props, right?
That is right, yeah. I was very glad to see that he's sort of turning over a new.
Leaf. Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. I think we're turning over a new leaf too because we corrected Andrew up for it and now we're about to give Paul Kaiser some props, so.
Yeah.
New things are happening at Send Forward From On The Radio.
Definitely. Yeah, I was very encouraged to see that he went, I think it was in that same episode or maybe the one before it, somewhere around there, he did say that he was affirming the fact that he was actually starting to read Baptist Covenant Theology, Reformed Baptist authors and he was recommending them as well to his listeners and he also said that, he was affirming that there was a lot that we had in common that Reformed Baptist and certain streams of New Covenant Theology have a lot in common, and so I was very encouraged by that, I was very excited, I'm very excited to see that they're willing to you know, step into the conversation respectfully and actually do their homework do some research, you know, actually read the arguments and so on and so forth to have a much better dialogue hopefully, and be able to represent the other side more accurately than they have been in the past and so, because when there's so much straw manning and misrepresentation, it's very hard to see any common ground, you know, because you're just, especially in the beginning where they were kind of equating us with like, you know, why are you, aren't you Presbyterian, you know, making jokes about being Presbyterian and, you know, just very sort of superficial remarks that did not illustrate or demonstrate a good understanding of what Reformed Baptist Theology actually.
Is. And that wasn't funny. It's not a funny joke.
It's, yeah, I mean, it's if you, anybody who is aware of it realizes that there are very significant differences between those two areas of Covenant Theology. So, and we have talked, again, we've already talked about this stuff before in our show so, you know, you can go back and visit my discussions with Lewis Lyons and things like that but, yeah, that was very encouraging.
I do look forward to seeing what they have to contribute.
Okay, so we're good with the public service announcement, right?
Well, I'm glad you asked because I want to make a quick public service announcement because in case you all are not aware June was declared LGBT month by Barack Obama, I believe, back.
In 2008.
And so this is why you're starting to see a lot of activity. Actually, just today, we had an LGBT parade in El Paso and some of the brothers went out and witnessed there. So there's a lot of activity going on.
Even in my job, like, I was just sort of shocked at how I'm a software engineer, right? So I like to use a certain coding editor called Vim and I was looking at some of the videos by the creator of Vim because I'm going to give a presentation on it next week.
And so I was going onto his channel and I thought I had the wrong channel because I was seeing a bunch of LGBT parade videos posted on there with nude people. You don't even have to click on the video and there was nude people everywhere, topless and things like that.
And I was like, do I even have the right channel? And then I realized oh, wow, no, this is the same guy, he has videos on the history of this coding editor and then he has a bunch of videos that he recently uploaded on his channel about LGBT parades because he works for Google and Google has very pro-LGBT and so much.
So that they already they just hit the ground running by the beginning of March and they're already participating in all these parades and vile, filthy parades. Even just looking at the thumbnail is already defiling they also released a video and this is a very important public service announcement because they recently, Google recently released a video on Google movies called Historic Journey and this movie is for kids and the problem with that is that it has some very subtle and very not so subtle LGBT agenda being promoted through it and it's pretty.
Bad.
The whole point of this movie, and I haven't seen all of it, I started watching it and we were like, there's something really wrong with this and so the whole month of June, it's going to be free. You can download it or watch it for free and add it to your library for the whole month of June so that already tells you one thing this is clearly tied to the agenda that they're pushing as the LGBT agenda.
The other thing is that the whole point of the movie is that this bird was adopted by, it's a sparrow that was adopted by a stork a stork family and the problem is that the birds have very different ways of life.
They were saying that the storks they fly at much higher altitudes because they have to travel much further and the sparrows can't do that the sparrows don't migrate. Basically the whole movie is this bird insisting that he's a stork and defying his own.
Nature.
That's Romans 1 right there folks. And here Google is promoting this trash very subtly to kids and then later on he basically starts running into all of these birds that are kind of like outcasts. They're like the outsiders and outcasts kind of pushing that motif and how the LGBT agenda is outcasted and all this stuff even though they have incredible amounts of power and influence especially through the most wealthiest companies like Google and Facebook and all that stuff.
So this one bird they meet this one bird who's trapped in a cage and he's basically like a trans what do you call it? He's sort of like a drag queen bird. He's a male bird but then it looks like he has makeup on and he sings the bird sings and his favorite song is I'm Coming Out.
And the way Google did this is like they're playing the song I'm Coming Out because he wants to get out of his cage. But there you see again some very subtle very evil just parallels there with the LGBT agenda and Coming Out about your sexuality or whatever.
And here's the worst part of it all the worst part of it is that this movie has the Dove Foundation stamp on it on the front cover of the movie stamped as family approved by the Dove Foundation. So I thought that was supposed to be a Christian ministry that reviews movies and tells you that whether it's okay or not if this is family friendly.
So I was pretty disturbed by all this and so I wanted to bring that out to our listeners. This LGBT agenda is getting very very bad. They're reaching out to kids, they're trying to get into their minds.
So just be careful. Be very careful. And you can watch it for yourself, it's free. You can go to Google Movies and watch it for yourself and see, there it is. That was all the PSAs that I had.
That's really good, I'm really glad that you brought all that stuff to light, Carlos. I did see the rainbow flag posted on basically as the emoji icon for Google and one of the things that you were talking about right now was the fact that this is very subtle and I kind of wanted to comment on that because this issue came up with the Beauty and the Beast movie because here we are, we're making a big deal about this, right?
Joseph did that episode with me. We're making a big deal about this and then people go to see the movie.
They're kind of like, what's the big deal? You know, like, oh it's not overt, I mean, it's just it's this one little scene where they dance or, you know, it's not really that, you know, it's not a big deal like you guys are making it out to be.
Well, so I'm going to read from the King James Bible Genesis 3 verse 1, it says, Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast in the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman Yea, hath God said ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden.
And I've talked about this before, God did not say that you shall not eat of every tree. This is the first time that we see that Satan is actually twisting God's word. But I actually, I really like the King James Bible when it comes to this verse because it says that the serpent was more subtle than any beast in the field.
And we see that these things are brought in with stealth and they're brought in in a very subtle way. And that's exactly what's going on. And so, if you're a Christian parent you'd better think that these things are a big deal.
Because they're laying the ground work for your child to be indoctrinated into what we would rightly call an anti-Christ agenda. So, that's my piece with that. Yes, it is subtle. But yes, we need to make a big deal about it.
And the fact that it's subtle, the fact that I mean, it's you know, the English Standard Version says, now the serpent was more crafty.
Than.
Any of the other beasts of the field. Well, this is they're being very crafty in the way that they're presenting this to your child. They're being very crafty in the way that they are going about this.
And it's very subtle, but it's very I would say very damaging. It's very wicked. And so, that's my piece about that. So, alright, with that being said, we got the public service announcements out of the way.
Let me go ahead and play a little promo clip from Tim Hurd, just highlighting the other podcasts. I want to recommend them. Check them out. You always got to hear both sides of the story. So, check out to see what Andrew Rappaport has going on.
And we mentioned Conversations from the Porch. We mentioned Logical Belief Ministry. So, those are only three of the ones that we mentioned. I believe there's ten on the podcast. So, go ahead and check them out.
And then also, I want to give a little word from our sponsor, TrackPlanet, and check out what they've got. We'll be back.
In a minute.
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Alright, so we are back and so we got the public service announcements out of the way. Carlos had been wanting to get that off his chest for a while. It's come up multiple times in conversations with him on the phone.
So, Carlos, where are we going next? You wanted to read some emails, I believe, right? Yeah.
We have a lot of, some emails that I've been piling up to. Some really good emails from our listeners.
Okay, let me, before you do that, let me just go ahead and plug our email. If you guys would like to email us, you can reach us at semper .reframanda .radio at gmail .com. We always appreciate the emails.
Carlos does a really good job of getting back to people if I can't. Sometimes we read them on the air but we definitely appreciate feedback. Alright, Carlos.
Yeah, you know, and we never, that was another thing that we had carried early on in our show with the whole LGBT agenda and we wanted to do a concluding episode but really it's not something that you really conclude because there's just, this stuff is going to keep recurring and it's going to keep getting more and more blatant and stuff.
So, I mean, I want to just kind of summarize a little bit and give some encouragement to people who either are in the LGBT movement or know somebody who is. And so, just to sum it up, we've kind of went over this already a little bit but the religion of the LGBT agenda, which is Antichrist, is essentially existential humanism because they make you believe that you can fabricate your own reality according to what you see fit.
It doesn't matter what gender you were born with. It doesn't matter what sexual organs you have and therefore what desires you should have that should accord with that, with nature. It doesn't matter.
You can choose whatever you want and that's what, that's why I pointed out that movie was so wicked because a sparrow is not a stork. No matter how hard he wants to be, it's just not gonna happen. A sparrow will die if he tries to do what a stork does and vice versa.
It does not work because it goes against nature and that's exactly what Romans 1 teaches us. That when you are in this LGBT movement agenda and you think that gender is fluid or that your identity can be defined by whatever you think or feel you are, you are deceiving yourself.
And that means that you will incur God's wrath and judgment upon yourself if you do not repent. Now there is grace and there is repentance and there is forgiveness because by means of the gospel which is the power of God unto salvation.
And so, a word of encouragement to you all because 1 Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 6 -9 it says, Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor homosexuals nor sodomites nor thieves nor covetous nor drunkards nor revilers nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.
Here is what you need to listen to. Verse 11. And such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of God. That is our word of encouragement to you who are either in the LGBT or if you know somebody.
There is hope for you but it is only found in Christ and Christ alone.
So,.
That is a wrap for that for now.
Well, yeah, real quick. And also, we want to point out that that is not just, we are not just pointing the finger at you, the people who are LGBTQ people. As were some of you as applied to us because there are sins listed in that that I...
We are all in that list. Yeah, that I would have struggled with that I have been saved from. Joseph and Carlos as well. So, it is encouraging for us because Paul is basically... This can be applied to a person who is a Christian and it can be offered as hope for if you have family members just remember what God has done for you.
And so, there is definitely hope in Christ. So, yeah, hey, that was good stuff, man. So, were you going to read an email or what?
Yeah, let me go on to the emails now. Yeah, God is powerful, God regenerates and He will change and conform your desires to His will if... Of course, you have to... It is repentance and faith. It is Christ alone.
So, don't.
Lose hope. Hope is in Christ alone. Yeah, so now the emails. We have a few emails that I wanted to point out. We have one from Dan Ames, a recent one from Dan Ames. He actually... I think he has emailed us before and he...
I think Tim, you mentioned something about starting the Classical Conversations homeschooling and he was very encouraged to hear that and unfortunately my email app is not working so I can't pull it up but he said that he heard on a recent episode that you were talking about it and so that's another thing that we're going to have to get into eventually.
The homeschooling thing, give our two cents on it. We're also planning to provide some resources on our blog so that people can have some stuff that they can work with. Homeschooling is very important.
It's an extremely important thing because it is the parent's responsibility to educate their children. So, he was encouraged to hear us mention it and also we have to point out that some curriculums are better than others and I have found a lot of good stuff in Classical Conversations but unfortunately you have to be careful with even that one because a lot of times what these curriculums try to do is they try to cater to as many different types of Christian denominations and faiths as possible.
So, oftentimes they're not explicitly reformed and they don't really give you the fully reformed fleshed out worldview embedded into every subject that you cover. And so, that's a problem and another problem is that they unfortunately also have some kind of contract with Doug Wilson, who is a false teacher.
He's a heretic. I believe he's been tied into the Auburn Avenue theology and believing that you have to be baptized to be saved and things like that. So, just be careful. Be discerning. We're definitely going to touch more on that later.
As well.
So, I homeschool or my wife homeschools my kids. She was talking to one of the ladies at our church who does Classical Conversations and actually is basically leading that for a few people in the area.
Maybe off air or even on air. At some point. Talking about that, I'd be curious to have that conversation. At least nothing else to ask questions because it sounds like you've done a little bit more research in it.
But I think the thing that's important to remember is that regardless of what curriculum is set forth by a homeschooling program,.
We don't.
It's still our responsibility to teach. So, for example, the one that my daughter has been doing over the past couple of years, which we're switching from this year,.
Where.
It tries to teach an idea in regards to the Bible courses that are in it.
There.
Have been more than one occasion where I said, well, that's wrong. The answer you gave was right because it's what I taught you. And this is why that's wrong. And so I don't think it matters at all what program you do.
I don't think there's going to be the perfect program that aligns with your theology personally. Then, obviously, there's not going to be a perfect program. But I think it's our responsibility to teach and raise our kids to a school system.
We don't do that with a homeschooling program either. So I think that was a really good point.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. My church actually does classical conversations. So we have, you know, they meet once a week at our church. And it looks very good from what I've seen. By and large, they really it's probably the best that I've seen out of the ones that I've kind of looked at.
But even then, of course, there's caveats. You have to be careful. And actually, another one that we were planning to tie into with the classical conversations was actually called the Puritan Homeschool Curriculum, which I believe you can also get for free online.
It's actually free. And that one is explicitly reformed. It's based on the Westminster Standards. So there's always some stuff that you can fill in and find online thanks to the Internet. But, Tim, were you going to jump in here?
I didn't expect that you were going to call Doug Wilson a heretic or a false teacher. So I wanted to just recommend a book by the Trinity Foundation. And I was trying to look it up because Sean Garrity, who was a co-author to a book.
Do you know what the book is called?
Yeah, it's called Not Reformed at All.
Yeah, Not Reformed at All. And he co-authored it with the late John Robbins, who was the founder of the Trinity Foundation. I think does a pretty good job in that book explaining how Doug Wilson compromises the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
It's been some while since I've read the book, but hey, I mean, we'd love to get Sean Garrity on the show to talk about Clarkianism. And we think a lot of Sean Garrity. We've had.
Some.
Really good interactions with him. That being said, I want to recommend that book to people if they are curious and they want to find out a little bit more about why we would say that because Doug Wilson gets a pass by most Christians.
And I think even Apology Radio was promoting, they liked him from what I gathered. He's really, really under the radar with a lot of people. That's really all I had to add.
To that. Yeah, the Trinity Foundation has published articles in that book, and I think another book, really exposing some of the errors that Doug Wilson is promoting, heresies, in fact. Also, Brian Schwartley, he's also written stuff against him.
He's got some sermons against him too, pointing out his heresies. It's definitely out there for people to look at. I guess that was another public service announcement. They might just keep popping up throughout the show.
Just trying to get people caught up here and be wary of the times. The times are evil. The days are evil. I hate to break it to these post-millennialists. I don't understand post-millennialism. The days are evil and they're getting worse, so beware.
Another public service announcement.
So, Carlos, I'm going to create a bridge here. So, you're not a theonomist?
No.
Oh. Uh-oh.
Well. Well.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I don't know, because apparently we're the new theonomists on the block.
Somebody's been playing the part of the snake and saying just I don't know what it is, man, but before we jump right into that, I want to springboard from this, because we're talking about apologetics and some people I can understand how some people maybe get lost in our discussions, because when we started the podcast, we kind of just sort of, we hit the ground running and we didn't really get a chance to explain ourselves, and now we're starting to do that a lot more.
And so this episode will also be some of that as well, definitional stuff that we're talking about. And I wanted to read a very good email that I got from, actually it's the same person, it's Dan Ames, so how fitting.
The guy who was commending us for the classical conversation stuff, earlier he sent another email saying Hello, would you be so kind as to recommend the best available books written on Clarkian apologetics?
I am considering the purchase of Religion, Reason, and Revelation but wanted to get your recommendation first. Sincerely, Dan. So, and Dan, thank you very much for your emails, we are very encouraged by that, and I responded to Dan's email, and I'm just going to go ahead and read it, because this is going to set up sort of a springboard as to our discussion now.
I said, Hi Dan, great question. There is a sense in which all of Clark's work is apologetic, so you can't really go wrong with any of his publications. Religion, Reason, and Revelation is definitely a great place to start.
It's one of my favorite books in which Clark also tackles the problem of evil brilliantly. I would actually recommend Volume 4, though, which includes Religion, Reason, and Revelation and is more complete, or more comprehensive.
This volume also includes a very important key article, God and Logic, by Clark, that you should read first to grasp his approach. The best foundational primer on scripturalist apologetics is probably God's Hammer, which is a collection of essays that focuses on how we should view, use, defend, and argue from the Bible.
You can't go wrong with this one. This is the first book I read by Clark. I've re-read it like five times and always learn something new, even though that happens every time I re-read anything from Clark.
Another good place to start is Christian View of Men and Things. Some say this is Clark's magnum opus, where he presents a panoramic worldview of Christianity by applying it to every major branch of philosophy.
This is a quote. Commenting on the scripturalist apologetic methodology of Gordon Clark, Gilbert Weaver.
Wrote,.
An extended example of this type of apologetics is found in Clark's volume, A Christian View of Men and Things. In it, he takes up the topics of history, politics, ethics, science, religion, and epistemology.
And in each one, shows that the major opposing non-Christian systems fail to establish answers to the basic problems of the area of study, that they tend to skepticism or self-contradiction, and that the Christian worldview, based on divine revelation, provides plausible solutions in each case.
The net result is that the rivals of Christianity are undercut in each area of thought and are thus in no solid position from which to launch an attack upon the Christian faith. That was an article from the Trinity Foundation.
So I continue. So it kind of depends on where you want to start. For a good foundational primer and bibliology, which is a study of the Bible, basically, God's Hammer, Go With God's Hammer. For a comprehensive philosophical and theological understanding of apologetics, including the problem of evil, Go With Volume 4, which is, I think it's called Christian Philosophy from the Trinity Foundation.
For a big picture, broad-sweeping and apagogic or ad hominem presentation, Christian View of Women and Things is a good one. So the best source for all things Clarkian is the Trinity Foundation. They have all of Clark's, most if not all of Clark's published works and more.
You can also look at these recommended resources by Topic to Get Your Feet Wet. We're going to share these links as well on the show notes, so we'll put them up there. Their MP3 lectures on apologetics and logic are outstanding too.
They're worth listening to several times, which I have. I've listened to, I think, all of those lectures from the Trinity Foundation at least twice, and they are outstanding. They are very, very good lectures, even on economics, on theology, everything, so it's very good stuff.
I hope this helps. Let us know if you have any other questions when you dig in.
This is it, folks. This is what we've been, you know, encouraging people to look at, and actually, this reminds me of what we forgot to mention too, because in that episode with Dustin Seegers and Jason Mullett on The Conversation from the Porch, they talked a little bit apologetics, and so in it, I think The Porch has recommended a book by, I can't remember the author, I think it's Clifford Goertz, called Biblical Apologetics, and they kind of recommend, I guess they all kind of recommended a sort of soft presuppositional, you know, Vantillian approach of doing apologetics, like, just use the Bible, you know, just use the Bible, you know, that's all you really need, and kind of like, well, that's a thing though, because the Bible itself has a method, and this is why we are encouraging people to study Gordon Clark, because it is our responsibility to do apologetics according to God's Word, and if the Bible has something to say on it, then we need to follow it, and does it?
Absolutely. Absolutely it does. You know, just some verses right off the bat is in Proverbs, what's that verse in Proverbs, is it Proverbs 23? That says, you know, how to answer the fool and how to not answer.
The fool. It's Proverbs 26 verse 4 through, because I actually wrote an article on this. Right.
Proverbs 26. Here it is, yeah. Proverbs 26 verses 4 and 5. It says, do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.
This is, this is scripturalist presuppositional apologetics folks. It's not enough, you know, it's important for us to do detailed in-depth studies of apologetics, and I know it can be difficult because there's all these different methods and all these different ways of going about it, but nevertheless, we can give you a head start.
We would encourage you to study Gordon Clark. Gordon Clark has by far what we've seen the most consistent approach to doing apologetics biblically, and it's not enough to, you know, it's a sort of, it's kind of a cop-out, to be honest, when people say like, oh, well, just use the Bible, you know, just use the, well, okay, well, what does the Bible say?
What does it teach? What does it have to say on it? Because if it has something to say on it, it is systematic. It's going to be a method, and you should use that method consistently. And that method, part of that method is illustrated in these verses.
You're not supposed to answer a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him in his foolishness, because in the sense that you're not supposed to adopt his own principles and try to argue from an evidentialist approach.
That's what evidentialists do. They try to argue from their perspective to try to prove and kind of prove and go back to God, but that doesn't work because you have to always presuppose, you can't not presuppose God.
You have to start somewhere, and for the Christian the starting point is nothing else but the Bible and the Bible.
Alone. Yeah, let me jump in here. So, what we're advocating is that you can't, so, for one to just say, well, just use the Bible, I'm getting the impression that it's kind of like, well, you don't really have to study Islam, or you really don't have to study Mormonism, or you really don't have to study the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Black Hebrews Lites, like, just use the Bible.
That's the impression that I'm getting. I don't know if that was I'm not attributing that as the actual position that was stated, but the problem with that is that in order to answer the fool according to his folly, you have to actually know his position, and you have to be able to deduce from his position either contradictory propositions or propositions that they would view as that they would themselves reject.
And so, I actually I wrote an article that I encourage people to read, and it's called The Scripturalist Ad Hominem Reply, and what I advocate is what Clark identifies as an ad hominem response. It's Latin meaning to the man, a form of argument that accepts a proposition espoused by another for the purpose of deducing from it contradictory propositions and propositions or propositions that would be rejected by the other person.
And then he emphatically states ad hominem should be distinguished from.
The.
Informal fallacy of abusive ad hominem. And so, basically what I point out is that ad hominem is basically the abusive ad hominem is a fallacy of irrelevancy. So, you can attack another person's character and say, well, this person's wrong because they're just dumb, or this person's wrong because they're immoral, and you can't believe anything that they say.
That's a fallacy because the person being immoral has nothing to do with whether or not their argument is actually sound. And in the ad hominem reply that Clark is advocating, instead of attacking the person's character or attacking some other irrelevant feature, what we're actually doing is we're attacking the person's presuppositions.
And so, I'll read the passage again. It says, Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest he be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. So, answer not a fool according to his folly.
That is, you do not accept his false presuppositions as your own, lest you be like him. And we see this happen all the time. One of the areas that this happens the most in is with regards to science. So, the unbeliever has this view of science that they can prove things through using the scientific method, that they can prove things just using science in general.
And so, what we see is that a lot of Christians will then try to use science to prove the Bible. Well, what have you just done? You've accepted his folly as your own, and you're going to be just like him because you face the exact same problems.
One being that the scientific method commits the fallacy of asserting the consequent, which is if P then Q, Q therefore P. Another one is that the scientific method commits the fallacy of induction. I want to point out that not all inductive reasoning is fallacious, but when you try to assert a general principle or a universal claim from a limited set of particular instances, then that's a fallacy.
And the problem with science is that science can never actually complete the induction. You can do scientific experiments on geese. Well, you've not seen all the geese in the past. Your experience is very limited in the present, and you've not seen any geese in the future.
And so we've played this before, but let's go into the second part of this. Answer a fool according to his folly. That is, you do accept his false presuppositions for the sake of argument, and this is what Clark is advocating, so that you may deduce from them contradictory propositions or reduce them to absurdity, lest he be wise in his own eyes.
And in order to do that, you actually have to dig into what it is that they are presupposing. And in this article, I actually give three examples. I talk about empiricism, I talk about naturalism, and I talk about materialism.
I believe those are the three. And I show how they are either self contradictory or they reduce to absurdity. And I'm going to write some more articles on this because this applies in pretty much every area of apologetics.
If you want to use this approach and you should use this approach with Jehovah's Witnesses. So I'm going to accept that for the sake of argument, let's accept that your Bible, the New World Translation, is accurate and is true.
I'm going to deduce from that contradictory propositions to show that it's absurd.
By the way, I'm going to hopefully put out an article about this in the future and we are going to take up the issue of Jehovah's Witnesses in the future as well. But that is a pretty brief summation of what the ad hominem replies.
And here's the other thing. So you can actually use the ad hominem reply going back to the LGBTQ agenda. You can use the ad hominem reply for the sake of argument. Let's say that how they say that homosexuals are born that way and because they're born that way, it's therefore morally acceptable for them to act upon those behaviors.
Let's just accept that as true for the sake of argument. Well, if that's true then why can't pedophiles I mean, they're born that way, right? I'm accepting your propositions as true for the sake of argument and what's going to happen is they're going to take a step back and say, well, no, no, I mean, pedophiles are different because they are you know and then they're going to try to come up with some arbitrary arbitrary distinction between the pedophile and the homosexual.
And most of the time it's, well, the homosexual couple, they're two consenting adults. The pedophile, they're not. But then you can just go right back to, well, okay, so why is harming children morally wrong.
In your worldview?
And I'm going to once again stand in your worldview and I'm going to ask you to tell me exactly why hurting people is morally wrong. And then you can get into a great moral argument. I also have an article about morality.
There's more that I need to address on that. The article is long enough so I put it out. But anybody have any thoughts on any of that? Well,.
To be fair to the Porch guys I think it was Pastor Paul Kaiser that said they've advocated sort of like kind of like a fundamentalist biblicist approach to apologetics. But he did say that it will necessarily be presuppositional.
And our point is that you should study this. You need to take the time to study this in more depth because it will greatly benefit you. And the Bible requires it. These verses that we just read to you requires it.
In order to answer a fool according to his folly you need to be sufficiently equipped with other worldviews in general especially the ones that you encounter, that you've already encountered in order to be able to refute them effectively.
The great thing about scripturalism though, about the apologetics and the books that Clark wrote is that you're able to really do, you're kind of able to apply a very big you get a very big tool set when you're able to isolate the assumptions behind a worldview.
When you can isolate assumptions and identify them properly, you can then begin to argue against their worldview by showing them that they either contradict themselves, they contradict the Bible, they contradict, or they're absurd.
They're just absurd notions that they themselves would not even hold to. That is what an apagogic argument is. It's an ad hominem argument like Tim explained, so we encourage you all to check out Tim's article, the Scripturalist's Ad Hominem Reply.
We've got a couple of other articles on the Bible Thumping Wingman as well. We also wrote one on Knowledge, Faith, and the Marks of a True Clarkian, and that was kind of a bit of a controversy that arose between different schools of thought, Clarkian camps, and so we talk about epistemology as well.
In order to have knowledge, you have to have justified true belief. The way you justify your true belief is through the Bible. If you cannot justify it with the Bible, you do not have justified true belief.
That's a very important notion as well.
We've.
Begun to write about some of these things. Tim, you also mentioned the morality piece that you wrote. A lot of good stuff there, and I would also encourage you, if you've never read Clark before, or if you're kind of just getting started, getting familiar with the different views, I would encourage you to read Clark's article called God and Logic.
That is a very good place to start, I think, because it really shows you his method, his approach, and he really analyzes.
How.
Logic relates to God, the Bible, and man, and kind of showing you the necessity of holding to the Bible and why the Bible itself encompasses everything, including logic. There's no need to presuppose logic before it, because Christ is the logos.
Christ is the logic or the wisdom or the reason of God. It's brilliant stuff. We encourage you to take a look at that article. We'll post it on the show notes as well.
Hey everybody, this is Tim, and I am changing the channel on this episode. If you heard the original episode released on Wednesday night, really, it was early Tuesday morning, we had critiqued and called out a brother by the name of Tyler Vela, who is the host of the Freed Thinker podcast, and shortly after that, Tyler had contacted me, asked me to take it down, and we began to reconcile.
I'm very grateful to report that we have been fully and completely reconciled, and I'm very grateful for that because I'm so glad that we were able to deal with this quickly and come to terms quickly.
I also need to let everybody know that I wasn't completely innocent in this. I had unfortunately given Tyler a wrong impression about where we were at with each other, and I think that we were talking past each other.
He was on one page, and I was on a completely different page. So I accept responsibility for that, and I apologize to him for that. And I want Tyler to know that we appreciate him, that we value him, that we pray for his ministry,.
I think that he's got some good stuff out there, guys.
Look, God is good. He's been good in the midst of this, and the other person that I want to thank is my wife, my wife Amy. She was very encouraging to me, to give me advice, give me counsel,.
I'm very grateful for that, and I'm very grateful for her as well. And with that, we want to close out this episode. So I believe that all parties that were involved in this conflict were or are in the process of being reconciled.
I am reconciled with Tyler, and.
I hope to check you guys next time, and in the meantime, God bless.