July 17, 2018 Show with Dr. Stephen J. Wellum on “God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of Christ”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy... What is today?

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Today is Tuesday! It's been a long day and I forgot what day it was, but I know it's

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Tuesday, July 17th now, and I am so delighted to have for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

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Stephen J. Wellum, and I actually, although I already was aware of Dr.

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Wellum and his work and his ministry, I was so delighted to hear from a listener, a faithful listener in Cork, Ireland, Mary, who highly recommended that I interview

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Dr. Wellum because Mary is actually a student of Dr.

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Wellum's in Ireland. Dr. Wellum, first of all, it is my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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Well, it's great to be with you, Chris, and thank you for allowing me to come and talk today. Yeah, and let me give a little bit more background to our listeners.

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Dr. Wellum, who received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is a professor of Christian Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, or should

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I rephrase that, because I know that some people get upset if it's phrased that way, it's THE Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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He's also an editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, and today we are going to be discussing

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Dr. Wellum's book, God the Son Incarnate, the Doctrine of Christ, and Dr.

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Wellum, if you could tell us how a listener of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in Cork, Ireland, became familiar with you and became a student of yours.

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Well, sure, I'd be delighted to. Therefore, for a number of years, one of my colleagues here at the seminary,

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Dr. Michael Hagen... Yes, I've had Dr. Hagen on the program a number of times. Yeah, so he's all over the world, and particularly he has a love for Ireland because of his family roots,

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I think it's on his mother's side, and there were a number of five, six churches in the southern part of the

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Republic of Ireland, in the Cork area, in the province of Munster, Baptist churches that are faithfully proclaiming the gospel in a very, very spiritually dark land, and they said, we need some extra theological training and ministry, and so they started

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Munster Bible College, and I've had the privilege of teaching some of the theology courses, and Mary, who recommended me, is part of the churches there in the

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Cork area, and also a student in the classes, and so that's how I got to know her, and it's great to see what the

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Lord is doing in Ireland, pray for that country, but the churches there are doing a great job, and they're being faithful, and that's always good to see.

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Yes, in fact, I highly recommend, among everything else that Dr. Hagen, who you mentioned earlier, among everything else that he has written,

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I highly recommend all of it, but one in particular, since we're talking about Ireland, is his book on St.

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Patrick. Yes, that's right. And if you could now tell us something, tell our listeners something about the

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Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where you serve on the faculty. Well, yes,

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I'd be happy to. It's a great privilege to be here at Southern. I've been here since 1999, and they let me come here as a foreigner, because I originally grew up like Dr.

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Hagen in Canada, in the Toronto area, and then even though I did my studies at Trinity Divinity School in Chicago area, but I've been here since 1999.

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Southern is the flagship of the Southern Baptist Convention. There's six institutions in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, Southern being the first, and it went through a big change in the 1990s, 80s, 90s, with the conservative resurgence and recovering the truth of Scripture and the foundational issues of the gospel, and so it's been a privilege to be here since 99, teaching theology and trying to be faithful and raising up a new generation to proclaim the glories of the gospel and Christ in our local churches.

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Amen. By the way, I'm going to give our listeners our email address if they have questions.

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The email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

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If you live outside the USA, please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, and I can see possibly that being the case, even though our subject is of a theological nature.

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If you perhaps are in a religion or church that denies that Jesus Christ is

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God incarnate, or you have some other, you're from a church that has some radically different position, or any different position, from what we are discussing today,

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I can understand that you might want to remain anonymous, but if it's not personal and private, though, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

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What we usually do, Dr. Wellum, when we have a first -time guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, is we have them give a summary of their personal testimony of salvation, what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, they were raised in, and what were the providential circumstances our sovereign

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Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to him, and how specifically they came to embrace

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Jesus Christ as their Lord, God, Savior, and King, and came to trust solely upon his finished work on Calvary as their only hope of salvation.

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Yeah, they weren't happy to do so. I had the privilege of being raised in a

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Christian home, and that's not true for everyone, but in my case it was.

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As I mentioned, I was raised in Canada, born there in the, we'll just say roughly the

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Toronto area, technically it's Burlington, Ontario, but out in the larger Toronto area.

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And I, by the time I was the fourth of four boys, and then we had a little girl that we adopted after myself, and my parents were converted in the 1950s or so, influence of their background, but also

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Billy Graham and others like that, involved in evangelical churches, and then in the late 60s, early 70s, really wanted to be instructed more in the truths of God's Word, and they went and started a church with a man named

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Bill Payne, or William Payne, from England. Yes, I had the privilege, it's funny that you mentioned

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William Payne's name, I'm sorry to interrupt you here. Yeah, no problem. But William Payne, what a powerful preacher he was, and I know that he is with the

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Lord for eternity now. As soon as you mentioned William Payne, I happened to glance upon an endorsement for your book, where it was written by my friend

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Fred G. Zaspel, who I've known, I've known him since the late 1980s, and I used to attend a conference that no longer is taking place, but it took place for a number of years.

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I used to attend this conference called the Bunyan Conference, named after John Bunyan, that Fred Zaspel and John Reisinger would orchestrate, and William Payne was at least one year one of the speakers on the roster, and he totally blew me away when he spoke.

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Well, he was my, I had the privilege of having him as my home pastor, so you know,

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I was about six years old or so when Trinity Baptist in Burlington, Ontario started, and you know,

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I heard him faithfully expound Scripture, my parents taught me God's Word, but it was around 16 that really

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I came to know the Lord myself. You can't, you're not a Christian because you're raised in a

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Christian home, or you sit under the preaching of God's Word, you have to own it yourself, and through a variety of circumstances with my brother and Pastor Payne, and a man named

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Bernie Crooks, Presbyterian minister who was up in the

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Northland in Ontario cottage country hearing him when we were away on vacation, the

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Lord brought me to himself and opened my eyes to see my sin before him and the need for the

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Redeemer, the Lord Jesus, and calling out to him, and I was converted at 16, and then from there was baptized and wanted, sensed a real call to Christian ministry, whatever that would look like, whether pastoral or teaching, and Bill Payne was helpful in giving advice and counsel, and so I went from there to eventually university or college in Upper State, New York, at Roberts Wesleyan College, and then

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Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and then into the ministry and pastoring and teaching and so on.

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Great. Well, I want to read three endorsements for your book because they're so powerful, and I've had all three of these individuals on my radio program, and not only does

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Fred Zaspel go back many years with me and my own Christian life, but also Michael Horton, who actually preached at the church where I was a member back in 1995, and I actually couldn't be there because it was the same night that my mother's funeral was being conducted.

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Mike Horton, I've known him so long, believe it or not, he was a single man when I first knew him, and he used to ask me to help him find a girlfriend, but I've interviewed him many times, and he is also a dear brother, and well, first I'm gonna start with Fred Zaspel's endorsement, and Fred Zaspel writes of your book, which is also the theme today,

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God the Son Incarnate, the Doctrine of Christ. Fred says,

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Willem's treatment of this glorious subject is comprehensive in scope and is marked by precision, clarity, biblical fidelity, and a close acquaintance with the centuries of discussions surrounding it.

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It is the most helpful book on Christology I've read, and it is a pleasure to commend it to you.

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That's Fred Zaspel, pastor at Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia, Pennsylvania, and author of The Theology of B .B.

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Warfield, A Systematic Summary and Warfield on the Christian Life, Living in the

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Light of the Gospel, and I have interviewed Fred on his book on B .B.

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Warfield, his biography. Michael Horton, who we just mentioned earlier, says exploring our

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Lord's person and work from a variety of angles, Willem engages a wide range of issues and conversation partners, consolidating the gains of evangelical

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Christological reflection. This volume makes gains of its own, particularly by wrestling clearly and carefully with contemporary trends in biblical studies, as well as philosophical, systematic, and historical theology.

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That's Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary, California, and host of the

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White Horse in Radio program. And David Wells, who I've had on the program several times, he says, this is a clear, comprehensive, and compelling study.

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It shows Christology to be like a fabric made up of many threads, all tightly woven together, a doctrine with presuppositions, connections, and consequences for the age in which we live.

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This doctrine is here seen in its wholeness, and that is what makes this study so theologically wholesome.

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It is fresh and excellent. David F. Wells, Distinguished Senior Research Professor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and author of The Courage to be

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Protestant, Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergence in the Postmodern World.

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Well, those are very powerful commendations for this book, and if you could, Dr. Willem, as you know, the topic of God the

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Son Incarnate, the doctrine of Christ, this topic has been written about numerous times, not only by great heroes of the faith of the past, whether they be ancient or more recent, such as the 16th, 17th, and 18th, and 19th centuries, but also from, it has been addressed by contemporary authors, and I've had some of those authors on this program.

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What did you think was needed in this, in writing, on this particular subject, that drove you to say,

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I need to write this volume, because although there may be many excellent things available, there's just something that I want to contribute myself.

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Yeah, that's a great question, and obviously we stand on the shoulders of those who've gone before us, so in some sense we don't.

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On this particular doctrine, because of its, you know, careful exposition through the ages, we're not really saying anything brand -new in the sense of, oh, here's a new insight.

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Yet, for every age, every day, there needs to be an articulation and a re -articulation of the foundational truths of the faith or the

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Church today, and that's really the job of systematic theology, to make sure that we are speaking in the context of some of the challenges, the problems, the trends, and so on, that are going today, and to lay out a faithful exposition.

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And so a part of the series that the book is part of, is Crossway's series on the foundations of evangelical theology, is to lay out each of the doctrinal areas in such a way that it's saying, here's what evangelicals should be affirming today, and doing so in light of things that are going on, and, you know, historical reflection where we are in the 21st century.

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So, one thing that, you know, it's nothing new here, yet, you know, when

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I wrote the work, I was very deeply burdened to make sure that, and this shows up in part one of the book, that we approach doctrine and theology, and particularly this subject of the person of Christ and Christology, according to the

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Scriptures, and we do it faithfully, and we do it with a proper theological method, which is not always done, and so throughout history of the

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Church, there's been a uniform witness all the way to the

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Enlightenment times, so say to the 1600s of, you know, in the early church, the

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Middle Ages, the Reformation, the post -Reformation, who is the Lord Jesus Christ?

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Well, he's God the Son Incarnate. Yet, in light of the challenges of the

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Enlightenment, and critical theories, and so on, we need to be able to withstand those challenges, and we need to do so firmly on the basis of a

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Christian worldview, a Christian theology, a proper Christian methodology, and so that, in some sense, was a little new, because it had to address the challenges of the day, and so that was part of the part one, so how do we move from biblical text to proper theology in light of the challenges of the day, to give a full biblical defense and worldview defense, and then thereafter was in one place to discuss what the

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Church has actually said. Unfortunately, as we live in the 21st century, there's a lot of historical amnesia, right?

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So we think that part of our age is to neglect the past, and so there were current trends going on in evangelical thought that were departures from what

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I'm going to call classic, historic Christology, and those had to be addressed.

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They had to be dealt with. I think many, many people in the evangelical Church thought, well, there's really no difference of opinion on who

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Jesus is with among evangelicals and Bible believers, but that's just not the case.

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So I had to, as we worked through the work, at the end of it, take on some of those trends that were going on in the evangelical world.

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So all of that brings the book up -to -date, shows biblical, historical, and contemporary issues that need to be addressed as we faithfully articulate who

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Jesus is and proclaim the gospel today. Now I'm sure you agree that this problem that you have just in detail described of churches and pastors and denominations and Christian individuals developing these unbiblical and even heretical understandings of Christ is a product of the very tragic lack of genuine exegesis of the scriptures and genuine study, because you will have in many churches across the

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American landscape, and I'm sure globally, where they just love to lift up the name of Jesus and they love singing to him and about him, but they really don't, for the most part, possibly not ever, dig deep and plumb to the depths of the unsearchable riches of the

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Word of God to really exegete and bring to the surface, to bring to the light of day, who

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Jesus Christ was, is, and ever will be. Because there seems to be a championing of shallowness in regard to who

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Christ is, as much as people may love to talk about him and sing about him and sing to him.

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Well, that's exactly right, and it's not an engagement with scripture, it's not a proper exposition and exegesis of the text, and alongside that is also the adoption of ideas and assumptions, or what we sometimes even say presuppositions and so on, that are foreign to the scriptures, so that even if they do some exegesis, they are already not understanding what scripture is saying as a whole, they're not understanding those texts in context, they're not then understanding how the church has understood these passages, so it's a combination of things.

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It's not doing engaged exegesis, it's the wrong interpretive methods, as well, that are being brought to bear, it's adopting false ideas that are alien to the

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Christian theology and Christian worldview, so it becomes a complicated affair. But at the bottom, the bottom line would be, they're not taking scripture seriously, and they're not following scripture's own presentation of who the

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Son of God is, from old to new, a whole Bible, and realizing that he is the

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Son from eternity who has become incarnate, and so there's a whole host of things that are going on, especially in our day that it's so easy to pick up false ideas from the society around us.

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Well, I think it would be wise for you to begin in as much of a summary fashion as you can, letting our listeners know what is the truly biblical description of Jesus Christ, God the

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Son incarnate, and if you could give us the the primary things that all

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Christians should and must believe in regard to this very important doctrine. And by the way, it's interesting that you have as a subtitle,

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The Doctrine of Christ. It's a very bold subtitle in a day and age when doctrine is dismissed as being nothing but divisive trivia that really just prevents the enthusiasm and the ecumenism of those who claim to love

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Christ, and they look down upon doctrine as if you can actually say anything that you believe about what the

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Bible teaches without bringing up doctrine. But it is an interesting phrase, The Doctrine of Christ.

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Before we go into your specific description and definition of God the

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Son incarnate, if you could tell us why you chose to use that phrase, The Doctrine of Christ. Well, because doctrine is that which summarizes and states as a whole the biblical teaching, and doctrine is very close to the older understanding of dogma.

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This is what we ought to believe. This is what God's Word teaches. This is what the whole counsel of God teaches from Genesis to Revelation.

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And to not maintain these doctrinal truths, these theological truths, these dogmas, especially in this case, is a life -and -death issue.

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So that the doctrine is, we're not saying these are just nice wishes and thoughts. I mean, this is dogmatic.

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This is theology. This is truth. This is objective truth that Scripture gives to us, that God has made known to us, and this needs to be embraced, believed, proclaimed, loved, and taught, and all of that gets bound up with the

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Doctrine of Christ. This is what the whole Bible teaches regarding who the Lord Jesus is.

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And we have to say with the area you commented about some who see doctrine as divisive, and this type of thing, the truth of the matter is that they just impose their own doctrine.

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These individuals who will say, well, you know, you have doctrine and we don't, and we just love

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Jesus, well, you just have to push further and realize that they have a whole doctrine, it's just not the correct doctrine.

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And they are just, in fact, they are the ones who say, we must fit into their mold, and you see this in theology and you see this in all areas of life, especially in morality and these kind of things, and so we cannot be pushed by that.

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We have to say, wait a second here, you need to articulate accurately who you think

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Jesus is. There's many Jesus's running around, but there's only one Jesus of the Bible, and that is what doctrine seeks to say.

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This is the Jesus that is presented to us in the whole of Scripture, and that's what the

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Doctrine of Christ is getting at, right? So you have to always keep that in mind. Everyone has a doctrine, everyone has a theology, they just don't always tell you what it is, and that's what we have to get people to articulate well.

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Now, when we come to our understanding, then, of who the Jesus of the Bible is, I try to capture that in many ways with the title of the book.

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Often, when we speak of the Lord Jesus, we just say God Incarnate, but that's a little misleading if you're not careful, because the word

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God can speak of God in His entirety, God as entire being, and then if we are saying that, of course, the

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Lord Jesus isn't just the entirety of God Incarnate, we're specifically saying that it's

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God the Son, and so God the Son is saying very clearly that the Lord Jesus is the

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Son of God from all eternity. He is the second person of the

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Godhead. This is now tying us to the Doctrine of the Trinity, so that there is a Father, there is a

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Son, there is a Holy Spirit, all three persons share the same divine nature, the same essence, a number of ways of saying that.

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There's one true and living God that subsists in three persons, and it's the Son of God from all eternity, the

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Son who has always been there in relation to the Father and the Spirit, who is fully

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God, just as the Father is fully God and the Spirit is fully God, the Son is fully God, the

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Son at a point in time adds to Himself human nature, Philippians 2 or John 1, 14, the

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Word, the Son became flesh, so that the Lord Jesus Christ is the

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Son who is fully God, He is the one who shares the divine nature with the Father and the

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Spirit, and He adds to Himself a second nature, a human nature, so that He is fully human.

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So He is the Son from eternity, the Divine Son, who remains a Divine Son and always is the

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Divine Son, who then becomes the one who is incarnate, the one who is the man

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Christ Jesus. And so, in the language of the Church, Chalcedon or Chalcedon, the famous Council in 451, often this is summarized, who is the

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Lord Jesus Christ? Well, He's the Son, the Divine Son, one person who exists in two natures.

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He's fully God, fully man, now and forevermore. And so that gives you some sense of the title picking up the summary of the statement, this is the

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Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son from eternity, who has become human. Amen. And we're gonna go to our first break right now.

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If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Dr. Stephen J. Willem, On God, the

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Son Incarnate, the Doctrine of Christ, please send us an email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

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USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away, God willing, we'll be right back with Dr.

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32:03

Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with a little less than 90 minutes to go, is

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Dr. Stephen J. Wellam, and we are discussing his book, God the Son Incarnate, the

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Doctrine of Christ. If you have a question that you'd like to ask, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

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chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and we already do have a listener question that I was going to wait a little bit before we took listener questions, but this one

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I think helps sets the stage further for this very important topic.

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We have Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, and Susan says, as much as we can say that the

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Bible has very vital and necessary teachings about who

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Jesus Christ is, must we not be very careful in going beyond what is written and thinking that we can possibly grasp in perfection things like the hypostatic union and other things that are beyond our comprehension?

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Yeah, it's a great question, and obviously we have to, as we think through all the

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Scripture says, we don't want to say anything that is adding to Scripture or contrary to Scripture.

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What I would say, though, is that that's not what's taking place when we think about things such as when we move into theology, the hypostatic union, and wrestle with these areas, really comes back to the question of what theology is and how theology is to be done.

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Theology best goes back, ancient in the history of the Church, is faith -seeking understanding, and by faith

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I mean that which is tied to what Scripture says and what Scripture gives. It's not a blind faith, it's a faith in God's Word and what he has revealed of himself.

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But we also, as we receive God's revelation and we read it and we then try to understand, in this case, who is the

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Lord Jesus? How do we make sense of all the biblical data about him that leads us to then try to understand?

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And in fact, God wants us to understand. He's given us his Word so that we will know him and we will love him and serve him and honor him.

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And as we read his Word, we then see who the Lord Jesus is.

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As we work right across the Bible, we see that the Lord Jesus is the Son from eternity.

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I think the best place for that is, say, in John 1. In the beginning is this

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Word who's with God, face -to -face with the Father who is also

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God himself. And so we read of that and we realize then that he has become flesh, and we then think through the biblical data regarding the

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Father, the Son, the Spirit, and we then begin to say, this is how we are to understand how that material is to be put together to be faithful to the

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Scripture itself. Because some will put the data together in such a way that begins to deny the scriptural teaching is what we call heresy.

35:22

So some will say, well, he can't be the Son from eternity, he must be a created being, which would be, say, a

35:29

Jehovah's Witness or ancient Aryans, and we say, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what the Scripture says, that's unfaithful to it.

35:35

So as we then try to put the pieces of Scripture together according to the way Scripture teaches these things, inevitably we then say, we start wrestling and giving terminology to hypostatic union, or what does it mean for him to be fully

35:52

God and fully man? What do we do with passages that speak of him,

35:58

John 8, 58, where Jesus will address himself as, before Abraham was, I am, and he takes the very name of God to himself from Exodus 3, which has to mean that he's claiming to be the

36:11

Lord. He's the God of the Old Testament, he's the one who is the Lord, the Son, who is God equal with the

36:16

Father. And yet, at the same time, he will say, only my Father knows the end, or I don't know certain things, and we then say, well, how do we put those two together?

36:28

We have to put them together, we don't eliminate any of the data. So what theology is doing is trying to wrestle with all of the data of Scripture, it's true to the

36:38

Bible, yet it's using, sometimes, terminology to then account for, make sense of, what

36:46

Scripture is teaching, so that we preserve the full scriptural teaching against denials of what it actually says.

36:55

So, yes, we have to be too careful that you don't go so far, we stay with what Scripture says, but Scripture itself is driving us to think through these matters very carefully.

37:06

When Jesus says in John 5 that, you know, I can do nothing on my own, only what

37:13

I see the Father doing, and then says, whatever the Father does I do, we have to think about that, and we have to meditate on that.

37:19

What does that mean for the Son of God to do everything that the Father does, which means create universes and bring judgments and sustains all things, which is an act of deity, yet at the same time he says,

37:32

I can do nothing on my own. Well, we've got to put both of those together if we are going to take

37:37

God's words seriously, and that leads us, then, to think theologically about all that God has said, and that's where the

37:46

Church, then, thinks about hypostatic union and the relationship of the two natures of Christ, and so on and so on and so on, and it's not adding to Scripture, it's not going beyond Scripture, it could, but we have to be, then, instead saying what we're doing here is being faithful to all that Scripture teaches.

38:06

Now, just before we leave the concept of hypostatic union, does this not especially focus upon the fact that Christ is fully

38:19

God and fully man, and yet there is no mixture of the two? Yes, I mean, hypostatic union, the very term itself, is from the

38:31

Greek, which is picking up what we would say today, person, right? So that there's a long history of from the

38:40

Greek to the, you know, Latin to English and so on, but when we speak about the hypostatic union, we're talking very specifically about what

38:48

John 114 teaches. John 114 makes it very clear that the

38:55

Word became flesh. It doesn't say that the divine nature became flesh, it speaks of the

39:05

Word, which is identified in John's Gospel as the divine Son, the person of the

39:11

Son. Now, the language of person, we've now, you know, sort of now making sense of this data, that there's a

39:17

Word in relationship to the Father, the Son in relationship to the Father, what are they called?

39:22

Well, they are persons who share the same nature, and it's the person who became flesh.

39:30

So it's the person of the Son who added to himself a human nature so that there's two natures, yet the deity, the divine

39:39

Son, who shares with the Father and Spirit, the divine nature, it doesn't lose that deity, it's not blended with his human nature, is that he adds to himself a human nature, so there's now two, and the hypostatic union then reflects, how is it that the person of the

39:56

Son has two natures? How are those natures then related? And all of them, the implications of that, as in the person of Christ, we preserve what is foundational to Scripture, the creator -creature distinction, the difference between God and humans, a divine nature and a human nature, all of that is being wrestled with when we talk about the hypostatic union.

40:17

Well, I think that it would be very wise of us now to discuss, so we can basically warn our listeners, where not to wander in regard to current known

40:34

Christian evangelists, pastors, writers, and so on, but if you could let our listeners know something about contemporary

40:46

Christology and the two major trends in contemporary Christology.

40:52

Yeah, well, I mean, there's a number of trends that we have to think about in terms of outside of the larger evangelical world, and then obviously the trends that go on within the

41:06

Christian Church and the evangelical world. All of these trends need to be set over against the historic position of the

41:15

Church. So, not in every doctrine, but there's a number of doctrines. The doctrine of the

41:20

Trinity, and particularly the person of Christ is what we're looking at here, the doctrine of Christ.

41:26

There has been, from the very beginning, agreement. The Scriptures are teaching this.

41:34

They're teaching that the Lord Jesus is God the Son incarnate, that He is God the

41:39

Son, fully God, fully man, one person, two natures, and that then got put into creeds and confessions that were consistent throughout the history of the

41:51

Church, all the way until, say, the 1600s or late 1500s, right?

41:57

So that's the trend that's gone, and that teaching has been put together in a very specific way, trying to account for all the scriptural data and do justice to the biblical data and so on, and that's why we call that a classical

42:11

Christology, or historic Christian view of who the Lord Jesus is, and there's been a whole history of that that's gone all the way, you know, to our recent days.

42:23

Now, outside of the Church, where in the Western world especially, where you have the influence of Christianity on Western culture in Europe and so on, people began to depart from these things, and there's trends that basically reduce the

42:40

Jesus of the Bible, they deny His deity, they deny the Trinity, they deny the uniqueness of the

42:46

Lord Jesus as fully God, fully man, and they then recreate a Jesus in terms of the search for historical

42:53

Jesus and trends for Jesus. You know, a contemporary figure today, like a Bart Ehrman and others like that, which would deny anything of what the

43:01

Bible is saying, and they reconstruct the Bible, that's a whole trend that you'll pick up in the universities, you'll read in magazines, you know, a whole liberal

43:12

Christianity that moves in that direction, we need to oppose that because they're not taking seriously the

43:18

Jesus of the Bible. Yes, in fact, Bart Ehrman specifically, I think one of the things that makes him more dangerous is that he is an agnostic who believes that Jesus actually historically existed, so sometimes when you're listening to him, you might not be aware that he is not a

43:35

Christian, he's not a believer that Jesus is God. He used to be! Well, I don't know, obviously, he obviously never truly believed it, because as a

43:46

Reformed Christian, I don't believe that a genuine believer can become an apostate like Bart Ehrman, but he professed to believe, was an evangelical, and in fact was considered a rising star by some amongst evangelicalism, but he can be very dangerous because you're listening to him speak about the historic

44:06

Jesus, and you might not even be aware that you're listening to an enemy of Christ, an agnostic.

44:13

Well, that's right, and he's just part of a whole stream that has taken place now for, you know, 300 -400 years that's been growing, of really those who stand outside of belief in the

44:26

Bible. They try to take the Bible and reconstruct its history, they don't take seriously what the

44:32

Bible actually is teaching, they don't receive it as God's Word, and they're doing then sort of a historical analysis, but all of that I try to show in the book very briefly is already dependent on a non -Christian worldview and assumptions, and it has to be dealt with at the sort of what we call apologetic level, defense of the faith, where we're really dealing with a different theology, a different worldview.

44:54

The Jesus that they are presenting is just another historic Jesus, that after they get done their work, he looks a lot like them.

45:02

I mean, that's the problem, is that it really fits in our pluralistic age,

45:08

Jesus is just one religious figure among many. Well, that's clearly not the Jesus of the Bible, that's one huge trend that you'll see in the universities, you'll see in the, you know, many, many liberal seminaries, the mainline churches are moving this direction, and so on.

45:24

That's not historic Christianity, and that has to be opposed as an entirely different worldview, theology, that has to be rejected, hook, line, and sinker type of thing.

45:36

And then within the Evangelical Church, within historic Christianity, we'll stick within Evangelicalism broadly, we won't get into Roman Catholicism, that has, you know, they've affirmed these historic truths, too, in this area, as well as Eastern Orthodoxy, but within the

45:53

Evangelical, Protestant, Evangelical, and even aspects of Reformed, and so on, there has been a consistent embrace of the historic doctrines, we see that in terms of the

46:06

Council of Chalcedon, Jesus is fully God, fully man, one person, two natures, but what happens is, is that there's a redefining of terms, there's a redefining of what a person is, or maybe what a divine nature is, and it takes different angles, but what happens is, is when it all comes out in the end, you don't have the position that the

46:32

Church has affirmed, and I think, rightly, the Church has affirmed that which is true to Scripture. So you have some kind of scriptural distortion, which then becomes dangerous, and if you get your

46:44

Christology wrong, and then his person and work wrong, and the doctrine of God wrong, your whole gospel will get wrong as well.

46:53

And so we're seeing some of these trends within the Evangelical world there, not nearly as bad as outside of the

47:00

Evangelical world, but there is a distortion of the historic position of the Church that I would argue is true to the

47:07

Bible itself. Now you mentioned pluralism, if perhaps you could just be a little more descriptive in regard to pluralism, because of the fact that you do have some people who claim that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, that his death on Calvary is what purchased sinners and paid in full the penalty of their sin, and they were redeemed by him and atoned by him, but you don't have to know that.

47:47

For instance, unfortunately, in fact, I was just watching again with a friend over lunch, a pastor friend, the notorious video clip of Billy Graham and Robert Shuler having a conversation where Billy Graham was tragically describing in his view that people are coming to God from the

48:15

Muslims and the Hindus and the Buddhists and the atheists, and yet they are not leaving those ideologies and religions, but they are coming to Christ anyway because they are really worshiping

48:29

Christ without knowing it. Yes, yes, yeah, we have to carefully, carefully think of, you know, these positions and also the term pluralism and so on.

48:40

So usually how it's stated, and there's always, you know, various what we call nuances to things or, you know, qualifications of things, but pluralism as a whole would be a term, whenever you add that ism to the word plural or plurality type of thing, is really, it's a worldview, it's a mindset, it's a whole viewpoint that says all views, the plurality of views have something to contribute and all of them have some kind of grasp on the truth.

49:14

No one of them is better than the other or more true than the other and so on. Now, you have to say very quickly, that's more of our kind of what we call post -modern, post -Christian, very secular mindset that's everywhere we see.

49:27

You can't say Jesus alone is Lord and Savior and so on. He's one among many, but of course the pluralism tends to try to be tolerant, but then they turn around and just say, you're wrong and we're right.

49:39

And so, you know, you have all of that, but pluralism is that view which says Jesus is just one among many, one among all the options out there and there's no one view.

49:50

An individual, there's many individuals that represent this today, but you know, like a John Hick and Paul Knitter in the past, these are famous pluralists and you'll find many of them today as well.

50:03

Now, what you are describing of those who will say, no, no, no, the Lord Jesus is

50:09

God the Son Incarnate. He has done a work that is the only basis for salvation, the only ground for our salvation, yet one might not in this life.

50:22

Correct. Obviously when we die, we'll be confronted with him, we'll know him, but in this life, particularly tied to those who've never heard the gospel, those who have never heard of his name and never presented with the gospel, they can still benefit from his person and work without ever knowing it, and they'll come to know that later on, you know, after death, in a post -mortem experience or something like that.

50:50

These are called, by a variety of terms, usually they're called inclusivists. That's right, yes.

50:56

Yeah, inclusivists and sometimes people call them accessibilists, and what they're doing is they're holding to historic

51:05

Christianity in terms of the person of Christ, even his work, but even then we have to qualify here, is if you press further, often there's even a distortion or a misunderstanding of Christology in these views.

51:21

Not all of them, but many of them, and also when it comes especially to the work of Christ, there may be an exception.

51:28

There are a few, what we call, reformed inclusivists. Terry Thiessen and others have written on this, and so they're the exception, but most inclusivists are very

51:40

Arminian in direction, very much people who deny penal substitution, hold to a different view of the cross, so even then there's a watering down of many, many, many doctrinal implications regarding Christ's work, and they will then say, people can come to saving faith apart from faith in Christ because they've never heard of him, and they usually then define saving faith in some kind of generic or very general sense.

52:11

So they may have a call out to God as they look at the creation and say, oh God save me, and they then come to realize that Jesus has the one that saved them.

52:21

The problem with this view is that saving faith in Scripture is always, always, always tied to God's promises, and God's special revelation, and the covenantal promises of Scripture, and now with the coming of Christ, it's tied to the new covenant promises.

52:38

The Bible does not know of people having saving faith apart from receiving the promises of God that he's specially given through the covenants now centered in the coming of Christ.

52:49

And then there's a whole host of other problems with these views that have distorted, usually views of divine love, and divine holiness, and divine justice, but this is a view that unfortunately is found in many, many evangelical churches.

53:04

So they'll say, we believe in a Jesus who's fully God, fully man, and his work is the foundation of salvation, but then they distort how we come by grace through faith to receive the benefits of Christ's work, and it's a very, very dangerous position that has to be opposed.

53:24

Amen. And we are going to be going to our elongated midway break. This is a longer -than -normal break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

53:33

FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break than normal during the midway section of our show because they need to air their own public service announcements and other things.

53:45

So please be patient as we take this longer -than -normal break, and take this opportunity to write questions for Dr.

53:53

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Now we just have a couple of announcements to make before we return to our guest

01:03:22

Stephen Jay Wellam on our theme, God the Son Incarnate, the Doctrine of Christ.

01:03:28

First of all, coming up very shortly, the Fellowship Conference New England is being held August 2nd through the 4th at the

01:03:35

Deering Center Community Church in Portland, Maine. And the speakers at this conference include

01:03:42

Pastor Tim Conway, Pastor Mac Tomlinson, Pastor Jesse Barrington, and Pastor Nate Pikowitz.

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Please go to fellowshipconferencenewengland .com fellowshipconferencenewengland .com

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to register and let them know that you heard about that conference from Chris Arnsen on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio.

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Then coming up in November the 9th through the 10th, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their annual

01:04:22

Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

01:04:28

The theme this year is the Glory of the Cross. The speakers include David Garner, Ray Ortland, Richard Phillips, and Timothy Gibson and Carlton Wynn.

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That's November 9th and the 10th at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

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If you'd like to register, go to alliancenet .org alliancenet .org

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Then coming up in January, my favorite conference that I look forward to like a little kid waiting for Christmas, we have the

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G3 Conference, which stands for Gospel, Grace, and Glory G3 Conference.

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And this is going to be held once again at the Georgia International Convention Center in College Park, Georgia, which is a suburb of Atlanta.

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It will be held Thursday, January 17th, through Saturday, January 19th. And by the way, if you know any bilingual or Spanish -speaking brothers and sisters in Christ, they are having an exclusively

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Spanish -speaking edition on Wednesday, January 16th, so make sure you let them know about this.

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This is a remarkable conference that has one of the longest rosters, if not the longest rosters, of speakers

01:06:17

I've ever encountered at any conference. The speakers include such well -known and beloved figures as Paul Washer and also

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Phil Johnson of the Grace to You ministry. He's the executive director of John MacArthur's Grace to You ministry.

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We have Conrad Mbewe, who I think is the most powerful preacher on the planet

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Earth, pastor of Kabwatha Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa, and Chancellor of African Christian University.

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Vodi Balcom, who is also on the faculty at African Christian University, a name

01:06:57

I'm sure that many of our listeners recognize. We have

01:07:02

Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, and the list goes on and on and on.

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01:09:44

Dr. Steven J. Wellum, and we are discussing his book, God the Son Incarnate the

01:09:50

Doctrine of Christ. Send your questions to chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:09:57

We mentioned Ireland earlier. We actually have two listeners from Ireland waiting to have their questions asked and answered by you

01:10:06

Dr. Wellum. We have Joy in Curribinny, Ireland. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

01:10:12

Knowing my track record, I'm probably not pronouncing it correctly. But Curribinny, Ireland. Joy asks, can you ask

01:10:20

Dr. Wellum to explain the limitations that Christ accepted as he took on human form?

01:10:27

Despite his humanity, he still held the universe in his hands.

01:10:33

How should we understand this apparent perplexity? Well that, yeah,

01:10:40

I know, I think I know who this Joy is who's asking from Ireland, and that question really is at the heart of all of our worship and adoration and theological reflection on the

01:10:56

Jesus of the Bible, because we have to put a number of truths side -by -side and not dilute them in the least.

01:11:06

And the first truth is that from Old to New, in particular in the

01:11:11

New Testament, right, the Lord Jesus is presented as the Eternal Son, who's God the Son, who is

01:11:17

God equal to Father and Spirit, and by that meaning that there's, he has all, he shares all the divine attributes, all the divine perfections, all power, all knowledge, and so on.

01:11:31

Yet he also, at a point in time, John 114, the

01:11:36

Word became flesh, and he added to himself a human nature. Now what do we mean by human nature?

01:11:42

Well, he added what we have, a body and a soul, and he then is finite in that human nature.

01:11:51

He is the one who doesn't know everything in that human nature. You think of Luke 2, 52, he not only was that human nature was conceived in the

01:12:04

Virgin Mary, a virgin conception, but then the Son of God, in and through that human nature, grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man.

01:12:15

And so you have two things together, two truths together, that must be kept together, and also must both be affirmed, that he is fully

01:12:25

God and he is fully man. And being fully man, the creature is not the creator, in the sense that the human nature doesn't suddenly become a divine nature.

01:12:37

The human nature remains finite, localized, and spatially tied to this world, and so on and so on.

01:12:45

And then we then have to say, well, how do we put that together? And in addition, you've got passages such as Colossians 1, 17, that speak of the

01:13:00

Son of God in, as the Incarnate One. Paul is describing in Colossians 1, 15 to 20, he says the

01:13:09

Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, because he's the firstborn, the ruler over, preeminent over, because he's the creator of all things.

01:13:20

And then he speaks of him sustaining the universe, Colossians 1, 17, but the emphasis in the grammar of the text is that he not only has sustained the universe as the

01:13:34

Son, but he continued to sustain the universe, and continues to sustain the universe, and of course that includes even in the

01:13:43

Incarnation, so that as he takes on a human nature, the

01:13:50

Son of God also is able to simultaneously sustain the universe.

01:13:55

And you say, well, my goodness, how do you put that together? He's got human limitations that Scripture affirms.

01:14:03

He is the Divine Son, though he has no limitations. He is, even as the

01:14:08

Incarnate One, he sustains the universe, and so on. Well, I try to wrestle with that, and churches wrestle with that.

01:14:15

We have to affirm properly what we then say, a person -nature distinction.

01:14:23

The person is the Son from eternity, the subject of the natures, so the

01:14:30

Word, the Son became flesh, so that the Son of God, the person of the

01:14:35

Son, the second person of the Godhead, always has had a divine nature and continues to have that.

01:14:44

He's human nature to himself takes human limitations to himself, so that as the

01:14:51

Son, the person of the Son, acts in and through that human nature, he is now fully human.

01:14:59

He is limited in that human nature. He doesn't make that human nature omnipresent and all -powerful, and so on.

01:15:06

Yet he is not totally, what we say, circumscribed by. He has another nature.

01:15:11

He's always had another nature, is the Son is able to also act in and through the divine nature simultaneously.

01:15:18

Now, we don't have that in human experience, so we have to be very, very careful that we are led to a proper affirmation of Scripture, as well as a proper saying, there's nothing in human experience like this.

01:15:32

Yet, we have to affirm all of these truths to speak of his limitations through his human nature.

01:15:40

His norm, there's no limitation through his divine nature. The Son of God has two natures, and he is able to act through both of them, and then we would have to wrestle with, well, when does he act through human nature and not divine nature?

01:15:54

And I try to wrestle with that, but I tie it then to the mission of the Son, the obedience of the

01:16:00

Son becoming last Adam for us, and him acting as our mediator and the office of mediator for us, and so on.

01:16:09

But that sort of is starting to get at an answer to that question that is very, very, very complex, but so, so important in affirming rightly the

01:16:19

Jesus of the Bible. Amen. By the way, I forgot to mention earlier that Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who asked her first question,

01:16:29

I forgot to mention to her that she has won a free copy of God the Son Incarnate by our guest

01:16:34

Stephen J. Willem. This is quite the gift you are receiving. This book retails for $45, and it is a hardback, and it is quite a gorgeous book, quite a really large book, and you have gotten this absolutely free of charge by writing in.

01:16:56

It's nearly 500 pages long, so please make sure we have your mailing address there in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, so CVBBS .com

01:17:07

can ship that to you. We thank our friends at Crossway for providing these books that we're giving away.

01:17:14

Unfortunately, I have to let our friends overseas who have written in questions know that we cannot ship you free copies of the book because CVBBS .com

01:17:25

cannot afford to take on the financial responsibility of overseas shipping.

01:17:31

They would probably go out of business if they kept mailing our overseas listeners books, so if you do know somebody in the

01:17:39

United States who will ship these books to you, by all means let us know where we can have them shipped by CVBBS .com,

01:17:47

and they can, if they are your friend or family member in the United States, they can ship it to you.

01:17:53

Thank you very much, our friend, our new listener, or at least our first -time questioner,

01:17:59

Joy in Kirrabini, Ireland. We hope to keep hearing from you when we have other guests on the program.

01:18:05

Now for a second native of the Republic of Ireland, we have

01:18:10

Mary in Cork, Ireland, who is actually a primary reason that we're interviewing

01:18:16

Dr. Willem today. She is the one that gave me a nudge to interview him, and although I already knew about Dr.

01:18:23

Willem and appreciated his writings and ministry, she was the one that reminded me that I should be interviewing him and the rest is history.

01:18:32

But Mary in Cork, Ireland, says, Hi Chris and Dr. Stephen. I am so privileged, blessed, and humbled to be able to sit at Dr.

01:18:42

Willem's feet, as it were, and listen as he expounds the wonderful glories of the Son of God incarnate.

01:18:47

My heart thrills as the Word of God is explained and is expounded, and I hear God exalted above all the modern trends and worldviews and the denial of the of the

01:18:58

Jesus of the Bible. We truly appreciate Dr. Stephen here in the Munster Bible College in Cork, Ireland, and also appreciate all the other lecturers

01:19:06

God has sent us. Thank you so much, both of you, for a very life -giving interview.

01:19:12

This was just a commendation for you, Dr. Willem. There was no question there. She just wanted to give her regards to you.

01:19:20

Now we have... We have Murray in Kinross, Scotland, who says,

01:19:27

Does Dr. Willem's book address recent and current controversies regarding the

01:19:32

Lord's eternal sonship and generation? Yes, good question.

01:19:39

I do, but not in a detailed, direct fashion.

01:19:45

The reason for that is the controversy... I mean, the issue has been around for quite a while, but it was about 2016 where it really hit the blogosphere, and the discussion took place, and the book was already at Crossway Reading.

01:20:04

It took a while to get out, but it was already in print, and so to go back and change all of that would have been difficult.

01:20:10

So I'm very, very much fully aware of it, and I was aware of the issue before it actually became sort of very, very public on the social media front.

01:20:20

And what's taken in the book, it's there, but what the position that's taken in the book is what

01:20:28

I am arguing is a classical Christology that is tried and true through the history of the ages, and it would not directly affirm what we now know as sort of eternal relational authority subordination or submission.

01:20:46

Instead, it would be saying, I think what Scripture says and what the

01:20:51

Church has said is that the Son is the Son who is from the Father, so we speak of that in terms of the doctrine of eternal generation.

01:21:00

That's just simply trying to get at the Father -Son relationship from all eternity. Everything we see in Scripture is that the

01:21:08

Son is the Son from the Father, and it's not reversed, so there's a proper ordering in Scripture.

01:21:14

But to speak of that ordering and to speak of those relations of Father to Son to then

01:21:21

Spirit in terms of authority, in terms of higher or hierarchical kind of authority,

01:21:29

I don't think is quite right. The Son of God, in becoming human, takes on our role as mediator and is obedient.

01:21:38

It's fitting, is the language of the Church, that the Son is the one who becomes incarnate because He is the

01:21:43

Son from the Father. It's not the Father who becomes incarnate or the Spirit, yet the unique obedience of the

01:21:50

Son is tied to the incarnation and His work, yet there is a proper ordering of persons from all eternity, but it's not the best way to think of that from eternity in terms of a higher or a hierarchical in terms of authority.

01:22:09

Father, Son, and Spirit have equal authority, yet they express that authority in terms of their relations as persons.

01:22:15

So the Son expresses His authority from the Father. John 5 is very important here. You can do nothing on his own, but all that the

01:22:23

Father does, He does. So He has equal glory, equal worship, equal authority and honor, yet He exercises that authority as the

01:22:34

Son of God from the Father in relation to the Spirit. So I do address the issue, but not in a detailed, direct way.

01:22:41

It's all there, but it would be more of the classical position of the Church. Well, thank you Murray and Ken Ross Scotland.

01:22:47

Please continue to listen to the program and spread the word there in Scotland and the UK and beyond.

01:22:54

We look forward to hearing from you and future questions for our guests. We have, let's see here, we have

01:23:02

John in Bangor, Maine, and John says, I will not mention this name of a very popular and beloved figure within Christendom who

01:23:13

Chris has actually had on his program years ago. I will not mention him because I believe he has changed his view on this, but do you believe that it is heresy to believe that Jesus Christ, although He always existed as the second person of the

01:23:31

Godhead, that He did not become the Son until His incarnation, as that was

01:23:38

His role only as a human? Yes, yeah, I'm familiar with, you know, that view that was popular a bit ago, and then there was some in the evangelical world who, some high -profile people, that did hold that, but have now rejected that, so it's important to see that.

01:23:58

No, I do think that that is not a correct position, and that's one of the reasons why the view got changed, in that the

01:24:06

Sonship of the Lord Jesus Christ has to be very carefully understood across the

01:24:13

Scripture, so that what they were picking up is one stream of biblical presentation of Christ which is tied to His humanity.

01:24:24

So if you work from the Old Testament to the New, the promised plan of God, as it unfolds through the biblical covenants, you have the promise of a seed of the woman to come,

01:24:35

Genesis 315. That seed of the woman is then given precision and definition, step -by -step through the

01:24:43

Old Testament, and in the Old Testament we begin to see the Son of God tied to not only

01:24:49

Adam, but to the nation of Israel, to the Davidic King, and then to Messiah.

01:24:55

So that clearly, the Sonship of the Lord Jesus is tied to His Messianic office.

01:25:01

He is the greater Adam. He is the true Israel. He is the great Davidic King.

01:25:07

He is the Son of God in that way. Yet, and that's where this view took this, and it solely looked at it from that end, but it's not just that He is the

01:25:18

Son of God in His humanity, and that He becomes Son in that humanity. He has always been

01:25:24

Son from eternity. So John 5, and even John 1, that uses the language of word, word is still in John's Gospel referring to the

01:25:33

Son of God throughout the entire Gospel, so that it's not legitimate to think of His Sonship as merely human, it's eternal.

01:25:42

So He's the eternal Son who takes on our humanity, who becomes sons. It's important to keep both of those together, which

01:25:49

I try to show is tied to the entire storyline of the Bible. The eternal Son who is the

01:25:55

Lord, with the Father and the Spirit, also takes on our humanity to redeem us, and He becomes

01:26:02

Messiah. He becomes the greater Israel, the greater David. He is the greater

01:26:07

Adam, the last Adam, who then wins for us our salvation. So Sonship has to be both deity, and also picks up His humanity as well.

01:26:17

And that is, I think, the correct way of understanding the Sonship of the Lord Jesus. Amen. Well thank you,

01:26:24

John. Please give us your full mailing address in Bangor, Maine, and CVBBS .com. We'll send you, absolutely free of charge, this massive $45 hardback, 500 pages long, by our guest

01:26:37

Dr. Stephen J. Wellum, and we look forward to hearing from you in the future with other questions for future guests.

01:26:46

I'm going to email you, I'm rather lengthy question, and I figured since we're going to our final break, you could take the time during the break to look over his question.

01:27:04

And I just forwarded it to you, so you'll be happy. Okay, great. And if anybody else would like to join us, we still have several of you waiting patiently,

01:27:13

I hope you're waiting patiently, to have your questions asked and answered by Dr. Wellum. And if anybody would like to get in line with them, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:27:24

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please always remember to give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

01:27:30

USA. Don't go away, God willing we'll be right back with the remainder of our interview with Dr. Stephen J. Wellum, right after these messages from our sponsors.

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But please keep Mike Gaydosch of Solid Ground Christian Books in your prayers. We are now back with our guest,

01:35:58

Dr. Stephen J. Wellam, for the remaining 23 minutes or so, and we have been discussing his book that I hope you all get a hold of.

01:36:09

If you don't win it today, I hope that you will go out and purchase this book, God the Son Incarnate, the

01:36:14

Doctrine of Christ by Stephen J. Wellam. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:36:21

And as you know, Dr. Wellam, I sent you, I forwarded you an email from one of our listeners,

01:36:26

Joey in Clifton, New Jersey, and he says, what do you see as the areas for the

01:36:32

Doctrine of the Person of Christ that need to be explored even now? It seems that heresies that emerge are really reappearances of those that were dealt with in early church councils, and yet they seem always to take on new forms.

01:36:50

Can you comment on what you see as the latest in formidable heresies that have developed and or research that you think should be explored?

01:37:05

And he has another question, but I'll wait till you respond to that. Yeah, sure, that's a great question from Joey, and I appreciate it.

01:37:14

I think his observation that heresies in our own present day often are repeats of the past is exactly correct, and this is one of the reasons why we must faithfully expound and teach and proclaim the whole

01:37:35

Council of God, and also teach what the church has said in these areas from history as well.

01:37:43

If we don't learn from history, we're, as many have said before, we're doomed to repeat its mistakes, and this is too important an area to get wrong, so that as we do go through history of the church, especially in this doctrine, because there's been such universal consent through the ages, that the church has thought very, very carefully about all of the sort of possible false paths that people have gone, and so as we learn from church history, it will help us today, because sadly, people do repeat the past, and they do take, you know, paths and directions they shouldn't go.

01:38:28

So, presently in our own day, he asks, you know, what new forms are being taken, and some sense they're old heresies, but they get combined with sort of current thought in terms of particularly philosophical thought or definitions of what a divine nature is and what a person is.

01:38:47

This has happened in the evangelical world, where there's been a kind of borrowing from contemporary psychology and contemporary understanding of what a person is, and that has led to a denial of there being two wills in Christ.

01:39:08

This is a very complicated debate, but the church has always affirmed that the capacity of willing is tied to the natures of Christ, and so that there's two natures, there's two wills, so that the

01:39:22

Son of God is able to will humanly, as well as will as he always has divinely, in the sense of his divine nature.

01:39:30

Now today, there's been a redefinition of person, and it brought up the old what was called

01:39:38

Apollinarian heresy, and it then leads to the implication that there's no human will of Christ.

01:39:46

If there's no human will of Christ, we don't have a human mediator. We don't have one who can act for us as last

01:39:52

Adam and obey for us. Doctrine of justification will have an impact on this, and so on, and so that's a serious sort of new form, except it's an old heresy, but it's a borrowing sort of contemporary definitions of persons and natures and philosophical terms and so on.

01:40:11

So those are the things that you have to be very, very careful of. We do see a sort of revising or updating of affirming that the

01:40:21

Son of God, when he took on a human nature, he took on a fallen human nature. The Church has not said this, and that has to be looked at carefully.

01:40:31

He took on our human nature, yet without sin, but also unfallen, and we would have to then appeal to the unique work of the

01:40:39

Spirit of God at conception, and so on, but that's something that needs to be explored. Even the debate, which is, people have differed on this, is whether the

01:40:50

Son of God, as the Incarnate Son, could have sinned or could not have sinned.

01:40:56

Even in the Reformed community, some have taken sides on this. That's the impeccability debate?

01:41:03

That's the impeccability debate, yes, and there have been good people on both sides, but the dominant view through the history of the

01:41:10

Church has been that the Son of God could not have sinned. He was impeccable. Some have challenged that, and that needs to be explored.

01:41:19

I do think that the traditional view of the Church is correct, that the Son of God experienced temptation, and all of these areas, as Hebrews 2 and Hebrews 4 will affirm, but he could not have failed.

01:41:32

He could not have sinned, and other areas there. Other debates that need to be dealt with are tied to the

01:41:39

Son in relation to the Trinitarian issues, the functional subordination, those kind of matters.

01:41:45

Some of those can eventually, if you're not careful, lead to what is called a social understanding of the

01:41:52

Trinity, which will have massive impact on the unified work of God in our salvation, the cross, the nature of the atonement, and so on.

01:42:02

So these are all areas that are old, but they're new. They're new in the sense that they need to be reaffirmed and thought through.

01:42:12

The historic position needs to be taught once again, so that what I've discovered in teaching theology now for over 20 -some years is that on these key doctrines, you really almost sound new when you're old, because going back to the old historic position of the

01:42:29

Church is far better than the so -called new things that are arising, and the

01:42:35

Church has been very, very careful to preserve for us the kind of mediator and Redeemer that we need, and usually the implication of all of these views, if you're not careful, will rob us of the

01:42:48

Redeemer that we need. We need God the Son, who has become human, to redeem us, and certain views today are so emphasizing

01:42:58

Christ's humanity, which is good, but if you don't have the Son of God as the person of the second person of the

01:43:06

Trinity, as the one who does a divine work for us, then we will not have a divine redemption as well.

01:43:12

We need a human Redeemer, yes, but we also need a divine Redeemer, and all of these truths are so important to affirm, to preserve the truth of the

01:43:20

Gospel and the salvation that we need. And Joey's last question is, what do you think of the terminology of eternal begetting?

01:43:30

Yes, well, the language of eternal begetting is fine, it's the historic position of the

01:43:38

Church, and all that it's trying to do, and more commonly it's seen as eternal generation.

01:43:44

So what it's wrestling with is the biblical data that the Son of God is the eternal

01:43:50

Son, but that He's never a son apart from His relation to the

01:43:55

Father and the Spirit. We have a triune God that is the true and living God. So the Son has always, always existed, but the

01:44:03

Son is the Son of the Father. The Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the

01:44:08

Son. The Father is the one who initiates, yet He never initiates independent of His Son.

01:44:17

All of the works of God outside of Himself, of all the persons, are what say, inseparable.

01:44:23

They're united. It's one act of the triune God. Now, eternal generation is trying to think through how the

01:44:32

Son is from the Father, how that is from eternity. So it's perfectly legitimate, it's a faith -seeking understanding, it's trying to wrestle with the truths of the biblical data.

01:44:44

The Jesus of the Bible is the eternal, divine Son in relation to the

01:44:49

Father and the Spirit, and eternal beginning or eternal generation is trying to do justice to that, to make sense of that, and to preserve all that Scripture says.

01:44:58

So in that area, kept in that domain, it is perfectly acceptable and perfectly fine, and I think even necessary, to affirm, to get our doctrine of the

01:45:09

Trinity correct, and also to get our Christology correct. Amen. Well, thank you, Joey, and please give us your full mailing address in Clifton, New Jersey, so that CVBBS .com

01:45:19

can ship out to you the book, The God, I'm sorry, God, the Son Incarnate, by our guest

01:45:25

Stephen J. Whelan. We have Bob in Hartsdale, New York, who says,

01:45:34

I can recall hearing a very well -known and beloved Christian radio personality years ago making the horrifying statement that Jesus Christ at times wanted to commit sin, but he did not yield to that temptation.

01:45:53

The reason why this is such a horrifying statement, obviously, is that this professedly evangelical

01:46:00

Christian speaker, who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, did not even seem to realize that wanting to commit sin is a sin.

01:46:09

How do we harmonize this fact, that Jesus never even wanted to commit sin, with this very precious and important text that we have in Hebrews chapter 4, verse 15, for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weakness, but one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin?

01:46:35

Yeah, no, we have to be very, very careful as we put this together, because when we think of, say,

01:46:42

Hebrews 4, that he's been tempted in every way like us, yet without sin, we have to make sure that we're not pushing that to the nth degree, right?

01:46:54

It's speaking of him in his humanity, tempted like us, but the temptation has to be carefully understood.

01:47:02

It's not the temptation. He, obviously, in taking a human nature to himself as a man, is not tempted in certain areas, such as a woman is tempted, and so on.

01:47:12

So people today see that as a liability. That's not a liability. He's tempted in his humanity to not to go the path of what the

01:47:24

Father wants for him. He never wants to do that. He's never in desire to do that, but you think of the rocks, the initial temptation, turn these rocks into bread.

01:47:37

No, that's a temptation. He has the ability to do so, but he commits himself to the

01:47:44

Father's will, to do the Father's, to unfold the Father's plan. What is that plan?

01:47:49

It's ultimately to go to a cross. He will not bring about the dawning of the kingdom and salvation apart from a death on a cross and the obedience to the

01:48:00

Father's will and paying for our sins and going as our mediator. So he's tempted at that point to not go the way that the

01:48:09

Father will. That's the greatest temptation, to not do God's will in our life. He says, no,

01:48:15

I will. He experiences that temptation right before him. He's hungry. That hunger is legitimate, yet he does not go that path.

01:48:24

He submits himself gladly to his Father's will, but he experiences hunger.

01:48:30

He experiences alienation. He experiences the things that we experience, yet his affections are holy.

01:48:37

His desires are right. His wanting is never contrary to his Father's will.

01:48:43

There's a sense in which you go to Gethsemane and he says, not my will but yours. In and through his humanity, he's desiring a holy thing, not a sinful thing.

01:48:53

Yet, I mean, it's a holy thing to want to have continued fellowship with the Father that he's had for all eternity, yet he knows that he has come to do his

01:49:03

Father's will and obey for us and to go to the cross for us. So I think that's how you put this together, is that his affections are holy and they're good.

01:49:13

He is not, you know, fallen in his human nature, yet his temptations to go a different way are not tied to a wrong motive or wrong desires, but holy desires, yet he submits to his

01:49:30

Father's will to the very end and wins for us our salvation. And he knows what it's like to experience hunger.

01:49:38

He knows what it's like to experience the loss of a friend. He knows what it's like to experience, even in a far greater way than any of us experience, the bearing of our sin.

01:49:47

And the Father, whatever is going on there, which is difficult, when he cries, my

01:49:53

God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He knows the full effect of living in this fallen world.

01:49:59

And Hebrews 4 is reminding us that the mediator that we have knows what we're going through. Yet, without sin, he is the

01:50:06

Lord who is able to help us in the midst of our fallenness. And thank

01:50:11

God there is a mediator who actually can save us and is not wallowing in fallen desires and affections like we are.

01:50:19

Now, could it be that a part of the explanation is that we very often, and I don't know how many centuries this has been the case, but when we read the word tempted, especially in our modern day, we are immediately, typically, transported to the thought of somebody rubbing their chin and going, hmm,

01:50:45

I sure would like to do that, instead of an external temptation that's occurring.

01:50:52

Like, for instance, you could theoretically have a man who is so in love with his wife and so incredibly faithful to her that a woman who is trying to seduce him, while she is tempting him, he does not even give a thought to betraying his wife.

01:51:10

Am I making sense here? Yeah, no, I think that's right. And some of the times that we have to carefully define our terms, we're seeing this, unfortunately, today in debates over desire and conferences that are dealing with certain sexual desires and this type of thing.

01:51:29

We have to be very, very careful how we're defining our terms, so that, yes, the temptation comes from the outside.

01:51:36

Turn these rocks into bread is legitimate. He's hungry. He would like some bread. Yet, his love for the

01:51:42

Father is to obey his will, to bring about our salvation, and he does not then say, oh, wow,

01:51:49

I'm in a really desire to want to displease my father here. That never takes place, yet the temptation outside of him is real.

01:51:59

He knows what hunger is like, and he can experience what we experience in that regard, but he does not experience sinful desires, sinful affections, sinful wants, and just resist them.

01:52:12

All of his affections and desires are holy desires, even when he says, not my will, but your will.

01:52:17

If there be any other way, this cup, that's a holy desire, yet he knows that he has come to go to the cross to achieve the eternal plan of God, and that is that which he then puts his hand to the plow and sees it through to the end.

01:52:35

Well, thank you very much, Bob. You have won a free copy of God, the Son Incarnate by our guest

01:52:41

Stephen J. Wellen. Please give us your full mailing address in Hartsdale, New York, so that cvbbs .com

01:52:47

can ship it out to you. We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who says, one verse that I cannot wrap my brain around is

01:52:57

Luke 2, 52, where it says, and Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature in favor with God and men.

01:53:07

I understand how physically his stature would grow, but the part obviously that is baffling me is how he could increase in wisdom if he was truly

01:53:16

God and fully God, as well as being fully man. Yeah, that's obviously a very, you know, question that is not easy to, you know, just answer in a quick way, and I think how the

01:53:31

Church has sought to think through that, right? So you have Luke 2, 52. You cannot deny what Luke 2, 52 is teaching, just as you have to put that alongside the fact that he's the eternal

01:53:41

Son who does not grow. He does have all wisdom. He has all knowledge, all power, and so on and so on and so on, right?

01:53:48

So you have to put them side by side, but to do justice to Luke 2, 52, you have to put in place the whole biblical presentation.

01:53:58

So the first thing that has to be put into place is that the Son, the eternal

01:54:03

Son, the Word, became flesh, right? John 1, 14. He added to himself what we would then say is a human nature.

01:54:14

What's a human nature? Well, we would say a body and a soul, right? We are not just physical, but we also have an immaterial aspect to us, and the

01:54:22

Son, who is the person from all eternity, is now, through that human nature, able to experience a full human life.

01:54:33

So that when you think of the Son now adding to himself what we would say a body, you think if he grew in stature.

01:54:40

Well, we know that from the moment of conception that human nature was added to the

01:54:47

Son, right? That's hypostatic union. And so there was, from conception all the way through birth, then through growth through childhood and, you know, infancy, childhood, teenage years, adulthood, there's that physical growth.

01:55:03

The growth in wisdom, it's very crucial here. This is where we have to then affirm, and this is usually, we're not exactly sure on all of this in terms of ourselves, we don't fully understand human nature, but we would say that the

01:55:18

Son of God, by a human soul, has a human mind, right?

01:55:24

And what we mean by human mind is we have to, Church was very careful in making a person nature distinction.

01:55:31

So the human mind is a capacity, the ability to think humanly, so that the

01:55:36

Son of God, through that human soul, through that human body, is able to grow in understanding and in knowledge.

01:55:45

So in and through that humanity, the Son of God did not have, through that humanity, through that human mind, through that human body, through that human will, omniscience.

01:55:56

He did not have, you know, omnipresence. He wasn't simultaneously everywhere. Through the divine nature, he is.

01:56:03

So we have to keep two natures together, and the Son of God, through that human nature, grows in wisdom, stature, favor with God, amen?

01:56:11

But we have to also add quickly that the Son of God has two natures. The Son of God is not completely limited to that human nature.

01:56:19

This is one of the challenges of heresies today that move in this direction. The Son of God is able, also, to live what he's always lived, a fully divine life.

01:56:29

So he's able to do that simultaneously. So that accounts for his growing in wisdom, stature, favor with God and man, in and through his humanity.

01:56:38

In his deity, he's not growing in wisdom and stature and in knowledge or anything else.

01:56:44

And so, person, nature, two natures, I try to wrestle with that in the book in more detail, but that's how the

01:56:51

Church is thought to think through all the biblical data and to account for it. Faith -seeking understanding and to present to us the glory of Christ.

01:57:01

Amen. Well, thanks, R .J., and you've also won a free copy of God the Son Incarnate. So please send us your full mailing address in Westchester County.

01:57:10

We have Gordy in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who asks, and I'm assuming he's asking about what book other than yours, but he says, what post -Reformation book on Christology would you most recommend?

01:57:26

Well, I mean, you think of some of the post -Reformation authors, excellent. John Owen, you can't get better than John Owen on...

01:57:36

Not easy to read, though. Well, once you sort of get his flow of sentences, you can sort of work through it.

01:57:45

But he has a whole book on the person of Christ, one of his massive volumes.

01:57:51

You have sections in people, the Francis Turretin in his Systematic Theology, Electric Theology, and others, those key people.

01:58:01

I do think that Herman Bavink, it's a shorter section, is in his Systematic or Dogmatic, Reform Dogmatics.

01:58:09

Herman Bavink has a wonderful section on Christology. David Wells' volume, that's out of print,

01:58:15

The Person of Christ, was excellent. It's a short little volume, you can still get it out of print, probably in some places used in this type of thing.

01:58:27

Donald MacLeod, the Scottish theologian, The Person of Christ, in the InterVarsity Press series that was done in the 1990s, excellent volume on The Person of Christ.

01:58:37

All of those are very, very good. Michael Reeves has a popular book on The Glory of Christ and other books that have been written as well.

01:58:46

Well, Dr. Willem, I think that we need to get you back on a couple more times to more thoroughly plunge into the depths of this book that you've written.

01:58:56

And I will send you a calendar of dates that are available if you would like to return. I would love to do that.

01:59:02

After I finished the book, I said to my wife, I don't think I even scratched the surface.

01:59:09

And that's probably an understatement. Well, you definitely made an effort because it's 500 pages long.

01:59:15

And by the way, Gordy, you've also won the last copy of the book, God, the Son Incarnate. Stop by cvbbs .com

01:59:23

on North Hanover Street in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, since you live so close, and spare them the expense of shipping the book out to you.

01:59:30

I want to thank you so much, Dr. Willem, for being our guest today. I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

01:59:37

And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater savior than you are a sinner.