The Revealed God with Jeffrey Johnson; Stephen Wolfe's 2024 Resolutions

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line, early in the year 2024, and we are joined today by a special guest, a one -winged special guest from Conway, Arkansas, Dr.

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Jeffrey Johnson is with us today. We weren't sure whether that was going to be able to happen, because Dr.

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Johnson has never actually asked me for any bicycling advice, and I feel sort of sad about this.

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You know, I've been there a number of times, and I've never never been asked.

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I've ridden 163 ,000 miles on a bike, and got a lot of experience, but I've never been asked for any any, you know, insights, and so as a result of not asking me for any of those insights,

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Dr. Johnson now has a broken collarbone and three busted ribs, and I could have told you that, for example, here in Arizona, if you go mountain biking, the only thing you have to fall off onto are rocks, cacti, and rattlesnakes, and so it's just, it's just not wise, you know, to to be doing that.

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But we do thank you for joining us, and I, should I go ahead and make the general disclaimer right now, that since you're, you know, post -operative and things like that, that we really can't vouch for the orthodoxy of pretty much anything you say for the next month?

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Should we go ahead and do that? Basically right. I'm on some pain medication, so I'll blame it on the medication.

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Well, I've tried that many times with friends, the wife, things like that, when I've managed to mess myself up in the past, though I've only crashed once in 163 ,000 miles.

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Now, a lot of it these days is indoors, so it's impossible to crash anyways. But even, even when

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I was riding pretty much just outdoors, I only crashed once, and it was in a race. There was like, you know, you're in a peloton, there's people all around you, guy in front of me, cross tires, fell off his bike, landed on my front rim, and I'm now sliding down the road at 22 miles per hour on my back, holding the bike up in the air, trying to save, because the old, you know the old cycling saying, skin heals,

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Campanola doesn't. And so you have to try to protect the, the, the bike as much as possible.

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And I did, it's amazing, I sacrificed my body. But that was in, that was like 1998 in El Toro, Tucson.

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So that's the only time I've been down in all those, all those years. So the Lord either really likes me or doesn't like you or something,

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I don't know. But we're glad to see that you're, and you were wearing jeans too, by the way,

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I saw that picture. And, and I'm just sort of like, you know, anybody who wears jeans while, while mountain biking, you're gonna crash.

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I could have told, I could have told you that. Yeah, that's right. It was cold though. It was a cold day. Yeah, yeah.

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But that's why they make, you know, there are, there are entire companies that make super cool and incredibly expensive cold weather riding gear.

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And that's why they exist. So you don't wear jeans while, while riding in the forest.

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But anyways, seriously, sorry about the crash, but you know, that happens.

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And, you know, I am older than you are. And so I can assure you that as time passes, you recover much more slowly.

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It's just something to look forward to. I'm just, I'm just full of all sorts of positive stuff today, aren't

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I? Anyway, hopefully that'll be it for you for bad stuff for 2024 and the rest of the year will go, will go well for you.

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I won't mention to folks your other activities because I don't know.

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People have always thought it was really weird that, that I was this big cyclist guy because they don't figure that people who teach

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Greek or church history or whatever are big cyclist guys. But you like going fast on stuff you can fall off of.

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So I'll just, I'll just leave it at that and, and leave it to your wife to talk to you about, you know, the necessities of staying alive and things like that.

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Yeah. I was most nervous about calling my wife. I bet. I was nervous about it.

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What was her response? Believe it or not, she was very sympathetic and she has not mentioned retiring from bicycling.

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Okay. So I'm happy about that. I was afraid she was going to say that's it. But we,

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I plan on getting back on the bike after I heal. Yes. Get back to it.

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Well, did they offer you what Lance Armstrong got? You know, you know what happened to Lance Armstrong, right?

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No. You know, professional cyclists break their collarbones with, with great regularity.

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And so after like the second or third time, it's sort of like, um, there's not much left repair. So, um, he has a carbon fiber collarbone.

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Oh, that'd be nice. Yeah. Uh, it'd be much harder to break. Uh, I'm not sure that's good though for, for the rest of the bones around it now to think about it, but yeah.

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Uh, and it's actually lighter, uh, than, than a natural collarbone. So, um, there you go.

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Uh, that's probably what's in your future there for you. Um, titanium might be cool.

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Looking to get surgery maybe on Tuesday. So I'm, I might ask for one of those. There you go. Um, I'm not sure what they charge you, but, uh, if I can give you good ideas like that, that's, that's great.

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So anyway, so Tuesday, all right, well, I'm glad we're doing this, uh, before, before Tuesday or something along those lines, because you went and messed up, uh, the release of a book.

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That's, um, I don't know. I don't remember when I first read it. Uh, it must've been some point.

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What? Um, April, May, maybe did is that that's all right.

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Okay. April, May of last year. I read it again a few weeks ago, uh, on one of my trips.

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And, um, it's, uh, got a nice little cover out there. You got a little mountain, the background sort of hard to see a little bit, but it's the, the dark, uh, the dark side here.

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Uh, the revealed God introduction to biblical classical theism. And I, I noticed that some people were arguing about whether it should be the

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God revealed or revealed the God and all the rest of this stuff. I'm going, man, people have much too much time on their hands, uh, on social media.

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They really, really do. But an introduction to biblical classical theism, you're obviously seeking to get to the top of the

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New York times bestseller list just as fast as you possibly can, um, by writing an easy to read, uh, wide popular topic, uh, type of a book and, you know, hit it out of the park with one and retire after that.

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Right. Is that, that the idea? That was right. I'm sorry.

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I shouldn't, should I not make you laugh? Uh, because I understand that, that could, that could hurt, but you're on pain meds.

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It doesn't matter. Seriously. Um, not, uh, not an easy read just as the book on, um, on Thomas and natural theology and things like that.

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Um, so obviously you have other, other intentions than getting up the

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New York times bestseller list, uh, which is where most of us are. Uh, why, what's, what's, what's the motivation fundamentally for a, um, a book like this?

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Yeah. Of all the books I've written, this is the 14th book I think I've written. And this is the one

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I felt compelled to write because, you know,

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James, we've been in a long time, probably 15 years, 10 years, uh, internal debate within the

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Reformed Baptist community on the doctrine of God. And when I was younger,

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I studied, uh, mysticism and I studied, uh, Pseudo -Denisius and I began to see a lot of similarities between, uh, what's being said about God with what

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Pseudo -Denisius was saying. And that led me to study Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Aquinas, other than leaning on Aristotle, he, uh, quoted and cites

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Denisius, uh, second to any other person he cites. And I think the, uh, uh,

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Augustine and Apostle Paul are third and fourth, if my memory is correct. Uh, but anyway,

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I've started seeing the influence of mysticism in on the doctrine of God. And that led me down this rabbit hole.

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And I don't know if it was for the better, for the worse, but I've just given the last six years to diving deep into this topic.

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And, um, I'm convinced, I'm convinced the importance of Sola Scriptura in giving us our understanding of God.

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And I felt compelled to write something that would, uh, warn us from going to pagan philosophy to shape our understanding of God and some of this mysticism that is going to lead us away from scriptures.

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So I felt compelled. Um, it's not something I wanted to do after I wrote my first book on Aquinas and all the negative feedback

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I received from that book. Um, and having thin skin, my wife asked me, do you really want to write another book on this topic?

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And, uh, and one way I didn't, and one way I don't like the fight. I don't enjoy the arguments.

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I don't enjoy, uh, just debating and fighting and the, the disagreeing with my brothers, uh, good men.

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I don't like that. I prefer to live quiet, quietly and in peace. But there's another side of me.

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It says, I have to do this. And it's not because I think I'm the, the man to do it, or I'm the great scholar to, to confront this.

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It's just as a looking around, um, waiting for someone to, to address this substantially.

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Um, uh, uh, I thought, well, someone's got to do it. And, um, so that's why

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I felt compelled to do it. And now I feel like now that I've written this book that I can, uh, maybe close the chapter on the, on the topic.

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Yes. The, um, the great desire, um, reminds me a little bit of, um, uh,

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Calvin, uh, wanting to just go to Strasburg and be the quiet, uh, retiring scholar living in his library.

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And, uh, God had other, other plans for him. Um, and that's what, that's what happened to him.

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But, um, so the, the first book obviously gets you all sorts of, um, uh, notoriety, as you said, a lot of it was, um, pretty nasty.

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Um, I certainly saw a fair amount of that. And, um, now it's obvious to me that the focus that people are going to have in this book is found in the subtitle, the concept of biblical classical theism versus philosophical classical theism.

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Now this is a subject that you, you raise right at the start, right at the beginning.

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And then go into just all sorts of other things.

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Um, empiricism and rationalism and, and, um, uh,

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Christian existentialism, Christian empiricism, all sorts of stuff that just be perfectly honest with you.

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A lot of folks are going to find somewhat difficult to plow through, um, lengthy discussions of pseudo -Dionysus and, and, uh, just how different people use different sources from the past.

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And, and it's stuff that isn't the, the normal things that Christians are talking about in most churches.

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Okay. And so it seemed to me that the opening where you're talking about, uh, literally in the, it's, it's in the introduction.

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A lot of people skip introductions, but we can't skip introduction here. It lays everything out.

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Um, but the most important thing, it seemed to me, the thing that's going to attract positive and negative reaction is what you say at page 16, um, a division within classical theism.

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So you are presenting two concepts, philosophical classical theism and biblical classical theism.

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So I think the most important thing we can do for folks in the time that we have today is to help them to understand what that is about, why that's relevant and how that gets fleshed out later on in, in the book.

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Um, and so let's, would you agree with me at that? Would you agree with my analysis that that's probably where the, the focus is going to be?

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I mean, certainly there's gonna be folks who will always take, um, umbrage at something that's said later on, or I don't think you should put this person in this category, but it should be over in this category or all that kind of stuff that that's, that's the essence of scholarly debate and things like that.

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But it seems to me that the fundamental thesis of the book, the revealed

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God is the difference between biblical classical theism and philosophical classical theism.

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That's what's touching. That's what's touching on the debates amongst reformed Baptist and everything else right now. Um, would you agree that that's the focus and that that would be really the best thing we can focus our, our time on?

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Yeah, I agree with that. Uh, I agree with that because one of the objectives of the book is to show that you don't have to have a novel view of the doctrine of God, uh, and denying one of the three, what

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I call the three transcendental attributes of impassibility and simplicity.

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Those three attributes is what I classify are the attributes of God that puts you into the classical theism camp.

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And so I'll uphold the confession of faith and I'll uphold that the doctrine of God is that God is transcendent and that is immutable.

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He's impassible and that he's, um, uh, simple.

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I'll uphold that. A lot of people say Jeff denies simplicity of God. That's not true. I uphold the simplicity of God, but I want to show that throughout church history, there's been multiple versions of articulation of the doctrine of divine simplicity and that you can uphold simplicity and you can get these doctrines from scriptures as scriptures affirm these doctrines.

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And thus you can still classify yourself as a classical theist in the historical tradition, especially the confessional tradition, without falling into the trappings of philosophy and the trappings that lead to,

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I think, a hyper version of simplicity, a hyper version of immutability and so forth.

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And so that's what I want to do is distinguish between a doctrine of God that has been classically held by Calvin and others that do not lean upon Aristotle or Plato or other such pagan philosophers.

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So obviously, in my experience, the immediate pushback to that is if you do not hold to a certain individual's definition of simplicity, normally

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Thomas's, as it's been developed, even since Thomas, then you're not truly holding to simplicity.

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And the pushback is you're being a biblicist, you are rejecting natural theology, you're rejecting really the role of the

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Spirit in guiding the church, confessions, all the rest of this stuff seems to be packaged into that.

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And yet you're saying that these terms, such as impassibility, immutability, simplicity, they need to have not only a biblical foundation, but we can't limit our definitions of these things to particular philosophical systems, because none of those philosophical systems are actually big enough to handle what's found in divine revelation.

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And so it is a fundamental and foundational divide that is being exacerbated in the current situation, partly because the conversations aren't all that helpful, and then just partly because once you've got a tradition, you like to hold on to it.

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So you listed, it says on page 17, the differences between philosophical and biblical classical theism.

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And you said, to be more precise, there are six notable differences between philosophical classical theism and biblical classical theism.

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From my perspective, the book stands or falls here, because if you can knock these out or enough of them out to raise an issue, then your thesis is in trouble.

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But if these stand, then that gives you the format for the other analysis that you do throughout the rest of the book.

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The book is what, 275 pages, somewhere around, yeah, 290 pages with the notes.

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So you've got a lot more to be talking about, but it seems to me that the battle is right here in these six differences, and it seems to me

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I can name names of the specific people they're going to be focusing right here.

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Would you agree? Right. I agree. I agree. I think that's why I put it front and center in my introduction.

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Let's look at the major differences between these two systems.

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And I affirm that within church history, even within the Protestant side of church history, you're going to find men that hold to both of these positions.

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And my position is not trying to excommunicate those who disagree with me as being unorthodox.

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My position is that my position is also orthodox and within the historical tradition, that the history of the church on these doctrines are way more nuanced than what this simple idea that everything leads to Thomas Aquinas and everything flows out of Thomas Aquinas.

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And if we disagree with Thomas Aquinas, then we're somehow, we're not confessional, or somehow we're not adopting the metaphysics that underlay the confessional framework.

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I was like, no, that's not how history works. History is way more nuanced and complicated than that.

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And then I want to show, the goal of the book is to show where the great distinction between philosophical classical theism from biblical classical theism and show where philosophy has crept in.

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Who brought this in to the church, how that developed, and who sought to fight against that.

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And I'm not the first, or you're not the first, we're not the first people in church history.

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It's not just those who come after Immanuel Kant that want to argue against Aristotelian philosophy or Platonism metaphysics.

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We see that throughout church history, there's been theologians that have limited their understanding to the doctrine of God to scriptures.

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And I would say even some of the framers of the Westminster confession of faith differed among themselves on the doctrine of divine simplicity.

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So it's like, let's take a closer look at the history of this doctrine. And that way, this charge that if somehow you disagree with Thomas Aquinas, you can't be upholding the second

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London Baptist confession of faith and understanding its articulation of God without parts, passions.

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It's like, somehow, we're non -confessional if we happen to disagree with Aquinas.

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I just totally disagree with that and seek to lay out the historical development of this doctrine and show, you know, the great distinctions between, ultimately, between a philosophical version of simplicity that's derived from philosophy and speculation from that which is derived exclusively from scriptures.

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Now, you're not saying that this specific nomenclature is something that, you know,

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Tertullian was talking about or Thomas was talking about or something like that. We're looking backwards, and in history, you're going to get a lot of mixtures.

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You're going to get people with an emphasis one direction and with an emphasis another direction and things like that.

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And we're trying to say, in light of that, that the—and

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I'm saying we in the general we here, I didn't write the book, but we're obviously fighting the same battle—and my argumentation has been that the solid foundation that the people of God can trust in, that I have seen over and over in my ministry over the years,

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I have seen young men grounded and they remain faithful and they remain strong and they accomplish things in the kingdom because of a conviction, first and foremost, that this is the teaching of the

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Word of God. It is God speaking. It is God's revelation. You know,

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Christ's sheep hear Christ's voice and they hear that voice in His Word, and hence they see the supremacy of biblical revelation over the speculative nature of any philosophical argumentation.

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And, again, the philosophically minded say, ah, but you can't touch the

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Scripture without using our philosophy, and they're always trying to push that as the primary.

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But there is a major difference in from what are you deriving the very marrow and heart of your system?

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Is it flowing from the consistent exegesis of the text of Scripture, or is it a mixture of authorities?

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Is it thoughts from Plato and then

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Neoplatonism and then Aristotle and Stoicism and all the various permutations of Greek philosophy and then the mysticism that comes from the sources you discuss in the book at length, and then that becomes a part of how you exegete the text of Scripture, to where we've heard people saying over the past couple of years, you have to start with Nicaea.

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You have to start with the confessions to be able to exegete Scripture appropriately.

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And I would just argue, at least for a Reformed Baptist, if you can read the first chapter and then say that, then, you know, you can make circles into squares and triangles into squares and everything else, because it doesn't work.

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You're epistemologically confused. It's not only the confessions you have to uphold above Scripture.

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You have to uphold the—you got to go back and not just go, hey, this is what the confession says, because I'm like,

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I agree with everything the confession says. It's going back. Now we have to go and do a deep study of the different authors of the confession, see what they said in their other writings, and that's how we interpret the confession.

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So now you have three tiers of understanding the Scriptures. You've got your confession that helps you understand the

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Scriptures, but the confession, if we disagree with confession, then you have to go back to the writings of these framers of the confession.

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And so there's no end to this where it's going to take us away from Scriptures. And my point is, yes,

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I'm a confessional guy, but I don't put confession above the Scriptures. But I still don't believe that the framers of the confession were unified.

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In fact, I know they weren't. They weren't unified on their understanding of the doctrine of simplicity. And so they had differences among themselves, and I point that out in my book.

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And so that's the only sure foundation we have for our faith is the

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Word of God. And the problem with philosophy is, especially

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Aristotelian philosophy, it collapses biblical categories together.

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And I use this throughout the whole book. And once you see this, it's like you see it almost every page of my book, that Aristotle had a simple

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God, but his attributes, the attributes of God, the unmoved mover, were identical with the operations of God, the works of God, what

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God does. So what God does or what his operations are identical to his attributes or who he is.

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So when you collapse or when philosophers collapse the works of God or the operations of God with the attributes of God, then you have no longer a creation out of nothing.

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No longer do you have a distinction between what God does from who

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God is. And once you undermine that distinction, the whole biblical worldview is undermined.

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And so that's a hyper view of simplicity. The Scriptures does not conflate God's operations, creation, and providence, and judgment.

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It doesn't conflate those activities with his essence or his attributes.

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And that's the real heart of the problem of leaning upon Platonism and Aristotelianism is that they both collapse the operations with the essence of God.

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And that's why I want to put my finger on that particular point and say that this is the problem. And so we can't integrate that view of God with the

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God of Scriptures, the God that's been revealed to us. Clearly what he does, what God does, creating, governing, judging, is not identical.

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I mean, it's reflective of who he is. You know, God is going to be consistent.

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His operations are going to be consistent reflection of his nature. He's not a liar, therefore he cannot lie.

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You know, he cannot do evil because he's holy. So his operations are going to reflect and depict his essence.

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But we can't identify them as being one and the same. Let's look at the six notable differences that you listed and what you were just talking about will come out in that.

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But let's be honest, a discussion of, and as you know, the philosophical discussion, modal collapse, that is attributed to philosophical classical theism in its formulation of God and things like that.

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That's not what you're normally hearing from the pulpit on a Sunday morning. The vast majority of our folks are not having discussion like this over lunch on Sunday afternoon.

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And hence, a lot of people are struggling to understand why this should be important for them. I think it ends up coming out very clearly in when people do lose balance here when you start getting, you know, a 12 -week sermon series on simplicity.

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If you can't explain that one early on, by the time you get to the 12th week, there's not going to be anybody there listening anyways.

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But I think it might help folks if we went through these six notable differences, give them the categories between the two.

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You're right, the first notable difference between philosophical classical theism and biblical classical theism, as already noted, is the epistemological foundation in which they are rooted.

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Philosophical classical theism is rooted in Greek philosophy, while biblical classical theism is rooted in divine revelation.

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This is no minor difference. Natural and special revelation are from God, while Greek philosophy is from man.

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Revelation comes by the way of authority, while philosophy comes by way of demonstration. Revelation is a sure foundation for knowledge because it is received by humbly submitting to the wisdom of God.

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At the same time, Greek philosophy is a faulty foundation for knowledge because it is built on the autonomous and contradictory notions of man's wisdom.

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In the same way that philosophical classical theism is not dependent on the Bible for its conception of God, biblical classical theism is not reliant on pagan philosophy for its conception of God.

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Now, that's just an opening paragraph, but I'm always sitting back thinking what kind of pushback

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I'm going to be getting for anything that I'm writing in any of my books or anything like that. Obviously, the immediate response from the other side is, no, no, no, no, no.

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That's too stark. We clearly believe in scripture and we clearly believe in its importance.

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Philosophy is just a handmaid of theology. It's not the driving force.

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No one could believe in such a simplistic dichotomy. Now, are you just simply saying that this is your conclusion, or are you saying that this is something you're going to be demonstrating over the course of the rest of the book?

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How would you respond to that immediate pushback? Yeah, I mean, I seek to show that forth throughout the rest of the book.

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Also, at that point in the book, classical theism is not limited to Christianity.

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Plato and Aristotle are categorized as classical theists.

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You've got Islamic scholars and Judaic scholars that are classified as classical theists.

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I'm classifying classical theism as anybody holds to a simplicity, immutability, and impassibility.

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That's classical theism holding to those transcendental attributes. And so, for the

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Greek philosophers, they're coming to their doctrine of God, not through scriptures or through revelation.

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In fact, I would even suggest they're ignoring revelation, even rejecting natural revelation, because we know the

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Bible tells us that Plato and Aristotle knew who God was, that he's a personal being, but they didn't come to a personal

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God, so they rejected what God clearly revealed to them in nature. And they built a doctrine of God on speculation, starting upon something they thought was more solid or certain, so they sought to build up to a doctrine of God through their own speculation.

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And I show how that, throughout the book, is impossible. It's impossible when you reject the

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God of revelation to use your own reason and logic through empiricism or rationalism to get to a personal

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God. So, here they have a doctrine of God that is transcendent.

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They have a doctrine of God that is simple, but that doctrine of God that is simple is not the same simple

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God of revelation. And then what happens,

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Protestants and Catholic theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, that they take the foundation of their epistemology off Aristotle and Plato, and they want to correct that with scriptures.

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But what they're going to do and find out that they're going to try to blend or bring together opposing worldviews that are incoherent or can't fit together as a square and circle, that square can't fit in a round circle, so you can't fit these things together.

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And that's why I try to show that they're not just, they may appear to have some similarities, simplicity, they both teach simplicity.

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But if you understand the simplicity that Greek philosophy brings us to, then you have no

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God that can act, that's an act that is separate than his essence. His operations are identical to who he is, then you have to have an eternal creation.

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You cannot demonstrate a creation out of nothing, a temporal universe. You have to have, according to Aristotle, you have to have, the universe has to be just as essential or necessary as God.

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So you have two necessary things, the unmoved mover and all of the universe. And that's, those beliefs is contradicted in scriptures.

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And so if that's, if the very foundation is contradicted in scriptures, then why would we go back and lean upon that as a foundation?

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So it's like we should reject philosophy and just limit our doctrine to God, to what is revealed.

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So that sort of summarizes the next paragraph, which says, as we shall see, the attributes of simplicity, immutability, and impassibility rooted in pagan philosophy are not the same as simplicity, immutability, and impassibility rooted in the holy scriptures.

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Though these divine attributes appear similar at first glance, they have irreconcilable differences that lead, if consistently followed out their logical conclusions, to two different conceptions of God and ultimately to two different gods.

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So that's the first of the six points that you have. The second is, the second notable difference between philosophical classical theism and biblical classical theism is whether God is a personal being or an impersonal substance.

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According to scripture, both natural revelation and special revelation communicate a personal God who will judge the world in righteousness, yet according to Greek philosophers such as Platonism and Aristotelianism, God is not personal at all.

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Though Plato and Aristotle held the transcendence of God, they rejected his personal imminence.

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And so this then leads to the—however, it should not surprise us that Plato and Aristotle did not believe in a personal

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God. The logical proofs and argumentations they used to construct their models of God are incapable of demonstrating a personal

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God. At best, we shall see the rationalism of Plato ends with God being an impersonal conception, which he defined as the form of the good.

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Likewise, the empiricism of Aristotle ends with God being an impersonal conception, which he described as the unmoved mover.

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And so you will have chapters later on dealing with rationalism, empiricism, all the implications thereof.

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But the second of the differences then is whether God is personal as described in scripture or impersonal as found in Greek philosophy.

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That's right. You know, natural revelation—everybody thinks I deny natural revelation. No, natural revelation is upheld.

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Special revelation teaches us about natural revelation. And when we go to scriptures, I said, what do scriptures teach us about natural revelation?

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Well, we can look at Romans and see that we all know that there's a God and he's going to judge us.

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And if there's a God who's going to judge us, then we know that God's a personal being that we're going to personally be held accountable to on the day of judgment.

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And we don't need special revelation or scriptures to tell us that. So that means Aristotle and Plato knew, they knew that God was personal.

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But in their philosophies, they rejected that. So I'm saying that Plato and Aristotle suppressed the truth in unrighteousness.

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They came to a higher being, an ultimate reality. But this ultimate reality is not the

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God of revelation. And it's surprising to me, you know, just because there's maybe some similar terminologies.

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There may be some, what appears at first glance to be some similar traits to the ultimate impersonal being, the unmoved mover or the

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God of Plato, the form of the good in this concept of simplicity and immobility.

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It seems similar at first, but it's kind of like the word equality and justice when it comes to social justice.

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Social justice uses terms that the Bible uses, but they mean quite different things than how the

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Bible defines justice. And I think we need to limit our understanding to what does it mean for God to be a simple being, being without a body or parts.

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He is simple. God is a spirit. He must be worshiped in spirit and truth. So there's many ways biblically to deduce that God is not a complex being made up of diverse parts that when you put the parts together, then all these lesser things come together.

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God's dependent upon the lessers to be who he is. No, God is simple. That's something we want to affirm and hold to.

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God is immutable. He does not change. He's not like us. He's transcendent. But once you go and say, okay, there's some similarities between that and what

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Plato and Aristotle was teaching. Therefore, let's apprehend or commandeer their epistemology and use that as our foundation.

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It's not going to be long until you say all the scriptures is anthropomorphic. All of scriptures must be interpreted according to the metaphysics of the

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Greek philosophy. And it's like that in the end will undermine the

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God of Revelation rather than being a handmaiden to theology. It ends up being something that destroys theology if you're consistent with yourself.

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Thankfully, a lot of people are not consistent, but if you're going to work it out consistently, you're going to end up going to have a

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God that's nothing like the God of the Bible. So I think the third point,

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I'm pretty amazed that it's almost quarter to already, but the third point we're going to have to dig into a little bit more because this is, you already mentioned it, and it seems to be where the rubber meets the road.

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Third, though both versions of classical theism affirm divine simplicity, mutability, and impassibility when it comes to divine essence.

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They differ on whether God's operations, parenthesis, divine activity, parenthesis closed, are to be included in the doctrine of divine simplicity, divine immutability, and divine impassibility.

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This is where their understanding of divine simplicity, mutability, and impassibility differ. And this is where most people have never even encountered this kind of a discussion, and that is the relationship of God's being to God's actions and operations.

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So according to Plato and Aristotle, God's essence and operations are both simple, immutable, and impassible.

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God's essence is who God is, which includes his attributes, while God's operations are what

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God does, which includes the act of creating and all acts of providence. For Plato and Aristotle, however, there is no distinction between God's essence and God's actions.

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Now, I would imagine you would agree, for the vast majority of people, that's counterintuitive.

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That's not something we would ever think of. I mean, who God is and what God does, we obviously believe there's consistency between who he is and what he's going to do, but to equate them together doesn't make any sense to us.

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So why would the philosophical classical theist make that kind of an assertion?

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Why is that important in their system? I mean, for Aristotle, for God to be the unmoved mover, he can't create.

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He's not the creator. He's the efficient cause. He's the final cause, which means the creation is moving, always in flux, always moving, and he's like a magnet that's unaware of us, and we're trying to become like him.

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So he's pulling us, without knowledge of us, he's pulling us towards him.

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So he's not moving, and so any act of efficacy, any creative act, would be a change from non -creating to creating, and such a change undermines immutability, undermines simplicity, undermines their versions of simplicity and immutability and so forth.

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But then the problem you have is you have an eternal creation then, and you have a necessary creation, and even

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James Dole's Law, he admits that this is a problem and addresses that, and in fact, he doesn't really have a solution for it, but he ends up having, there's never a time that God is not creating.

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There's never a time, even conceptually, even if we want to debate God's relationship with time, and I seek to avoid even entering into that debate, but even conceptually, in the mind of God, is there a logical order, a logical order in God, and many of the, for the philosophers, and even some of the scholastics, they would deny logical order in God, because illogical distinctions in God would be a differentiation, it would deny divine simplicity.

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If God knew that decrees took place before the actual act of the decree, then there would be a distinction in the mind of God, but for classical philosophical theism, there can't be even a distinction in God's mind.

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God can't know the difference between himself and what's not himself, and that's why Aristotle said, God can only contemplate that which is pure simple, which he can only contemplate and think of himself.

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If he could think of something outside of himself, there would be a separation in his thinking, and that would undermine simplicity, and so this is foreign to scriptures.

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No Bible reading scholar who's not looking at Greek philosophy would ever come to the conclusion that God cannot make logical distinctions in his thinking, or know the difference between himself and that which is not himself, and so that just seems so counterproductive to scriptures, the basic reading of scriptures, that I think it's going to end up undermining our understanding of scriptures if we seek to do what

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Aquinas did and merge the two or synthesize the two.

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So you sort of flesh that out in saying there is no difference between who

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God is and what God does in this perspective, and hence when the doctrine of divine simplicity includes

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God's operations, the doctrine of divine immutability and impassibility will also be merged into God's operations.

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To say God is immutable, according to Aristotle, is to say that God's operations are immobile.

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It's not merely the divine essence cannot change or suffer, God cannot even choose to do something that is not identical to his eternal essence.

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For example, God cannot choose to become angry with sinners. Such sovereign operations and free activity would bring a disturbance and change within the very essence of God.

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And so when you think of it in that way, it's very difficult for most of us who have a biblical concept to even understand how this

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Greek philosophical perspective has a God that can any way be described within biblical categories.

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Every description we have of God's wrath and God's activity and God's love and God's justice and everything else has to be redefined in such a fashion as to really, as you say, create a different God than what we have in Scripture.

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Yeah, he ceases to be personal and relatable. He ceases to be a real comfort to those who are in need of a

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God that can come and hear our prayers and respond to us.

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Of course, we understand God's sovereignty, that God's... we're not changing his essence in any way by praying to him.

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And by him answering a prayer, he's not changing his essence. He's free to do.

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This is the thing. We believe in an immutable God in his essence, but we also believe in a personal

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God that is free to do something or not do something. He revealed himself to Moses in such a way,

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I can have mercy upon whom I want to have mercy upon. Or if I want to withhold mercy, I can withhold mercy.

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His actions are not fixed by necessity. He's free. He has free will to do as he so chooses according to his own pleasure, according to Paul in the book of Ephesians.

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So he's free. He's free to operate or not operate. He's free to create or not create.

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He's free to save or not save. This is essence of who God is, as revealed in Scriptures. But such a

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God is incompatible with God of philosophy. So, under this philosophical model of God, sin cannot kindle

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God's wrath any more than the death of Christ can appease God's wrath. This is because the God of philosophical classical theism cannot have wrath or compassion in the first place.

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Such affections are relational. Because God's operations and actions are simple, immutable, and impassable, philosophical classical theists agree with Deus that there are no personal relations when it comes to God and His interaction with man.

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Therefore, all such language in Scripture that speaks of personal association and exchange is metaphorical and anthropomorphic.

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And so then you go in and you talk about operational simplicity, operational immutability, operational impassability, the same thing, essential simplicity, essential immutability, essential impassability.

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What does this section have to do with the charge that I saw someone making, actually against both of us,

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I forget which of the many heresies I've been accused of recently, was being thrown in my direction, but you're being called a divine mutualist.

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Now, this doesn't have anything to do with any of your insurance policies, though I'm glad you do have insurance policies. You need insurance policies right now.

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But is this the foundation for the charge of divine mutualism?

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Yeah, that's why I get charged with that. You know, it's strange because I have a whole chapter where I argue against open theism and the ones that would have

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God's essence being changed. That's why it's important to distinguish between God's essence, who he is, and what he chooses to do.

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And if we separate those two categories and not conflate them together, then you don't have to have one or the other.

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So the charge that I'm a mutualist, that somehow I am, because I say

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God can create, freely create, he can save who he wants to save, he can be angry if he chooses to be angry with sin, according to his own nature.

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That doesn't change who God is. So you have to be able to—you don't want to fall into the open theistic other side of the ditch, if you would, where God is always in flux,

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God is changing, he's only personal, he's not transcendent, he's only imminent. You need both ands.

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You need God to be immutable, simple, but you also need him to be personable. You need him to be able to act and freely act.

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So you need both. And the only way to have both is to distinguish between God's essence and God's operations.

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But if you don't have a category where you can separate those out, then of course they're going to charge people like you and me with leaning towards open theism or processed theism, which

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I think is equally as dangerous as philosophical classical theism.

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And so that's the next section, is God self -mobile?

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You include that—it's a fairly brief section, on the other hand, because biblical classical theists do not conflate

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God's operations with God's essence, they believe that God is free without any external restraints or causes to do as he pleases.

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Of course, God is immutable in his nature, but this does not restrict God from being self -mobile and free to act according to his nature.

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But there are Christian classical theists who would say, oh,

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I believe in the Bible, I believe God is sovereign, etc., etc., but they will embrace this idea of the identity of God's essence and God's operations so as to say that his attributes are one, even though we distinguish them,

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God does not. How do they explain the biblical revelation of God's actions in time, his providences, interaction with Moses, just all these things throughout scripture where God is anything but immobile?

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How do they respond to that? Well, that's the danger, is that they'll use their philosophy, their depiction of who

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God is, to go, okay, when the Bible says this about God, we have to understand that as he's speaking in humanity language, he's using anthropomorphism, he's speaking in a way we can understand from our conception, but we actually know better that God doesn't actually have the ability to freely do something that he hadn't always been eternally doing.

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We know that God is unrelatable philosophically, so we're just going to understand the scriptures as speaking to us metaphorically or anthropomorphically, and so it ends up you using their philosophy to be their grid in which they understand and interpret the scriptures rather than just basic exegesis that you and I would prefer to say, what does this mean?

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And no doubt you and I would hold to anthropomorphisms, but how do we know if something's anthropomorphic?

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How do we know that God doesn't literally have an arm or he doesn't literally have eyes? Well, we know that he doesn't have arms and eyes is because the

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Bible tells us he's a spirit. The Bible tells us that, so we're using the analogy of scriptures to define what is and is not anthropomorphic and what is symbolic or metaphoric.

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We don't have to use a pagan philosophy to basically explain that God doesn't actually have pity or compassion.

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The Bible says he does pity us. He is compassionate, and that compassion and pity is a reflection of his nature and that is telling something truly about God that's not just something that's anthropomorphic.

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So you then spend a great deal of time delving into a lot of history, a lot of earlier writers, and what you document is the development of a theological tradition over time.

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And what happens in that context is you have people who gain a great name who may be very deeply influenced by extra -biblical sources and concepts, and they seek to express

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Christian truth and yet also do so within the constraints of these non -biblical, non -revelational traditions and ideas.

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And that then becomes a part of the next layer of tradition, and the next layer of tradition, and the next layer of tradition, and this builds up over time to where it can no longer be questioned.

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For Baptists, we look at these types of doctrinal developments in so many areas and go, no, we reject this.

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In our ecclesiology, in our sacramentology, in our soteriology, we are open, blatant biblicists in saying, when you look at the tradition that develops all the way through the medieval period in regards to the sacraments, in regards to the church, in regards to soteriology, all these areas, it doesn't seem that most of these guys have any problem on the other side of the divide of going, nope,

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I reject that because Scripture plainly teaches this out of the other thing. But then when it comes to this one area, it's like, oh no, we dare not do that.

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We have to come up with a different way of looking at things on this subject.

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All these other subjects, oh yeah, Bible first, and wow, can you believe how far off the beaten path they got on that?

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I'm seeing a lot of people going, yeah, we need to stop being schismatic, so we need to stop being so divisive, and things like that.

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I'm like, you mean we need to stop being Baptists, is what you seemingly are saying, because on so many of these issues, we just go, you can follow the chain of development through church history where this then got built on by this, and that got built on by that, and the problem was back here, all the way back at the beginning.

01:00:14

That's where the first misstep was taken, and if you want to believe what the apostles believed, you can't play that game.

01:00:23

You have to have ultimate authority in Scripture. So it comes to this one subject, and all of a sudden, we're being told that divine simplicity, which

01:00:38

I don't think almost anybody before 2010 was preaching any sermons about.

01:00:46

I'm so thankful that in the Providence of God, I think it was 2004,

01:00:53

I think it was 2004, I wrote an article on monotheism for Ligonier, and I had a whole section on simplicity.

01:01:02

Now, it was biblical simplicity, it was, because that's how

01:01:07

I've always understood it, is God is not made up of lesser parts. You can't take some

01:01:13

God parts away, and God stops being God. Anything that exists exists because God made it, so there can't be any created things you put together to make

01:01:23

God. That's obvious. I'm not sitting here going, well, Aristotle said, or Plato said. I'm going with what

01:01:29

Isaiah said and what Jeremiah said, really. But there was a doctrine of simplicity, and I just put it in as part of an overall discussion, but now all of a sudden, if you dare say, you know, when

01:01:48

I read Scripture and I read it with a true desire to accurately handle it,

01:01:54

I can't come up with this idea that God's wrath or God's justice or God's holiness is the same thing as His omniscience or His omnipresence or His grace.

01:02:10

And it seems to me that if it's important for me to be able to recognize those distinctions in God's actions as part of His self -glorification, then

01:02:21

I think God can probably do that, too. And if you dare say that, well, no, no, you're denying simplicity, and it's like, no,

01:02:31

I'm denying a philosophical warping of it, but I'm not denying simplicity at all.

01:02:40

That's called the identity account, historically, where all the attributes are collapsed into one attribute where they're not distinguishable, at least in the mind of God.

01:02:48

Maybe we can distinguish them, or they're revealed to us in different ways, but ultimately

01:02:54

God's wrath and justice and God's love are identical. In every single way, it's identical.

01:03:01

Well, not everybody in the 14th, 15th, and 16th century held to that. That's one of the charges is like, if you deny identity account of simplicity, you're not confessional.

01:03:12

No, there's many people who, some of the framers of the West Minister denied identity account.

01:03:19

John Calvin denied that. So there's many people who have not come to the conclusion that all of God's attributes are identical in the eyes of God with each other.

01:03:29

I'm with you. Calvin would say, once you say God's wrath and God's love are identical, then they have no meaning at all.

01:03:37

They seem to mean anything. Except there are many in our circles that are willing to go that far now, and this has happened so quickly.

01:03:49

Look, you were on this before I was. I remember, I forget what year it was.

01:03:58

I started popping into Conway once in a while, and y 'all would let me speak, and we'd have dinner and stuff like that.

01:04:09

Early on, you said, hey, I'm writing this book on Thomas Aquinas. I'm like, do

01:04:15

I look like I need extra sleep? Seriously. But I'd love to have you read it.

01:04:22

And I remember getting back to you going, I'm sorry. It's not on my radar right now. And so I was a little bit late to the game.

01:04:31

But I don't know. Maybe it's because I'm the weirdo. I'm the guy out there running around with the

01:04:39

Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and Roman Catholics and the atheists and the Muslims. And so I'm very much outwardly looking as far as presenting the

01:04:50

Trinity and Scripture and the Resurrection and soteriology to people outside of our little circle.

01:05:01

Maybe that's I didn't see this coming earlier. And I've even apologized to one

01:05:10

Reformed Baptist leader who took it on the chin in the early 2010s.

01:05:17

I knew what was going on, but I didn't get involved with it.

01:05:23

It wasn't impacting the church that I was in, and I didn't think you could stick a number 10 envelope in between the two positions.

01:05:32

I never thought people would divide over it, but they did. It's happened awful fast.

01:05:39

And it seems to be accelerating. Like you said at the beginning, you don't want to be doing this.

01:05:47

And your hope is that this will be the last thing you have to do about it. To which

01:05:54

I only chuckle and go, oh Jeff, you're such a nice guy.

01:06:03

Because where does this go? Does it keep accelerating?

01:06:11

Is there a wall that we run into? What's the long -term result of this, as far as you can see?

01:06:22

Well, as a president of Grace Bible Theological Seminary, I'm worried about the students, because the students are the next generation of pastors.

01:06:30

And so I see it as affecting the church. In fact, when I wrote the book, the Thomas Aquinas book, the imagery

01:06:37

I had is that here's this wolf trying to get into the church, and he's wearing sheep clothing, and everybody's inviting him in, and he looks fuzzy and soft.

01:06:46

And I was like, Aquinas is not a friend to Protestant theology.

01:06:53

He's not a friend to the church. And so I see it as having a devastating effect long -term, not just in the academic arena, but I think it has an effect on pastors and their preaching.

01:07:06

Because once God ceases to be personal, and maybe they continue to use the word that God is a personal being, but once God is so anthropomorphic and distant in such an extreme way, then

01:07:21

I do see how it's going to affect the preaching of the word and in the interpretation of Scriptures.

01:07:27

And you and I affirm this, that before the authority of Scriptures are challenged, the sufficiency of Scriptures are challenged.

01:07:36

And I think this is where the debate is, is are the Scriptures sufficient? Are they enough?

01:07:42

Or do we have to have something in addition to Scriptures? But once we say the Scriptures are not sufficient to interpret themselves, but we need something outside of the

01:07:51

Scriptures to interpret the Scriptures for us, then that's when the authority of Scriptures are going to, down the road, downstream, be undermined.

01:08:01

And so that's why I think it's a very important battle to fight.

01:08:09

I don't like it. I don't like it. Yeah, I know. We've had that conversation, and people think that I do, and I don't.

01:08:24

But some of us have been equipped with a rhino skin and others have not.

01:08:31

So God puts us all together to do what we're supposed to do. I heard it said by someone on the other side that this divide will continue and grow, and unfortunately, unless there is a mutual commitment to the ultimacy of Scripture, it will.

01:08:55

And looking historically, this is not the first time this type of thing has happened. There is an allure to scholasticism, and there is always a process of swinging that direction and correction based on the reality that scholasticism loses its meaningful connection to the people in the pew, to the people in the church, the people that are actually doing the

01:09:25

Christian life, actually building Christ's kingdom. It loses connection to those people, and unfortunately, ends up looking down on them as if they are benighted children that need to be led by the great scholastic minds.

01:09:39

And so this happens in every generation, and we're now experiencing it, and my hope is that 100 years down the road will be a footnote in a book someplace that says, here were some of the people that stood firm and tried to keep the ship going the right direction, and stuff like that.

01:10:03

And I just, you know, when you mentioned

01:10:09

GBTS and you were talking about pastors, you know, our journals called Pro -Pastor,

01:10:16

I just think of the contrast between a seminary that is focused upon equipping men of God to serve in that vital role, and those that have no one preparing to be a pastor, but only to produce scholars to teach in further seminaries.

01:10:40

And I think that's a, it reminds me of the bad taste

01:10:48

I got in my mouth, and still have in my mouth, in 1998 when I attended the ETS meeting in Orlando.

01:10:54

I presented a paper there, but just the attitude, the mindset of the people that were there.

01:11:04

We are the academy, we are the enlightened ones, we are here to guide the benighted church, and I never went back.

01:11:14

I'm not saying anybody goes back, or you shouldn't go, I'm not saying that at all, I'm just saying for me, I was deeply impacted by that experience, and by that attitude.

01:11:26

And it's always impacted, as a result, how I do scholarship, and why

01:11:34

I don't want a seat at the academic table in that sense.

01:11:40

Because you have to evidently adopt an attitude that I just don't think is brought about by the

01:11:47

Spirit of God. I had a similar experience. During the studies, I was reading the

01:11:52

Summas, I was reading Aquinas every day. I gave myself to try to learn them, and I read them night and day, to the point that it felt like I could tell you, before I get to a section,

01:12:12

I say, he's going to say this, based upon what he said here, he'll say this. And I'd read it and go, yeah, he does say that, because there's a philosophical way of thinking that he has.

01:12:22

And I will say, after learning Aquinas, and diving into some of the other scholastic theologians, it does elevate your thinking, and it does make you go, wow, this is a complex philosophical position.

01:12:36

And it gives you a sense of accomplishment, like, wow, I can understand this. But it leaves you dry.

01:12:44

It leaves you cold. It doesn't leave any warmth in your soul. And for the last four or five months,

01:12:50

I've been studying the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And I haven't been reading a lot of other books.

01:12:56

I've just been reading the Bible, and just reading the Gospels over and over and over and over and over again, because I'm doing my own study on the life of Christ.

01:13:06

And I find myself so warmed, so encouraged. Like, there's moisture.

01:13:11

There's water. There's life. It's nourishment. It's devotional.

01:13:18

And it draws me, it's like it's drawing me close into a relationship with Christ that is life itself.

01:13:26

And there's such a contrast, seeing that I've spent so many years in the Summa, now

01:13:32

I'm giving all my time to the Scriptures. There's no comparison between the

01:13:38

Word of God and with scholasticism. Scholasticism might build your mind up, and might make you feel like you're smart and educated, and that might make you think, oh, look how big

01:13:49

God is, because he's so transcendent, no one knows who he is. He's ineffable. That can do that.

01:13:54

But it doesn't bring you into a close relationship with God. And that's where, you know,

01:14:00

I want my life as a pastor, as a professor, to draw people to Christ, draw people to the

01:14:08

God of Revelation, to Scriptures. And that would lead us into humility, not pride, and lead us into brokenness, not a stuffy intellectual superiority complex, you know.

01:14:21

And so I'm with you there. I want to push people to the Bible, push people to Revelation, push people ultimately to Christ.

01:14:30

And I'm not saying the other side doesn't want that either. You know,

01:14:36

I believe there's good men on the other side of the debate, and they just want to guard against open theism and process theism, and they're truly motivated out of good motivations.

01:14:50

But there is a danger that if you fall into scholasticism, and you're just reading these

01:14:58

Catholic theologians, there is a strong danger of losing your warmth in your devotional life.

01:15:06

Yeah, I was talking with a scholar who has written on Aquinas and has criticized him. Last year

01:15:12

I was talking to him, and I said, yeah, I heard you once say that reading Aquinas dries up and shrivels your soul.

01:15:19

And he said, I said that? And I said, yes. He says, that's a good thought. So he had forgotten he had said it, but it was certainly my experience as well.

01:15:29

And, you know, no one needs to convince me that there is a danger in open theism and process theology and stuff like that.

01:15:38

The funny thing is, I've debated those people. I debated

01:15:44

Dr. Sanders at Reform Theological Seminary in, what was that, 2001,

01:15:50

I think? Over 20 years ago. And, you know, nobody else seemed to be overly excited about the subject enough to arrange debates and actually engage these individuals directly in scholarly debate.

01:16:06

And so to now have people on my own side saying, oh no, this is going to lead to tri -theism, and I'm like, open theism and process theology and all the rest of this stuff, and you're like, well, okay,

01:16:24

I'll tell you what, why don't you show me your debates with these folks? You know, over three decades, and, you know, none of them have done it.

01:16:32

It's all speculation. Anyways, well, first of all,

01:16:37

I'm very, very thankful to your doctor who gave you the appropriate medications to be able to get you through an hour and 16 minutes of discussion without turning blue or without all of a sudden wincing in pain.

01:16:52

I'm sure you probably need to move in that chair now, maybe get some rest, even though I hear sleeping with broken ribs can be really enjoyable, really fun.

01:17:06

Yes? I can tell you it's not. Okay. Are you using the recliner and things like that to try to find a comfortable spot?

01:17:18

There's only one spot, and that's the trouble. You get one position, and you have to stay in that position.

01:17:25

For the most part, you can move around a little bit, but that's been the hardest part of sleeping.

01:17:32

Thankfully, my medicine kind of helps me sleep. Well, again, we're sorry that happened, but, you know, with the desire for the thrill comes the danger of the spill.

01:17:48

There you go. Thank you, Dr. Johnson, for being on with us.

01:17:54

The book, again, is called The Revealed God, which they can get from Free Grace Press, of course, and I believe on Amazon and other places like that.

01:18:05

Right now, it's exclusively on Free Grace Press. We're holding it back from Amazon for about six months.

01:18:12

Okay. All right. So, you get to go to Free Grace Press to order this book.

01:18:18

It's in hardback. Very nicely done. We'll get you much, much more into the topics we were talking about today.

01:18:27

Hopefully, that's been helpful to you. Dr. Johnson, heal up, and Lord willing, I'll be seeing you in about a month and two weeks or something like that,

01:18:39

Lord willing, and I make make the trip.

01:18:44

You should be aware of the fact, since I drive to everything now, you're always the backup guy.

01:18:51

So, you may want to have just a few notes jotted down for a Baptist history intensive in case me and a big old semi -tractor trailer get all gnarly somewhere along the way.

01:19:04

Yeah. Well, you need to make sure you drive safely. All right. Thank you, sir.

01:19:09

Thanks for being with us. God bless. All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you,

01:19:14

Rich, for bringing that up. Lots of stuff. I mean, the stuff on pseudo -Dionysius, the influence that that apocryphal, who knows who this guy really was, writing had on the development of medieval scholastic theology is astonishing.

01:19:35

It really, really, really, really, really is. And again, digging into all that stuff,

01:19:45

I guess I can understand why he'd need to go ride a mountain bike for a while after reading all that stuff from Thomas and stuff.

01:19:54

So anyway, when you see your wife has sent you a note...

01:20:03

Oh, okay. So, Josh Tanner's supposed to be coming by. No? Sunday.

01:20:13

Oh, okay. Okay. Never mind. All right. Okay. So, one thing

01:20:19

I wanted to say to finish things up. We got 10 minutes. Might as well make it a jumbo while we're at it.

01:20:27

I saw this tweet yesterday from someone who's involved with IRBS.

01:20:36

And it's a back and forth, just a little snippet, between Karl Truman, who by his own admission became a big fan of Thomas in 2016.

01:20:49

Karl Truman and James Dolezal, the primary importer of Thomism into the

01:20:56

Reform Baptist movement, I would say, through his writings.

01:21:03

Karl Truman says, when I look at the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 2, it's impossible, is it not,

01:21:11

James, James Dolezal, to read that without hearing the voice of Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor in the background.

01:21:24

And James Dolezal's response is right.

01:21:30

If you don't know the angelic doctor, then you don't know that's whose voice it is.

01:21:40

Now, Thomas was called the angelic doctor just a matter of decades after his death.

01:21:53

And his establishment as the very standard of theology for the

01:22:01

Roman Catholic Church took place fairly quickly. Tradition says that there were two books always in front of the

01:22:13

Council of Trent and their deliberations. And that was the Bible and the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.

01:22:22

And of course, Council of Trent is the Counter -Reformation Council. The Council of Trent launched the revivification of Roman Catholic theology over against the

01:22:34

Reformation and resulted in the recapturing of certain lands for Rome and the forced reconversion of individuals and all sorts of things like that.

01:22:48

And so, the angelic doctor is the terminology of Rome.

01:22:57

He was made a doctor of the Church. He is the angelic doctor above any other.

01:23:06

Popes have declared that his theology is always to be the standard. Now, we know that doesn't mean a whole lot these days, does it?

01:23:18

I mean, what's the next pope going to believe? This guy who's the head of the

01:23:26

Inquisition right now, even he has said he's way to the left of Francis.

01:23:32

Man, so much going on there. But point being, I don't speak of the angelic doctor.

01:23:43

R .C. Sproul did. Sproul followed. Gerstner. And hey, we've all got our blind spots.

01:23:52

But the angelic doctor, who was the motivating theology in the denial of justification by faith, you're to read the second chapter of the

01:24:08

Westminster Confession of Faith in his voice. Not the first. Not the first.

01:24:16

And I don't know, I'm just naive. I'm just that dumb biblicist guy. But I sort of think that there's a reason why chapter one of both

01:24:26

Westminster and the London Baptist Confession are chapter one. Maybe you're supposed to start there.

01:24:34

Maybe there's something foundational there about Scripture, the norma nomata, the standard for everything else.

01:24:48

Maybe you start there. And if you do, and if you then refuse to engage in the hey, we're going to take this 12 % right here.

01:25:12

And the rest of it, oh hey, we discern. Appropriations, man.

01:25:19

We don't worry about the rest of that stuff. And like I said in the last program, we were talking about this

01:25:27

Aquinas's, Thomas's Christology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Levering's book,

01:25:37

Thomas's Christology. You can not have Thomas's Christology apart from Thomas's sacramentology in regards to the mass.

01:25:47

You can't do it. And if you pretend to do it, you are no longer talking about actually studying

01:25:54

Thomas Aquinas. That's just a fact. Not one of you people that are running around just so in love with Thomas Aquinas can dispute that reality.

01:26:09

So when I hear Carl Truman, James Dolezal, I get it.

01:26:18

He's been a Thomas for as long as I know anything about his material.

01:26:27

But Carl and I did stuff together back in the days before Thomas came along in his life.

01:26:35

And he's the one that's made references to me as a Neo -Sicilian and stuff like that. I've written to him. I've tried to get him.

01:26:41

He won't even respond to me. Won't even talk to me. Won't even, nope, won't do a thing.

01:26:48

He knows that Neo -Sicilian stuff is indefensible. He knows that. He wouldn't, yeah, he's a smart guy, smart guy.

01:26:57

And that tweet, quoting from Truman and Dolezal, was in response to a

01:27:05

Steve Meister tweet quoting J .V. Fesko. And J .V. Fesko is the OPC's big

01:27:11

Thomas guy. The Westminster Divine stood on the shoulders of theological giants on the doctrine of the

01:27:19

Holy Spirit, not Calvin as we are often told, but on Augustine, Lombard, and Aquinas. Well, again, people get the idea that if you dispute something like this, you're saying that everything that Thomas ever said was false.

01:27:35

I've never said that. We've looked at things where Thomas had a great insight on something here, or a great insight on something there.

01:27:43

But especially if it was a biblical insight, that was in spite of his exegetical errors, not because of them.

01:27:52

He was deeply influenced by Origen's methodology of interpretation. And we've gone over these things.

01:28:00

We've read various passages, and bought commentaries, and everything else to give you examples of how sometimes you'll be writing, oh, okay, yeah, mm -hmm, okay, yeah, all right.

01:28:10

And then all of a sudden, phew, out into the ozone someplace, and then back, oh, okay, goes that direction, and it's just how it works.

01:28:21

So I tweeted something very, very briefly.

01:28:27

I didn't bother to bring it up. It basically said, if you can literally say that you're hearing the voice of the angelic doctor in the

01:28:37

Westminster Confession of Faith, you really ought to give consideration to what your true position is.

01:28:45

And, oh, the responses. And what we discovered was that Stephen Wolfe, yes, the

01:28:54

Stephen Wolfe of Christian nationalism fame, is back to Twitter.

01:29:01

I hadn't seen him for a while. I don't know if he took a vacay or just what, but I had not seen anything from Stephen Wolfe in a long, long time.

01:29:11

And one thing is very, very clear, and that is he woke up this morning and chose violence.

01:29:24

I've seen that on Twitter a few times. I'm not sure where it comes from. But someone woke up and chose violence this morning.

01:29:32

And he did. There's a whole series of nastygrams aimed at me on Twitter this morning from Stephen Wolfe.

01:29:40

One of them says, the thing is, you cannot learn Reformed theology by following White, at least in its historic form.

01:29:48

He articulates a Calvinistic theology unique to the 20th century. In the eyes of the historic

01:29:54

Reformed faith, he's wrong on natural theology, natural law, philosophy, and reason. And in his articulations of total depravity,

01:30:01

Trinitarian theology, theonomy, biblicism, tradition, etc. Wow. Everything. Now remember, this is the guy who wrote a book on Christian nationalism.

01:30:08

He says, I'm not doing theology! This is the non -exegete, non -theologian guy.

01:30:14

But he knows all about this stuff. If you think I'm going to learn the historic Reformed faith of James White, then you're wrong.

01:30:21

Well, let me tell you something. First of all, you're not going to learn the

01:30:26

Reformed faith at all from Stephen Wolfe. Okay? Zip, zero, nada. He's not a theologian, he's not an exegete, and he knows it.

01:30:34

He knows it. That's why he tried to sort of head that stuff off the path, because he doesn't give you any of that stuff.

01:30:42

But here's the issue. My response was, okay, this is good.

01:30:51

What is the Reformed faith? 20 years ago, R. Scott Clarke was out there saying, you know, here's this defined definition, and it's this narrow, and there ain't nothing else, and if you don't fit in this, you ain't it.

01:31:11

And we'd have these arguments, and I, back then, my primary response to him was,

01:31:17

I think being Reformed, first and foremost, what it involves is that soul -shattering, hubris -destroying, pride -extinguishing recognition that God is

01:31:38

God, and I am not, and he can do with me as he pleases, and that, therefore, if I'm going to have peace with him, it is going to be because solely of what he has done and not anything

01:31:50

I can add to it. If you don't have that, you're not Reformed. Now, there's stuff that flows from that.

01:32:00

I mean, part and parcel there was the absolute sovereignty of God in election, predestination.

01:32:07

His sovereignty over time, his providence, that's going to result in a certain theology of prayer, of a certain theodicy, that all things work together for the good of them that love

01:32:21

God, them that are called according to his purpose. There's a lot that flows from that, but without that, you don't have it, and that means there's all sorts of churches today that have the word

01:32:32

Reformed in their name that are not Reformed, because the only way to believe all that stuff we were talking about is to have the highest view of this.

01:32:42

If you don't have the highest view of this, if you don't see this as the full -orbed revelation of God to his people, if you don't view this the way that Jesus viewed it, you're not going to believe any of the things

01:32:59

I was just talking about, because that's what they're derived from. Why do we believe what we believe about God's sovereignty?

01:33:04

Well, it's because we actually believe the Genesis 50, that we are supposed to take

01:33:13

Genesis 50 and see Isaiah chapter 10 as related and flowing from the same source of truth.

01:33:23

And then we're supposed to see it, that's the background that causes the early church in Acts chapter 4 to pray the way the early church prays.

01:33:32

So there is a unity here, there is a wholeness in this revelation, and so that's part of being

01:33:42

Reformed. If you don't have that, and so many of the quote -unquote Reformed, you know, the Shulers, these

01:33:48

Reformed churches, they don't believe any of that stuff anymore. The liberal

01:33:53

Presbyterians, the liberal Lutherans, they don't believe any of that stuff anymore. The Episcopalians, they don't believe that stuff anymore.

01:34:03

So, historically, you can look back at some of their creeds and confessions, and there was elements of Reformed theology, or they were a part of the

01:34:12

Reformed movement in the past. They're not anymore. They're not anymore. And so, the real issue is, and think of it this way, where did the

01:34:29

Reformation come from? And what has happened in the centuries thereafter to fundamentally change its character and its nature?

01:34:42

Because when I read Calvin's response to Satellito, I see the

01:34:49

Reformation in its nascent power, at the time period where it made the greatest change, when it was establishing the theology that would alter the course of Europe.

01:35:09

And if we get to the point where to be where Calvin was then is to no longer be

01:35:16

Reformed, what does the word mean anymore? Does it have a meaning anymore?

01:35:26

There was a book written not too long ago. Is the Reformation still important?

01:35:33

I forgot what the title was, but it was some guy from Wheaton, I think, something like that. Anyways, does the

01:35:40

Reformation still matter? And everybody's saying, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. But the question is, why?

01:35:46

Why does it still matter? And will it only still matter as long as it denies its own historical origination as being

01:35:58

Reformed Biblicism, not rejecting what

01:36:03

God has done in the past, but looking at everything God's done in the past in the light of the ultimate authority of Scripture?

01:36:12

Because we can sit here and say that all we want. We used to say

01:36:20

Semper Reformanda. Now there are Reformed Baptists saying, no, they reject

01:36:27

Semper Reformanda. And there are Reformed Presbyterians saying, no, we reject Semper Reformanda.

01:36:34

And I say, without that, you will have no Reformation continuing into the

01:36:42

It's the end. It's over with. Because you have now established a new set of traditions that cannot be tested by Scripture.

01:36:54

We talk about testing our beliefs by Scripture, but how would you ever do it? That's one of the things

01:37:01

I appreciate about this, is read

01:37:06

Pseudodionysus. Read the sources that were brought together and have coalesced and created these traditions.

01:37:20

And ask yourself a question. Should we not be able to remove the influence of these sources in light of the fact that the

01:37:34

God they presented is fundamentally contradictory to the God Isaiah presents to us in Isaiah 40 -48?

01:37:44

Or because that influence has become enshrined in later creedal and confessional statements, it's all over.

01:37:54

What Isaiah said doesn't matter anymore. How do you do it?

01:38:01

How do you go about it? Are you even allowed to do it? If someone today, even, it's amazing the speed with which this has happened.

01:38:09

Semper Reformanda. There are still people, there are Reformed Baptist leaders right now who will go,

01:38:16

Semper Reformanda is not a

01:38:22

Reformation concept, who will speak at conferences called Semper Reformanda, which only demonstrates how fast this change has taken place.

01:38:37

So, look, God bless him, but I don't want to be in Stephen Wolf's group.

01:38:48

Okay? I don't want to be there. I don't see him reaching the people that we reach.

01:38:57

I don't see him even trying to. And I don't see him being equipped to. So why should

01:39:02

I, you know, if he wants to call whatever he's presenting as the historic

01:39:08

Reformed faith, more power to you. You can't teach this.

01:39:17

And I will teach this until my dying day. And if you want to say that makes me non -Reformed, well, go to it.

01:39:26

Have fun. Enjoy. Don't want to be a part of your club. Don't want to be a part of your club.

01:39:35

In some of our upcoming programs, I'm going to be talking a little bit about this book,

01:39:42

Stephen Jay Shoemaker's book, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption, and then his 2016 book.

01:39:51

This one was 01, was it? 02. No. Wait a minute.

01:40:01

How can that be? First published 2004, first published paperback 2006. Okay. Well, whatever.

01:40:09

Fascinating stuff into the historical material regarding the

01:40:15

Marian dogmas and Roman Catholicism. I'm absolutely convinced the Marian dogmas are the clearest example of the fundamental epistemological failure of the

01:40:24

Roman Catholic faith. You have what is being taught as dogma unknown in the early church, and in many instances directly contradictory to the plain reading of scripture.

01:40:41

Shoemaker is fascinating because he's written a number of books, those two that we were looking at, rich resources of historical information on Marian stuff.

01:40:55

But guess what else he's written on? And I didn't know this, and I'm just catching up to it.

01:41:03

I didn't see the connection. He's recently put out books on the invention of the

01:41:08

Quran, creating the Quran, and the search for the historical Muhammad. Now, when you think about it, it's the same time frame.

01:41:18

The Marian beliefs begin to develop in the middle of the 5th century, after the

01:41:24

Council of Chalcedon. Chalcedon kicks the door open. Chalcedon kicks the door open with the use of Theotokos, and that's when everything starts exploding.

01:41:37

Same time frame. That's 450. What we're talking about with Muhammad is 632.

01:41:48

So pretty much same centuries, same background area.

01:41:55

And so fascinating stuff on Islam that I want to, after the

01:42:00

February -March marathon, I want to get into some of that, as well as some of the stuff that Shoemaker has on the

01:42:07

Marian material as well. Why do I say that right now? Stephen Wolfe ain't gonna touch any of this stuff.

01:42:15

He doesn't know diddly about any of this stuff. He doesn't know

01:42:21

Islam. He doesn't know the Marian dogmas. He hasn't engaged any of these people, and he's not going to.

01:42:29

And I hope he doesn't. We don't want people making messes out there. But that's the difference, is he can sit around saying, hey,

01:42:41

I know the standard of what it means to be reformed. If your reformed standards keep you stuck in some place where you're not reaching out to these people and you're not doing anything, you can have it.

01:42:54

We don't want it. We're going to keep doing what we're doing. And I just have the feeling that most people go,

01:43:01

I think we're going to let the pinheads over there do their thing. And we're going to do the thing that's actually having some type of accomplishment.

01:43:10

Yeah, the scholastic pinheads. That's what some of you are. I'm sorry. But the reality is, you are so smart that you're dumb.

01:43:21

Because you don't see that you're wasting your time on stuff that isn't going to make any difference.

01:43:29

There you go. Well, all right, we almost made it to a mega edition of The Dividing Line there.

01:43:35

Not quite, but close enough. But hey, had to point those things out. And hopefully some people will be excited about that Shoemaker stuff as we get around to it.

01:43:45

So we will see you next time on The Dividing Line. Don't ask me when it's going to be, but we will let you know.