Systematic Theology (part 2)

Well, good morning, everyone. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, we started to take a look at our summer series, which is gonna be on systematic theology.

Steve wasn't done yet. There were a couple more weeks of looking at simply Trinity, but Mike is leaving this week, which means that it is time to start our summer series.

So we're gonna be looking at systematic theology, primarily using Louis Burkhoff's book. That's this one.

I got a very apologetic message from Ben Roberts. I think he texted me even this morning that for the first time ever, whoever it is that we order books from sent him the wrong books.

Not the best time for that, but I'm sure he's working on getting some more of these Louis Burkhoff's systematic theology.

We also have the high schoolers with us. Woo -hoo, go high schoolers. If you are a high schooler and you don't have this book, come see me after class.

Yeah, I think I made a comment last time about the incredible cover design of Burkhoff, but knowing

God's truth, it has two circles. It's much nicer, I guess. I don't know. But it is even more,

I find Burkhoff to be readable. I think that Nielsen's book is even more readable. But yeah, so this is for the high schoolers.

Although if you are daunted by Burkhoff, it is acceptable for an adult to read this. It would be okay.

I will add a third recommendation, which is another introduction to systematic theology that I really like.

Everyone's a Theologian from R .C. Sproul. You may have heard of him. This is an excellent book. This is a little bit less interactive.

There's a lot of pause and pray, pause and think about this question, do this stuff, whatever. There's actually a workbook that goes along with this.

So if you don't wanna stop and start so much, you just wanna read systematic theology,

Everyone's a Theologian by R .C. It's pretty good. I even quote him in our lesson today.

All right, so we're running a little late. And I have a ridiculous amount of content.

I'm just gonna apologize now. I will probably be skipping stuff. This will probably sound a little bit disjointed.

I was texting with Corey, mostly yesterday, but a little bit through the week saying like, man, I don't know,

I got a lot to go and I'm already halfway through what I have allotted. So I ended up chopping off like literally half the lesson.

I just said goodbye, but we're still, yeah. All right, let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for this morning.

We just thank you, Lord, that we can come together in this place to worship you. Father, we know that worship is found in many forms through study and discussion,

Father, through singing, which we know, Lord, but also proclaiming the word of God, listening to the word of God proclaimed.

We praise you for BBC, this light in Massachusetts, for Pastor Mike, for Pastor Steve, Lord, and all of the ministries that go on, even a men's breakfast yesterday.

I just thank you, Father, for all that we have here and I pray that it would all glorify you.

In your name we pray, amen. All right, okay, so our goal for the summer is to help you get comfortable looking at theology in a systematic way.

Okay, we all have Bibles, I hope, and we all read our

Bibles, I hope, but a Bible is not a systematic theology, and I can say that with confidence because Pastor Mike said that last week, so I'm okay.

So when we started a couple of weeks ago, we're gonna do a very quick review. We talked about what systematic theology was.

What is systematic theology? Does anybody wanna hazard an attempt, and by the way, if you have your quiz from before,

I didn't do a quiz because I heard the copier wasn't working, I hope that's been resolved, but I just didn't wanna take a chance, so there is no handout this week, but if you have your quiz, you might be able to cheat.

Cheating's okay in this context. So what is systematic theology? Go ahead, yeah, so it's a systematic look at a given doctrine or set of doctrines and how the understanding of that doctrine has progressed over time, how a doctrine has been understood through history.

Here's the official Lexham dictionary definition. Lexham's not super, whatever, anyway.

An approach to the Bible that seeks to draw biblical teachings and themes into a self -consistent, coherent whole in conversation with the history of Christian theological reflection and contemporary issues confronting the church.

This is distinct from, yet related to, the approach of biblical theology, which focuses on the development of theological themes within individual books of the

Bible across one or both Testaments. The practice of biblical theology is often more closely intertwined with the practice of biblical studies, whereas systematic theology is usually viewed as a discipline that goes beyond the scope of biblical studies into church history, philosophy, and pastoral application.

I didn't expect you, Ms. Cooley, to say all of that, so. I said better than what I did last time.

You were, it was great, you were great! You were great, I do not worry about you. And what we're gonna see today, if we get to it, is some looks over history, some ways in which understandings have evolved well and poorly.

All right, so we talked about dogma. Anybody remember dogma? We talked about religious dogma.

What is dogma? Now, let's not see the same hands. What is dogma?

We talk about doctrine a lot, right? The word doctrine comes up in our jargon frequently, but what is dogma?

And are they the same thing, by the way? Sure, yeah. So this is, dogma is what it is.

There's no black and white, there's no gray area, and that's absolutely correct. So dogma would be, we would call it a self -evident truth derived from Scripture, where we would look at it and we would say, okay, well,

Jesus was crucified. That is a dogma. There's no conversation about whether or not that happened, again, in the context of Scripture, right?

Berkhoff defines three characteristics. He says their subject matter is derived from Scripture, they are the fruit of the reflection of the

Church on the truth as it is revealed in the Bible, and they are officially adopted by some competent ecclesiastical body.

I like the word competent being included there. All right, are dogma and doctrine the same thing?

No, they are not the same thing, okay. What's the difference between dogma and doctrine?

Anyone remember? This is cool. That's fine, I said everybody could cheat.

Everybody should have notes. Oh, that speaks right to my heart as an engineer.

Yeah, dogma is something that we can look at. It's undeniable, right? Doctrine is a step back. It is a gathering of dogmas to create a cohesive theological understanding.

So from this, we can best understand in the building of our theology, when we look at dogma, doctrine, and dogmatics, right?

Dogmatics is the method by which we assess the dogmas. We assess the clearly evident truths to create doctrine, to build doctrine.

So we have this idea that we have observable truths, and we have a process by which we observe those truths, and through this observation of truth, we build what are essentially theories, which we can then test through additional analysis of the truth.

What does that sound like? Somebody said this last week.

Science. Stand back, I'm about to try science. This is the foundation of science.

That's a scientific method. Here we have theology, the study of God. All right, so for those of you high schoolers that have the book and have actually read some of it, the very beginning of the chapter on theology,

Nielsen says, as you read this book, you are going to be learning and doing theology.

Learning and doing theology. It's not a separate thing. Theology is something that we do.

We study God. Then we got into some weird

Latin terms. We talked about the principium ascendi, the primary source of being, which is God, and from that, the principium cognoscendi externum, the foundational source of knowledge, which is scripture, right, in the context of the church.

God provides scripture, revelation, and everything else that we understand, those dogmas, those doctrines, all that stuff, derives from that.

We talk about a lot more stuff on, read the, go watch the video or something from two weeks ago, three weeks ago.

Our goal today is to cover some more of the introduction, and I pulled a bunch of bullet points out of this because as I was going along,

I realized we had no chance. Today, we're gonna talk about religion, and we are gonna talk a little bit more about the principium cognoscendi externum, which is what?

I just said it. What is that? It's a massive Scrabble word.

Well, it's three words in the Latin, and I don't think you're allowed to use Latin in Scrabble, but maybe in special Scrabble.

Scripture, yes, yes, so we're talking about scripture. It is the primary way by which we can understand the truths of God.

I would also say, by the way, if and when we do get more copies of the book, I know Ben's working on it.

Ben, I already told everybody that you sent me a message this morning. It's not your fault this time.

I'm just kidding, I love Ben. I love Ben and his ministry so much. So we're working on getting those. We'll get that figured out, but it is a 200 -page introduction.

It's worth it. It's pretty heavy, but I'm not gonna get anywhere near through all of it.

All right, so high schoolers, read chapter two this week to catch up, and then,

I don't know. Cory, do you know what you're teaching on next week? The name of God. What's that? The doctrine of God.

The doctrine of God. So open up your book, look at the chapters, figure it out.

You're high schoolers. You're almost adults. All right, so let's talk about religion, shall we?

Figure we're here. So there's many thoughts about where this word religion comes from, but most scholars believe that it logically proceeds from Cicero, who lived 50 to 100 years before Christ.

In his use, it comes from the word religere, which I'm confident that I've mispronounced, which means to reread, to repeat, and to carefully observe.

To reread, to repeat, and to carefully observe. And if you think about it, the word religious in a secular context means what?

Can somebody use the word religious in a sentence that does not refer to the church? Anyone?

I have a modest example here. Yeah, that does not involve the church.

We think about the way that it can be used. At the gym, or going to the store, or going fishing, right, or one of these things.

And what does that mean? It means that they're consistent. They do it over and over again, right?

It's regular with repetition, right? So certainly, when we look at this definition, it tracks, right?

We kind of understand that. And again, this is that look in history of where these words come from.

But there's no doubt that the roots of religion are not in the secular, but in the sacred.

This is what Burkhoff says. He says, there is a very close relation between religion and theology.

This is evident from the very fact that many regard theology as the science of religion. While this is certainly a mistake, the fact remains that the two are inseparably connected.

There is no such thing as theology apart from religion. Religion consists in a real, living, and conscious relationship between a man and his

God, determined by the self -revelation of God, and expressing itself in a life of worship, fellowship, and service.

Okay, one furrowed brow means I can continue. Religion and theology are tied together at the hip.

So we'll start looking at this idea of religion by looking at, more Latin, the term religio objectiva.

Now, anybody wanna guess what that means? The object of your religion. Imagine that, right?

I wouldn't have asked the question if I didn't think it was relatively self -evident. That which determines the nature of man's religion, the object of man's religion, which is what?

The revelation of God, right? That's how we know him. We talk a lot about language of accommodation, and that's exactly what scripture is.

This is the method by which we know who God is, right? This idea is consistent. When we look at scripture, and we look at words that would convey the same idea, in the

Old Testament, we see things like law, or precepts, or commandments.

In the New Testament, we would see this idea manifest with the gospel, right?

So we have religio objectiva, and then we have religio subjectiva, which is our response to that, right?

So the objectiva, the object, right? It's something that is external from us. It is something that does not change.

Our response to it, right? What do you think would be words, maybe, in scripture that would kind of describe this?

Our response to the law, commandments, gospel, praise, worship, obedience, reverence towards God, godliness, faith, all of these things, right?

Now, we get to look back. We get to look at how this understanding of religion is spelled out, because if we start at scripture, by the way, does anybody, can anybody think of an example of religion, the word religion being used in scripture, in the

English, at least? James 1, 26, if anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

So, it's weird because in here, the working out of religion is not worship, praise, it is service through obedience because of who we are, by extension, in Christ, right?

Interestingly, the same word here, it's the word that we have in James, is in Colossians 2, talking about worship.

The same word is translated, not religion or religious, but worship, and in that case, it's talking about the worship of angels, right?

So, it's very clearly an action word, right, that is not necessarily coupled with righteous action, it's just an action word, it's a verb.

So, scripturally, we see the word religion being used to describe a practiced working out of reverence, likely with repetition involved.

Lactantius, in the post -scripture early church, described religion as, quote, the right manner of knowing and serving the true

God. Again, that's action, right? That's not a kind of a like, oh, well,

I hate religion because they do blah, blah, blah, right? Like, that's what we hear, right? I'm spiritual, but I hate religion, right?

You know, this idea, it's not an institution, right?

It is an action, it is an active thing. He doesn't really define, at least in this brief passage that Burkhoff is talking about, what the right manner is, but at this time, religion is still closely tied to scripture, it's still tied to the religio objectiva, and so we can take from this, saying, okay, where do you understand the right manner of knowing and serving the true

God? Do you understand that from scripture? Then we talk about the

Middle Ages. Ah, the Middle Ages, the Church of Rome. And this is where the balance shifted and it becomes a much more of an external idea, right?

This idea of religion as this external thing. And I'll get into some of this, don't worry.

This is where we see the Church of Rome doing a lot of what the Pharisees essentially did, right? That's what the Pharisees did. They would stand there and say, thank you,

God, I'm not like this tax collector. They would have these external showings that are ostensibly derived from some sort of Old Testament scriptural basis, but really it's about the external, it's about that action.

And that's what this term religion began to evolve to refer to. Scripture is still said to be the basis for all the actions of the

Church and all the Church tradition, but you gotta remember what's going on in the Middle Ages. What are the common people doing in the

Middle Ages when they go to church? What are they hearing? They're hearing Latin. Do they know

Latin? No, probably not. I mean, maybe some of them heard like a word, right?

It's like when I come up and I'm like, oh, this Greek word, blah, blah, blah, means blah, blah, blah, I can't speak Greek. Like, let's be clear. No matter what, if I suggest something, it's probably because I was studying it for a while.

I can't speak Greek. They can't speak Latin. Can they read? No, they can't read.

So, it's not like they're studying scriptures. They can't do that.

They couldn't base their religio subjectiva on scripture because they couldn't read it.

Everything that they had, their truth about God was a study diet of what the

Roman Catholic Church would teach them. Certain church scholars at the time, and like Aquinas, would hearken back to scriptural truth when discussing religion, but the pre -reformational church was a church of tradition.

One man famously said that religion is not a matter of feeling, it is a matter of the will and of action, and consists in following out the principles that God has laid down.

Which, of course, the common people would only get through the Catholic Church. And they had no ability to discern between what was scripture and what was.

So here we see religion being further defined as this kind of personal external outworking of theology and doctrine.

Unsurprisingly, Reformation comes along, right? And we see a call to reclaim the inner conviction of scripture and our relationship with God through the external working out of religion.

This is Calvin. Such is pure and genuine religion. Sounds almost like James, right? Namely, confidence in God coupled with serious fear.

Fear, which both includes in it willing reverence and brings along with it such legitimate worship as is prescribed by the law.

And it ought to be more carefully considered that all men promiscuously do homage to God, but very few reverence him.

Talking about what's going on at that time, right? They do homage to him, but they don't revere him.

On all hands, there is an abundance, this is very Calvin. On all hands, there is an abundance of ostentatious ceremonies, but sincerity of heart is rare, all right?

So religion has become this thing where there's this external outworking going through the motions, and there's no internal conviction.

I mean, if that's not a condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church, I don't really know what is, but we look at this and we see it today, right?

The religio objectiva remains scripture, but Calvin repoints the subjectiva, the religio subjectiva, to refer to the dispositions of the heart as it falls to sin and is restored by the spirit.

It's not really a surprise that the reformers sought to redefine our obligation in religion to address the whole state of man from sinfulness through salvation, but the

Church of Rome clearly, they just expected a response to what they declared to be the truth, right?

Oh, you've confessed, say, 17 Hail Marys, and I don't know what all those things are. I don't know what the Ave Maria is.

I don't know. I don't know what you're supposed to say. I never went to confession, so I don't know, but there's this very, very transactional idea to the

Catholic Church, and it has nothing to do with your inner heart disposition and everything to do with just do the thing, put this key in that shape lock and whatever.

I don't know. Finally, Burkhoff moves on to the modern conception of religion, which is honestly,

I think, the biggest mess. We come to rationalism, 17th century.

This is Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, different Kant than the Kant we have here. Don't worry. This is the epistemological view, say that five times fast, that regards, listen, reason as the chief source and test of knowledge.

Reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. Never a theological or even really religious concept, but its cultural influence changed the church.

Religion stopped viewing the religio objectiva as purely God's revelation. Remember, until now, religio objectiva, that's

God's revelation, that's scripture. We just kind of assumed that. Now this is changing, at least in this context.

Now, instead of it being scripture, it is God, virtue, and immortality. Kant and Schleiermacher began to redefine what modern theology and religion represented.

For reference, Schleiermacher is referred to as the father of modern liberal theology.

I'm not gonna dig into all of these. I will give you just the prefix note here. All of these definitions of religion are bad.

So just, Arnold, morality touched with emotion. Reinach, a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties.

I hear that now, right? Oh, I don't wanna go to church, it's a bunch of rules.

Right, that's what that is. Hofding, faith in the conservation of values.

That's a very subjective idea of what this, of what the religio objectiva and even religion is.

And then James, not Bible James, different James. The belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies harmoniously, lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.

So when we talk about sanctification, what is sanctification? Come on, this is an easy one.

This is a softball question. What is sanctification? Becoming more like Christ, thank you. Thankfully Bev Kranz is here.

Becoming more like Christ. Whereas this says we need to harmoniously adjust ourselves thereto this unseen order, right?

That's the same kind of an idea, but it's very misdirected. None of these definitions talk about God.

None of them talk about objective truth. None of them talk about scripture. And there's more, again, read the book when you can get it.

We move on. We move on from religion into revelation. I'm skipping some stuff.

So if something doesn't make sense, please come talk to me after. At the beginning of the chapter in Revelation, Berkhoff talks about the fact that every religion in the world has some sort of defined revelation, whether it is

Christianity with the Bible, or even Buddhism, because they basically revere

Buddha, and anything that Buddha says is pretty much revelation. At the bottom of the quiz from a couple of weeks ago,

I can email the quiz out, by the way. I still have it. There was a grid that we put out there, and we talked about the

Principium Cognizante Externum of theology and the non -theological sciences.

So if we remember, the Principium Cognizante Externum is basically the source of truth, the method by which we discern things.

And what did we say? Does anybody have their sheet in front of them? I asked that question because I know the answer is yes.

Was the, can I say just, whatever, Principium Cognizante Externum of the non -theological sciences.

The world, nature, right? The observable world, and then of theology, the

PCE, as I will call it from now until the end of this lesson, is scripture, which we've already kind of talked about.

All right, so I want to focus our conversation, because if we just talk about Revelation in general, we'll be here all day, and we don't have time for that.

So we're going to talk about the context of Christian theology, okay? So I don't want you to get distracted. This is a scope conversation.

The variable is Christian theology. That's where we're going to stay. But again, read the book, please.

The idea of divine revelation for us assumes a few things. By the way, if anybody has any questions, just raise your hand. I will stop,

I promise. The idea of divine revelation assumes a few things.

Number one, if there is divine revelation, that means that there is a personal God who actively communicates knowledge, right?

That makes sense. Number two, there are truths, facts, and events which would not be known without divine or special revelation.

Number three, there are rational beings to whom the revelation is made who are capable of appropriating it.

Eh, I've been on Facebook, right? So those are some kind of presuppositions.

As we look at divine revelation, someone's got to give it. Someone's got to give it in a way that makes sense.

There are things we wouldn't know without it, and someone's got to understand it, right? Pretty simple.

So up until the popularization of rationalism, which threw everything out the window, there were generally two distinct forms of revelation.

And we still actually use this definition even today. We talk about the revelation of God in nature, and then we talk about special revelation.

All right, common, special, there's a couple different words that we use. And up until the 17th century, really the only disagreement that you would have would be where you would draw that line, like what constitutes things that you would learn from nature, and what are things that you absolutely need special revelation for.

And obviously there are certain things like clearly the gospel require is a special revelation situation, right? But like, what about some of the things in between?

Like, well, we can clearly see from nature that God superintends everything, there is order in the world.

So does that, can we presume from that that God knows everything about us because he clearly is maintaining all of creation?

Like those are the kinds of things where like, you could say, well, no, you don't know that he knows everything about you because you've got free will. And then on the other side, you might say, well,

God knows everything about you because God is sovereign. So that line was basically the primary part of the debate with regards to common versus special revelation, pre -rationalism.

But these rationalists are so incredibly hubristic and arrogant.

Listen to this quote. The idea was that the light of nature is quite sufficient for man.

This is the premise of rationalism. And that the Christian revelation really adds nothing to it but is merely a republication of the truths of nature for the benefit of those, listen, for the benefit of those who cannot discover or reason things out for themselves.

I didn't say it, I'm reading the quote. The idea that Christian revelation is a republication of the truths of nature for the benefit of those who cannot discover or reason things out for themselves.

What does this idea suggest about Christians? What does this sound like to you?

It sounds like 1 Corinthians 1 to me. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful.

Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. So I use the word rationalism.

This is the enlightenment, right? That's this period of time. I mentioned some of these guys

Kant and Schleiermacher and their influences on revelation. Just like their influences on religion, they follow

Descartes, they follow rationalism. They blended the ideas of natural and special revelation suggesting that they were both equally valid ways to understand

God. Is that true? Yes, no.

Is that true? No, okay, I'm trying to ask some easy questions to make sure that people are engaged. Steve, the dark ages, right?

Yeah, so Steve just said this idea of the enlightenment is really a kind of a repositioning of world perspectives with man at the center, not

God at the center, right? Listen to this quote. Both of these men,

Kant and Schleiermacher, are quote, convinced that the only argument capable of reaching deity is one that starts not from external, but from human, from nature.

And they believe too that it is in human nature and not in its abeyance, in trance or dream or frenzy, that God characteristically reveals himself.

God reveals himself through human nature. I hope not, is a great answer.

Well, I'll skip my next paragraph. I need you to not read my notes, but you're 100 % right.

This is what the Greeks did, right? You think about Greek gods. Greek gods were magnified humans in every way, in good and bad.

They were the strongest, they were the fastest. Anybody read any Greek, other than Asher, oh,

Asher's not here, Greek god creation myth? That's weird stuff, really weird. Steve?

I mean, it's fun, right? We read about Superman too, you know? But it's weird, it's very, very odd.

And just like Anitra said, it's a repackaging of all of this stuff that we've seen before, which brings us to some modern views on revelation.

Again, I'm skipping stuff, so if something doesn't make sense, please come talk to me afterwards. Okay, deism, the deistic concept of revelation, which is essentially the evolution of what we just talked about.

What does a deist believe? Right, God created the world.

He's kind of like kicked the ball off the hill and walked away, right? He's no longer involved. He created everything, okay, sure, fine, you want creation, fine, but he doesn't get involved.

Right? So the logical conclusion of the deist position is that you can observe the world and understand all of revelation.

Because if he's not around to give you special revelation, then the only revelation that exists is what he created at the beginning, right?

Thumbs up, thumbs down. Thumbs up, thumbs up, you like that idea?

You think that that's good, that God did not give special revelation? No, no, no, it makes sense. Oh, okay, good, woo, all right, woo.

I was a little nervous about this. This is the guy who's teaching the high school kids. Okay, it makes sense.

But this is a bad thing. Thumbs down, deism, bad. He just doesn't care.

He's just like, he's gonna watch it. There's also, like, I mean, maybe there's this idea of open theism that goes along with deism, too, where it's like God's just watching.

This is like the Michael Jackson gif with the popcorn, right, he's just like, oh, look at these guys.

This is amazing, right? He's not involved. So, I mean, if he came back, it wouldn't be because of anything we did.

Yeah, so, I mean, sure. Well, I mean, there's a good thing to that, which is that at least there's some kind of comprehension of the otherness of God, right?

Like that he's fundamentally unlike us. But we want a God that is closer than our brother, don't we?

I mean, that's a scary thing. But I also think that, and I certainly don't mean to speak ill of your dad, but.

I think you should address it to him. Okay, well, you know. No problem. A lot of that is pride.

It's like, how could we possibly allow God to have influence on our own lives?

They're our lives, I can do what I want, right? There's that kind of an idea. Yeah. Okay, so we have deism.

Any other, did I miss anything? Okay, then we have idealism. You know what idealism means?

The beliefs of the idealists. I think we most prominently see this in Christian scientists who are famously neither

Christian nor scientists. Unlike deism, which suggests that we could discern from natural revelation everything we need to know about God, theological idealism stresses the imminence of God in all things, which is different from this idea that God just kicks things off.

But it's far beyond what it ought to be.

It kind of sounds good, right? But it almost is this pantheism kind of an idea, where God is in everything.

It rejects special revelation, like deism, for the same reason, because if God is in everything, then surely you can discern what you need to know from God, because he's in everything, right?

So there's clearly issues there, because there is a rejection of special revelation. There's a rejection of scripture.

That's a problem. And there's more. There's the Barthian theology and crisis and some other stuff that I'm just gonna skip.

All right. Yes, ma 'am. Yeah, I mean, what

Christine said is absolutely true. It is important to understand some of these things, because it helps us in our own discernment.

When we look at scripture, when we talk to family, because let's face it, family that are like, well,

I'm spiritual, I go to church, I kind of think that God's in everything, right? I guarantee you that person's not studying idealist scholars.

They think they've drummed this up on their own, right? So there are no well -formed beliefs that are influencing these kinds of perspectives.

Yeah, or maybe something in school. Sure, sure, sure, right.

That's a surefire way to discern the truth, right? It's to figure out, you know, okay.

Yeah. All right, well, I have, that clock's wrong.

I have like five minutes left and nine more pages. So let's see what we can do.

All right. My watch and my iPad both play 944, and that says 933.

So yeah, okay. As we try to wrap up this segment, we're talking about the revelation of God.

There's more stuff. We're just gonna skip the rest of this. Now we can take a look at something called the proper conception of the nature of revelation.

What is the proper conception of the nature of revelation? This is what the

Council of Nicaea wrestled with. This is, how do you know what you know?

It goes beyond epistemology, but how do you know what is divine revelation?

Because remember, we're looking at this in the context of Christian revelation. How do you know, how do you understand what is the closed canon?

Like the white smoke didn't self -generate. They had to burn the right thing to make the white smoke. So how did they figure out when they were or were not to burn the stuff for the white smoke?

Like how do we figure this stuff out? If anybody has done a study in apologetics, which

I'm sure some of you have, you know that you have to start an argument or a position with some fundamental presuppositions.

You have to. It's the only way this works. That makes this idea that we're trying to independently verify the validity of supernatural revelation without anything supernatural very difficult.

It's hard to do. And so there's two methods for this. There's the historical method and there's the theological method.

The historical method would suggest that one should set themselves outside of any religion, put aside any presuppositions they have, observe the claims of each of these bases of faith, bases of religion, and determine, discern from them their accuracy in a historical context.

Some would say that this is the only way that you could possibly truly determine what revelation is. But there are problems with that.

Can anybody think of any problems with trying to do this? There's lots of them actually.

Sure, we can't actually completely disassociate ourselves.

I say this all the time. We are a product of our experience. That is who we are. There is, we are not objective.

Like human beings are not and will never be objective. It's not possible for us to be truly objective. And the idea that we would even try to do this goes back to that hubris that I talked about before.

Like we don't have the capacity for this. We can only understand things through the lens of our own experience.

Like how do I know that my red is the same as your red? I have no idea. And there's really no way to prove it either, right? We just don't know.

And that's a very simple example, Janet. Right, as you study these, what is the measuring stick?

You need to have a measuring stick. But if you're trying to figure this out without a measuring stick, like how do you do it?

It's like the whole thing with time, right? There's the atomic clock on Earth and there's an atomic clock on some satellite and they don't agree with each other, but they're atomic clocks.

And the atomic clock is the most accurate thing we have. So how do we figure out what time? I don't even know. Like that clock, it's obviously wrong.

All right, so number one, yeah, we are a product of our experience. True neutrality is impossible because everything we understand comes from the experience that defines who we are.

And the second one, which is kind of similar thing, if that were possible, if we could actually step outside, if we had no presuppositions, we would have no standard by which to judge the claims because there's nothing objective in that position, in this method.

You don't have a litmus test to judge against. And even having that test would require that you would presuppose that that litmus test would be accurate.

Right? Circular, huh. Christine just said the word circular.

That's interesting. So there's problems with this historical method. I'm just gonna wrap up with just a touch on the theological method and skip the rest of my notes.

By the way, I asked Corey if I could have another week and he said, no, so read the book. Okay, theological method of determining revelation.

Theological method is reliant on its own revelation. Question, how do we know

God is God? I'm sorry, I heard

Gungus miss, I didn't hear it. Because he says so. How do we know that what

God says is true? Because he says so, right? I should use that at home.

It doesn't work. The truth is that the issues that crop up during the historical method are no less present when we analyze things with the theological method.

But the theological method comes with a presupposition that whatever the

Principia Ascendi, namely Yahweh, whatever he says is true, is true.

That's the presupposition. Burkoff writes, it will of course be so that in following this method, the theological method of procedure, we are also reasoning in a circle.

You could write a systematic theology, yeah. And we frankly admit this, but it is the same kind of circle as that in which the scientist moves when he turns to the earth in order to learn what really constitutes it.

You have to have some kind of litmus test that you presuppose is accurate. And so we are generally reliant on the theological method for determining divine revelation.

The next topic are the distinctions that apply to revelation, talking about general revelation, talking about special revelation.

The problems with general revelation, there's no presentation of Jesus Christ in general revelation.

We can learn a lot about God, but we can't learn about Christ. By general revelation, we receive some knowledge of God, of his power, goodness, and wisdom, but we do not learn to know

Christ, the highest revelation of God in his redemptive work and in his transforming power.

The irony is that Descartes, when he was drumming up this whole rationalism thing, was ostensibly a

Christian looking to prove the existence of God through things that human beings could observe. And in doing so, he messed everything up, right?

Again, this idea that Descartes had was based on a presupposition that people were generally perfect, were generally able to discern things, because, and we talk about this, by the way, scripture is true, scripture is infallible.

Our interpretation of scripture is not infallible. Sure, so Steve said that Descartes was, the horse was involved, but that's a different thing.

Essentially, Pelagian, in the sense that in order for him to believe that we could possibly discern these things from general revelation, he had to assume that there was no original sin that would corrupt us, right?

And obviously, for many reasons that I'm not gonna get into, that clearly is not the case.

So, I'm just gonna stop there. Sorry, notes. All right, that's gonna be it.

Next week, Corey will be teaching for a couple weeks, and then, again, I've said this before, I'll say it again, if there are systematic theology topics that you would like us to cover, please email me or Corey.

I made a gentleman's wager with someone, I don't even remember who it was, so I can't shame them, on the over -under on the number of emails

I would receive. I think it was three, I took the under, and I got zero, so I win. Please, if there is something that you would like other people to study on your behalf and talk about, let us know, and we would be happy to do so.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for this opportunity to look at your word, to look at the history of understanding as it comes to the revelation that you have given to us.

Help us, Lord, to rightly discern truth from error. Help us, Father, to glory in the special revelation that you have given us in scripture.

Help us, Lord, to remember that your Son, Jesus Christ, is the incarnate word, and he is to be treasured.