Theological Standpoints

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the.

Podcast. Thank you. I'm Dylan Hampton and with me are Michael Durham, David Kazin, and Andrew Hudson. Today we have a question sent in from one of our listeners. The question reads, I would love to know how you each would categorize yourself theologically and how you came to hold these views.

Michael, would you mind letting the audience know how we're going to answer this? Yeah, so.

We discussed how we're going to try to approach this. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to name a very broad category of doctrine and then we're going to talk about which side of the issue we're on and why.

I think this will move us along at a fairly good rate and also avoid any overly technical terminology unless we want to bring it up and then define it. So starting off, I think classically we should just start with our view of the Bible and I'm going to split it up into two camps.

Hermeneutic of Submission Versus Hermeneutic of Suspicion

Okay, how about hermeneutic? Hermeneutic is the way we see things, the way we interpret things. So when you come to the Bible, do you have a hermeneutic of suspicion or a hermeneutic of submission? What's the difference?

Hermeneutic of suspicion is something that you might do when you read a book and you kind of trying to figure out what is this author really up to and, you know, are they really making their points well or they, you know, they have an agenda or here's their mistakes and so on.

Versus a hermeneutic of submission, I'm coming to.

This text as my authority. Well, I think most of us would, if you're going to put it into those two camps, then we would be hermeneutic of submission, which is the appropriate response to the divinely inspired Word of God.

So because we hold to this is the Word of God as given to us through the words of men, then we say, all right, yes. So we take it and accept it. But the hermeneutic of suspicion has an appeal where you say, well, I want to really get to what this author was saying.

That's not the same thing. Getting to what this author was truly saying is the original author to the original audience. How does it apply? It's still submission, right? So we're not just reading it and then repeating it as if it's a mantra.

That is not submission. You have to have an understanding, a rational intellectual understanding in order to submit and follow. So hopefully that's clarifying. Which the Bible itself commends. The Bible is a revelatory experience and reveals something about humanity that humanity doesn't know of itself in and of itself.

So I guess maybe there's some anthropology and some epistemology wrapped up into that, which we'll get to.

But it is the truth as revealed by the truth teller. I'm into that submission.

All the way. Yeah, so when you think about the ways in which the Bible is treated wrongly, it all comes from the hermeneutic of suspicion. So when people are claiming that there are errors in the Bible, or failures in the Bible, the Bible isn't clear, or the Bible is outmoded, outdated, not for us in some fashion.

All of these things come from a hermeneutic of suspicion. Hermeneutic of submission is not going to entertain those approaches, right? We're gonna come to the Word of God and say, you know, what I find here is true.

It is good. It is profitable. It matters. Here's the scepter of Christ's authority in our lives. So that's two different approaches to the Bible. We start there because we come to know the particulars about God, and man, and salvation, and you know everything else that's pertinent to theology and thus to all of our lives, we learn that from the scriptures.

The Sovereignty and Trinity of God

So moving on from how we approach the Bible, we could ask the question, what do we think about God? Which is again, you know, a massive question, but here's a pertinent one. Do.

We see God as sovereign or limited? I would hold that God is sovereign and outside of his creation. So we have, you know, often we say, you know, two-ism and one-ism, that God exists as creator and has created all that is outside of himself.

It is not one with creation, which is one-ism or pantheism. We are theists, where God creates, and he has absolute sovereign control over his creation, and as the Word of God says, that he knows the end from the beginning, that no one resists his will.

He knows what's going to happen in the future because he causes it. The creator-creation distinction, I think, is very appropriate. You also have, as revealed in his Word, what we describe as Trinitarian, or the Trinity, as God's revelation of his personhood.

Amen.

Sovereign Godhead. Yeah, so when we think about who God is, as revealed in the scriptures, we have been helped by our spiritual ancestors to talk about the character of God and the nature of God, the characteristics of God, and that the fact that he is God is love, he is merciful, he is righteous, he's faithful, and but also we can talk about the attributes of God, that he's eternal, he's unchanging, he's self-existent.

Impeccable. Yeah, impeccable, and we can talk about all of those things. Now, when we think about these things and meditate on these things, we're led to worship. As Proverbs talks about, a word that he's spoken is like apples of gold and settings of silver.

That's what happens when we begin to take up the character of God and the attributes of God and bring them together. Not only is he holy, he's eternally holy. Not only is he merciful, but he is unchangingly merciful.

You know, we begin to bring those things together and we begin to meditate on and worship and rejoice in this God who has made us and is bigger than us and beyond us and yet has condescended to us. And he's made this in his image.

The Image of God and Human Depravity

So that moves us on to mankind, our anthropology, as we would use a different term. But when we think about man, we could split it up in a couple of different ways, but let's just do this. Is.

Man basically good or is man basically depraved? By basic, you mean at the base level? At the base level, man is depraved. Yeah, well if we use the term.

Radical in terms of meaning to the root. Oh. Radically depraved. Begins in the heart,.

Right? Yeah. The heart is exceedingly wicked. Who could know it? Right. Yeah,.

Some have phrased it this way, that we are not all as bad as we possibly could be, but there's no aspect of our humanity that is not tainted by sin. That every aspect of ourselves, our mental, physical, our will, our moral compass, if you want understanding of our creation itself, all of it, every aspect of our humanity is in some way marred by sin.

Not fully depraved in magnitude, but in totality.

And not in magnitude because it shows his mercy on us. Amen. You know, it gives us, when we don't have the fullness of what we could be, we're being shown something about God as well. I think that's a interesting point on that.

And.

Given this negative description of mankind, depraved, wicked, unrighteous, so on and so forth, we recognize that there's a standard. We recognize that there's something that we're being compared against, right?

And of course we remember that God created Adam and Eve, created mankind in his own image, male and female, he created them. And he told them be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. And God making us in his own image puts us into a unique intersection between himself and one another in the created order to where we are to love God supremely, love each other rightly, and steward the creation and righteousness as well.

So we are made in the image of God and thus all sorts of things are true about us, whether we like it or not. We wear the uniform of God and if we rebel against him we fall short of the glory of God and the wages of this sin is death.

We are created in the image of God, thus the worship switch is hardwired on and we're always worshiping something or someone and we have to take an account of that. So when we think about the fact that God is sovereign and holy and good and immense and eternal and so on and that he has made us in his image and yet we are depraved, fallen in sin and radically depraved, then this brings us to the doctrine of salvation.

Salvation by Grace Alone Through Faith Alone in Christ Alone

When it comes to salvation we think of some terms that were saved by grace alone, through faith alone, by Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. So there's that option and the other option is we get rid of the alones.

What do you think? Yeah that's well said.

Well you have, hopefully those who are listening are seeing exactly what what we're doing. We're building the case, we're narrowing things down, but you started with the Word of God. So you said this is who, this is what the Word of God tells us who God is and this is what the Word of God tells us who, you know, what man is and the Word of God tells us about the standard and how far short mankind falls.

What does the Word of God say about salvation itself, this depraved person that's an image bearer of God, has a responsibility to worship, that worship is hardwired, is not worshiping, but is instead serving, you know, serving themselves.

Well if I can strike to the to the heart of it, pun intended, man's heart is completely turned away from God in rebellion to God in active rebellion. Yeah using Romans chapter 1 all the way through 8 you have humanity in and of themselves, left to themselves, worship anything other than God.

A purposeful, willful rebellion to God and you go all the way through, you know, Romans chapter 3, there is none righteous, no not one, no one seeks after God, no one does, all the way to Romans chapter 8 that no one submits to the law of God and is not even able to do so.

Right. So we have a doctrine of not just total depravity but an inability for human beings in and of themselves to repent, believe, even understand these things, you know, these things of God because our will, knowledge, the way we see things is so incredibly marred by our sin and our remaining, our remaining sin.

So we would have, if you want to put this into, want to put me into a category, then I would say that it would be, you know, Calvinist in that if you want to put a word on it, monergist would have to be the the word that I would use, that it can't be mankind doing it, it must be God from the outside doing it because we are unwilling to do so and unable to do so,.

Total inability. So monergism means a single work, right, the single energy, single effort there. All right, Andrew? I would just summarize from Colossians.

Chapter 1, he delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

It was what he did for us. Amen. Hearty amen to everything there. Yeah, when it.

Comes to these alones, I think it's very important that not only do we maintain them at the beginning, but we maintain them all the way through. The testimony of the Word of God is that we don't get to begin by the Spirit and continue by the flesh, and that when it's all said and done, we are in joy around the throne of God.

The praise is that salvation belongs to God and to the Lamb who's on the throne, and that our crowns are cast down before Him in glory to Him. So whether we're thinking about the beginning or the middle or the end of our salvation, the alones still matter.

We're saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and those alones matter all the way through. And so I think that that's a good way to talk about it. There are other particular facets we could talk about, and we'll leave those for after our last dichotomy that we can flesh out, and then if we have particulars we want to talk about, we'll talk about that at the end.

The Already-Not-Yet Triumph of Christ and the Future of History

The last one is, how's it gonna turn out? Good.

Or bad? I was given a note that I'm going first this time, so I'll go ahead and take a crack at it. Good. I think it's gonna turn out well. I think we've been told from the beginning of the Word we've been given that we find an errant that it's gonna turn out well.

I think the promises that were given to Abraham having their yes and amen in Christ will be fulfilled, and the seed will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and as numerous as the pebbles of sand on the beach.

So I'm of the mindset that it is going to be fruitful.

And not unfruitful. So we we've moved from God is the one who saves, and you had referenced it, why is God doing this? Well, you know, it's by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone, to the glory of God.

So however God is glorified, whether that is in punishing sin, distributing mercy, showing His holiness, showing His justice, showing His love, showing His grace, He is displaying His glory. And if the greatest good is God, then displaying His glory is serving the highest good.

So no matter what happens as far as numbers go, or percentages go, as far as the amount of humanity that's saved among the mass of humanity that's not, God is glorified, and that is good. So you're asking how things turn out.

It's going to be good, because God is good, and glorifying God is good. I'll just read from Revelation chapter 22. I'll start in verse 3. And there will no longer be any curse, and the throne of God and the Lamb will be in the city.

His servants will worship Him, and they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads, and night will be no more. And they will not need the light of a lamp, or the light of the sun, because the Lord God will shine on them, and they will reign forever and ever.

Forever and ever. It's.

Coming up all good. Yeah, so I think when it comes to how it all turns out, well, Jesus has risen from the dead, and He ascended at the right hand of the Father, and there He will reign until all of His enemies are made a footstool for His feet, and the last enemy is death.

And then He comes to give His kingdom and present His kingdom to the Father as completed, as the faithful servant who has accomplished all that the Father has given Him to do, so that God is glorified in all forever and ever.

So yeah, I think it turns out really well. I think Christ wins, and He wins big. So, I mean, we just went through some major theological categories. Hopefully that gives a better sense for the questioner where we're at.

Obviously, sometimes when we begin to talk about our theological positions, there's a lot of shorthand that is used in terms of theological terms, but I think that sometimes it's helpful to walk through doctrinal convictions in the way that we just did, because, boy, there's a lot of agreement and a lot of unity amongst the people of God about these matters.

How Each Speaker Came to These Views

So the second.

Part of this question was, how did you come to hold these views? So most of what we had talked about, most of the Church, as you said, has a lot of agreement. There's a, you know, you start diverging when you talk about the total inability of mankind, and then we talked about Christ being on His throne until all of His enemies are made of footstool for His feet and reigning now.

There's some implications to those things. So I would like to know, how did you guys come to a belief holding to God moving first, God saving us out of a mass of humanity that deserved punishment, as we all do, but God reaching down and changing that, because that's not where I started out.

Yeah, I didn't start out there either, and, you know, every, well, maybe not every Christian would define themselves as a Bible-believing Christian based on that hermeneutic of suspicion.

I believe Andy Stanley would defer from saying that. Yeah, exactly. He don't hitch.

Himself. But after further reading in the Bible, what I read didn't indicate that what I was doing was what made the difference. I wasn't the deciding party or factor in any of salvation, or that I was the one fulfilling God's plan for my life.

It was all what He was doing, and what He had done, and what is doing. When I read, whether it's Old Testament or New Testament, I don't see any room for my co-laboring with Him in anything good. All of what I see is the life of the Spirit at work in a vessel.

There's nothing good in and of myself, you know. In many ways, I feel like my spirit is tied to my flesh at times, where my flesh wants to do one thing, but my spirit is against that. I think we read about that in Romans.

Very often, I find this dichotomy between consistently failing on my own efforts, and Him succeeding in my weakness. Right, so we.

Would actually say that no human starts out a monergist, probably. We're all relying on our own works, and you only have monergism revealed to you. It's a humbling. Yeah, yeah. Then that's how I viewed it.

I went through a long period of synergism. When you really get down to it, it wasn't synergism, it was monergism of my own. Right, like so I believed solely in my own works, but I had not had certain passages revealed to me for most of my childhood, even within Sunday schools and sermons.

The centrality of God's work in salvation, and His work alone, was never preached or taught to me. In a sense, it was never really revealed to me, and I didn't do enough reading to have it revealed to me.

Then once I did enough reading, it was revealed. Yeah, and.

Growing up, I was taught that the starting point was, you have a free will, and God is still in control. There has to be a balance. All about the balance. I hear that often. It says, well, there's a balance.

There's always a balance in scripture, and that's, without going into too much history, that's all that is, is part of Western culture's love of Aristotle and the golden mean. You have an extreme position, you have another extreme position, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

That was my starting point, and I hear that often from other people that are on the opposite side of the spectrum of the more Arminian mindset. I hear all their reasons why it has to be a balance, an interchange between the two.

God doesn't want robots, and doesn't want this, and doesn't want this, but it's all coming from this logical, syllogistic argument from a point of origin. Their point of origin was that, okay, there has to be a balance.

I know that there is, because that's my starting point. When I gave that up and said, well, what's the starting? What does the scripture say? Okay, well, the scriptures talk about an elect, and then the scriptures talk about how we've exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and then the scriptures talk about that God's the one that grants repentance, and then the scriptures also talk about that you're unable to submit to the law of God, nor are you even able to do so.

Isn't repentance part of what God wants you to do, and you're in willful rebellion against him? And as I just kept reading and went, I don't like this. This goes against what I thought was true, and I have all these people that I respect and love that says, no, there has to be a balance between the two.

It says, no, your starting point is wrong. The starting point of the scripture, and that was our starting point for this whole discussion. It was a hermeneutic of submission to the Word of God that says, this is who you are, and this is who God is.

You're not gonna like this, but you're really bad, and God is really good, and when God saves you, changes you into an image of his son. He covers you with the blood of Christ, and it's okay that you didn't have a play in it.

It's better that you didn't. It's better that you didn't. You're not a robot. All of these emotional appeals to free will or anything else, in the end, the Bible clearly says, you are without God, and you will not submit.

You are in rebellion, and the only way you're gonna be saved is if he changes your will.

I was pretty much theologically novice. I didn't really have any depth of anything when I went to college, but I did know that the Bible was true, right, and God was big. You know, I knew those things.

Okay, when I got to college, which is America at Christian University here in town, my first professor was an open theist. You know, God doesn't know the future because humans haven't decided yet. My professors, they were, you know, talking about errors in the Bible.

I had a professor, he was a huge fan of Karl Barth, you know, orthodoxy, and I looked around at what was being taught, what was being preached in chapel, you know, God is your biggest fan kind of stuff, and then the lives of the students being discipled by this stuff, and I was like, well, I'm gonna go the opposite direction, you know, and the Providence of God ended up at a church where they constantly talked about that God is big and man is small, you know, and they taught the doctrines of grace.

I went out and bought a book, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination by Lorraine Boettner. Nice. Yeah, and I read that thing through cover-to-cover, and that was really helpful, but you know, there was one chapel service where somebody had invited a guy to come in to preach, and nobody really knew who he was, but he came in and he basically got up there and started preaching.

He said, you know, God is not your biggest fan. God is God's biggest fan. He loves and glorifies himself more than any other, and that's the way it has to be. Otherwise, he'd be an idolater, and just wrecked everybody out there.

I mean, they were just, they were, they didn't know what to do. I mean, they almost had to cancel school. I mean, it was like, so anyway. I had a better.

Vetting next time. It was an unrecorded Paul Washer moment. Yeah, it was pretty.

Amazing. I was like, yeah, there you go. So I was greatly helped by my local church. You know, there's fundamental convictions that were given to me by my father, who was my pastor, but those were tested, and it all came back to the scripture, and that's where my pastor in college talked to me about the battle for inerrancy.

The Bible is true, and that's where everything for me began. It's like, well, the Bible is true. It doesn't matter what's in there. It's true, and so I don't like it. It makes me uncomfortable. It doesn't matter.

It's true, and that's just how I began to move through the whole learning and growing up process. So I.

Will, hopefully this will stir the pot just a little bit. I have said before, as people have asked me about this podcast and the people that we have on, and not all of us are all in the room at the same time, but you know, I've said we're not monolithic.

We're not carbon copies of each other. We have a great deal of agreement, but I wanted to know, are there areas in which we disagree? Dylan? Is this like a Donald Rumsfeld unknown unknown moment? I don't.

Know if I don't know if they don't. Yeah, that's exactly what this is. We've avoided talking about it till this point, kind of thing. I don't know everyone's theological positions on every single jot and tittle, so I would say I'm sure that there are disagreements that we have.

I'm sure there are disagreements between even those of us who are closest in being carbon copies, because that's, you can't avoid the disagreements on stuff, and my disagreements would probably be something that are beyond tertiary with you guys, I would think, and.

In certain cases. So I've got one. You got one? Yeah. The other day, Michael had said something about dogs dying and not going to heaven. Hey, now, is that real fight? Is that is that scripture guys? See, I watched that.

Movie, and there was a lot of theological issues. I noticed all dogs go.

To heaven. That's the movie being reverie pastoral to say that the people's loved ones, loved pets, don't go to heaven. How dare you? Oh, man. We have, we'll reference old Baptist confessions. We'll reference Philadelphia, the 1689 and the 1644, which I actually carried a copy of the 1689 for a while.

I now have the 1644 just in my bio. I think it's a really good summary and a good historical work and something that Baptists in particular should be familiar with. But I am not confessional with the 1689, and I'm not Sabbatarian.

And there are reasons for that. But I did want to see where you guys stood on Ten Commandments, Sabbath-keeping, and then the confessional. Because somebody asked me, are you a Reformed Baptist? I said, well, technically, no, because I didn't sign the 1689 in my own blood.

I mean, it's not something that I adhere to, but I do like the ideas of confessions, but I can't be a full subscriber to any of those. I had a 1689 coffee mug, but the.

1689 got washed off, like wore off, so I took it as a sign. Well, and since you.

Brought up the question, do you have any ideas of where you disagree with some of us? Like, because I'm thinking you might have something in mind that we're not.

Seeing. Well, I brought up the Sabbatarian issue just to see if anybody disagreed with it, and I think we're all kind of on the same page as far as that level of confessionalism goes. I am not post-millennial, or that is, I'm not a preterist, the partial preterist in the sense of R .C. Sproul or even our pastor.

I'm more of a traditional Reformed amillennialist. The irony, of course, being is that all amillennialists are technically post-millennial, if you said that Christ coming back after the Millennium because it's the current reign of Christ between the two Advents, but it doesn't have the earthly implications of a growing cultural influence of the church in the world.

I see the church growing, the kingdom being not of this world, growing throughout the entire world while at the same time the wheat and tares are growing at the same time, and at the end harvest that's when the separation occurs.

But the kingdom of God that we have now that's growing currently is very much not like the geopolitical kingdoms in the past, and I don't see a cultural domination in the Scriptures. I see that growing underneath, and that the natural and common experience of the Christian will be persecution.

So that's probably an area on which we disagree. Okay, would you say that in the increase of his government there shall be no end? Would you say amillennialists believe the same thing as post-millennialists?

That the increase of his government, that Christ is King, reigns now, and no one will dethrone him, and that he will reign in perpetuity, and that eventually all of his enemies will be destroyed, but they'll be destroyed at his second coming?

Is that any different than the post-mill view of.

The increase of his government? Well, again, it depends on, okay, so some post mill renderings are gonna be looking at, we're only, goodness, how many translate, how many generations in so far? You know, 150?

Yeah. We're only 150 generations in. God's faithfulness is to a thousand generations, which we don't understand, you know, however many that is, the fullness, but a thousand is way below 150, you know.

So when we think about what lies ahead, you know, who knows? You know, our experience of the here and now tells us that things can be pretty rough, as far as the unity of the church, and the activity of the church, and the, you know, there's persecution, and so on and so forth, but we've seen so, we've seen the Lord do some amazing things in the last, so, 2 ,000 years, from where we began, where we are now.

Are there more believers on.

The planet Earth today than there were, you know, 100 years ago? Yeah, we.

See a massive growth that I think everybody can agree on when it comes to, you know, the parable about the leaven in the dough, and the growth of the fig, or the mustard seed into a tree. You can see how there has been growth.

I mean, the gospel, praise God, didn't stay in Jerusalem. It didn't go to Judea. It didn't go to Samaria. It is going throughout all these different parts of the earth. Do I think that there's going to be some one-world Christian government with some sort of holy potentate at the top, you know, and basically all problems have been put down to a minimum of static, and then everybody knows this is Christ doing, and he's done it over all these generations, and then when everything is bright and shiny, then he comes back.

I don't know. When I read the scriptures, I tend to see there's a lot of, you know, we're weak, he's strong, he triumphs through our weaknesses. It's not something that we orchestrate, ordain, and predict.

It's something that he brings about, and we do know there's been genuine works of the Lord in revivals, in history, and we've seen this, you know, and we just give praise to God. They're always, you know, messing, and there's controversies that happen in them and all that, but, you know, what is it all based on?

It's based upon the sovereignty of God. It's based upon the power of the Holy Spirit. I mean, I don't know how he's gonna do it. I know he's gonna win big, and all he's got to do is breathe in the Holy Spirit, wash across, and we'll see what happens.

Like, oh my goodness, we have no idea how fast it can happen. We have no idea how fast it can happen. So I know that we can't be looking around and reading the newspapers and saying, well, there's no possible way Jesus is coming back anytime in the next ten years because, boy, there's a lot of work to do.

I'm not saying that. I'm also not saying there's not a lot of work to do. Let's get busy, okay? But so some post-millennial readings are going to be looking for some kind of everything, like I said, doing really really really really well before Christ comes back.

I don't know if that's an essential reading of the post-millennial position. I already see a lot of wonderful things that have happened so far, and I think even more wonderful things are ahead. Will this mean the elimination of problems of persecution?

Not necessarily. That probably makes me not as stout of a post-mill as others. Some maybe want to call me an optimistic aw-mill, but I don't think I actually fit there, given some of my other convictions.

So I really do think that's where the split is, though. I think it really is, you know, which emoji are.

You using with your eschatology? Right. That's a reference to the pessimistic, optimistic from Greg Bonson, right? Yeah, but he didn't know about emojis.

No, no, he didn't. The Lord took him before that trial. Yeah, he's thankful for that.

He's quite thankful for that, I'm sure. Birthing person. So just a couple of things to add there, that usually, I'm no farmer, but the more wheat you have in a field, the less room there is for tears.

And we know that by his parables, talking about the return that he gets on his wheat, and what that looks like, to a hundredfold, and Satan doth go out with a whimper, as well, at the end. And he has power, yes, but it appears to not be very much in the face of what is to come.

And as far as the setup being optimistic, I would fall in there, as well, as Post Malone. I went through a two-year study on it, and I found it to be the most coherent, internally, with the Word. So that's just where I ended up, after that long of reading, and studying commentary, comparing the four views that I was thankful to read through all 670 some-odd pages of.

So, yeah, that's that's where I'm at, too, with you guys. I'm sure I differ in how I might look out, because that's kind of left up to the imagination, given that we are reading mostly metaphor, when we're given an understanding of how the kingdom.

Grows, and how large it grows, as well. Yeah, and honestly, again, I know there's a lot of fight. There's a lot of fights going on. I truly believe, though, when brothers can come together, and recognize that Jesus Christ is at the right hand of the Father, and nothing else, and no one else, belongs there.

And there really is, genuinely, a great deal of agreement. Amen. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of love, and a lot of unity. And I remember, when I first came here, eight years ago, they were interviewing me about, you know, for the whole church, about being pastor here.

You know, they asked me if I was a Calvinist. I refrained from saying, you know, I dragged my face in the gravel, Calvinist. But I said, I said, I was a Calvinist. And they said, well, you know, a lot of people here aren't.

And how are you gonna pastor those who aren't Calvinist? And I said, well, you know, it's my job to pastor everybody. And the reason why fights happen, is because of, a lot of reason why sometimes the fighting goes on, is because of, because of pride.

You can put two humble people in the trunk of a car, and they're gonna make room for each other. You can put two prideful people working the night shift, alone in the factory warehouse, and they're gonna find somewhere to fight.

You know, now there's genuine fights that you have to have, in order to defend the faith. And we should never shy away from those. Got a paper above my door in my office, it says, be of good comfort Mr. Ridley, and play the man.