Simplicity, Molinism, and More

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:31

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is almost the end of 2021 and we have the

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Christmas holidays coming up and it's a very, very busy time of year and an amazing number of things going on.

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I was thinking today of how many resources I would be able to avail myself of each day and how many hours it would take to listen to all of them.

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And so if you include our little podcast in your routine of seeking to edify, learn, we very much appreciate that and appreciate your continued support.

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And we certainly try to make this time that you spend with us useful to you and unique.

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We definitely want to try to keep it unique. We don't do a lot of store stuff anymore.

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We used to have the Alpha and Omega Ministries store and we would have books and all sorts of things like that.

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You can go to Doctrine Life and get t -shirts and hats and things like that. If we had a big old store, obviously right now the most important item

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I could be working on having produced would be Essence of James White.

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That would be selling hotcakes. It would be one of the biggest Christmas gifts ever would be

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Essence of James White. And now we would have the perfect,

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I mean, if we had had to go out and ask someone to buy for us, to make for us, we had to buy a professional advertisement to use the

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British way of saying it, advertisement for Essence of James White, this would have been absolutely beyond our capacity to pay for.

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So well, professionally done. So there is no Essence of James White out there, either in Molinism or in a cologne, just so you know, because people might get confused.

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Not even, yeah, not even a counterfactual version. There is no feasible world in which there is Essence of James White.

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And God has always known that because of his divine decrees. So anyway, here is this wonderfully done advertisement for Essence of James White.

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We're talking about Calvinism and Molinism, and we'll be back with my guest James White and Bill Craig in just a moment.

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And by the way, if anyone's looking for a last minute Christmas gift, I can highly recommend Essence of James White, which apparently is the latest cologne on the market.

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I just couldn't resist that when I heard the phrase Essence of James White. Would you wear

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Essence of James White for a lecture if I sent it to you, Bill? If I were rich, I would buy an Essence of James White.

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It doesn't come from anywhere. Essence of James White.

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Brought to you in partnership with Truthmaker Maximalism. Welcome back to today's show.

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We're talking about Calvinism and Molinism. Thanks, Justin. Nothing like knocking the entire conversation right off the rails,

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Justin. I'm sorry. Bill's just sitting there going,

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I'm not sure if I even want to comment on this. I don't know if I want to get involved with this.

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Yeah, that was a tremendous amount of work that went into that.

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I mean, the video from Arizona, you know, the drone stuff, and wow, massive amount.

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Peter Byron put that together, and he obviously has a future in video editing.

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No two ways about that, but that's one. I'm going to have to make sure

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Summer has a copy of that for my funeral video. We'll have to slide that in somewhere for my funeral video, because that's, yeah, incredibly well done.

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So we had to have something good to start off the day, and so we have that. We also have a,

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I haven't gotten this book yet. I'm looking forward to it. I need to get it on Kindle, but Peter Sammons, I believe it's

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Sammons, S -A -M -M -O -N -S. I don't know Peter personally, but I know people who do, and he has a, we actually just ordered the dissertation version.

06:04

Thank you very much, Rich, because I want the patristic stuff, but there's a new book out called Reprobation and God's Sovereignty, Recovering a

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Biblical Doctrine, and evidently Fred Butler knows Peter well.

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So Peter posts a picture of his book, and on the tweet he says, It's interesting they got these out by Christmas.

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Nothing says I love you like a book on reprobation for Christmas. Giving them out to in -laws and estranged family members goes a long way.

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Well, you gotta roll with them while you can, because we have so many heavy things to be talking about today that we have to be reminded that there are reasons to have joy and smile.

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I was given a book, by the way. Mike Hendrickson gave me this book.

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Mike's a member of our church. Mike's a guy you don't want to mess with. If you come to church and you see the guy out front that's like 1 ,000 % muscle, that's

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Mike. He might be playing a guitar once in a while, too, or actually leading when

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Eliot's not leading in music. But anyways, he said,

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I really need to take a look at this. It's an exegetical refutation of Calvinism by J .B. Owen, and he said, hey, we need to respond to this, because this is about the best the other side has to offer.

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So I'm like, okay. So I'm sort of looking at the back going, okay, a biblical scholar.

07:41

Okay, all right, all right. I didn't recognize the press, Vacancy Press.

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It's like, it's a lot of nice paper there that I can let the kids...

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Vacancy Press, yeah. There's actually a point being made there when it comes to searching for that exegetical refutation.

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I'm sure there are some people who think they've come up with it, but I haven't seen it anywhere.

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So there you go. All right, so three things to get to today, three big things, two major things to get to on the program today as the

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Lord gives us strength and as we seek to rid ourselves of things that would distract us from providing you with the whole reason why you tune into this and keep the ministry going and things like that.

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First of all, I just saw news that the house, that the lower,

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I think the lower house of parliament had just passed vaccine passport legislation in the

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United Kingdom, which is not good news in any sense of story.

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I'm seeing a lot of stuff on both sides. I'm seeing the totalitarian states recognizing that the wheels are coming off.

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And so they are rushing to solidify all the draconian tyrannical powers that they have claimed in the light of a pandemic that have created.

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That if we didn't count deaths the way that we decided to start counting deaths, if we didn't redefine the term vaccine, if we just didn't do all this stuff, if we had just used the drugs that are available to us already, this whole thing would have been a minor blip, but it wasn't a minor blip because people didn't want it to be a minor blip.

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We now are facing a rash of elite athletes across the world collapsing in football fields and basketball courts and everything else.

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And an amazing rise in general mortality in nations, only in nations using the mRNA vaccine technology.

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It's almost like it was planned, which it was. And so at the same time we have the dreaded, deadly

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Omicron variant. So deadly that so far no one has been able to confirm any deaths from Omicron.

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And the one thing I haven't heard anything about, anything about, and maybe it's because I just stumble onto weird stuff and read weird stuff, but someone, sorry,

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I don't remember who it was, someone sent me a fascinating link to a biologist who has been doing lots and lots of videos trying to really follow a middle road,

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I think, on a lot of these things. But he was talking about the genetic breakdown of the

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Omicron variant, which is not Omicron or Omicron or anything like that.

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It's Omicron. Anyway, he pointed out that the spike protein, we've noticed there've been numerous mutations on the spike protein for the

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Omicron. And one of the mutations shows cross connection to another coronavirus.

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So in other words, there's another coronavirus out there that we know really, really well. And a portion of its spike protein profile has taken over a part of the

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Omicron profile. So its spike protein, one of the mutations, the spike protein comes from this other coronavirus.

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Now, what other horrible, dangerous, destructive, zombie making coronavirus out there could contribute something to the spike protein of Omicron, which is making it necessary for California mask mandates for everybody all over again, because of Omicron.

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And it's being used in Germany and the United Kingdom. Here comes Omicron. This is just terrible.

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What is this horrible coronavirus that's now contributed something to Omicron?

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It's called the common cold. It is the coronavirus that causes the common cold.

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Yeah, the sneezes, the sniffles, which we've all had for as long as mankind has known anything about these things.

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That's the great coronavirus that has contributed something to the Omicron. It's a cold for crying out loud.

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It's the common cold. And I've heard no one saying this.

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You're not going to get this out of the media. But here's this guy and he's got the, you know, here's the charts and here's the, and see, this is what we've known for all this time, the common cold.

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And now here it has transferred into Omicron and nobody's dying of it.

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And yet we're going to continue to establish absolute totalitarian dictatorships with forced inoculations and starving people and everything else over something like that.

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There you go. It tells you everything you need to know. It tells you why I have talked to many people and have personal experience with the reality that the medical community has simply been told, and you've got to have power to tell the entire medical community what to do.

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You've got to have power and you got to have money. Well, money is not an issue these days. We're printing it faster than, you know, that's why inflation is at record levels.

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That's why your savings is becoming worthless overnight. That's why every time you go to the gas station, you know, all that stuff.

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But that money is going someplace and that money is going into the coffers of Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson.

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And they're all in bed with all the regulators. All the regulators used to work for them.

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All the people work for them used to be regulators. It's just, it's an incestuous, disgusting, vile mess.

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And they've told the medical community, this is all you can do for COVID.

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You can't, you know, that ivermectin stuff, which entire nations have used to wipe

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COVID out. You can't do that. That's over there that, you know, leave that to those nations.

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They've wiped COVID out. They're not, nobody's dying of COVID over there because they're using ivermectin, but we can't do that here because we need to use these vaccines that are broken.

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There was just a huge study. Well, I have, oh, why didn't

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I save that? I thought it did. I'm sorry. I mean, I have the one on the effectiveness of the vaccines, an article called the

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COVID vaccines have failed by David Archibald. That's 11, December, 2021, showing the dramatic crash in effectiveness of these things.

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But I forgot to save a study this morning from Israel. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, me, me, me.

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It's just, excuse me. It's that I have to remember that it was in an email.

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And so, let me see if I can find it real quick here. This was a study in Israel that is just basically demonstrating very, very clearly that the natural immunity, that anyone who gets natural immunity has so much stronger immunity than is provided by the vaccines.

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The vaccines fall off incredibly fast. They have to be boosted constantly.

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They never provide the level of protection that natural immunity does. And it really is going to become a situation where if that's what you're relying on, that you're going to have to be getting a shot every week, eventually.

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And up until 2020, everyone would have realized that really sounds dangerous.

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That sounds like diminishing return. That sounds like side effects. That sounds like, why are we having such a greater number of unusual mortality events?

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And we're not even allowed to suggest that has something to do with the introduction of genetic pathogens into our bodies.

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You're not even allowed to say that, or you'll get kicked off of almost everything. History will record that we are going through a period of time right now of almost unparalleled crimes against humanity.

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And now we understand how it happened in the past. Now we understand.

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I didn't get a chance to look at it, but CrossPolitik did a thing on the Auschwitz survivor who talked about how it was they dehumanized the

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Jews. And it was the process. And it is exactly what's going on in Germany right now. They're repeating themselves.

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My German friends told me a couple of weeks ago, you would not believe the hatred toward the unvaccinated here.

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They're creating this, they are creating in the minds of these people, this fanatical acceptance of whatever it is the government tells them for their safety.

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And yes, that's exactly how it worked in the past. The Jews had diseases. The Jews were doing this and the

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Jews were doing that. And that's how you got people to do Buchenwald and Auschwitz. That's how you did it back then.

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And you're doing it again. And it's all based on, it was all based on lies back then. It's based on lies now.

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And you had the media and you had money and you had power. Let's just do it all again.

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Make sure that everyone forgets about history in the process. It is absolutely positively amazing.

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And it's just part of the overall degradation of the morals, the moral fiber of Western civilization that's been going on for quite some time.

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And finally the threads are just snapping and it's all coming apart. And so you have not only the totalitarian tyranny, but then what they do is they force you to believe lies.

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Do I have to read Dalrymple again? I almost feel like I do at times, to be honest with you.

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Because yeah, it just has to, we forget.

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I forget. We forget. Let me read it again because I'm about to give you a story that illustrates this.

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Dalrymple said, in my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate.

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And therefore, the less it corresponded to reality, the better. When people are forced to remain silent, when they're being told the most obvious lies, or even worse, when they're forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.

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To assent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil, and in some small way, to become evil oneself.

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One standing to resist anything, including tyrannical governments, I might add, is thus eroded and even destroyed.

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A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

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So every time they force us to lie, they are emasculating us.

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And that's a bad term, by the way, all the toxic masculinity stupidity.

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And they're making us easy to control. Why do I say this? Because there is a fellow by the name of Will Thomas.

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Will Thomas is a 22 -year -old swimmer at the

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University of Pennsylvania who competed for a number of years on the swim team as Will Thomas.

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And then Will Thomas decided that he was Leah Thomas. Now, you see him standing next to anyone else, to any of the girls, and my six -year -old granddaughter would go, that's a boy.

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And she would be right. She would be right. He grew up and went through puberty, all of it, full of testosterone.

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You look at swimmers, you look at Phelps, you look at, uh, what was that other guy?

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He would race all the time. They're real close. Starts with an L, I think. These guys' wingspan is astonishing.

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They've got arms. I mean, they can just do the water and just produce an incredible amount of horsepower out of those arms.

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And they're just built to swim. And they've got those big old shoulders and the necessary connective tissues and the nerves and everything because they're men.

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And that's how God designed them. And that's what testosterone does. It makes big muscles and the connective tissues and everything goes with it.

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Well, Will Smith, or Will Thomas, I'm sorry, Will Thomas. Will Thomas decided he's Leah Thomas.

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And so now he's on University of Pennsylvania women's swim team. And he, of course, is now destroying every record in every meet that he competes in.

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He recently did a race where he won by 38 seconds.

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Destroyed the record by 38 seconds, I think. 38 seconds. And you look at the pictures and you go, this is a dude in women's clothes, long hair.

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And he is making it impossible for any woman to succeed in this sport, to win in this sport.

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Because a woman cannot defeat a man in swimming. The fastest woman,

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Ledecky, is that her name? Will still get crushed by the number 10 guy on the male team.

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She's fast. She's dominant. But she's a she. She's not a he. And this is the reality.

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And yet, we live in a time where we are told, you cannot say that. I could not say this on YouTube.

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That's why we're not doing it on YouTube. Can't say it on YouTube. Not allowed to. And in certain places, you can actually be fined and charged for misgendering, mispronouncing.

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And we all know it's pure insanity. We all know this is reality. This is the lie.

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But we're being told, like Dal the lie.

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And the more times you're told to repeat the lie, you become a nation of emasculated liars.

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And emasculated liars are easy to control. And there are people who simply want to control others.

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The World Economic Forum, WHO, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci.

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These people. Klaus Schwab, primarily. These people love power.

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And they want to control everybody else. And they will crush your freedoms because they believe they are the most wise people on the

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But by their genetic supremacy. And they will control everybody else and tell you what to believe.

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And so you have to, you have to believe what they are telling you. And you have to look at that man as he swims through the pool and leaves the other girls weeping, literally.

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The reports are that in the team meetings, these girls are weeping. They know they have no chance.

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And this guy is just wiping everybody out.

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We've been saying it's the end of women's athletics for a long time.

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It's just, can you imagine if Pete Sampras, if Pete Sampras came back today at his age as a quote unquote woman, he'd win

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Wimbledon for five years in a row. There is no woman, even at Pete Sampras' age, that could beat him.

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It's not possible. The serve strength, speed, agility.

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That's all there is to it. Yes, sir. Do you recall the bet that Arthur Ashe had with Martina Navratilova back in the early 80s?

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I, uh, no. He was building, now, Arthur Ashe had a lot of money.

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He was building a brand new home. It was a luxury home. And he wagered, because at the time, the

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American press was just fawning over Martina Navratilova and her skills, her athleticism, all this.

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And he wagered, he said, you take, I don't care who it is, whoever ranks 100th in the men,

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I'll bet my entire house, you can have my entire house, and you can play him.

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And she never took him up on that bet. Nope, nope, she wouldn't. Well, let's give Martina credit despite her predilections.

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She's been willing to say that. She didn't take the bet, because she knew that he was right.

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That any of the top 100 men could wipe the court with any number one woman player.

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And they know it. They can't hit that return. They can't hit it that hard. It's just, it's physics.

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Simple physics. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just as enjoyable to watch the girls play as the guys.

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Um, though it's not as enjoyable to watch women play basketball as it is to watch men play basketball.

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Let's just, let's just be honest about it. Um, if you want to see raining three pointers, if you want to see high flying jams, you, you, you, you got to go with the guys because that's just the way it is.

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If now you could, you could change by having a different basketball court, uh, make it a nine foot rim instead of a 10 foot rim.

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You have people, you have girls jamming all the time, but that's what you have to do. That's the point. They're not seven foot two and they can't jump as high as men because they're just not designed that way.

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That's, that's how God made it. And that's, that's where we have the problem today is, well, we don't allow

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God to do things like that. And so there you go. But the point being, this is another lie that, that will

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Thomas is a champion. Will Thomas is a coward. He's a coward. I have no respect for a guy who deprives gals of their opportunities for scholarships and success and destroys women, women's sports.

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I have no respect. I will not respect someone like that. Our society says you will. And I say, I won't end that discussion.

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It's a lie and it will always be a lie. All right. So there's, uh, there's some of those things that we wanted to, uh, wanted to get to now at the moment.

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Um, I am finding myself, uh, in battle on numerous fronts.

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And right now there is interestingly enough, there's two areas, uh, where there is a serious,

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I'm going to get him. I'm going to get him eventually. I'm not sure how in the middle of the, well, it's actually,

31:28

I'm sort of excited about tomorrow. It's gonna, the highs could be like 58,

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I think. Yeah. Some of you are going high of 58.

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We haven't, we haven't gotten anywhere near that. It's about 70 outside right now. Yeah.

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It might drop into the thirties for us. So for us, this is, this is winter weather.

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This is, I was, see, I was supposed to have already experienced some really great winter weather if I had been able to go on my trip and I wasn't.

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And, uh, that's still a situation. Um, I was, the first night

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I was supposed to be, I was supposed to be down like 16 degrees or something like that. So I was really looking forward to that.

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But, um, so I really haven't felt the cold yet. And most of you would say that, uh, that 58 for a high and, uh, what is, what is the lowest supposed to be like?

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Is it supposed to drop into the thirties finally? Um, well, yeah, there you go.

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Friday night, 39 is what I've got at least my home one, but, um, but 44 tomorrow night, 41

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Thursday night. So, you know, for us, that's, that's exciting. That's, that's, that's great stuff.

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We're, we're excited about all that. Anyway. Um, how'd I get onto that? I have no earthly idea.

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Um, there are two, two fronts that one, one of which

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I think could produce. Um, I want to,

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I want to have it produce some unity and some, um,

33:08

I could see it helping people. And the other is more of a, just warning about a, a, a rabidly anti -reformed theory that's been around for hundreds of years.

33:25

And it's still just an anti -reformed theory. So obviously talking about the continuing discussions in regards to Molinism and the entire schools promoting

33:41

Molinism, getting together, do their thing and cranking out articles.

33:47

There was an article that I stumbled upon this morning. Um, I think it was, uh, yeah, right here.

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This is, uh, convincingproof .org. And, uh, this was a

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Dr. Johnson. And, uh, I, I mentioned it on, uh,

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Twitter this morning and I gave it as an example of just how bad some of this stuff is.

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Uh, I said, you want, when someone's writing about you, how can they prove that they've never read any of your books?

34:32

They've never listened to any of your lectures. And they're simply going off of their prejudice and a single, uh, dialogue or debate that they happen to view.

34:44

And, uh, this Dr. Johnson, Dr. Stratton was promoting it. Here's the sub, the sub line is, can you find

34:53

Calvinism in the Bible? Yes and no. Here's the, here's, here's what he writes. White seems naive about how theology works.

35:01

He seems to think that Calvinism rolls right off of the pages of scripture as though the Bible explicitly spells it out in detail.

35:09

I find that folks who think they're particularly theological position is clearly taught in scripture. And anyone who disagrees is obviously unbiblical have become so influenced by the theological system.

35:18

They can't help, but read it into verses they see in the Bible. So, um, that last sentence is true, but since he doesn't even show the slightest evidence of having even looked at the rather extensive discussions that we offered, uh, prior to the debate, where we looked at the decree of God in both the

35:45

Hebrew scriptures and the Christian Greek scriptures. And we didn't just simply cite an

35:53

English text, cite a single line from one commentary, a single line from another commentary and call that exegesis.

36:00

That's not exegesis. We did exegesis. We put the original languages on the screen and we walked through them and we talked about syntax and we talked about grammar and we talked about the relationship of this to, uh, we very frequently will, for example, put the

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Greek Septuagint up and follow the intertextuality between the testaments and we do serious exegetical work.

36:25

There has been none of that in response from our

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Molinist friends. None, none, zip, zero, nada, because there isn't anything there.

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Um, it's been this kind of, well, these, these naive reformed people, they're just not a part of our, our inner club.

36:51

They don't read the papers that we do at the conferences that we do. So there you go.

36:59

And so, uh, but, but this, this was a straw man that I refuted in the discussion itself.

37:09

I'm not sure how you could miss that. I don't think he was listening very carefully to my side anyways, but I'm not sure you can miss that.

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But I point out that that's not what I'm saying. And we have provided hours of demonstration that that's not what we're saying.

37:25

So to have it just simply repeated over and over again. And, and I'm seeing this a lot from the Molinists, um, is, is a capitulation on their part.

37:33

It's not going to convince anyone who actually knows what's going on and who watched the encounter and has done any listening beyond that.

37:43

Um, but that's the kind of stuff you're getting out of the Molinistic side. And then the other issue, um, is a much more, is actually a much more complex issue and it's much more in house.

37:59

Molinists tend to be rabidly anti -reformed. Um, even those who claim to be 5 .1

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Calvinists and are Molinists, I'm sorry. Um, most Molinists are just rabidly anti -reformed.

38:13

Within the community of Reformed people, and especially amongst

38:18

Reformed Baptists, there is currently a large conversation going on regarding, uh, natural theology, uh,

38:30

Thomas Aquinas, categories of metaphysics, and the aseity of God and the doctrine of simplicity.

38:40

And whether Thomas's formulation of simplicity is necessary, there are those, uh, who would say that if you do not adopt the metaphysics of Thomas as mediated, they would say, um, by Aquinas, um, that you are heterodox in your understanding because they would say, well, this was what's behind the this is the necessary tradition, uh, that you're, you're going to be utilizing.

39:15

And if you don't, then you're heterodox. And there are others who thankfully are going to say, well, let's have a conversation about it.

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I think, I think this is useful. Uh, I think this gives some insights. And then some of us point back, push back and say, it's troubling and problematic in regards to its origin, source and functionality of Sola Scriptura.

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And there are lots and lots of Reformed, uh, people who have pointed out certain issues that need to be discussed in this particular issue.

39:46

It can get rather complicated and complex, but at least in this situation, at least what's, what's helpful or what could be positive in looking at the concept of simplicity and asking what would, what would a biblical doctrine of simplicity be?

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What would a Thomistic doctrine of simplicity be? Um, can you utilize the metaphysical categories of Thomas Aquinas to explicate or, or enlighten biblical truths, or is there a necessary conflict there?

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And of course I would also point out, you know, when it comes to the issue of things like the

40:39

Lord's Supper, we've been pretty clear on making sure that we don't use Thomas's categories there.

40:46

Um, we recognize that Aristotelian categories of accidents and presence in the supper.

40:52

No, no, no, we, we don't, that's not helpful there at all, but it is helpful with the doctrine of God, evidently.

41:02

So I've made just a few comments and I, uh, mentioned, you know, we, we,

41:09

I mentioned, uh, I don't know, we did, I did a dividing line from home, my kitchen actually, uh, did just a couple of those testing out stuff for the

41:20

RV and things like that. And in one of them, I was, I played a portion from Bill Craig, Bill Craig was talking about the, the key issue of simplicity being the idea that the attributes of God are one in God, because all that is in God is

41:36

God. And so this results in the assertion that in God, his attributes are the same while in revelation, we distinguish between them.

41:48

And so I made some comments about this months ago, and that started this whole thing. And someone even said this week that I had joined forces with Bill Craig in, in critiquing divine simplicity.

42:00

I I'm going, we have completely different perspectives and approaches to this whole subject.

42:05

I'm not sure how that's joining forces, but all I said was, wow, I found something that I agreed with him on.

42:11

And that is, I don't think that Thomas's categories are, um, helpful in dealing with biblical things.

42:19

So I made the, um, announcement a couple of days ago that what

42:25

I want to do over time, um, is I want to, uh, what

42:31

I'll probably do is I might use some Kindle for some quotes, um, if it's more organized.

42:41

Uh, but Dr. James D 'Alazal put, uh, has published a couple books.

42:48

I linked to them. I, well, I gave the names anyways, in the article that I put on the Theology Matters blog, which is accessible through the app, by the way.

42:57

So if you download the Alphamagus app, the Alphamagus app, there's a, you can get, um, notifications when stuff is put onto that blog and things like that.

43:06

And so I mentioned the books, All That Is in God, um, and an earlier book on Divine Simplicity, and then the 2015

43:17

Southern California Reformed Baptist Pastors Conference, where he laid all of this out.

43:24

And I'm not sure which is better to use because the book was,

43:30

I think, what, 2017? I think it was after that. Um, and that was 2015. Same material.

43:37

I've read the book, listened to the, uh, the presentations, and he's a very good speaker.

43:43

And there, there is a, um, specific section in the conference talks that we could focus in on where you, you have what for me is the key issue in regards to the oneness of attributes of God, uh, and the necessity that, that this has, um, otherwise that you're, you're introducing constituent parts in God.

44:13

And I, I, I, I disagree. You're not. Even when you, when you say, if God, if, if we can make distinction,

44:22

God knows it too. Um, this is, this is a, this is, we're demanding of biblical revelation categories that were never a part of the process of prophet thinking.

44:32

This is a post biblical traditional structure that is being forced upon scripture that I, I reject.

44:40

Um, I don't see that it's necessary at all. Um, but I understand why people have embraced it in the past.

44:50

Um, you, you can read Turretin and I quoted Turretin. Did you, did you read, did you, is that more or less complicated than Molinism?

45:03

Really? You thought it was less? Okay. All right. Round. Okay.

45:10

All right. Well, um, some people might find it to be more demanding on a vocabulary level.

45:20

Rich says, Rich agrees there. Um, but Turretin struggles with this and he wants to affirm

45:27

Thomas's stuff, but he also recognizes that we need to distinguish between the attributes or we're not able to talk about anything about the attributes.

45:37

And if God is glorified in the revelation of his attributes, then, and so he's talking about ad intra and ad extra.

45:45

So in God or outside of God and, and there's, it's complicated stuff.

45:52

And what's concerning me is that once you get to the point of saying,

45:59

Hey, since I found this to be helpful to me, then you have to find it to be helpful to you. And if I say, but I find it not only confusing, but actually to, to detract from these aspects of inspired revelation.

46:18

And therefore I don't go there. If now that becomes the standard of fellowship, um, that's dangerous.

46:29

I find that really, really scary, to be honest with you. And I just,

46:35

I just point out that, for example, uh, we, we are not the first to be dealing with uh,

46:49

Gerhardus Voss in his reformed dogmatics. Let me just read you two short sections here in reformed dogmatics.

47:00

Uh, question 11, may we make a distinction in God between his being and his attributes?

47:09

No, because even with us being in attributes are most closely connected even more so in God, if his attributes were something other than his revealed being, it would fall that also essential deity must be ascribed to his being.

47:25

And thus the distinction would be established in God between what is essentially divine and what is derivatively divine.

47:31

And that cannot be question 12.

47:36

May we also say that God's attributes are not distinguished from one another. This is extremely risky.

47:47

This is Voss. This is extremely risky. We may be content to say, content to say that all

47:56

God's attributes are related most closely to each other and penetrate each other in the most intimate unity.

48:03

Amen to that. However, this is in no way to say that they are to be identified with each other.

48:15

Also in God, for example, love and righteousness are not the same, although they function together perfectly in complete harmony.

48:24

We may not let everything intermingle in a pantheistic way because that would be the end of our objective knowledge of God.

48:34

Now is Voss heterodox or orthodox? And how many

48:42

Christians have ever even thought about it? Well, everybody needs to think about their metaphysics.

48:51

Well, you know, everybody does in some sense or another. I'm not saying that having metaphysical discussions is not a good thing, but here's the issue.

49:01

What I want to focus on being little old dumb me, you know, we all know that I'm not quite up to snuff on the brightness scale.

49:12

Little old dumb me wants to be consistent and wants to know if I'm going to have a standard that's going to cause me to look at another

49:25

Trinitarian sola scriptura confessing, justification by faith confessing, predestination election confessing, five points of Calvinism confessing individual and say, that person is heterodox.

49:38

That person needs to be marked that you need to be be aware of that individual. I want to find that I'm sorry, in my

49:48

Bible. And that's where the problem is because I've listened and I've read and I just look, okay.

50:03

I recognize that I have, there is parts of me that make me weird.

50:11

It's not just my Coogee sweaters, which I can wear at this time of year. And I'm very thankful to do so. I am an apologist who says to people outside the

50:24

Christian faith. And even those who claim to be inside the Christian faith, you need to be consistent in your sources of authority.

50:32

That means I feel like I need to be consistent in my sources of authority too. And so when

50:37

I listen to the attempts to say, here is the big old grounding.

50:45

Okay. I want, show me the texts, not in a simplistic,

50:51

I'm not, I'm not looking for simplistic proof texts. I'm not, I get how this works.

51:01

Show me the threads, show me the consistency, show me that you're looking at texts in their context and that a proper hermeneutical application is going to make this what

51:15

I believe to be three or four steps beyond biblical revelation, conclusions necessary for understanding what's actually in here.

51:26

And that's what I do not find. And since Dr. Dallazal presents it and then says, here's the biblical backup.

51:37

Let's go through the biblical backup. Let's walk through it because I'm hearing it and I'm going, okay, let's say

51:46

I adopted this viewpoint. Let's say I said, yeah, there's, I've got lots of friends who think this is just the cat's meow.

51:56

This is you, you're not buying into this. You're not really with us.

52:01

I want to be in the club, right? Well, most of the people in the club don't want me in anymore anyways. So, oh, well, but okay.

52:07

So I'm listening to it and I'm going, and this is how

52:13

I function. I'm going, let's say I believe this and this is my argumentation.

52:21

Could I take this into a debate and defend it? And the answer is no way, no way.

52:31

I can just see so many gaping gaps between, well, you know, the scripture says

52:38

God's unchanging. Yes, it does say that. And I'm just thinking about the sharp people that I've debated and I'm going, man, if they were on the other side, we're making some leaps here.

52:57

And I get it if you want it all to work together, but see, that's not my standard. My standard isn't, oh, this really seems to be a nice package.

53:06

My standard is if I'm telling somebody else, they need to believe this and they have the same level of exegetical skills and language skills and history skills that I have, they're going to tear me apart.

53:24

That's the issue. That's the issue. And it's interesting, very interesting that along those lines, come on, stop, cancel, come here, come here.

53:40

Why won't you move? Okay. Anyway, strange.

53:46

Dr. Jordan B. Cooper is a Lutheran and he's a really nice guy.

53:53

I'm sure we'd probably enjoy, you know, getting a burger together or something. But we obviously have really different context to align things to,

54:08

I guess you might say. And just today, I believe, yeah, this is today.

54:15

He tweeted, I won't put it up, it's just one tweet. Not surprising that Vantillians are continuing to react strongly against divine simplicity and classical philosophy.

54:29

This break in the Reformed world has been there for a while and further fighting is an inevitability. And I appreciate his comment.

54:44

Because I guess sometimes it drives me crazy, but I can just tell he's a quality guy. And, you know,

54:52

I promise once we get to heaven, not to rub all of his Lutheran errors in his face. But we're going to get there together.

55:03

And what's neat is here's a perspective outside of our little group.

55:11

And we need perspectives outside of our little group. And notice he says

55:19

Vantillians. And that made me sort of sit back and go, you know, when

55:29

I first read Vantill, I read Vantill.

55:34

I don't think I've been here. I read Vantill in the PNR paperback books.

55:42

Because there was no electronic version at that time. This would have been, oh, goodness, 89 -ish, 88, 89, somewhere in there,

55:56

I think. And I remember thinking, I remember what apartment we lived in.

56:06

And I remember thinking, as I was sitting there on the couch reading, I was like, wow, this guy's really got to focus on the errors of Roman Catholicism and how

56:20

Roman Catholicism, and especially Thomas Aquinas, has been so detrimental to the development of a truly biblical apologetic.

56:31

So you get lots, so I'm hearing lots of folks today in the

56:38

Reformed community that are taking potshots at Vantill. And they're the same ones that are promoting

56:46

Thomistic metaphysics and perspectives within the

56:52

Reformed community. And I mean that in the Reformed community broadly.

56:59

Presbyterians, all the Paedo -Baptist elements of that, not just amongst the

57:07

Reformed Baptists. So yeah, Vantillians tend to have, from my perspective, a very healthy recognition of the detrimental impact

57:24

Thomas Aquinas has had. And I'm also the guy who has been dealing for years with people who have apostatized to Rome from Presbyterian churches and Reformed Baptist churches, but mainly

57:43

Presbyterian churches. And I've seen Thomas functioning as the gateway drug.

57:50

I mean, look at what happened at Southern Evangelical Seminary. You can poo -poo all that you want.

57:58

You can buy their line that, oh, it just wasn't a major... You know it was. Well, that's just a genetic fallacy.

58:07

No, it wasn't. You folks, Norman Geisler, presented

58:13

Aquinas as the most brilliant mind in the history of the

58:20

Christian faith. You know that that was how he's presented. And it is how he's presented.

58:27

And so you can't escape from the reality that you can do all you want on the metaphysics of God and all the rest of that stuff.

58:36

And he had all this impact, but that's not where he stopped. And the more consistent his system was, the more it leads to a fundamental undercutting of Sola Scriptura.

58:51

I've seen it happen. I've seen the ruined lives. I've seen the broken churches over decades.

58:59

So I've got to go, that does, that's a part of me. It would be very hard for me to just put that all aside and forget all that.

59:11

And so does that make me biased? There's a bias there. Okay, there's a bias there. Is there a concern to be had that can go the other direction?

59:24

I really think there is. I've seen statements being made that really concern me.

59:34

And I just wonder where this is going to take us in 10, 20 years. Now, that is assuming that there isn't such an external rush into totalitarianism and tyranny that all we're going to be worried about, we're not going to have our copies of Turretin anymore, and we're not going to have the

59:59

Summa. I was offering Rich, the Summa is right inside the door there.

01:00:04

I know exactly where it is. It's about a wide if you want to borrow it and do some reading.

01:00:10

And oh yeah, Rich said he'd rather have the monk's robe. It's reading the

01:00:16

Summa while wearing the monk's robe. That's the full thing. And if you walk in with a tonsil cut, then we know that things have gone really south, bad, big time.

01:00:28

No thanks, I gotta drive. So we're not going to have a lot of stuff.

01:00:38

I mean, if things just go total secularism is going to have to burn itself out and destroy everything in the process and we get to rebuild it all, oh, this is not what we're going to be arguing about.

01:00:56

I hope not. Man, if we all end up in the gulag together, I hope that we're not going to have a division in our fellowship over something like this.

01:01:06

I really, really hope not. Because hey, if you want to find this enlightening, a great find and wonderful,

01:01:18

I'm just going to say, let's go to the scriptures and let's let that be what actually edifies the people of God.

01:01:26

Because that's what I think is the only thing that over the long term can truly edify the people of God is that which is not quote unquote consistent with, but that which is derived from, that which is organic to the entire witness of solo scriptura and total scriptura together.

01:01:52

So there's some good discussions going on. I saw an article just this morning that I think I directed.

01:01:58

I did direct somebody. I think I directed somebody too. In social media, there are people with good insights on these things and it's very complicated.

01:02:09

But a lot of people are basically telling me, well, you didn't need to do that right now. No, I don't have time to do it right now. I'm investing time in it.

01:02:17

I've already invested hours that I don't really have right now, but I'm doing it anyways.

01:02:26

But we will. We'll get to it. All right. Didn't mean to go that far that long.

01:02:33

I need to get to this and I apologize that we covered all the rest of that stuff first.

01:02:41

Oh, I'm not the essence of James White again, though that is really, that's good stuff.

01:02:49

I wanted to, I said that I would get to this and I need to because there's more and more stuff coming out.

01:02:56

Like I said, once you, if you have a whole group of people working together, you're going to just simply be able to overwhelm anybody who's only giving a certain portion of the attention and time that he has to this particular topic.

01:03:12

But I mentioned last week that the

01:03:18

Stratton and James video, that when they got to my challenge to them to do what we can do, and that is to open the pages of the scriptures in their original languages and demonstrate consistently using the same hermeneutical methodology that we use to establish the deity of Christ.

01:03:49

The hermeneutical methodology that we use to establish that Jesus used

01:03:56

I am statements of himself in John 8 .24, 8 .58,

01:04:01

13 .19, 19 .5 -6, and then trace these back through the to Isaiah, for example, and the use of in the prophets.

01:04:12

That level of exegetical hermeneutical work, the demonstration of the validity of the prophecies of the coming

01:04:22

Messiah and the work that Messiah would do, the exegetical demonstration of the meaning of justification.

01:04:35

I mean, I've disputed that with N .T. Wright, and N .T.

01:04:42

Wright's a brilliant guy. I think he's a little bit too brilliant for his own good, but he's a brilliant guy. That kind of exegetical work coming, so in other words, organically deriving not for the 47 ,000th time in a simplistic fashion, just simply from a page of scripture, but from the entire testimony of the inspired

01:05:06

Word of God in its original languages, in its original context, using consistent hermeneutics.

01:05:13

Molinism cannot present its central claim from scripture.

01:05:19

Bill Craig admitted that because Bill Craig recognizes it's not a biblical claim. It is a philosophical claim.

01:05:26

It is not something the apostles believed. It's not something the prophets believed, and it's not something that's derived from scripture.

01:05:32

So he gets it, and that's why he's going to go, no, you're asking something you can't really get.

01:05:38

Problem being that it is an assertion that is being made.

01:05:45

Now, some of the Molinists, what they want to try to do is say, well, we're just simply saying God's omniscient.

01:05:51

If God's omniscient, he has middle knowledge. That is a charade.

01:05:56

It is empty. It's worthless because there is a claim that's being made, and that's what

01:06:01

I appreciate about Bill Craig. What he said in 2014 to Paul Helm was exactly right.

01:06:07

This is what Calvinists reject, and that is that there are true subjunctive conditionals that delimit.

01:06:16

Really interesting. I heard Dr. Stratton saying that to say that Molinists say that middle knowledge delimits

01:06:24

God is absurd and ridiculous. If he wants to say his boss is absurd and ridiculous, I'll let him say that, but that's the terminology of Bill Craig.

01:06:35

Those subjunctive conditionals delimit the range of feasible worlds.

01:06:41

They delimit God's decree, what he can and cannot bring into existence, and they do not arise from God's will.

01:06:48

They do not arise from God's will. They do not arise from the creatures because the creatures have not been decreed to have anything arise from them, so we are left without an origin.

01:06:59

This takes us back to the alleged silliness of truth -making maximalism, but I can simply trust that my fellow

01:07:09

Christians recognize that if you're going to claim something exists that constrains what

01:07:17

God can do, and it didn't come from God, and it doesn't come from man, you need to explain where it came from, and they can't.

01:07:28

They throw dust in the air and everything else, but they cannot give that explanation.

01:07:35

Okay, so I had in my little dividing line short, which

01:07:47

I recorded at home, had said this is the difference. The organic derivation of theology from the rightly exegeted inspired scripture versus the enforcement of an external philosophical set of lenses on the scriptures where you simply say, well, it's consistent.

01:08:13

Those are two very different things, and I can trust my fellow Christians to recognize that they are two very, very different things.

01:08:20

So I was interested to see how Dr. Stratton would respond to that.

01:08:27

His response is nothing short of amazing, and if you go to Freethinking Ministries, you will see that his arguments against exhaustive divine determinism are all over the place.

01:08:43

They are central. This is a central aspect of what he's about and what he does.

01:08:52

So there is a fundamental anti -reform. Now, you might say, well, you're anti -Mullinist.

01:08:58

Well, I suppose, but we spend far more time giving a positive presentation of historic

01:09:06

Christian theology. I mean, I've been teaching church history for decades, and just ask the guys.

01:09:19

We did a class for Golden Gate once called Development of Patristic Theology, and I remember that one because we arranged it.

01:09:28

It was so cool. I got permission to do this. We arranged to have part of the class on a cruise.

01:09:36

I don't know if you remember this. It was when we were on the Zondam, and the majority of the class got to go on the cruise because if I recall correctly,

01:09:46

I don't remember what had caused it, but there was some economic downturn or something. I don't know if you remember, but that Zondam trip, we had like over 200 people on the cruise, and it cost like $200.

01:09:57

I mean, when you just think of the food you eat on a cruise, I don't know.

01:10:03

That was when I got really sick. No, it was 2000. It was right before the

01:10:09

Bryson debate. Whenever the Bryson debate took place, that was the cruise.

01:10:14

I got off the boat. I'd been sick on the boat, and I flew from Florida through Phoenix to Los Angeles, and then the next day was the

01:10:24

BAM program with George Bryson. So yeah. So anyway, Rich is looking at me going, yes, okay.

01:10:33

Point is, we had a class on the development of patristic theology, and so we're sitting there.

01:10:40

We're not just reading Clement or the Didache or Ignatius. We've got the original languages out, and it was really enjoyable, and that is something

01:10:51

I've enjoyed for years, delving into that time period and demonstrating justification by faith and the belief in the sovereignty of God all the way back there.

01:11:05

This is stuff, not new things that we're doing here. And so I was really interested, how are these guys going to respond to my challenge to them to do the exegetical thing?

01:11:24

You ready for this? You got it ready to go? Okay. Here's Dr.

01:11:30

Tim Stratton responding to that section. Here we go. All right.

01:11:36

So yeah, I'd just like to add a little bit. Exegesis is vital, but if one's exegesis of the original

01:11:44

Greek leads one to the conclusion that the author of the original

01:11:50

Greek is a deity of deception, which I have argued exhaustive divine determinism leads to, then one has no reason to trust the original

01:12:01

Greek, right? I mean, exegesis is impotent to solve that problem. The Ed Calvinist asserts that God causally determines all things, and they admit, as they ought to, that they are not theologically infallible.

01:12:16

I mean, I have asked Dr. White if he is theologically infallible, and I didn't get a clear response or a clear answer to that, but I'm sure that if pressed, he would say that he holds some false theological beliefs.

01:12:30

Well, what follows from this? If God causally determines all things all the time, including all of your thoughts and all of your beliefs, and even all people, all

01:12:41

Christians, even all elect Calvinists affirm some false theological beliefs, then it stands to reason that God causally determines all people, even

01:12:49

James White, to affirm false theological beliefs. But that's a big problem, because now he doesn't know.

01:12:57

He doesn't stand in a position to know which of his beliefs are true and which of his beliefs are false. So not only can he not rationally infer better or true beliefs over false ones, but he cannot rationally affirm which of his beliefs are true and which of his beliefs ought to be different.

01:13:14

So if one's, here's my point, if one's exegetical interpretation and view of God relegates

01:13:25

God into a deity of deception, then spending time focused on the exegesis of the original

01:13:31

Greek is irrelevant. It's like shouting, look at what a known liar told us in the original

01:13:37

Greek. Well, think about it. If God causally determines all people, including

01:13:43

Calvinists, to affirm false theological beliefs, then we have an undercutting defeater to anything this deity of deception promises.

01:13:54

And if that's the case, then say goodbye to the authority of Scripture, so much for the assurance of salvation.

01:14:00

So we can't do that. But fortunately, thank God, God is not a deity of deception.

01:14:06

He is a maximally great being, and thus White's view of Ed Calvinism is false.

01:14:15

Now, next thing I'd say is in my book, I note the vital importance of knowing the original languages.

01:14:21

But really, unless you're William Lane Craig, you can't be an expert in the original languages,

01:14:27

Dr. Craig is, an expert in systematic theology, Dr. Craig is that as well, and an expert in logic and philosophy.

01:14:35

Again, Dr. Craig is an expert in these fields. Now, James White does have expertise, right?

01:14:44

He has that doctorate for a... Okay, going into irrelevancies.

01:14:51

So, deity of deception, this is his

01:14:58

Edd argument, that if God...

01:15:06

So, if Yahweh does whatever he pleases in heaven and earth, Psalm 135 .6. If Nebuchadnezzar was right, no one can stay his hand, ask why you've done this, he does whatever he pleases.

01:15:17

If he works all things after the counsel of his will, Ephesians 1 .11. And you would think that Dr.

01:15:23

Stratton would provide us with his own exegetical refutation of the use of those texts, because we've mentioned them so many times.

01:15:32

They're just a few of the many, many places that we can go to affirm these things, but he doesn't.

01:15:40

And in fact, in his book, actually says they seem to actually reflect determinism, but that's how he tries to get to middle knowledge eventually.

01:15:51

Because Molinists, they have their doctrine of extreme providence, where God is working everything except for that one big thing.

01:16:09

And evidently, that one big thing, that one big thing, the freedom of man, that's what excludes them from this argument, evidently, is that even though in God's decree in Molinism, God decrees to place people in situations where he knows that they will hold false religious beliefs.

01:16:38

In other words, let's take the

01:16:43

Molinist view for a second, because I find it honestly one of the most absurd arguments

01:16:49

I've ever heard. But because it's so out there, most people sit back and go, why?

01:16:57

Why? Because it's just, if God is actually sovereign, you can't know the truth.

01:17:05

There's just so many false assumptions packed into it that we'll get to in a moment, but let's see if they can actually escape it.

01:17:15

Because he's saying that God's decree has been to put every

01:17:22

Mormon who's ever lived in the position of being taught

01:17:28

Mormonism. So every member of a cult, every

01:17:35

Jehovah's Witness, every member of another religion, every Muslim, every

01:17:40

Buddhist, every Hindu, it's been God's decree placed them in the position to believe all the false things they believe, because the

01:17:51

Molinist says that. And then the Molinist falls back on, yeah, but they do so freely because God knew that if they were put into that circumstance, they would believe false things.

01:18:08

And so he puts them in that circumstance. And this somehow, somehow he's not a deity of deception, a deceptive deity, by actualizing a world in which millions of people will believe lies.

01:18:29

Oh, but they believe them freely. Yeah. And God decreed that they'd be put in the position of doing so.

01:18:37

But they do it freely? Is that really the answer to all things?

01:18:43

How does that change the argument? Because the argument basically is if God is active, now there's one big, big, big thing here, and it's central to Dr.

01:18:57

Stratton's errors and to Dr. Craig's errors, is they have this incredibly simplistic, shallow idea of what divine causation is.

01:19:10

It's the puppeteer, it's the strings, it's you're just sitting there going, you know, it is so simple and so shallow and so unbiblical that it's hard to really respond to it in a meaningful fashion.

01:19:27

Dr. Stratton likes to talk about, it's ridiculous to ask about the grounding thing is, objection is ridiculous and so on.

01:19:36

Well, it's ridiculous the way that they present this as if man is this innocent, free creature, and God is just popping thoughts into his brain.

01:19:50

There's nothing going on there. There's no real person. There's no real context, connection with other people.

01:19:57

The complexity and the beauty of the divine doctrine of providence, which is seen so clearly, for example, in the prophecies of the coming

01:20:08

Messiah, and the fact that God would do this through a particular people at a particular time, in a particular place, in a particular fashion, and yet would do so in such a way as to glorify himself and to hold responsible all the men and women that are involved in that process of bringing the

01:20:33

Messiah into the world. When you think of all the choices that down through the decades had to be made, most of which were not even mentioned in scripture, but you see them, interestingly enough, in the genealogies of Jesus, and you think about just how

01:20:55

God's providence worked through all of that, and yet these are real people, and they are real people that are either presented to us as examples of faith and goodness and glorification of God, or as examples of sin and rebellion, um, and God's justice comes upon them justly, just as in Isaiah 10,

01:21:20

God uses the Assyrians and then judges the Assyrians. Their actions have to be real, and they have to be judge -worthy, and yet they are the result of God's activity.

01:21:35

This, see, the Molinus, Dr. Stratton, doesn't show any, this is why

01:21:40

I said he claims to have been a five -pointer, fine. He never understood Reformed theology. There's no question about that.

01:21:46

He was never Reformed, because to be Reformed is to recognize, okay, the five points, fine.

01:21:53

Six points, you need to have the sovereignty of God. You have to have that situation where you've thought through the relationship between what scripture is saying, notice

01:22:03

I'm talking about scripture here, what scripture is saying about God's eternal decree, and the reality of our creation in time.

01:22:14

And what you discover is that they are both real, and they are both important. Their view of divine determinism makes the eternal completely wipe out the temporal.

01:22:25

It has no meaning, it's irrelevant, it's just simply God putting thoughts in people's minds, and that way you can, that, he actually said in this argument, what's in here is irrelevant, because God's just plopping it into your mind.

01:22:42

That's, again, so shallow that you, any

01:22:50

Christian who's been reading this their entire lives goes, wait a minute, the way that God works with his people to lead them to understand the truth, are you literally telling me that if God, and I've seen this in my life over and over and over again,

01:23:10

I've seen this pastorally, I've seen this as a hospital chaplain, all of you have seen these things.

01:23:18

How many times have you experienced, now, if you're a new Christian, okay, hold on, but I'm talking to those of us who've been on the block a few times, how many times has

01:23:29

God brought you through a particular circumstance that may have even included sin in your own life, sin in other people's lives?

01:23:36

You may have been betrayed, you may have been hurt, death may have occurred, brings you to that situation, and only because you went through that situation, only because you had the relationships that you had, only because you experienced the things that you experienced, were you then able to be the very means of bringing

01:24:02

God's comfort and guidance into the life of another person? And you saw

01:24:08

God use that to his honor and glory. There you have the beauty of the eternal decree and the reality of the importance of time, which again,

01:24:23

Dr. Stratton demonstrated last year, or maybe the year before, but I think it was last year.

01:24:29

When I pointed out that the incarnation demonstrates the reality of the importance of the temporal world, the

01:24:38

Son of God entered into his own creation. He's sitting there going, I don't know what Christmas has to do with anything, missed it completely, missed it completely.

01:24:48

Now, it may have been because I didn't explain it clear enough, or because he has a prejudice and a lens that doesn't allow him to hear what the other side is saying.

01:24:56

That's what I think it was. But what takes place in time?

01:25:03

Has God decreed it? Yes. Is it real and important to the glorification of God?

01:25:10

Absolutely yes. And what proves it? Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and he became flesh.

01:25:17

And that means all of the interactions that the Lord Jesus had with everybody at any time, but especially with those disciples that are not recorded for us in the few, relatively few pages of this book were massively important, massively important.

01:25:39

Jesus was not a puppet and neither were the disciples. But nowhere in scripture does that mean that you have to have not only the autonomous will of God, but the autonomous will of man.

01:25:55

There is one autonomous will in the universe and it's God's. And it's his autonomous will that our creaturely wills be important and relevant to the demonstration of his attributes to all of his creation.

01:26:08

That's the full testimony of scripture. And I didn't have to borrow Aristotle or anybody else to tell that to you.

01:26:18

Okay? So when we have someone saying that to believe that God, when

01:26:27

God says, I'm doing what I please, I make the deaf,

01:26:33

I make the lame, I make the blind, I do whatever

01:26:39

I please. My plans will be established. I frustrate man's plans.

01:26:46

When we affirm that we are not making a God of deception in any way, shape, or form, our anthropology comes in here too.

01:26:59

Our anthropology comes in here too, because really our Molinus friends have a really lousy anthropology.

01:27:07

Dr. Craig dismissed original sin in his debate with Shabir Ali as something that Christians argue about, but it's really clear it's not a relevant aspect of his understanding of the nature of man.

01:27:21

If we understand the fallen nature of man, then we understand that, for example, when

01:27:28

God saves an individual and brings them into his light, there is a biblically, there is a sanctification reality that we are sanctified.

01:27:43

We have been made holy in Christ. We have been seated in heaven places in Christ. In Christ, we have everything that we need at that point.

01:27:51

We're not going to be adding anything to that. But God decrees that we continue in this life, in the timeline.

01:27:58

And he does so because he's conforming us to the image of Christ. And he's glorifying himself in the process. And we are to serve in the church, and we are to edify one another, and he gives us gifts, and we are to love the brethren.

01:28:11

And all of this is a preparation for the perfect union we're going to have with God and with one another in heaven.

01:28:19

But none of us are perfected in this life. We all need that mediator between God and man, and we are being perfected.

01:28:33

Now, here's the question. Does it make God a God of deception when he does not bring us to a full understanding?

01:28:44

He allows us to continue to have less than true thoughts of him in certain areas in our life.

01:28:52

You see, this absurd philosophical demand, not derived from Scripture, but from some, oh,

01:28:59

I'm a philosopher. I can come up with cute little arguments, would demand instant sanctification of every person at the point of regeneration, or God is a

01:29:10

God of deception. Right? So to escape

01:29:15

God being a God of deception, Dr. Stratton has to explain why it is that God plainly, very plainly wills to conform his people, not to instantly transform his people into the image of Christ.

01:29:33

So we have no more false ideas. It is his purpose to transform us through suffering and growing in the grace and knowledge of the

01:29:47

Lord Jesus Christ. Dr. Stratton didn't understand that when he asked me these questions a couple months ago on Twitter, my response was, well,

01:29:55

Scripture says we are to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. That means it's not an instant thing.

01:30:02

And that means in God's providence, there are things I have not yet learned about my

01:30:10

God. I haven't arrived. Maybe Dr. Stratton has, but I haven't.

01:30:18

And he brings me to those places through his divine decree for what

01:30:27

I am going to experience in this life. My days are written in his book.

01:30:36

The day of my death is as certain as the day of my birth. And even a

01:30:43

Molinist has to say that. But the difference between us is the day of my birth and the day of my death reflect what pleases him.

01:30:56

He does as he pleases, not as he is allowed by some external body of data known as middle knowledge.

01:31:06

He does what pleases him. That's the difference. Divine freedom versus divine necessity.

01:31:13

Necessity forced upon God by the content of middle knowledge, which does not come from his will or from the creation.

01:31:22

There's the issue. And so when I challenge them to do what

01:31:27

I can do, not because I'm special, but because Reformed theology is organically derived from all of Scripture, not sitting on the surface, not just, oh, here's the chapter on predestination.

01:31:40

No. But when I challenge them to do with the central claims of their system, what we can do with the central claims of ours, that's their response.

01:31:54

That's making God a God of deception. Boy, I hope no one looks under the hood of that one. When someone responds to that challenge in that way, you know,

01:32:07

Dr. Stratton's saying, I want people to reject Calvinistic divine determinism. Okay, I want people to reject

01:32:14

Molinism for the man -centered, human -created, philosophical pile of claptrap that it actually is.

01:32:22

It is meant to rob God of his freedom, and I want you to reject it, and I'm giving you good reasons to reject it.

01:32:32

And this whole idea that, well, if God exhaustively determines everything, then you can't even, it's not even worthwhile reading the

01:32:39

Bible. Well, when I read the Bible, it says God wants me growing the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. He tells me his word is truth.

01:32:45

His spirit drives me to that word, and it's in that word that I become more like Christ and learn to know him better.

01:32:52

And that's the biblical parameters, and all your philosophy is never going to change it. And brother, you need to abandon that kind of argument because you're going to have to answer for it someday.

01:33:01

You're going to have to stand before the Lord Jesus Christ and answer for using that kind of philosophical silliness against God's decree.

01:33:15

I hope you'll, I hope you'll think about it. I just don't hear you guys willing to hear. You, I just don't, do you have ears to hear?

01:33:24

Do you have ears to hear? Okay. All right. Well, yay. Yes. Oh, uh -oh.

01:33:31

Whenever Rich pulls up the microphone, it's probably has something to do with the end of the year stuff.

01:33:38

You still need addresses from people and things like that, I'll bet you. Yeah. Okay. Okay. There's always that I need email addresses.

01:33:44

If you've been sending checks and you have not been getting receipts from me in the email box, I need your email address, and that's why.

01:33:51

So again, rpearce, P -I -E -R -C -E, at aomin .org. Send me your information.

01:33:57

I have been getting some information from some folks, and so that's neat. A couple of things in housekeeping.

01:34:04

On our website, there is a link at the top, the newsletter signup, and that is probably already gone by now.

01:34:13

So the newsletter is going away, and the app is going to take its place.

01:34:19

So we are going to begin working on, and I've been working more and more on getting more active and more familiar with how the app works and getting information directly out to folks in that regard.

01:34:32

So like, for instance, over the weekend, you did the Theology Matters update, and I read it and went, everybody needs to know about this.

01:34:39

So I shot it out through the app, push notification, and stuff like that. So we're going to be actually working more and more with the app to make it more presentable and usable.

01:34:50

And so if you haven't got the app, get the app out of the App Store, both

01:34:55

Google Play as well as the Apple App Store. It's in both places. So that's all

01:35:00

I've got for now. Okay. We'll eventually have to make it available outside of those contexts, too.

01:35:07

It'll have to be something, if it's possible to do that, because they'll come after us eventually.

01:35:13

I mean, we're making efforts right now to stop making the target on our back glow quite as brightly by live streaming the way that we're live streaming and posting where we're posting so that I can say the things

01:35:29

I need to say. They don't care if we argue about Molinism or natural theology or simplicity or anything else.

01:35:37

Google could care less. But it's the stuff I said at the top of the show that, you know, you're done.

01:35:44

You're out of here. You already get your strike. So we've already taken some steps to try to maintain some light out in the darkness and then use other methodologies at the same time.

01:35:56

So that's what we're trying to do. Okay. Well, we covered the waterfront today and went for an hour and a half, more than an hour and a half, and only started on certain things.

01:36:09

So we'll keep on going, pressing forward. I'm excitedly working on some textual stuff that I may sneak out and I might start sharing with people.

01:36:22

Continue to pray for the health issues. Like I said, I'm hoping to... Man, the medical system has changed.

01:36:29

Man, it has changed. I guess when you fire half the people that does things.

01:36:34

But man, it's sad how much harder it is to get medical treatment today than it was in December of 2019.

01:36:43

Oh man, things have changed and it's all purposeful.

01:36:48

Really is. Anyways, continue to pray about that and our traveling. I need to be out and about by the end of January.

01:36:58

So pray the Lord opens those doors to be able to do that. Thanks for watching the program.