Severed From Christ, Mormon God, Finishing Cyril's Confession

Hello Greens and welcome to The Dividing Line. It's a Thursday. Yes, I have so many appointments going on right now. I pull out a week from today, Lord willing, anyways. I just noticed the light over there.

I guess you had to turn it off and aim it at the floor because it was reflecting. Much, much, much reflections. We have a new stand for our SuperDuper screen and that camera is really low. It's cutting off the top of my head there.

There you go. See, Rich does exist. That was not a computer doing that. Anyway, the SuperDuper screen is SuperDuper heavy evidently and I kept looking at it and I was like, you know, I don't know, it could just be me, my eyes.

I have an ophthalmologist appointment tomorrow. In fact, blew a nice big floater in my right eye recently. And it could just be me, you know, age and stuff. But it looks to me like it's leaning forward a little bit, you know.

Well, he checks it out and he texts me and he says, oh yeah. The screen was right at the top end of the advertised capacity of the old mount, right? And this one you can put an elephant on, is that what you said?

Yeah, okay. Well, anyway, this thing's a beastie. If we ever see the big bright flash, I'm getting behind this. This looks like it's, you know, like the one movie where Indiana Jones hid in the refrigerator, you know, with a nuclear bomb, atomic bomb back then.

Anyway, so yeah, it looks good. It looks good. And you like how I have the have a cordon set up for that. Looks good from that perspective too. Anyway, so we've got a billion things going on. And so the scheduling next week is going to be all over the place because I will be traveling on Thursday.

Might I be able to do the program from where I'll be stopping the first stop? I might. It's not that far away. I like making that first run a little bit shorter, a little bit less stressful, you know, in case something happens.

Besides that, I'm climbing to the high country that first day. So good to leave a little extra leeway there. So we'll see. Just have to use the app, follow us on X, and we'll go from there. Appreciate your support.

Appreciate your prayers. I have a new pair of hearing aids in. You know, we bought the super-duper, whopper-dopper, expensive ones. You know, you go to the doctor and have the fitting and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

And they're fine, but I forget them all the time. They sit next to the computer at home and I just... I even put something on the door that I normally go out that has a hearing aid thing on it. It doesn't.

So I went online and I found these. You can carry them around, one of these. It's got some weight to it. It's got a battery in it and it keeps them charged up. And so, you know, you don't have to worry about it.

I mean, if you've left them in there a month and you still need them, they'll be fine. And so I kept forgetting to grab the bag that I carry. Rich is like, why don't you get a pair? We'll just leave them here.

So like, when you play clips, you can actually... or when people call in, you know, you can actually hear. I mean, I can function without these things, but eventually there's a little bit of a, I don't know, the brightness where a lot of the enunciation of words comes in.

It gets lost. And so yeah, I've got floaters in my eyes and hearing aids and someone just, my mom used to, my mom used to go around, someone just shoot me and get this over with. Put me out in the pasture, send me to the glue factories.

And nobody, nobody gets send me to the glue factory. No, only people over at least. It is a definite boomer thing. Send me to the glue factory. If you don't know what that means, ask Brock or ask Claude or Lumo or Gemini or any of the other 47 billion AI out there.

And they will explain it to you. Whether it will be an accurate explanation is something else. Anyway. Okay. Real quick here. You know, there's so many things we could be talking about. I mean, the genocide of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa is a horrific situation, but it's being covered by, you know, the people that are good at covering that kind of stuff.

I'd only be repeating what I'm reading second and third hand anyways. I mean, I follow Voice the Martyrs and Barnabas Fund. In fact, support both. And yeah, what's going on in Africa is absolutely horrific.

And the militant malignant form of Islam is still very, very prevalent. The thing to remember is not all Muslims are militant, but historically militant Islam has always ended up overwhelming what I would call culture building Islam.

So there's a form of Islam that can escape the jihadi mindset and can create cultural boundaries to control the violence inherent in following Muhammad's actual example. But they can't withstand the attacks by the jihadis themselves.

That's what has happened historically. And that's certainly what's concerning as to what we see going on in the world. So there's all that kind of stuff going on. We have only a few years ago when we would talk about socialists, when we would say, these Democrats, they're socialists.

Oh, come on, don't be so reactive. These are good Americans. Now they're calling themselves communists. They're straight up. And if you say that, then you still get the people, oh, you're just conspiracy theories, and you're overreacting.

No, we literally, literally, literally have communists being elected to the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States. I thought you raised your hand and swore allegiance to uphold constitution.

You cannot be a communist and uphold the constitution of the United States. It's not honest. It's absurd. These people want to destroy the constitution of the United States. And they're getting elected right, left, and center because we opened the borders and invited everybody and their second cousin in.

And if you've ever seen the movie Black Hawk Down, do you know where that was shot or what the context that was? That was Somalia. And these folks are not our friend by any stretch of the imagination, but they've taken over my native state.

The elected officials in my native state of Minnesota celebrate, they fly Somali flags, they celebrate Somali Independence Day. I mean, they are just guilty of treason on every single level that you can imagine.

And you wonder where all the, I saw something and it did strike me, and I'm going to go on to a theological topic, but I'm just saying there's a lot of stuff we could be talking about. They're doing away or have done away with, I think, property taxes in Florida.

And you wonder how that is. I mean, I pay property taxes, sales taxes, all sorts of stuff here in the state of Arizona. And you wonder where the money goes. And when you start thinking about the billions of the bee that we are recognizing have been siphoned out of government accounts and sent overseas, and the people have been enriched by all that stuff, if you didn't have the corruption, you might not have to pay nearly the amount of taxes you do now.

Yeah, corruption is, well, do I really need to say it's a violation of the God's law, you know, equal weights and measures and all the standards you get there? Anyway, so I saw a post. I forget what it was.

No, I don't think it was. No, no, no. It was Trent Horn. That's right. See, I'm sorry. I even said I was going to listen to this, and I totally spaced putting on my phone. So yeah, I'm supposed to ride tomorrow.

So try to make a mental note. Unfortunately, the sticky has come off of the back of all of my mental sticky notes. The sticky on my mental sticky notes expires after 62 years. Okay, so I'm almost, I'm gonna hit 64 here at the end of the year, and so all the sticky's gone.

So I write the note, but it just doesn't stay up. Then the cats grab it and run off with it and play with it and things like that. So I would try to make a mental note to listen to, I think, was it needgod .net?

Why do people use URLs for names? I don't understand that. Please don't do that. It's not appropriate. But there was a debate with Trent Horn on Perseverance of the Saint. Now, I've debated Trent on the same thing, and in fact, that was the first debate that he ever did.

I was reminded of that recently, that our debate at G3 was the first debate that he ever did. And, you know, that was not the topic that I wanted to do, but that's what ended up being done, and it's not that I don't believe in the Perseverance of the Saints.

The problem is, the Perseverance of the Saints is the end of a chain of biblical teaching that starts with the sovereignty of God, the deadness of man and sin, the perfection of the atoning work of Christ, Trinitarian harmony in the gospel, doctrine of election, and all of that then leads to the Perseverance of the Saints, because that is just simply the recognition that God has an elect people, and Jesus Christ is the perfect Savior of those elect people.

Well, that's a whole lot to try to present in any context of a debate. I just don't have time, unless you do Church of Christ debates, where you debate for three days in the same text. Anyway, so I was told, I saw some quotes from this debate, and I was like, wow, was Trent having a really bad day that day?

I mean, it just seemed really aggressive and completely out of order, with sexual overtones. I guess the thing he was trying to do was to say, well, we can define, because we don't believe in sol scriptura, we can define exactly what sexual deviancy is and stuff like that, and I'm sitting here going, are we talking about the people in the Vatican?

You do realize the accusations and rumors about what goes on amongst the cardinals and archbishops and stuff like that, the Vatican, and long history, the pornography, you know, I mean, there was a time when pretty much everybody agrees the Vatican was a brothel.

Is that what we're talking about here? So, I haven't listened to it yet, so I need to get it up there, and maybe that's something we can listen to and respond to some. But evidently, Patrick Madrid jumped in on it and made some comments about First Virgins and Saints.

And one of his, and it's one of everybody's, I remember very clearly, I can almost remember what the guy looked like. I've told this story a couple times, so Algo remembers it. My senior year in high school, we were at a Southern Baptist church, and the Bible study teacher in my small group in the senior Bible study, and this church had ostensibly 20 ,000 members.

We couldn't find more than 7 ,000 at the time, but it was big. And so, the senior high Bible study department was, you know, I don't know, 150, probably, just for the seniors. And that was the seniors, not the juniors or the sophomores.

Anyway, one Sunday, this guy starts teaching against the Perseverance of the Saint, or Eternal Security, as I refer to it. And I remember immediately realizing what this guy was doing, and I started arguing with him.

And when I realized that he is totally intent upon pushing this for the program, for the whole session, I got up and walked out. I had never done that in my life. I had never got up and walked out of a Bible cycle.

But I went straight to the staff, and I told them, hey, this is what's going on. I knew what the church taught. The pastor preached on it just recently. And I don't think it was that Sunday night. I think it was the next Sunday night the pastor preached on that subject because of what had happened.

And what we found out was this guy and his wife had decided the same day, because they were both teachers, and the boys and the girls, to present this idea. And they did. And, of course, they left the church immediately thereafter, because they were immediately contacted.

They said, no, you can't do this. And so they left. I remember running into him at Bree and Christian Bookstore, that guy. And he knew who had reported him. I mean, I was the one that walked out of the class.

It's not difficult to figure out. And the first thing he did was hit me with the same text that Patrick Madrid presented. And so I wanted to look at it. It's on the screen right now. Now, Patrick Madrid focused on Galatians 5 .4.

But I want to read the context, because that's sort of important. Behold, I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is under obligation to keep the whole law.

You have been severed from Christ, you who are being justified by law, you have fallen from grace. For we, through the Spirit, by faith, are eagerly awaiting for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything but faith working through love.

Now, obviously, a la pistis de agapes energumene at the end of verse six is, of course, an extremely abused text. That is, in fact, the text that is cited in the Confession of Dositheus, as we will see when we get into that later on.

But that's the one that Rome uses. They say faith working through love, that working opens the door for all sorts of works to be added to faith as the mechanism of justification, which isn't what is being discussed here anyways.

But here's the issue. Paul is not talking about committing mortal sins here. Of course, nobody in the New Testament speaks about mortal sins. When it's talked about his sin unto death, it's not talking about their sins unto death and their sins not unto death.

It's talking about the sin of apostasy, cursing Christ. But it's not creating the mortal, venial category that Rome utilizes or some others utilize. That's not what is being discussed here. He is talking about, if you receive circumcision, Christ would be of no benefit to you.

So the issue in the churches in Galatia with the Judaizers, who were coming in and saying, faith in Christ is insufficient. You have to be circumcised first. You have to get into the Old Covenant first before you can get into the New Covenant.

And so it's something you must do. When we're talking about Gentiles, you've got to get into the Old Covenant circumcision, and then you can get into the New Covenant by faith in Jesus. And Paul is saying, nope.

We can proclaim the gospel to all of the Gentiles, and they can exercise faith in Jesus Christ and be justified in that way without all this other rigmarole that you people are throwing in there. So if you receive circumcision, Christ would be of no benefit to you.

And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is under obligation to keep the whole law. So if you're going to start with that, if you're going to try, we'll do this part of the law.

And yes, we can observe this part of the law. Paul's point is, well, then you need to do all of it. You need to observe all of the law, and you're going to fail to do that. And so you're under obligation to keep the whole law.

And that's the context, then, of you have been severed from Christ, you who are being justified by law, you have fallen from grace. Now, the argument is, and this is the argument that my Bible study, former Bible study teacher a long, long ago, made to me at the Berean Christian Bookstore at 35th Avenue and Camelback Road, as I recall.

The argument that he made and the argument that Patrick Madrid makes is, well, clearly, you know, Galatians is written to baptized believers. Galatians 3 .3, you've been baptized in Christ. So these are baptized believers, these are people who are in Christ, and it says they have been severed from Christ.

So you can be in Christ, you can truly be in Christ, and be severed from Christ. Okay. Now, obviously, the issue is, what does it mean to be in Christ? What does it mean to be an external member of a church?

What does it mean to simply be baptized but not be in Christ? And, of course, in the Roman Catholic perspective, baptism is what places you in Christ in the first place, which is not a biblical perspective, but that's their traditional perspective when they read the Bible in light of it.

But it's rather obvious, I think, when you look at the text, what is being addressed here? Who, if we look here, hoitanus, whoever, en namo decauste. So you who are being justified by law, and some translations are seeking to be justified by law, but that's interpretational, whosoever of you, by law, are seeking to be made right, then you have, I can actually see it on the screen here, you have fallen caes caritas, from grace.

And so, well, see, you can be in grace and you can fall from grace by committing sin. That's not what he's talking about. He is making it very clear, and he's already said this previously. He says it in verse 3.

He's making it very clear. You either do law-keeping or you do grace. Faith and grace. Empty hand. Romans 3 and 4. You can't mix the two together. And I've often said it's like walking down two paths that go 180 degrees from each other.

You can't get very far going down those two paths. And so, if you've chosen the path of justification by law, you're no longer on the path of grace. And since Christ is only on the path of grace, you have been severed from Christ.

He's not on the law side. The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. Paul had already said that. So there's all this context stuff that needs to be remembered when we look at material like this, and we have it here as well.

But it's amazing how many people will go to Galatians 5 .4, and even though it says right there, you who are being justified by law, they don't see it. They don't think about it. Don't do anything with it.

That explains what fallen from grace is. I suppose Patrick can say that seeking to be justified by law is a mortal sin, maybe. I don't know. But that's certainly not what Paul's talking about in his context at all.

I had this interesting conversation. It didn't last long last night, unfortunately. We've got this guy named Harfad Yek, who wants to try to turn the doctrine of theosis into Joseph Smith's thing. But here's Lego Joseph Smith.

I responded to him on Tuesday's Dividing Line. I responded rather fully, and so I thought it would be nice if I would let him know that I had responded to him, and so I did. I actually started doing this, and it's really annoying.

It just loads all this stuff one at a time. I went in, and he had written this big, long thing about honoring God because of what he's become. I thought that was a very useful thing to be able to illustrate the vast difference between the historical doctrine of God in Christian theology and the LDS perspective of God as an exalted man.

I responded to that, and one of the things I pointed out was, biblically, the attributes of God that are specifically denied by Mormonism, such as eternality, and not eternality of intelligences, but timelessness, being the origin source of all things, the creator of all things, that that is never separated from God's holiness, justice, love, mercy, grace.

Those things become the foundation. So over and over again, Isaiah, before Isaiah will proclaim God's forgiveness and mercy and the fact he's going to save the remnant of Israel and things like that, he starts identifying Yahweh as the creator of all things, the one who's with the first generation and the last generation, and so the timelessness, the alpha, the omega, the beginning, the end, the first, the last, all kinds of stuff.

And so those attributes of God become the foundation for a meaningful understanding of God's justice, God's holiness, God's righteousness. So scripture never divides these things up. And I said that in the last program.

You can go back, listen, like I said, I sent him a time index thing, whether he listened to all of it or not. So you'll notice what he says here. You can sort of see where the cursor is. He says, A, the ultimate metaphysical source of reality, B, perfect moral character, love, holiness, justice, mercy, faithfulness.

Why would A be more worthy of worship than B? Now, again, it's a useful question for us all to consider and ponder, not just those of us who want to be speaking to Mormons and these days responding to such a much wider realm of Mormon belief.

I mean, man, we thought it was a challenge to prepare people to deal with Mormon objections back in the 80s and 90s. And back then, you pretty much knew what the objections were going to be. But now you can get hit with all sorts of stuff.

It's a real challenge. But anyway, when you think about the ultimate metaphysical source of reality, what does that mean? God created all things. Everything exists, depends upon him for its existence.

You can call all of it out of existence in a moment. Nothing exists separately from him. This necessitates creatio ex in hilo, which Mormonism, of course, denies. Mormonism has the idea of eternal matter, that God organizes pre-existing matter rather than creating matter.

There's different takes on that amongst Mormons as well. No one's really exactly 100 certain what Joseph Smith was talking about then. Anyway, but God is the creator of all things. He's the metaphysical source of reality.

And the Mormon God isn't. He's not. Why do you say he's not? Because there was a God before him. Because there is a law of eternal progression that he had to obey to become a God. And so somebody had to initiate those laws.

There has to be some origin and source of those things. So the laws of priesthood, power of procreation—these are the things that make God God in Mormonism—they pre-existed the exaltation of Elohim as a God.

Now this is the stuff that, again, the neo-Mormons go, we're not going to go there, which separates them from Mormonism. They're not Mormons. But orthodox Mormons believe these things, and so they don't have an ultimate metaphysical source of reality.

That's one of the things that eternal regress, as they call it—God before God before God before God—robs from them. They don't have that. So they can't recognize—evidently, at least this fellow can't—cannot recognize the absolute necessity of this to the very identity of who God is.

When God differentiates himself from the gods, the peoples, he does so on the basis of his creative action. So Jeremiah 10—and I quote this to him—Jeremiah 10. The gods did not create the heavens and the earth, shall pass away from under the heavens and from the earth.

So if your God didn't create the heavens and the earth, your God's going to pass away. It's just a thing. It's not really a God—the only God. But then the B—perfect moral character—love, holiness, justice, mercy, faithfulness—all of those things we are dependent upon God's revelation to have a fundamental knowledge of.

There are all sorts of sub-biblical definitions of love and holiness and justice and mercy and faithfulness. And God's revelation of what these things are—his calling us to these things—does not mean that we are in the nature of God.

Because in Mormonism—remember we've listened to Jacob Hansen— we're of his species, you know, Acts 17. So we're the same species as God, you see. Ignoring—God says, I'm not a man. He's the creator of all things.

He's eternally existed. So taking just bits and pieces and stringing them together. And so we are dependent upon God's revelation of what love is, what holiness is, so on and so forth, to even know what these things are.

But God's throne, for example, is built upon justice. But what upholds the throne? What does the throne mean? Well, again, if you go back to the Bible's own definition of these things, God is on a throne not because he has created a throne to sit on, but because he is the one who created all things.

And this takes me back to that first conversation with Elders Reed and Reese a long, long, long, long time ago. When we finished up our second meeting—we met on a Monday and a Thursday, as I recall—when we finished up that second three-hour meeting, and I knew this was going to be the last meeting we had, at least in this context, I said to them, someday you're going to need to know the unchanging God, because your God has changed, and they had admitted it.

And so that's been our message all along, and that's the issue here. I said to them at the time, I said, how can you know that God is going to keep his promises if he might change tomorrow to where he no longer is holy, trustworthy?

If God can change, then his promises might not be fulfilled—the very ones you're trusting in. And so he does list there faithfulness, the last one, but justice has to be based upon unchanging standards.

And the Bible's character is sufficient to do that. My argument is there is no God in Mormonism, literally. You have an exalted man, but he's of the same species as man, and so therefore you do not have that ultimate ground of metaphysical reality, and therefore you do not have that ultimate ground of defining what faithfulness, love, mercy, or any of the rest of things are, either.

So it's the division of these two things into two completely different categories that's the main problem. So why would A be more worthy of worship than B? Well, there is no God that is A that isn't B—not in Scripture.

So it's the division of these things that I challenge, and that represents the fact that in Mormonism you can divide these things up because they don't actually have true deity. And that's why they're not the table to talk about election, predestination, everything else.

Oh, I just saw this over here, and I do need to make a comment on it. A couple days ago, on July 7th, the Egyptian Football Association released a video titled, The Secret to Victory. They openly declared the key to victory is to begin each match by cursing Christians and Jews.

Before every game, the team gathers to recite chronic passages describing Christians and Jews as infidels under Allah's wrath. Coptic Christians make up 15 of Egypt's population, yet they are not allowed on the national team.

Now, the Islamic team of Egypt has been eliminated by the infidel nation of Argentina. Allah was not on their side, is the comment here. And then there's a a video of them chanting some of the stuff from Now, did you catch that?

No, you didn't catch that. Rich, did you catch that? No, maybe they should have tried to go in. That's a good recovery. That's it. Maybe they should have tried rowing. The Scandinavians are doing that.

The Norwegians are doing that. They're having a lot of fun with that this time around. But what I meant was, did you catch that? There is a term that, if you listen carefully, and they're saying it fairly quickly.

Zalim. Normally, when Surah al-Fatiha, the first surah of the Quran is being recited, they elongate the vowel in that word. Zalim. That makes it easier to catch it. This is from the last ayah, the last verse of Surah al-Fatiha, the opening surah of the Quran.

Seven verses, as I recall. And it is a part of the Islamic prayers. And this is the section where it's saying, lead me in the proper path, not the path of those who earned Allah's wrath, or those who have gone astray.

So, every Muslim every day prays, don't let me be amongst those who earned God's wrath, or amongst those who've gone astray. But, Muhammad was very clear about who that was. Those who've earned God's wrath are the Jews.

And those who have gone astray are the Christians. So, Zalim is led astray. Though, the led astray ones, you just heard it, play it again, you might catch it. But, they are the Jews and the Christians.

So, every day a Muslim prays not to be a Jew or Christian. And so, yeah, that's true. And yes, they did lose to Argentina, but I have a feeling that even God was voting for Lionel Messi anyway. So, if you're not following all that, you have no idea who.

If you don't know who Lionel Messi, well, even I mentioned Messi last week. Remember, I said we have two goats right in front of our screens right now. We have the greatest of all time, Lionel Messi, football player.

He scored against Egypt. He scored the equalizer against Egypt, and they won, as I recall, 3 -2. Argentina did. I think they're the defending champs, too. I think they won the World Cup last time, too.

And then you got Tadej Pogacar, the cyclist, who today set a new record climbing the Tourmalet, which is one of the biggest, hugest mountains in the Tour de France. He broke his own record by, like, two minutes and 20 seconds or something.

Some ridiculous thing like that. He's just unstoppable unless a dog runs out in front of him. That's what always amazed me. You ride 2 ,200, 2 ,300 miles in the Tour de France over three weeks, and you're riding through countryside.

You're riding through cities. Do you have any idea what the chances of getting hit by a stray dog are when you're doing that, especially when you're flying along at 40 miles an hour? Oh, cows. They've had to dodge cows, deer.

Tour Down Under, they've gotten hit by lots of kangaroos. Lots of kangaroos just take you right off, and you're done for the season. So yeah, just finishing is amazing. And if Pogacar wins this one, that's five for him.

There's only a few people who've done five if you don't include Lance Armstrong. All right. So let me see here. There we go. All right. So let's get back to where we need to go here. Get the bar out of the way.

And finish up what we've been doing here, which I'm sure you're absolutely thrilled about. But hopefully there's people who recognize the importance of all this stuff. And I'll try to be brief here because this isn't super, super central.

We've been looking at the confession of Cyril Licaris, the patriarch of Constantinople, and the fact that he is an embarrassment to modern Eastern Orthodoxy. There are many Eastern Orthodox who claim that this confession, which is extremely Reformed and consistent with Reformed theology, didn't come from Cyril Licaris.

The evidence is firmly against them at that point. But it's understandable why they try to make the argument and say that, no, none of us would ever have said these things, believe these things, things like that.

And, of course, the confession of Basithius, which we started and which we'll pick back up again, maybe even today, clearly is written in response to this confession from Cyril. So if this was some big fake thing, it really doesn't make any sense why you'd have an entire synod called to respond to something that's fake.

All you do is say, no, the guy never taught this. But he did teach it, and there's very strong evidence that he did. So what does he say? Well, we looked at how he introduced the sacraments, and so chapter 16, we believe that baptism is a sacrament instituted by the Lord.

Unless a man has received it, he has no communion with Christ, from whose death, burial, and glorious resurrection the whole virtue and efficacy of baptism proceeds. And so, even at our church, we make it very clear that while we do not limit partaking of the supper to members of Apologia Church, we do require that you be a baptized believer in Jesus Christ who partake of the supper.

Why? Because it's the commandment of Christ. First commandment is to be baptized, then you partake of the supper, and if you reject Christ's commandments, then how can you say you're under his lordship?

And it is probably, I would imagine, almost every single Christian group of any nature would say that the whole virtue and efficacy of baptism proceeds from the death, burial, and glorious resurrection of Christ.

I think everybody would say that, but what do you mean by that? Do you mean that the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ creates a treasury of merit? Do you believe that this somehow makes original sin washed away in baptism, whatever?

How is the death, burial, and glorious resurrection of Christ the foundation of any of your sacramental views? It's very important. Therefore, you're certain that those who are baptized in the same form which our Lord commanded in the gospel, I wonder what that means, both original and actual sins are pardoned so that whosoever has been washed in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit are regenerate, cleansed, and justified.

But considering the repetition of it, we have no command to be rebaptized, therefore we must abstain from this indecent thing. Now there, interestingly enough, we could really try to dig into exactly where he fell on a number of controversial issues during the Reformation itself, but one thing is very clear, he was not a Nanabaptist, and the theological writings that he would have been exposed to from Calvin and others would have been adamantly opposed to any form of Anabaptist views.

And of course, that term is horribly abused because it's applied to people who believe a completely different thing. But I think that's what you have in the, we have no command to be rebaptized, therefore we must abstain from this indecent thing, is, I think, very clearly in regards to that.

But the relationship between justifying faith and baptism was still a debate, even amongst some of the Reformed, and that seems to be what's behind part of this statement as well. But again, this is not the current Eastern Orthodox perspective, by any stretch of the imagination.

When we come to the Supper, you'll notice it's a fairly lengthy thing here, in chapter 17, we believe the other sacrament which was ordained by, so the other sacrament, there's only two, that's Reformed, that's Reformation, that's not what had come before this.

The humidity is actually up, my mouth is dry. We believe that the other sacrament which was ordained by the Lord is that which we call Eucharist, for in the night in which the Lord offered up himself, he took bread, blessed it, has a quotation from Matthew and 1 Corinthians, this is the pure and lawful institution of this wonderful sacrament in the administration of which we profess the true and certain presence of our Lord Jesus Christ.

That presence, however, which faith offers to us, not that which the devised doctrine of transubstantiation teaches. What's interesting is that's pretty much what the London Baptist Confession says. It talks about faith as the mechanism whereby Christ is present with his people, all that kind of stuff.

Again, London Baptist Confession and Calvin's view, and that's what he's been influenced by, and then the rejection of transubstantiation. We believe the faithful eat the body of Christ in the supper of the Lord, not by breaking it with the teeth of the body.

That's Augustine. That's Augustinian language. I could give you the quote. Not by breaking it with the teeth of the body, but by perceiving it with the sense and feeling of the soul. There's no transubstantiation.

This isn't a re-sacrifice of Christ. This is a spiritual presence that is dependent upon the obedience of the faithful, the obedience of the church, doing what Christ has commanded, where bodies gathered, Christ is present, so on and so forth.

Since the body of Christ is not that which is visible in the sacrament, but that which faith spiritually apprehends and offers to us. This is Calvin. This is very clearly an expression of Calvin's understanding of the Lord's presence in the supper.