Has Natural Theology Failed?

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala, and today

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I have with me another guest. So, of course, folks who have been following Revealed Apologetics on YouTube and Facebook, you guys most definitely saw the thumbnail.

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I'm going to be having Dr. Jeffrey D. Johnson on with me to discuss the topic of natural theology and apologetics, and it's going to be right up that alley along the lines of presuppositional methodology and how we should properly understand natural theology and what are some of some of its weaknesses.

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Why do presuppositionalists tend to be very cautious about how we use natural theology or whether it's appropriate that we should that we should use it.

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So we're gonna be talking about things along those lines, and so I'm very excited to have my guest on with me today.

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So let me just give a little bit of a background about who Jeffrey D. Johnson is. He is an author of several

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Christian books, including the Amazon's number one bestseller, The Church, Why Bother? He's got a bunch of books on other theological topics.

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He's also got the book Absurdity of Unbelief, which is an excellent apologetic resource. I have recommended that book to many people who are interested in apologetics in general, presuppositional apologetics more specifically.

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He's also a pastor and teacher of Grace Bible Church in Conway, Arkansas, a community where he also resides with his wife,

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Letha. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. He'll correct me in just a moment. And their two children,

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Martin and Christian. Jeff graduated from Central Baptist College in Bible and earned his,

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I'm not sure what that is, an M, well, Master in Religion, maybe, in Biblical Studies.

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He earned his degree in Systematics from Veritas Theological Seminary. Along with his pastoral and publishing ministry,

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Jeff is a sought -after conference speaker and contributes regularly to the Reformed Baptist blog.

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So I am super happy to have him on with me, and I'm looking forward to an excellent and in -depth discussion.

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So without further ado, let me invite Dr. Jeffrey Johnson on with me. How's it going, Dr. Johnson?

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It's going great. Thanks for having me on. Well, it is a pleasure. I know you're super busy, so I really appreciate you taking the time.

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Yeah, it's great to be here and thankful for this conversation. Excellent. Now, I'm going to get this out of the way right at the beginning.

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Should I call you Dr. Johnson? Jeff? Jeff is great. Okay, good.

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Everyone's different. You never know. All right, excellent. So besides what I just gave by way of just a brief introduction, is there anything you'd like to share with folks so they can know a little bit more about what you do and what you write on, things like that?

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Yeah, I mean, you said pretty much what I do. One thing that wasn't in there, I'm a president of Grace Bible Theological Seminary, and so we're five years going on a new seminary, a

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Reformed Baptist seminary in the state of Arkansas, and I've been pastoring the same church for 21 years.

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Okay. Now, have you been a Reformed Baptist from the get -go, like when the Lord saved you, He thrusted you into a

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Reformed Baptist church, or was that something you caught on to a little bit along the way? No.

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Thankfully, I grew up in kind of a Reformed Baptist church. My father's a

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Baptist pastor, and so I came to the Doctrines of Grace and Reformed Theology when

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I was in high school, and so when I went off to college and into ministry, I knew what

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I believed, and so I've had a good foundation, thankfully, to my parents' church that I was raised in.

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Excellent. And how long until you kind of got onto the issue of apologetics?

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I'm going to ask you one question. When did you get into apologetics? And then the second question, what led you to presuppositional apologetics, since most people who are presuppositionalists kind of come to it a little bit later down the road, but what's your story with respect to apologetics?

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Yeah, I've been interested in philosophy for a long time. I don't know why. I'm one of these guys that likes to read and just read, and when

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I read, I end up reading the citations and the footnotes, and those footnotes push me to other directions, and I started reading philosophers.

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Not that I was... I never read philosophers in a sense that I was trying to figure out what

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I can ascertain from them. Sure. As much as it is, why do they believe what they believed, and what's the system?

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And so I've always thought systematically, like, it's not like I think things are just like independent truths, and if we happen to have overlapping truths, then

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I can borrow those truths and integrate those truths into my thinking. Sure. I've always, thankfully,

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I guess, intuitively thought truths come from some other truths, and everything's a system, and so I want to know, why do you believe that?

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Not just that you say you believe this, but why? What's the system? So I wasn't content with just knowing some sound bites from Aristotle or sound bites from Immanuel Kant, or I wanted to know the system of thought.

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Why do they think the way they think? And hopefully they're consistent with themselves. And so that led me to study philosophy, and in so doing, it led me to study apologetics, and epistemology, and ontology, and these things.

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And I've always convinced that the Bible, and the Bible alone provides us the answers to our philosophical questions.

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Like, the Bible is a philosophy in one sense. It's not man -made philosophy, it's not

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Greek philosophy, but it answers the ultimate questions of life. And philosophy is ultimately asking, why are we here?

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And what's the meaning of life? And what's the explanation of all things? You're ultimately looking for the all -inclusive explanation.

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The Bible provides that for us, so it's not like I was looking for that, but what are the explanations that the secular scholars, and philosophers, and thinkers of this world, what are their explanations?

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So I've been curious of that, and that led me to study Van Til and presuppositional apologetics.

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As long as, about 20 years ago, I began studying these things. And I've been a convinced presuppositionalist since my days in college.

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So you came at apologetics, really, from a curiosity out of, like, worldviews, just to see how everything fits together with respect to people's perspective.

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That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. Worldviews are important. And so I've been looking at that for a long time,

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I suppose. Excellent. Very good. Well, thank you for that. Well, you wrote an excellent book,

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The Absurdity of Unbelief, and perhaps we can talk about that kind of in the second portion of this discussion. But I really want to talk about an area that I think is really important, and that is the area of natural theology.

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And so you wrote a couple of books about natural theology. I think there's two of them, or maybe, yeah, two of them.

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So one book, which I'm looking at on Amazon right now, so folks are interested in purchasing this book, Saving Natural Theology from Thomas Aquinas.

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It's actually $2 .99 on Amazon Kindle. So yeah, you can just download that bad boy right now.

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And you also wrote the book that I'm currently working through, and I've been enjoying it greatly so far,

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The Failure of Natural Theology, A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas. What led you into exploring the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, and what interested you with respect to this whole thing of natural theology?

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Yeah, that study started six, seven years ago, maybe in depth five years ago, when

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I began to see more and more people quoting Aquinas favorably. And I'm like, what in the world?

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Because there's been this transition. When I was in college 20, 25 years ago, everything was fantil, presuppositional, that was the kind of the what everybody was studying.

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And you had your classical apologist, R .C. Sproul, everybody loved him.

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And so you had your few people that held to that. But as a whole, what you expected was presuppositionalism everywhere.

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And then I noticed this switch or this subtle change. I'm like, what is bringing this on? And so I began to read

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Aquinas for myself, started reading his works. I begin with the

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Summa of the Summa. And then I went to read the full Summa, both

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Summas. In fact, I end up reading both of those books like three times, just trying to figure this out.

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And I wanted to, I wanted to know why Aquinas believed the way he believed.

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What's his system? Not just what, like I said, not just some of the things he said, but what is the system behind his thoughts?

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And so that has been a five year long study, just seeing the concerns of more and more

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Aquinas being touted and promoted. I never did like him, honestly.

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So I never did. I didn't start the study thinking, hey, this is good. So I admit that I was reading him critically from the beginning.

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But as I begin to read him and read him and read the best interpreters of Aquinas, I felt like, okay, now

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I understand what he's saying. I understand his worldview and what he's trying to accomplish.

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And, and once I could put my finger on the fatal flaw, and I use that word fatal flaw, because that's,

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I put that in my first book, because I was trying to study a particular topic. And it's like fatal flaws, like, where's, where's the system fall apart?

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Where's the linchpin? If you pull that pin, the whole mechanism, the whole worldview cannot stand if you pull that pin.

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And once I determined, here is the fatal flaw of Thomas Aquinas' thinking, let me put my finger on that flaw, pull the pin out of the system and watch how it falls apart.

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So I wanted to write a book, exposing the failure of his version of natural theology.

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What I do appreciate, though, at the beginning of the book, you speak very kindly about Thomas Aquinas. So you're coming at him from a critical perspective, but you recognize that he was brilliant in a lot of ways.

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I mean, he's definitely no slouch. But at the same time, appreciating his intellectual contribution doesn't mean we necessarily agree.

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So, so let's jump right into some of the definitions and differentiations, and then kind of unpack what you think is the problem with Thomas Aquinas' view of natural theology and how that affects the realm of apologetics, especially coming from the

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Reformed camp. So when you, you may have mentioned before, that, you know, it was all Van Till and all this kind of Reformed apologetics, and then you saw kind of Thomas Aquinas being quoted here and used there.

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I would imagine you mean that within the context of like the Reformed community. That's right. That's right. Okay. Right. I think that's important there.

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Okay. So what is natural theology, if you could unpack that definition for us? Well, I'm writing a new book trying to explore that.

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So I'm working on this book and natural theology means so many things to different people. And that's part of the problem within this discussion is what is natural theology?

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It's sad because the basic definition would be what you can know about God independent of scriptures.

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I think we all might could agree with that basic definition. Now, if we all limited natural theology to that, then that would include

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Greek philosophy. That would include whatever knowledge that we could gain from natural revelation. And a lot of people can fit under that broad category of natural theology.

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However, historically, natural theology could mean what you can know independent of revelation, and not just special revelation or the

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Bible, but general revelation. And that Greek philosophy, for instance, is a tip to understand not just God, but understand the whole worldview, understand the whole explanation of why we exist, what's the ultimate meaning of life, and what's the purpose of knowledge, and how do we know what we know in these things.

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It's trying to explain all that independent of God, independent of revelation.

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Not independent of God, but independent of revelation. So natural revelation, in my mind, if we're going to save it, if we're going to save natural theology, it has to be tied and rooted to natural revelation.

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And therefore, we can have a natural theology if it's what we can know through natural revelation.

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But if we're looking at Greek philosophy, which is independent of natural revelation, then we have to get rid of it.

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So, okay, so you used another term there that I think would be helpful to differentiate between, because a lot of people confuse these two terms.

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What is the difference, then, between natural theology and natural revelation? And why is it important to keep those distinct?

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Yeah, exactly. Well, natural revelation is what God communicates in nature in its universal knowledge that God communicates to us instantaneously, spontaneously, that even the youngest child who knows how to think knows.

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We all know God in all languages. And we also know that God is the God of providence.

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We know that God is holy. We know that God is good and righteous. We know that we're sinners.

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We know the law that's written in our hearts. We know how to behave. There are certain things we all know that God has made sure that we would know, and he's not left it for us to try to uncover that under a rock or have to be smart and work our way to that knowledge through experimentation or through empiricism or rationalism.

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It's knowledge that he's given us through nature, and it comes quickly.

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In fact, we could try to suppress it, but it's a consistent communication that comes to us.

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And so we know God from the beginning. We know God as soon as we know anything.

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We know God as soon as we know ourselves. There's not a time that we can say, well, man doesn't know God. We already have that knowledge from the beginning.

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So this is innate. You're referencing innate knowledge. Well, I don't necessarily say it's innate.

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I do believe we're made in the image of God, which gives us the innate ability to understand revelation in nature.

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So it's not like it's just me and my innate consciousness by itself. It's my five senses seeing the world or sensing the world.

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And by sensing the world, I have immediate communication that God is behind this.

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So would you say that knowledge of God is immediate or immediate or both?

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Well, I would say I would say that it's spontaneously communicated through the medium of nature.

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Like we use words to communicate. God uses his works to communicate. So his works of nature are the letters, are the words, are the mechanism, are the medium of communication.

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And we know that the author of those works are those words of nature, the book of nature.

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We know the author is God immediately. Like when my dad, my father calls me on the phone, he doesn't have to say, hey, son, this is dad.

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I know immediately this is dad. When God's elect hear the voice of Christ, they know this is

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Christ. My sheep know my voice, Jesus says. We know when all humanity views creation, they know

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God is good at communicating and they know this is God speaking. They know that this is God that is behind the works.

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And so that's that is what I call spontaneous or quick. It's not a syllogism.

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It's not I have to work this out. I don't know. Well, let me think about this. No, God is communicating. And we all know that God is behind this.

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And that is working with the fact that we're made in his image and we have the sense of God. And so we have the law written in our conscience.

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So there's this we're made as proper recipients of that communication. And so as that which we're made to be in the image of God is able to properly understand and interpret the revelation, the divine revelation that comes from God through nature so that we know

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God. So would you say there is a point at which a person doesn't know God but comes to know

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God? No, no. OK, so I mean, you could say there's a there's a point where a child doesn't have any language and conception.

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And there's a point that the vocabulary, once the vocabulary is in his head, the knowledge of God, it fits that vocabulary.

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We could argue that we could argue that. But the

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Bible says that there's no language and there's no person that does not know. So I'm not saying that doesn't know

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God, that it's universal. It's not almost universal. It is universal.

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OK, and it is so effect. God is so effective in communicating that the intellectual people know and the people who are struggling intellectually also know.

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That was a gentle way of putting it. Smart people know it and the dumb people know it. Yeah, that's right. Even I know, even

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I, I'm on the lower end of things. And even I know there's a God. OK, so just real quick, for those who are listening, we got a nice, nice group of people watching.

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And there are a couple people sending in some questions. I want to encourage folks, if you do have questions, Jeff has agreed to take some questions at the end like we normally do on the show.

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So just make sure you preface your question with questions so that I can differentiate your question from the rest of the comments.

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So thank you so much for folks sending in your question. We'll get to some of those towards the back end as we normally do. All right, so we know what natural theology is and we know what natural revelation is.

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Natural theology is what we do, right? And natural revelation is what God does. He reveals himself in various ways.

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So what is the problem? From a reformed pastor theologian's perspective, why would you caution reformed believers of adopting the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas?

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Because it's not natural theology. It's not a natural theology rooted in natural revelation.

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It's rooted in natural science. Thomas Aquinas is essentially an empiricist.

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He says all knowledge begins with sense experience. And all knowledge not only begins with sense experience, it is confined to sense experience.

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So all my vocabulary and all my knowledge can be ascertained by the world in which I live in. And then that vocabulary which is gathered from the world

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I live in is the vocabulary that limits my understanding of God. So I can't know God as God knows himself.

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I have to know God as God is revealed in this world that he created. I know the cause by knowing the effects.

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So it's not like God is breaking into our world and verbally communicating to us to his image bearers that's made to be proper recipients of his communication.

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It's that here it's almost as if we're in this world and we can only get to God by the language of this world that is confined to this world.

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And so it begins on empiricism and the study of physics, the study of science, the study of particularly how motion works.

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And so let me study the attributes of motion. And by studying how things work and the powers of secondary causes,

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I can therefore take what I know and apply it to the transcendental

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God above secondary causes. And the study of science leads me to the study of God.

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We go from physics to metaphysics. And thus it's based upon an unbiblical idea that there is an ontological link or chain of being between creation and the creator.

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That the way motion works and power works and the way physics works, we can know how

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God works. And thus it's implied that that is built upon this assumption, this presupposition that that all effects resemble their cause.

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And therefore, I know about God by knowing about this world. And that is based upon an ontological chain of being between God and this world.

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And that's built off Aristotle's philosophy. And Aristotle did not believe that God created the world out of nothing, that there's this ontological gap or distinction between him and this world.

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So just because something works this way in the world doesn't mean that has to be applied to God. There's a separation.

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There's something that, okay, we can know about the world by studying the world, but how do we know that's how it works with God? We don't.

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We cannot know that. Would you say that that sort of attempt blurs the creator creature distinction?

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Absolutely. All the Greek philosophy does that. Every Greek philosopher made that common mistake of blurring the ontological distinction between the self -contained

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God and the universe. And because for all Greek philosophers,

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Plato, Aristotle, every one of them, you had two eternal beings, and sometimes they get brought into one.

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You've got God, whatever their view of God is, it's not the God of the Bible for sure. But whatever their conception of the all -powerful being, the ultimate good, their conception of God and universe are both co -essential and co -eternal.

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You don't ever have just God, self -contained, independent, alone by himself, who willfully, voluntarily created the world out of nothing.

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That's completely foreign to their worldviews. And to me, that's not a secondary, minor problem.

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That's a foundational belief. That's at the very root of a worldview. And so Greek philosophy is wrong at the foundation.

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So no matter if they have some things that are in common with the Christian worldview, the way they got to that thing, whatever it may be, that's in common with Christianity, they got to that point the wrong way.

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And then it leads to definitely a wrong conclusion. And so I don't think it's something we can integrate into Christianity.

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I think it's something we have to reject altogether. But that's what Aquinas does. His natural theology is not in natural revelation.

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It's in natural science, in physics. And thus, it leads to a

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God that has, if he's logically consistent, thankfully,

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Aquinas wasn't logically consistent. But if he was logically consistent, it would lead to pantheism. Okay.

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Now, I teach a course on presuppositional apologetics, which, by the way, is available on Revealed Apologetics.

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You could sign up now. But when I do teach it, there is a section that I teach called the twin poisons.

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And the twin poisons I identify, which us as presuppositionalists typically identify as such, is the twin poisons of autonomy and neutrality.

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Okay, so this kind of intermingles with this issue of natural theology and what's entailed in the sort of thinking that is assumed when we engage in that.

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That has some tie into apologetic methodology. So would you say that the practice of natural theology presupposes autonomy with respect to man's ability to learn about God?

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And is that one of the things that you would say is, hey, this is another thing we need to be cautious of? Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

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I think there may be a way you can redeem natural theology, again, if you root it in natural revelation, which takes our autonomy out of the equation.

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It puts our knowledge on the knowledge of God, and it makes us dependent upon revelation.

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It's not that we can work our way through our wisdom, our self -wisdom, or our ability to deduce to God.

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So we've become very dependent upon God breaking out of his transcendental realm and coming into our world and communicating to us.

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We need him to speak to us if we're going to know who he is. And so I'm dependent upon God's revelation, both natural and special revelation.

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So that takes away the autonomy, human autonomy. But also, you talked about us not being neutral.

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The fact that Calvin speaks about how God has revealed himself in nature, and we are living in the theater of God.

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However, he makes it also clear that none of us have ever used that knowledge rightly.

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We're always twisting that knowledge and suppressing that knowledge. And I think that's true with Greek philosophy is the prime example, though they knew

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God was the God of Providence. And by the way, Act 17 makes it clear that all men know that God is the

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God of Providence. Providence is not one of those doctrines that you have to work your way through and figure out.

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It's one of those things that God tells us at the beginning. We could just look at Act 17 and talk about how you just look at how

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God has arranged this world and how God is the great provider. We know that, that God is intimately and personally involved in the affairs of the world.

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He's not deistic. He's not absentee landlord. He's involved and he's watching and he's a caretaker.

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We know that, but Greek philosophy, all of the various philosophical systems has rejected divine providence.

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And so that shows us that Calvin's right, that man doesn't even take what God reveals and works and builds on that, but rather pushes that knowledge aside and seeks to start with self and then work their way to God.

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And I try to explain in the book that you're going through the failure of natural theology, that when you reject revelation and begin with pure empiricism or pure rationalism, let's start with agnosticism.

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Like I know nothing. And let me figure out what I can learn through my senses or figure out what I can learn through logic on the blank slate.

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We're not going to get to the God of the Bible because we're going to either get to a God who's a hundred percent fully transcendent, which means he can't be personal imminent.

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He can't be near the God of providence, or we're going to get to a God that is entirely imminent and personal.

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We'll get to open theism, if you would. We can do a God who's just like us, but he's not holy. He's not transcendent.

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He's not the creator. So either way, we're going to end up blurring the creator creature distinction, and we're going to push our way into some version of pantheism, either a soft form of pantheism or hard forward form of pantheism.

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So if we do not begin with the knowledge of God, as Calvin says, all knowledge begins with the knowledge of God.

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We build on that knowledge on that foundation up. But if you take the knowledge of God and the foundation that he provides for us and push it aside and build it on agnosticism, even if you're trying to get to God, like, hey,

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I'm agnostic, but I'm pro God, but I begin with ignorance, pure ignorance to get to the knowledge of God, I will get to the wrong

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God. So, okay. So as a presuppositionalist and also hearing other presuppositionalists, when we make presuppositional sorts of arguments, or we make theological statements, people will often accuse us of simply just asserting that that's the case.

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So for example, we'll say, for example, without God, you can't justify knowledge or whatever.

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And someone will say, you know, that's a cool statement. Why don't you show us how that's the case? Or when you, you just said, for example, if someone does, you know, natural theology, and they try to do it this way, this will, it will lead them to pantheism or on the other extreme, it will lead them to open theism.

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Do you think you can kind of unpack and walk us through the reasoning process of someone who uses natural theology and walk us through how that would lead one either to pantheism or to open theism, so people can kind of unpack more than the statement?

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Because I agree with you, but I think maybe the listeners might want to, or might, they might be asking, well, how does it lead to open theism?

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Because as a Christian, I don't want to, I don't want to follow a theological line of thinking that leads to that.

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Right, right. Well, even open theism leads to pantheism. So I think you get to pantheism, if you would, from two different directions.

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Now, but let me define pantheism first, because there's the various forms of pantheism or pan -in -theism.

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There's, you know, pantheism in my mind, kind of a soft form of pantheism is a failure to distinguish ontological separation between the creator and creature, that God is not what he created.

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God is not his works. He is his essence, but he's not what he does.

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You know, what he does reflects who he is, but he's not what he does, and he's not the heavens.

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He's, he, you, when you see the heavens, you see God, you learn something about God, but you don't see

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God by seeing the heavens. So creation and the creator are two ontologically different, distinct things.

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They're not the same. Pantheism is blurring the lines between those two things.

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And, uh, that's, that's what happens when you go with a natural theology or a philosophy that rejects revelation.

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When you reject, uh, that God, uh, that, uh, that's communicated in nature and God has made it clear that he's both in natural revelation.

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He's made it clear that he's both transcendent, that he's, he's the creator, that he's not part of creation.

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Uh, Romans one makes that clear. And he's made it clear in Romans, uh, acts 14 and act 17, that he's eminent.

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He's watching. He's a caretaker. He's providing for the world. And he's the governor of the world.

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So you got a God who's transcendent, but a personal God, who's also nears and cares.

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So we know both of those things, but how do we get to both of those? How do now we know that, um, in nature, we don't need the

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Bible to know that the Bible gives us the solution to how God can be both transcendent and eminent.

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And it's called the Trinity. And we can work our way. That's going to be another question. How does the Trinity resolve

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God's transcendence and eminence and how that God can be both. And at the same time, well, the

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Trinity and the one in the mini is that solution, but let's say we don't have the Bible. Who does it?

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That doesn't tell us about the Trinity. And we have natural revelation. It tells us that God is transcendent. He's eminent that he's absolute.

32:16

And he's also personal. You know that he's both, but philosophers want to know, how can he be both?

32:23

All right. How can he be both at the same time? And they have no explanation. They don't have the

32:29

Trinity. And God doesn't owe us an explanation, by the way, it's just enough that he says, Hey, I am. And you know, that I am trust me, submit to revelation.

32:39

And you can know these things, you don't have to understand to submit. Well, the philosopher says,

32:44

No, I need a rational explanation to know how God is transcendent and how God is eminent.

32:50

But when they seek to make that explanation and rule out natural revelation to do so, they start with the study of creation and science.

33:03

And science, if you're going to know God by studying the physics, you're going to get a

33:08

God that's like physics. You're going to get a God that's in physics.

33:15

And so if you're going to use science to know God, then God's going to be one with creation. You end up with some form of pantheism.

33:23

But let's say, you know, say, well, God transcends science. And you want to make that kind of the existential leap, like Aquinas did, that God is the great first cause, and he's completely the opposite of all that he created.

33:43

Then all of a sudden, God is so transcendental, he's so transcendent, he's so opposite, then there's nothing, in one sense, there's nothing that creation says that represents him at all, and that he becomes so wholly other that he becomes wholly agnostic, wholly unknowable and unethical.

34:03

And then that type of God is so transcendent, that all that we can know about him is what we know about him and creation.

34:12

And so that pushes God to be deistic, if you would.

34:18

And then our knowledge of him, of this deistic God is so wrapped into the language of physics and of sense experience that ends up pushing us back into conflating

34:36

God with creation. So either way, you're pushing to a deism or pantheism, and sometimes this deism leads back to pantheism.

34:45

And so it's not the God of the Bible. Yeah. Well, this is obviously a point of contention amongst

34:51

Christians. There are a lot of Christians even within the Reformed camp that use natural theology and encourage others to do so.

34:57

So what do we do then with the believer who practices natural theology and says that, hey, this is actually a biblical way of doing things to look at the created order and theologize our way up to God?

35:12

How would you respond to Christian attempts to provide a biblical foundation for doing natural theology?

35:19

One example that I often hear is Romans chapter one. How would you unpack that? Yeah. Well, there's a lot of confusion because they read, people we read,

35:27

I read Romans one and Acts 14, Acts 17, Psalm 19, and go clearly

35:33

God communicates in nature. And we just need to point out, though Thomas Aquinas would quote these verses.

35:46

These verses are talking about natural revelation. He's talking about natural science.

35:52

Now, these verses are not proving natural science. It's proving natural revelation. And so it's a totally different thing.

35:58

What the philosophers did, and this is the biggest misunderstanding when you read textbooks on natural theology.

36:06

I've been reading one book on natural theology after the next, and they almost all do it. I could list you one name after another.

36:13

They almost all do it. They confuse natural revelation with natural theology and often natural revelation with natural science.

36:24

And they'll go to the philosophers who rejected divine providence and say, look, the philosophers were doing natural theology and Acts 17,

36:35

Paul's doing natural theology. It's like, no, they're not doing the same thing at all. Paul in Acts 17 is referring to natural revelation.

36:44

And he said that you know that God is the God of providence. Natural theology outside of natural revelation denies a divine caretaker, divine providence.

36:58

So we have to make that distinction. But also we'd say, OK, now that we do admit as presuppositionalists that God does speak to us in nature, we confess natural revelation.

37:10

But we need to say now that we all know these certain truths in nature.

37:15

We ought to say now that we in our simple nature want to suppress that.

37:22

We're trying to suppress that knowledge. But let's say we're not suppressing that. Hypothetically, that man is going to accept the foundation of natural revelation.

37:34

And then we go and say, OK, well, that's fine. But one of the difficulties of natural revelation, it's effective it's universal, it's spontaneous, it's consistent.

37:47

But one of the things it lacks is objectivity. And so, for instance, if the

37:58

Lord Jesus Christ entered into a room and we're all in a room and he spoke to us personally, not with the

38:06

Bible, but he said, hey, guys, let me tell you something. And we all knew it.

38:14

We all knew it. It was one of those moments like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. We all knew it.

38:19

You can't convince us otherwise. How am I going to convince that to you? Even though you were in the room and you saw it, would you have the subjective certainty that you saw and had the same experience as I did?

38:36

But none of us would have the objective certainty of that reality. All of humanity has the subjective certainty that God has spoken to them in nature.

38:47

We all have it. But that doesn't give us the objective certainty that we can put into a proof or an argument.

38:58

And so people want to objectify what they know subjectively. And when they seek to objectify what they already know, it pushes them down a path of rejecting what they know.

39:13

OK, let me try to prove that when they know that they don't need to prove it. They know it when they when they seek to objectify and put a logical proof to what they subjectively know in nature by nature or through natural revelation.

39:27

They end up doing what I've already said. They end up creating another God. They create a

39:33

God of pantheism. So it's like we don't want to throw out natural revelation as presuppositionalists.

39:39

We want to affirm that. But a lot of classical apologetics think that we're objecting and throwing out natural revelation.

39:47

And that's why they're having difficulty with this, because they keep on reading Romans 1 and Psalm 19 and go, look, it's clear as day.

39:53

The Bible uses that. And this is clearly universal knowledge. And you are saying that this is not good enough.

39:59

I'm like, no, we're saying it is good enough. It's good at what it does. Sure. But it doesn't provide an objective proof that that is going to satisfy the skeptic.

40:13

OK. Now, OK, so using the language of proof now, and I think that'd be a good opportunity to kind of shift gears a little bit into the arena of apologetic.

40:24

So we're kind of familiar now with where you stand with respect to natural theology. People confuse natural theology with natural revelation.

40:31

We've got to keep those things distinct. We don't want to fall into the twin dangers of either pantheism or open theism, these sorts of things.

40:40

But apologetics, you use the word proof. So how might in light of what you just said, how might we do you believe we can prove

40:47

God's existence in in the in the way that we can be epistemically certain that he exists?

40:54

I know positionalists differ on this question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are what are your thoughts on that? Well, I would say there's two types of proofs.

41:00

There's the kind of a argument from design that says, look, all things that have that are designed to have a designer.

41:10

That's a clever way of putting a real quick, quick, not long syllogism, but a quick, immediate deduction.

41:19

And I think there's a validity to those quick arguments. So I don't throw those things out.

41:26

That's one thing. What is quite another thing that I think presuppositionalists as a whole want to caution against is the holistic arguments based upon a proof that begins with agnosticism, if that makes sense.

41:43

So like Aristotelianism is a worldview and it begins on on agnosticism built upon empiricism and it leads to deism.

41:53

That will always lead you in that direction. Aquinas sought to integrate those core presuppositions, agnosticism, empiricism, and not get to deism.

42:05

He wanted to get to the God of the Bible. And so he kept on correcting his philosophy or Aristotle's philosophy with Christian orthodoxy.

42:12

So there is two worldviews and come back conflating and they never do really get reconciled together.

42:19

And so what happens when you reject revelation and you seek to construct a worldview and everybody's constructing a worldview, by the way, you're going to get a incoherent, self -defeating worldview.

42:35

Aristotle's philosophy is self -destructive. It's inconsistent with itself. So is

42:40

Plato's philosophy. And every other philosophy is self -conflating and self -defeating.

42:48

And I think one apologetic that we have is like, look, it's true because of the impossibility of the contrary.

42:54

Every other worldview besides the biblical worldview that's based upon the Trinity leads to incoherency.

43:01

But if you have the Trinity, which is revealed to us in scriptures, then we can make sense of the transcendence and eminence of God.

43:09

We can make sense of knowledge. We can make sense of science and logic and morality.

43:15

All this fits together within the system. It's not a circular argument.

43:22

It's a worldview argument. Within the system, it's self -supporting.

43:28

Outside the system, it's self -defeating. So we have the only worldview, holistic explanation of the world and what things are.

43:40

It's coherent. So a question then. So we say that we have the only worldview that provides those necessary preconditions for intelligible experience, these sorts of things, the transcendental language that we've come to use after reading

43:53

Van Til and clumsily trying to simplify it by reading some Bonson and some

43:58

Franklin. Okay. So if you say we have the only worldview that can do these things, what would you say to the person who says, well, wait a second.

44:08

In order for you to know that that's the case, you need to refute every worldview out there. How do you know that, for example, the statement that your book is entitled, the absurdity of unbelief, how do you know that unbelief is absurd?

44:22

You have not refuted every form of unbelief. So how could you be in a position to state that? How would you respond to that?

44:28

Yeah, because there's not an infinite amount of worldviews out there. There's an infinite amount of false thinking.

44:35

I mean, you can take a story and you can say the color of the car is red and the color of the house is blue and the tree and add all these secondary and tertiary elements to the story.

44:49

And there's an infinite amount of changes you can make to that story. However, the worldview is not just an infinite amount of details.

44:58

A worldview is based upon ultimate questions and their foundational questions.

45:04

They're like, why do you believe this? Well, why do you believe that? Well, I believe that because of this. And ultimately it comes down to three questions.

45:12

All philosophers, I mean, this is true, all philosophers reduce all of knowledge down to three ultimate questions.

45:18

And those questions can ultimately be reduced to one question. Trinity, is there a God? But these questions is what is real?

45:30

How do we know what is real? And how should I behave? Those are the three ultimate questions. And every worldview is based upon how we answer those three questions.

45:39

And so there's a combination of how you can answer those three questions, but there's really only three questions.

45:45

And so the Bible answers those questions and it gives us a solution that is not self -contradictory.

45:52

Now, if you don't give the biblical question, answers to those three questions, and you go into atheism and pantheism and agnosticism and whatever other ism, it comes down to like the question of how do we know what we know?

46:04

There's only really three questions, three answers, empiricism, rationalism, or existentialism.

46:12

That's the only, if you don't believe in revelation, that's the only three answers you can get. Or you can say it's a combination of those three things.

46:19

That's all you can do. We have a fourth answer. It's called divine revelation. God speaks in, he enters in, he comes to us.

46:28

We as reformed believe that God has to condescend and come to us and speak to us.

46:34

But if you don't believe in God, you're down to empiricism, rationalism, or existentialism.

46:40

And how you answer those three questions will determine your ontology, what you believe is real. If you're existentialist, you're going to, you know, you can come up to some, some, based upon some experience or faith or leap of faith, you can believe in all kinds of things, but you have no foundation for that.

47:00

If you're an empiricist, you can, you come down to pantheism. All there is, is creation because empiricism doesn't have a category to get to God.

47:10

And if you're a rationalist, you can't explain the world. So in the end, they're self conflicting.

47:17

And, um, so you would say that those other options are available to the unbeliever if they want to argue against the claim of the

47:25

Christian position, but that the Christian is in a good position to refute those and show internal inconsistency.

47:31

I don't have, I don't have to refute a billion different worldviews. I just have to refute three or four or five of them, you know, really three worldviews, rationalism, empiricism, existentialism.

47:41

Now, would you say that all of the, the, those versions of, of thinking have, uh, similar weaknesses such that if you, uh, refute one aspect of those worldviews, you kind of refute all of them since all of them have inherently this kind of fatal flaw assumption.

47:57

All of them is going to be reduced, reduced to one of those. Okay. All right. Okay. So what do you do with, um, and a lot of people ask this, um,

48:05

I asked this question and I have my answer. I'd love to hear your, your answer, but, um, how do you use, for example, and if people would say presuppositionalism, okay, it works pretty cool when you're talking to the metaphysical naturalist, the atheist.

48:17

Um, but that's not really going to work when you speak to someone who holds to the belief in an absolute God. Um, you know, how do you deal with Islam?

48:25

How do you deal with religions that, that posit kind of a deity, uh, or deities? Um, how would you, if we can use the popular language, how would you presuppose those guys?

48:35

If we can use presuppose as kind of a, an intellectual karate move, how would you apply it to, uh, to folks from competing religious perspectives?

48:43

Yeah. It goes back to the Trinity. Okay. The Trinity is not our Achilles heel that we have to feel sorry for and feel embarrassed about.

48:50

It's the thing. It's the very thing that makes our worldview coherent. Um, we say, Hey, we believe in a biblical worldview.

48:57

Well, the Bible is that which reveals to us that God is Trinitarian, that God is not, uh, reduced to the one, or he's not reduced to the meaning in all forms of Greek philosophy and explanation and even religions outside of Christianity.

49:15

They're trying to ask the ultimate question. What is real? What is the ultimate being?

49:21

What is, what is here before all other things that are here? Everything is a derivative of what, what is the, what was eternal?

49:28

Uh, that's the ultimate being what's eternal. What did all things come from? Um, and there's two, two ways to answer that.

49:37

And only two ways. One, all things can be reduced to something that's ultimately simple.

49:43

All, all, all things are just particular. When you look at the particular alities, let's say all things are, are diverse and there's no unifying oneness behind the diversity.

49:54

You get to relativism and post -modernism, but so that leads to it's self -defeating because then you don't have any basis for knowledge and you don't even know if that's true.

50:04

It's really quickly self -defeating. So it's better to get to the conclusion that all things are one, but if you reduce all things to one, you can't explain the meaning and Aristotle and Plato ultimately oneness is the ultimate foundation behind their worldview.

50:20

And it leads to a transcendence of God that can't be explained. And no, you get to an unknowable

50:27

God and you get a God behind, uh, whatever conception of God would get.

50:32

And so you get this on a God that there's no way of that God being personal.

50:39

And so that once God is so transcendent, then it, then basically you get to Gnosticism and then you end up going back into relativism.

50:48

So we need a God that is, that's one and he's meaning, and we get that only in the fact that God is ultimately not, he's not one before he's meaning, and he's not many before he's one.

51:00

He's both simple and complex. He's, he's one essence of three persons. Are you familiar with the work of, uh,

51:07

Brant Bosterman in his book, uh, the vindication of the Trinity? Yes. Yeah. So, so folks, we've had, uh,

51:14

Brant Bosterman on to talk about, cause, cause, uh, Jeff just spoke about the necessity, really the

51:20

Trinity, uh, grounding kind of that one in the many issue. So you're speaking of what is metaphysically ultimate, is it ultimate oneness or ultimate particularity?

51:28

Um, if, if, if you're thinking, well, the Trinity is a solution, it's not necessarily the solution because, um, how do you know there's some other

51:37

God out there that maybe is one being, but four in persons, right? Um, so, um, there might be other options there.

51:43

Um, if you want to know why God must be triune, as opposed to Bayun or a quadrinity, check out that conversation

51:51

I had with Brant Bosterman. It's an older episode, but he unpacks his thoughts on it. It's an excellent, um, an excellent conversation.

51:59

So if anyone wants to dig deeper into that, um, would you like to give kind of a brief, uh, I mean, it's really difficult.

52:04

You don't have to, but would you like to give kind of a brief explanation, um, as to why the

52:11

Trinity solves it? So for example, if you say the Trinity solves the one in the many, what if you have another

52:16

God, another deity, another conception of deity that is both one in many, but not Trinitarian?

52:24

Yeah, that's, um, a difficult question, but I mean, it is a difficult question that I actually haven't spent a whole lot of time exploring, but, but, uh, um,

52:37

I do know, you know, what I'm convinced about is the fact that God is when it gets into the doctrine of God, where we're moving into this direction, that simplicity is being pushed as more ultimate than God's diversity.

52:53

And I do believe in the divine simplicity of God. And I think, I think it, what happens when you end up doing that, you can't truly explain the

53:01

Trinity. You can't explain the three persons. Sure. And so I think you have to have, it's the both ands that God is diverse and one that is essential.

53:10

Now, why is he three? Um, I'm not convinced with Aquinas's conclusion, like, uh, that the son is the wisdom and the spirit is the law of God.

53:23

Uh, that to me, that, um, that leads to, um, a differentiation of the attributes as if the son has one particular attribute above the other attributes.

53:33

The spirit is a particular attribute such as love in a greater way than the father's love, no greater way than the son is loved.

53:41

So that is unsatisfactory to divide up the attributes unequally or stress them in a particular way and the different persons.

53:49

I'm not convinced of that. Um, uh, uh, uh, I've just convinced that the fact that, um, that the

53:56

Trinity is, is eternal and necessary and God's a necessary being.

54:03

And it's necessary that he is, uh, that there is, uh, uh, interaction, uh, between God for there to be morality.

54:12

Uh, if God, if God wasn't, um, in communion, it would not be love.

54:17

Now there might be self appreciation, but there wouldn't be a charity where the father is giving to the son and the son is in reciprocating that love and giving back to the father.

54:30

And I do believe in the pair Carissa's that they give in, dwell at Cohen dwelling within themselves and they give of themselves.

54:38

So the father is giving to the son through the spirit and vice versa. And so there, there's, there's Cohen dwelling.

54:43

And so you have this mutual sharing and giving, which becomes the standard of their own holiness and righteousness that there are, there are giving commutative, loving

54:52

God. And that's the basis of, of their morality, which becomes the basis of our law.

54:58

And if you had one person, you can't steal a one person entity, uh, can't steal, he can't lie.

55:04

He can't cheat. You have to have another person to be able to uphold the law and you need that within God himself.

55:12

Um, so, uh, that's about the best I can do. Excellent.

55:18

Thank you so much for that. Oh, you're doing an excellent job. I appreciate it. Um, cause yeah, I'm kind of just asking this on the fly.

55:24

I don't have preset questions. These are kind of things that are on the top of my head. I know folks are interested in listening, uh, listening to, so I think you're doing a good job.

55:32

All right, well, let's, um, uh, we are at the top of the hour, just about, I want to go through, uh, some of the questions here.

55:38

So, uh, what's going to happen, uh, Jeff is I'm going to put the question on the screen there and, uh, you'll be able to read it.

55:45

I'll read it for you, but you can read it as well. And, um, if it's a question that you just don't know, that's fine.

55:51

That happens to me when I take questions and my other guests, they don't know all of the questions that pop up. You can just be like, not sure.

55:57

And then we can move on. Okay. So no worries. All right. Okay. So first question here by Richard Cox, he, uh, he asks,

56:04

I was a student at Reformation Bible College, Ligonier's College, and they taught that proving the existence of God using unaided reason was virtuous and intellectually admirable.

56:13

Is this true? Unaided reason.

56:22

That's interesting. Yeah. I don't know that it's possible. Unaided reason.

56:27

I don't know what that means. Unaided reason. I do know what they're trying to get across.

56:34

Technically speaking, unaided reason is like saying, um, uh, it's like,

56:43

I don't know. It's like technically unaided reasons. Like your reason is always going to be aided and slanted.

56:49

There's no such thing as, as neutrality as we've talked about. Okay. Um, so you're a, so to be as Calvinist, the biggest thing that shapes our reason is not facts, but feelings, our love, our greatest love.

57:08

That's why obedience is in scriptures is connected to knowledge and knowledge is connected to obedience.

57:15

You'd never have just pure knowledge that doesn't lead to obedience or rejection of that knowledge.

57:22

Uh, and so Calvin says the best hermeneutic is love or obedience. And the reason the natural man doesn't know

57:30

God is not because he doesn't have the intellectual ability to know God is because he hates God.

57:35

And because of that hatred of God, he rejects intellectually, then rejects God. So you can't have just unaided reason that's deattached from affections and ethics and morality and your nature.

57:48

So your nature is a sinful person. You're simple by nature. And so your simple nature is, is, is the biggest impact on how you interpret the facts and how you interpret, uh, reality and how you, uh, carry out your, your, uh, reasoning.

58:05

So I do believe the natural man centers can do math just fine because math leads to some things that they could care less about.

58:12

But if math led to things that they care about, like there's a God, that means he's the judge and I'm going to be guilty.

58:18

All of a sudden I care and I don't like that conclusion. So let me start over again. Let me, let me, uh, when

58:23

I, when I try to balance my checkbook and it leads to, uh, debt and deficient funds, I like, wait, let me redo that math and see if I can find some money

58:32

I didn't know about. So a natural reason, it would be great if we were robots and we're not moral creatures that hate truth and hate truth that opposes us.

58:42

Uh, so it's, it's kind of naive to think that natural man can do this or would want to do this or can do this without the supernatural quickening of the heart.

58:53

So that, that would say that initially, but hypothetically, I understand the question, let's take morality out of the question.

59:00

Hypothetically, uh, even if we take natural revelation out, what God gives us freely and say, as I already tried to talk about, take morality out.

59:13

If you start on agnosticism, even if you're saying, I want to get to God, but right now

59:19

I don't believe in God, but I'm open to God and you don't build off of God. Like, Hey, I already know there's a

59:26

God. God's already told me that he exists. I can't deny that. So God is there and he's God of providence.

59:31

I take those things as true to begin with. If you push that aside, you're going to get, as I already said, you're going to get to some form of pantheism or deism.

59:39

Okay. All right. Thank you for that. Logically, you're going to get to not the God of the Bible. All right.

59:45

Classic Christian literature says, uh, how can any natural theology be independent of natural revelation?

59:51

I think this question is being asked within the context of something you said towards the earlier part of this discussion, where you said that some people kind of, uh, try to do natural theology independent of this.

01:00:02

And I guess this person's asking, well, how is that possible? I wasn't aware that there are Christians who do natural theology independent of natural revelation.

01:00:12

Well, listen, they do it all the time. Ask, get, uh, get Plato out of the grave and ask him, why did you reject divine providence?

01:00:19

You knew God was the God of providence. Why did you reject that? Ask Aristotle why he rejected divine providence.

01:00:27

You knew that from the beginning. God told you that. Why did you reject that? Well, they did reject that.

01:00:33

Yeah. They got to a God that is unaware of the creation and unconcerned.

01:00:40

Uh, and, um, they didn't get to a God who's independent, self -contained autonomous, uh, that created the world out of nothing.

01:00:49

Sure. Why did they not get to that conclusion is because they did not build their philosophies on what they knew and what

01:00:55

God told them through nature. And so, yeah, it happens. It happens all the time. And partly the reason it happens is because we're talking about there's, these people are sinful and they'd rather get to a

01:01:05

God that they can control and they can understand than submit to a God that, that leaves some mystery.

01:01:10

And obviously without the Bible, they're going to come to some mysteries. I can't make sense of this transcendent, imminent

01:01:16

God, because I don't understand the Trinity. I don't, you know, they don't even know that they're missing the Trinity.

01:01:21

So they're, they're left with some gaps in their knowledge, but they know enough to be accountable. So what's sad is

01:01:29

Christians that know that God is the God of Providence. They'll go back like Thomas Aquinas and seek to use

01:01:37

Aquinas's foundation empiricism and build a natural theology off of Aquinas's natural theology, which is built upon Aristotle's natural theology.

01:01:49

And even Thomas Aquinas says natural theology, according to his version of it, doesn't get you.

01:01:55

Logic alone, reason alone, pure reason alone, doesn't get you to a God of Providence. That's an article of faith.

01:02:01

It doesn't get you to a creation out of nothing. It doesn't get you to Trinity. It doesn't get you to Divine Providence. These are articles of faith.

01:02:08

And I'm saying without the God of Divine Providence, you don't even get to the God of natural revelation.

01:02:15

So you have, you have Christians rejecting natural revelation, not knowingly, not purposefully, but practically they do it.

01:02:23

All right. Thank you for that. Richard Cox also asks, why did Bonson deny that revelation is immediate in his debate with R .C.

01:02:31

Sproul? I'm not sure if you're familiar with that debate. I'm not familiar with that debate. All right. So I, I want to kind of, yeah, just for Bonson, just a real quick comment.

01:02:41

I'm very familiar with that debate. And we want to be very careful. Dr. Bonson did not reject immediate knowledge.

01:02:47

He affirmed that both the knowledge of God is, is immediate and immediate in a sense.

01:02:54

So we innately know God because we're made in his image. And as, as Jeff said at the beginning, to be aware of ourselves is to be aware of God.

01:03:03

That's Calvin right there. And so there is a sense in which we immediately know

01:03:08

God. And there's a sense in which also we look and see God's fingerprints over all of creation, the heavens declare the glory of God.

01:03:14

So I think he said that in the debate just to draw the distinction between what Sproul was getting at with respect to starting from kind of like looking, seeing, and then acquiring knowledge.

01:03:24

He's saying, no, we're without excuse. We know already without my eyes that you'd still know. Yeah. Yeah.

01:03:31

And to carry on on that, like my little nuance is this, is that like, when you hear your father's voice, you know, what's your father, but God is using the method of your father speaking for you to know that as your father, because you have that internal witness that this is your father.

01:03:49

I think that's how this immediate, immediate, immediate work together. The fact that we're made in God's image and we see creation outside of us, these things pair perfectly together and it happens spontaneously.

01:04:02

Very good. Um, uh, Doherty Hyla morph.

01:04:08

Okay. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Uh, this person asks, what are your thoughts on the

01:04:14

Protestant Orthodox slash scholastic reception of Thomas, their use of natural theology, et cetera.

01:04:20

One example would be Francis Turretin. I don't know if you understand the question. I do. Francis Turretin did not accept

01:04:26

Aquinas's natural theology. He accepted a version of natural theology rooted in natural revelation, but he, he objectively, he clearly objective, uh, rejected natural, uh, philosophy and Aristotleanism.

01:04:42

So to put them into the same category as a mischaracterization, Terry Territon, uh,

01:04:49

I wouldn't put him as a presuppositionalist, but he's also not in the same category as Thomas Aquinas version of natural theology.

01:04:57

All right. Thank you. Um, Corey asks, Bonson seems to argue in his works that philosophy can be used under Christ's Lordship.

01:05:04

How does this differ from Thomas's use of philosophy? Well, we're not against philosophy.

01:05:11

Philosophy is just asking questions. It's the love of wisdom and they're asking the right questions. What is real?

01:05:16

How do we know what is real? What's, you know, how should we behave? These questions are questions we all should ask.

01:05:23

We should all be philosophers. We should all seek to know these things. So God has put it in our heart to ask such questions.

01:05:31

So the problem is not philosophy as a, a, a, as a discipline. Uh, philosophy, philosophical questions are not the problem.

01:05:40

Philosophical answers are not the problem. It's the problem of how you do philosophy and Greek philosophy or secular philosophy, pagan philosophy begins with the autonomy of man on agnosticism and Christian philosophy.

01:05:56

If we call it Christian philosophy is built upon divine revelation. It starts with God revealing himself.

01:06:02

And we begin with that as our presupposition, as our foundation. So it's two starting different starting positions.

01:06:08

So actually philosophy is not the problem. It's, it's the method of how we answer our questions.

01:06:14

That's right. And Bonson has a whole section in many of his books on revelational epistemology. So it's very much linked with revelation, how we know all of these things are grounded in God's revelation.

01:06:25

Um, all right. So, um, Hoyt asks a question. How does a sensory deprived person who was born blind and deaf?

01:06:33

I love these, these sorts of questions. Uh, how does a sensory deprived person who was born blind and deaf receive natural revelation without the capability to observe nature and the heavens?

01:06:46

Yeah. Hoyt, you asked some hard questions, but Hoyt it's technically, of course,

01:06:52

I know Hoyt is a good person. Okay. Okay. Um, uh, uh,

01:06:58

Hoyt, um, I don't believe there is such a person hypothetically that's doesn't exist.

01:07:04

Um, there's never been a person, uh, uh, that doesn't have any of their five senses, maybe blind, maybe deaf.

01:07:12

My mother was deaf by the way. Um, but we're one, one sense is not working properly.

01:07:19

The other senses compensate. And so it would be hard not to mention the fact that we're made in the image of God and we can't know anything without knowing

01:07:26

God. So we, we, we are part of God's divine revelation. We are part of creation ourselves.

01:07:32

So we're walking testimonies of God's existence and power by just existing ourselves.

01:07:38

So, uh, God has made it clear that all people can know him because they can't run from themselves.

01:07:45

So the question seems to suggest it's, it's trying to set up a hypothetical scenario in which there might possibly be a person who does not have access to the knowledge of God because they don't have access to their senses aren't working.

01:07:57

But as you mentioned before, uh, the knowledge of God is, is immediate. It's spontaneous. And the very fact that we are, we are ourselves revelational in character.

01:08:07

It's, it's known even if that person did exist, uh, that person wouldn't escape the knowledge of God.

01:08:13

Yeah. And I want to say too, you know, there's a difference between immediate deduction that happens spontaneously than a syllogism or a proof where you have to, that you can be mistaken, mistaken as a line of reasoning, a immediate deduction.

01:08:28

Like it's like, uh, it's true because of the impossibility of the contrary. Like if I know, uh, that is, that is wrong to kill.

01:08:37

I means I needs to preserve life. If I know how I want to be treated, I know how I should treat others.

01:08:43

It's like, it's like, it's just a quick. And so I think there's a sense that God has communicated to us and we have that quick, spontaneous ability where we do have reason.

01:08:55

God made us rational creatures. We do have the ability to go. I know that's true, but that's, that's a whole different thing than to build a system upon independent, autonomous reason from the ground up.

01:09:09

All right. Very good. A big Yehuda asks a question. Do you think Thomism is useless? It seems useless because it's extremely convoluted and therefore not even practically transmission of transmissible.

01:09:22

Well, uh, uh, that's a good question. I mean, I want to throw it in the trash.

01:09:29

I've spent five years studying and I, like I said, I admire the man as a person.

01:09:35

I don't believe he was a Christian, um, as a system. He, he had a wrong view of the gospel, wrong view of the church, wrong view of salvation, wrong view of the sacraments, wrong view of heaven and hell, wrong view of sanctification.

01:09:50

Uh, I mean, unorthodox positions that in his, his theology, his theology is bad.

01:09:57

Of course, I also believe his philosophy is bad. And so now does he have some truths?

01:10:05

He believed in the, he believed in sovereignty of God. He, certain things that we can say we agree with.

01:10:11

I don't even think his understanding of the Trinity is, uh, is helpful though. He did believe in the Trinity.

01:10:16

So there's things that you could pull out of him. I mean, I think there's things you can pull out of Aristotle. There's, I mean, he believed in science and, and any unbelievers, it's not that saying we don't have some things that we agree with them on.

01:10:30

It's say, but why do they say this? The system in which they can come to those conclusion is faulty.

01:10:36

And though they may have a element that we, we can agree upon. If you follow that element out to its logical conclusion, because of the foundation, which it was established, it'll take us away from truth.

01:10:49

So as a system, yes, Thomism is irreparable.

01:10:54

All right. Thank you for that. Um, Jacob asks, uh, would Johnson posit that there are three wills or self -consciousness is in God.

01:11:03

So that will would be located in the person rather than the nature. So if there are two wills in Christ, would he say two persons?

01:11:13

No, I don't. I do not think there are three wills in God. I do think there is a single will with three as John Owen points out.

01:11:21

I think John Owen is the best on this topic. John Owen says there's one will that has three perspectives.

01:11:28

Okay. And, um, and that's helpful because the son does things. He operates uniquely as the son and he does things uniquely.

01:11:37

He does it in cooperation and in, and co dwelling and dwelling with the father.

01:11:42

But he does something like the incarnation and, and the spirit does things uniquely of the will of the spirit from the perspective of the spirit, uh, that is different from the perspective of the father.

01:11:54

So I'm, I'm not going to say there's three wills in, in God. I will say there's one will with three, uh, perspectives of how they, uh, operate.

01:12:05

All right. Thank you for that. Uh, Thomas asks, does Dr. Johnson believe we have direct access to reality or do we have to rely on a lens as a medium between us and the world?

01:12:16

It seems as though this question is a little Kantian in nature. I wonder if, if the person's making a kind of a numinal phenomenal distinction there.

01:12:23

Yeah, it sounds like it. Um, uh, no, uh,

01:12:29

Thomas, where Qantas would, uh, end up putting that lens between us and God. And I would say, no, that he makes that lens creation itself.

01:12:37

And I'm on a comp would say, no, there's a lens between us and creation. So there's, they make us have two lenses.

01:12:44

And I say lens, I don't know exactly what you mean by that, but I'm taking it to be some type of, um, in intermediate knowledge that somehow doesn't give us direct access to the knowledge behind that knowledge.

01:13:00

And so, no, I think we have immediate, uh, awareness of creation through our senses.

01:13:06

All right. Very good. Um, Moses, uh, not the actual

01:13:12

Moses. He's not with us anymore, but Moses, uh, asks, uh, um, I consider

01:13:17

Aquinas, a heretic regarding the gospel. Do you think his faulty natural theology affected his views on salvation, which formed the

01:13:24

Roman Catholic gospel on sacraments and justification? I haven't come to that conclusion that his natural theology is what did it.

01:13:35

I do believe his natural theology has led the contemporary

01:13:41

Catholic church to a universalism. And I think,

01:13:47

I think his natural theology that God is, is, is easily accessible if you would, uh, through this method, through philosophers, as they are to Christians as has opened up that door.

01:14:01

And we could develop that further, um, working with some pastors that are that pastor in Rome, uh, and minister in Rome.

01:14:09

And they're right in the middle of a Catholic country and that's their conclusion as well. But, uh, um,

01:14:16

I, I think as a whole, my understanding of the life and thought and theology of Aquinas that he was seeking to be

01:14:24

Orthodox in his theology. Okay. And he wasn't novel in his theology. He's not necessarily,

01:14:30

I mean, in his Trinity, he was, he was new else in the Trinity in a ways that I don't know it was necessarily nuanced before him.

01:14:37

And he, he pushed things further along, but it wasn't necessarily, he was novel in his theology.

01:14:43

So he, he articulated them and solidified a lot of the theology of the

01:14:48

Catholic church. So you have pre -Thomas post -Thomas, I think in the Catholic church where his

01:14:54

Summa becomes the kind of the quintessential textbook for Catholicism after him. I'm convinced of that.

01:15:00

I mean, the Council of Trent is basically a republication of the Summa Theologica.

01:15:07

Um, but I think what happens is he's got two worldviews, uh, uh,

01:15:14

Catholic Orthodoxy and Aristotelianism, and he's trying to push these things together.

01:15:19

And I don't think his Catholic Orthodoxy is flowing out of it. I think it's rather, he's trying to combine conflicting worldviews together.

01:15:27

And that leads his philosophical theology with a lot of self -inflicting conflict and unresolved tension.

01:15:33

And he wrote a book at the end of his life, towards the end of his life on questions about power, divine power.

01:15:39

And he basically asked us these questions of that, that really he, he, he admits that there's, there's no conclusion to their mysteries.

01:15:47

And I think they're contradictions. All right. Thank you for that. There's just two more questions and then we wrap things up.

01:15:53

You're doing an excellent job. And I appreciate so much, uh, your willingness to give me your time. You're doing, doing great. And this is really informative.

01:15:59

So, uh, Slam RN, uh, before I ask, uh, Slam RN's question, thank you so much,

01:16:05

Slam RN. I know you're kind of, uh, helping moderate the comments there. I don't get to really kind of follow the comments too much because I'm multitasking, asking the questions and doing other things.

01:16:15

So I appreciate that. Um, all right. So Slam RN asks if Aquinas believed that Jesus died for his sins, wouldn't he be a

01:16:23

Christian? And I think this question is, uh, in relation to a comment you just said just a few moment ago, moments ago, where you, uh, seem to suggest that you did, you don't even think that, that Thomas Aquinas was, was saved.

01:16:34

Are we understanding you correctly or? Yeah, I don't think he was saved. No. Okay. We had a false gospel.

01:16:41

Okay. Um, he didn't believe that Christ died for sins, not in the way that the Bible teaches it as an imputation.

01:16:47

He didn't believe in imputation. He said it was impossible for Christ to, to legally take our sins and judicially cover the wrath of God for us.

01:16:58

Christ died for our sins and not in the sense of a penal substitution or atonement. He denied that, rejected that.

01:17:05

Um, I don't think any Catholic interpreter of Thomas would say Thomas believed that.

01:17:10

In fact, I think you can just read the Suma and come to that conclusion yourself. But he did believe that Christ died for sins in a medicinal part, uh, for a medicinal role, like, like your medicine, take your medicine and it'll help you become holy.

01:17:26

So to be a Christian, to make it to heaven, you have to, uh, be sanctified.

01:17:31

You have to be purified and you have to come to the realization that you're a sinner and you need to do works of satisfaction.

01:17:38

You need to do some things that will, uh, rid you of your sins and you got the, the merit of the saints and you got the merit of Christ to help you.

01:17:47

But what they, that does, it helps you more of, uh, in the process of sanctification.

01:17:54

So his, his death is important for you to become holy, not to, to take your sins off of your account and put it upon Christ or Christ judicially takes the wrath of God on your place.

01:18:06

He did not hold to that. So basically he had an understanding of sanctification.

01:18:12

I wasn't familiar with, uh, Thomas Aquinas is soteriology. That's interesting. I want to look into, uh, good, good question,

01:18:18

Slam. Uh, appreciate that. Um, all right. So one last question and you survived, you successfully survived.

01:18:26

Uh, well, that's not, that's not the question. That was an accident here. Let's see. It is. I guess it's too late.

01:18:34

It's up there. Has anyone read Aquinas' prayers to Mary? You'd puke. Clearly not, not a

01:18:39

Roman Catholic. Uh, okay. So the last question was, uh, sorry about that.

01:18:46

Uh, Jacob asks, uh, Mr. Johnson, are you familiar with Christopher Cleveland's thesis,

01:18:51

Thomism in John Owen? Um, no, I am not.

01:18:57

Okay. I, to be honest, to be fair, I have that book. I become aware of that book towards the end of my studies.

01:19:05

And, um, but I have personally, um, I have personally looked up John Owen's quotes and citations and usage of John, uh,

01:19:17

Thomas Owen. I mean, Thomas Owen, Thomas Aquinas. Maybe I haven't survived this interview, but, uh,

01:19:26

I have in an appendix of my book, an appendix of my book, a failure of natural theology, a lengthy section of John Owen on the scholasticism and on Thomas, uh,

01:19:39

Aquinas. And I titled that appendix number two, Owen, not among the scholastics and where Owen blames the scholastics in particularly, he blames

01:19:49

Thomas Aquinas for the integration of Airstar Thelianism into theology.

01:19:55

And he is refuting it and says it has brought great harm to theology. And so there is,

01:20:01

I know for certain that John Owen did not embrace the natural theology and the philosophical theology of, um, of Thomas Aquinas.

01:20:13

Now, did he in the, some of the language that he uses is about God and the

01:20:19

Trinity. Did he borrow some of that, that, that could be argued, uh, but as a, as a worldview system,

01:20:27

John Owen was not a Thomist. All right. Well, thank you so much. That's the last of the questions, guys.

01:20:34

Great questions. And thank you so much for behaving in the comments as we all know how YouTube can be sometimes. Um, and, uh,

01:20:40

Jeff, I thought you did an excellent job and I'd like to thank you once more for just giving me so much of your time.

01:20:46

Yeah. Thanks for having me on. It's been fun. Absolutely. And is there anything you'd like to point people in the direction of, uh, a new project you're working on or a past book that we haven't mentioned?

01:20:55

Uh, when I introduced you? No, I'm, I'm working on a, uh, another book on natural theology where I'm trying to clear up this from a positive, from a presuppositional position.

01:21:04

What can we say about, uh, natural theology? Sure. And, and I would just encourage all you, all those who are listening to, um, go to freegracepress .com

01:21:15

and look at my books. And if you want a 25 % discount, use the word Aquinas and the discount code, and you'll get 25 % off on my two books.

01:21:25

See, Thomas Aquinas isn't useless. He can get you a discount. That's right. He's useful for something.

01:21:32

Yeah. Well, thank you so much, uh, Jeff. I appreciate you coming on and folks. Um, if you like this discussion and you've been blessed by the past conversations and interviews, um, that I've had with various scholars and apologists and theologians, uh, please click the like button, share these videos.

01:21:46

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01:21:52

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01:21:57

Um, so I definitely appreciate that. Uh, you can go over to revealedapologetics .com. Um, and there is a donate button there, as well as you can sign up for my presuppositional apologetics course, um, in which you, uh, receive lectures,

01:22:11

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01:22:22

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01:22:29

And thank you so much everyone for, uh, taking the time to listen in. That's all for this episode. Take care.