November 15, 2023 Show with David Reece on “One Reformed Pastor’s Critique of the Rising Alignment with the Theology of Thomas Aquinas”

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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

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Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 15th day of November 2023.

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I'm absolutely thrilled to have back on the program a returning guest who has become, as of recent days or recent weeks, a regularly featured guest.

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His name is David Reese, and he is the pastor of Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona, and he's also the owner of a company named

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Armored Republic. And we're going to be talking about something very controversial today. We're going to be hearing one

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Reformed pastor's critique of the rising alignment with the theology of Thomas Aquinas, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David Reese.

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Chris, thank you for having me on the show. It's an honor to be here, and I'm looking forward to talking about this. My hope is that we will see people be aligned with Bible Protestantism in a strong way from this, and they'll be able to see how we can make sure to avoid bringing in the heirs of Aristotle and Aquinas without compromising our

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Christian witness. And for the sake of our listeners who have not yet heard you on this program or have not yet heard you on Sermon Audio or anywhere else where your sermons are available, tell us about Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona.

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Puritan Reform Church is a church that's focused upon applying sola scriptura carefully to the doctrine that's taught, but also to the worship that the church engages in together and also to the form of government.

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And so we try to be very careful in the exercise of authority to make sure to not abdicate and not fail to recognize where it is that the

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Lord has told us to act with authority and also to be careful to not impose and to not be tyrannical in the imposition of doctrines of worship or government apart from what we can prove in the scriptures.

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And so if you are desirous to see right worship that can be proven from the

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Word of God rather than anything that's invented, or to see the doctrine that is drawn out of the scripture text in a careful way, that's the kind of congregation that we are and that we strive to be.

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And obviously we all have failings and we all have places where we need to grow, but that is our earnest desire to honor the

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Lord in that way. And if you could, provide a website for our listeners in the event that they want to visit your church or have loved ones in the

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Phoenix area. Right, yeah. So people can find us at puritanphx .com,

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and furthermore, if they want to see what I'm putting out personally, they can find me on the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

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Now called S, and they can find me at real David Reese, at real

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David Reese, and it's Reese with a C. Great, and we will be repeating that information, God willing, before the conclusion of the program.

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Now tell us about this exciting company that you own called Armored Republic.

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So Armored Republic, we manufacture tools of liberty for free men to defend their

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God given rights against tyrants and criminals to the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is a company where I'm trying to have a

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Christian culture as well as an explicitly Christian external facing. And so my desire is to see that happen in businesses.

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And right now, I think last time I was on the show, I'd mentioned to you that we were working on preparing to close for an acquisition for another company that we were trying to see become a

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Christian company. And we have completed what we need in terms of fundraising for it. I think

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I was told you we were really close a couple of weeks ago when we got together. And so since then, we've been able to get everything for that.

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So that that deal is about to close. And so praise the Lord. And so we're continuing to try to build out

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Christian companies. And I'm passionate for that because I think if you have a company like Armored Republic where we have a

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Christian culture internally, it really encourages Christians to be more bold because when you're around other people in a place where the

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Bible is used to talk about what we should do and what's right behavior in the company and and things like that, that that helps people to have a more consistent witness and the way that you can sharpen each other.

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And so, you know, your show's name is really fitting for that. That idea of iron sharpening iron. We do that when we're on your show.

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We're talking to each other about the doctrine, the things of God, and that can occur all day long if you're in a work environment where where there is explicitly

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Christian culture and things like the handbook try to draw what we ought and ought not to do from the law of God rather than just human opinion.

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Great. And today we are addressing, as I've already mentioned, a very touchy subject, a very controversial subject, a subject that has brought division and sadly even animosity with brethren in Christ toward one another, even not only brethren in Christ, but people who share the great majority of theology in common.

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I'm talking about people who are the brothers and sisters of my guest and myself in the reformed faith, people who may not only be reformed, but they may share our confessions.

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Pastor Reese's confession being the Westminster Confession of Faith and my confession being the 1689

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London Baptist Confession. There are people who embrace both of those confessions who have come, many of them just very recently and when

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I say very recently and I'll be generous here and say the last decade. But I think most of the controversy lately that has arisen has come about by those who have come to embrace

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Thomas Aquinas as a hero within the last five or six years. But I want to make it clear that neither my guest,

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David Reese, nor myself are intending to vilify anyone who would consider themselves

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Thomists, consider themselves adherents to much of the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

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In fact, the last time we were on the air, when we first basically came up with the idea to do today's show on this topic,

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Pastor Reese and I both enthusiastically declared that the late

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R .C. Sproul is one of our modern day heroes and he considered

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Thomas Aquinas a great hero of his and not only R .C.

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Sproul, but another hero of mine. I don't remember if Pastor Reese shared this fondness with me, but another one of my heroes was the mentor or at least a mentor of Dr.

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Sproul, Dr. John Gerstner, who was also an enthusiastic supporter of the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

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And although my guest and I are in disagreement with that, we do not vilify these men.

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We do not cast them aside to not be useful to us in many and great ways.

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But if you could, I think it'd be wise to start with a summary explanation of who

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Thomas Aquinas was and in the era in which he lived and had a powerful impact on the church of his day.

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Absolutely. So Thomas Aquinas is a figure who had a very dramatic impact in the 1100s and the impact of his of his teaching was such that in the high

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Middle Ages, in a time when you already had a kind of a dominance of the papacy, the rise of the papacy occurs in the 600s and you have the papacy's continued rise in many conflicts up into the

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Reformation. And so with the high claims of the papacy continuing to go higher and higher, one of the things that we see during sort of the high

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Middle Age period is a time where across Western Europe, the view of a literal eating of the physical body and physical blood of Christ starts to become more and more of an emphasis.

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And Thomas Aquinas comes up with the famous formulation of transubstantiation in terms of how he talks about that.

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And that's one of the dramatic impacts as he comes up with sort of a philosophical way of dealing with that.

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But furthermore, one of the things that had happened was the writings of Aristotle had come over into Europe and that came through the

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Muslim influence where there was translation. And my recollection is that Thomas obtained

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Aristotelian writings by having them translated from Arabic into Latin.

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So he's not even dealing with Aristotle in terms of sort of Greek writings or manuscripts there.

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He's dealing with them through layers of translation and he's trying to take that. And so he starts this idea of Aristotle being the philosopher.

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And so the influence that he has of encouraging people to think of Aristotle as this source of truth and to put it side by side with scripture is a significant change.

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Earlier on in the earlier Middle Ages, you had Augustine as sort of a very important figure from the four and five hundreds into the future of the church.

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And what happened is there's also sort of a connecting of Plato in the church.

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So you have sort of a platonic thought trying to take a rationalism without scripture and put that side by side with the scripture.

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And so you see that with Thomas, you have him taking experience as opposed to just reason and to take experience and what you might call empiricism and put it side by side with scripture.

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And that is there's another school that had to kind of try to deal with things. You might call them the mystics or irrationalists who had tried to take things and make it so that personal experience or feelings or sort of a super rationalism with the what are called the pseudo

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Dionysius writings. You have these people trying to pull in sort of this thing where reason is curbed or where contradiction exists in the mind of God.

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You have sort of this idea that God is beyond understanding at any point. So you have sort of this irrationalist school, you have a rationalist school, and you have

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Thomas bringing in an empirical school of thought. And this empirical school of thought from Thomas Aquinas is in a backdrop of sort of the mysticism and the rationalism views being dominant.

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And so what happens is you end up with Rome adopting this sort of empirical epistemology, and that's a $5 word for how do you know?

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So epistemology is a study of knowledge. And so you answer the questions, what's true and how do

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I know? That's what epistemology is. And so this is sort of the most significant thing that Thomas brings in is he's trying to emphasize that we can gain knowledge by experience, by our senses, by what we see, touch, taste, hear, and smell.

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And so using that as a source of truth that is authoritative, and that is sort of the emphasis there.

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And what we see Luther reacting to in the Reformation is not only a doctrine of justification and a doctrine of authority in terms of the church, but he also opposes tradition and sort of the human philosophy of deriving things from our experience as authoritative for the faith and for our ethics.

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And that's a major part of the reaction of sola scriptura against that backdrop.

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And so Thomas's influence significantly there in the high Middle Ages is an important part of what we find the

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Reformation reacting against. And what would be the essence of the dispute when it comes to those in our day who are both

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Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist, who are enamored with Thomas Aquinas, who actually some go as far as saying that we cannot accurately understand the scriptures or our own confessions without understanding

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Aquinas? What would be the essence of the argument between Aquinas' advocates and those who are extremely concerned, to put it mildly, all the way to perhaps the extreme end of those who would denounce the theology of Aquinas—in regard to the differences, that is—as heresy?

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Yeah, so I would say that the principal point of difference is going to be on the view of the role of experience in knowledge.

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And so, for example, you would call me a presuppositionalist. And so I'm going to say that scripture is the foundation for knowledge.

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I'm going to say that logic is a part of that. And so you have what God explicitly says and what

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God says as a necessary inference, right? So what he explicitly says and all of the system that's implied from his explicit statements.

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And an empiricist or a Thomist is going to say that we have to start with our experience and we can get to this set of natural theology that is derived from our experience, principally using, for example, the cosmological argument where from our observation of motion, we can arrive at the need for a first mover.

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And so you're going to have how you know is going to be built differently. So you're going to go from experience to God to scripture, as opposed to saying we're starting with scripture.

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And from there, we build the system. And so that's going to be the most foundational difference.

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And that's controlling the question, how do you know? And when you think about philosophies as a whole, and Christianity is a philosophy, it's just the true philosophy.

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And so there are human philosophies. The question is, what is it that God has said? The word philosophy is just the love of wisdom, right?

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Phila and Sophia. Sophia's wisdom, Phila is brotherly love. And so this idea of the love of wisdom, we ought to love wisdom.

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And God is the revealer of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And so we have this idea that God reveals himself.

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And the question is, how does he reveal himself? Does he reveal himself in a way where we learn about him authoritatively from our experience of the creation, or do we learn about him authoritatively because he has revealed propositional truths that he has communicated to us?

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And so that question of experience versus the words that God has spoken as the starting point for knowledge is going to be the key question.

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And because of what you just said, basically, the two sides of the divide amongst

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Reformed Christians have accused the other from some very serious errors.

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You have those on the one side who are advocates of Thomas Aquinas, who actually, for the first time in my life as a

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Christian, I've never heard this term used or this word used in a derogatory sense until recently.

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But the Thomists are calling those who oppose

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Aquinas' theology Biblicists, and they're using that as an ad hominem or a pejorative term.

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And then you have those on the other side of the divide who are opposed to Aquinas, who are accusing

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Thomists of denying sola scriptura, whether they would consciously verbalize that or not.

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If you could touch on those two ends of the spectrum that I would just mention. Absolutely.

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So this idea of being a Biblicist or a Scripturalist, for example, that idea that the

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Bible is used as the authority and the starting point and that you don't take things in from outside of the

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Bible to interpret it, that gets attacked as sort of a fundamentalist wooden view.

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Right. And so, first of all, I am a fundamentalist. So, you know, have that. Secondly, in the early 20th century, understanding of that,

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I'm assuming the fundamentalist modernist controversy. That's exactly right.

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That's exactly right. So the origins of the word fundamentalist come from that very controversy.

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And the funny thing is the controversy between the modernists and the fundamentalists was actually a question about what is the source of authority?

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Was it Scripture or the modernists would often present the view of we can learn from archaeology and science, and it's a authority alongside the

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Word of God. And I believe that modernism, frankly, is an outworking of the problem of a two source theory of truth, where what you say is we have the

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Bible and we also have something else. And we're going to try to harmonize those.

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And what happens is when one of them is always actually the higher authority. And so, for example,

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R .C. Sproul would have said that he believed you could get knowledge from science. But guess what?

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He interpreted the science from the Bible. Right. And and then, in fact, he ceased being a old earth creationist because of that.

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That's exactly right. So he went through a process of reform there because he was being reformed according to the

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Word of God more and more as he grew in sanctification. And he's a great example of that humility.

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When he realized he was wrong about something, he would publicly repent of it. He wouldn't try to hide it and pretend like he always knew.

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He would just straight up say, I used to believe this. Here's why I was wrong. And that was such a glorious example to the church.

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That man gave that wonderful, humble example in his time here. And I am so grateful for him.

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He didn't agree on the things that I'm talking about. He would disagree with my critique right here.

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But at the same time, in the places where he saw what the Bible was teaching, he would make sure that he would not say that the science is going to control his interpretation.

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He's going to make sure that the Bible is the Word of God. And he knows that his interpretation of the science is something that has to be controlled by the

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Bible. And so in an ultimate sense, I mean, he really was putting the Bible over since experience.

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And so that idea, though, the modernist fundamentalist controversy was a controversy about whether or not we should try to harmonize external things, evidences and science.

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Now, I think the modernists did a bad job even with that. They were not a consistent group. But I mean, you'd have people saying like the

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Hittites don't exist, for example, because we don't have any archaeological examples from them or evidence from them.

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And so they'd say, so, you know, the Bible must be wrong. Well, now we have tons of Hittite stuff. So like over time, you find different things.

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The fact that you haven't found it yet is a silly argument for the Bible being true or being false. And so that was an example of something that was occurring during the early part of the 1900s is that argument about the

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Hittites. But the point is that then on the other side, so there's the biblicists like myself.

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It's like I'm happy to take that title. And then there's the other side, where there's this idea of the endangerment of sola scriptura.

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And I think it's true that having multiple sources does endanger sola scriptura. And I think that historically, the

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Protestant Reformation declined into the mainline churches adopting modernism because our seminaries advocated for a dual source theory of truth.

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Both saying the Bible alone is the authority that governs our faith and practice. We tried to have other sources to govern our faith and practice outside of the

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Bible. And that could be science or whatever else. But the point is, the response to that is going to be, well, historically,

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Christians have always taught natural theology. And they're going to say that to say that natural theology endangers sola scriptura is something that's sort of an invention of Vantill or Clark or, you know,

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Bovink or something like that. They're going to try to come in and say that this is outrageous.

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Now, here's the problem. The term natural theology is a term that has four meanings.

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And I recently had an interaction with Stephen Wolf, for example, he's the author of Christian Nationalism.

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Right. And, you know, he's been interacting on this, and he made that same claim. And I said, well, you know, the idea that natural theology means the same thing in its historical usage is absurd.

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Same with natural law. So different people have defined the terms natural theology differently.

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And so the four definitions of natural theology are very important to understand. In fact, could you pick up with those four definitions when we return from the first break?

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Sounds great. And if anybody has a question for Pastor David Reese on Thomism or Thomas Aquinas and his and the modern church's adopting of his theology, including in the

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Reformed faith, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence.

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If you live outside of the USA, please only remain anonymous. If your question involves a personal and private matter, let's say you are in disagreement on one side or the other with your own pastors over this issue, or perhaps you are a pastor yourself and you are having a conflict with your fellow elders or your denomination or fellowship.

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Well, whatever the case is that would compel you to remain anonymous, we will respect your request.

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But if it's just a general question on history and the scriptures and theology, please give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence.

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Don't go away. We'll be right back with Pastor David Reese right after these messages from our sponsors.

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and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with my guest, Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and we are conducting a critique of Thomism, the theology of Thomas Aquinas, and there has been a rise in the acceptance of Thomism amongst

35:27

Reformed pastors and scholars and theologians and individuals, and it is a matter of concern, of great concern, to my guest,

35:36

Pastor David Reese. If you have a question, send it to Chris Armson at gmail .com and give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence.

35:43

So before the break, you had said that you wanted to give four different definitions of natural theology.

35:55

Absolutely. Thanks, Chris. So basically, when we think about natural theology and natural law, those tend to go hand in hand in terms of how you define the two, and so one of the critiques, again, of those who are the defenders of Thomism today, and again, they're not defenders of everything

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Thomas ever taught, but generally the defenders of sort of his apologetic in terms of how you know, and they're also defenders of his view of law and natural law, and the draw for them is they want to have a way of trying to appeal to something other than the

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Bible to argue for God and also to argue for morality and also generally to argue for some sort of a political order, so they're going to have natural law applied to the political order.

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So natural theology, natural law, they tend to go hand in hand, and so how you define natural law and natural theology is going to also go hand in hand.

36:47

So some people are going to talk about a natural theology in terms of everybody having a general sense of divinity, some sort of a feeling of the holy or a feeling of something that is higher and a feeling about what is right and what is wrong, and that's what they mean by natural law and natural theology is some sort of a deep in your gut feeling about those things, and I don't think that you're going to find that that's not the historic reformed view of natural law or natural theology, but that was associated with sort of romanticism, and so that philosophy has had a significant impact on us, you know, and that's kind of like Disney theology, right?

37:31

That's like, you know, do what you feel is right, you know, all that kind of stuff.

37:37

As Jiminy Cricket once said, always let your conscience be your guide. Right. So a conscience that's uninformed from Scripture is simply going to lead you into all sorts of wickedness, right?

37:49

Conscience is a negative guide. It guards us against error. We should not do things that are against conscience, but the conscience is not sufficient to provide us with active understanding, active teaching about what we ought to do.

38:02

Just like nature itself in Romans 1, it only makes us inescapable of guilt.

38:12

Right, and that is the Calvinistic position historically, whereas the next one, the next definition of natural theology, natural law, is that we can positively construct who

38:22

God is from empirical data reasoning using analogical reasoning from the creature to the

38:31

Creator. So, and that's through empirical information collection, through our sensation, through our experience with our five senses.

38:41

And you might have different number of senses depending on what person you're talking to as an empiricist, but that would be sort of that view.

38:47

That's one, that's a second definition. And that's the definition that people are saying is specifically Thomist.

38:53

So Thomist natural law is going to rely upon drawing definitions, and Thomist natural theology is going to rely on drawing definitions, drawing attributes of God out of your experience of creatures.

39:07

And so that's the problem there. Now, the third definition of natural theology or natural law is something that you're drawing rationalistically.

39:15

In other words, by reason alone, drawing using reason alone, having positive definitions of what man is and what the creation is and what

39:27

God is. And so Anselm of Canterbury, who is in the 11th century, and then you have

39:35

Aquinas being after that, being in the 1200s, in the 13th century, they're sort of separated.

39:43

And so Anselm is sort of an example using the ontological argument for God of a rationalistic argument.

39:51

And Aquinas is an example of using the sort of the empirical argumentation.

39:57

So there are two examples of trying to say we can prove God apart from Scripture. Now, both of them get their definition of God from Scripture, and they're trying to prove it.

40:08

And so they're trying to go. And they kind of pretend as though they're getting the definition from someplace else, or like you could get it from someplace else.

40:14

But the reality is the definition of God they're trying to work from is the God of the Bible. That's what the attributes they've got lines up there, and they're trying to give reasons why they're rejecting that.

40:25

And they end up trying to present methods that, you know, avoid the Bible. So but so Anselm is sort of a rationalistic example.

40:32

And Thomas Aquinas is the example of the sensation empiricism one.

40:39

And then you have the Calvinistic example of sort of natural law or natural theology, which has innate categories.

40:48

What you have is the idea of think of Adam before the fall. He has a proper definition of God in his mind, uncorrupted, and he has a proper view of the law uncorrupted in his mind.

41:00

And so then after the fall, we have wrongly formed a definition of God and a wrongly formed definition of right and wrong.

41:08

And we contradict even that. So we, you know, nonsensically worship stupid things because we take attributes of God and apply them to the universe or false gods or whatever.

41:19

And we contradict our conscience at different points because, you know, we have written on our hearts a sense of what it is that is the idea of property rights.

41:30

And we contradict ourselves because at one moment I go, hey, I want you to leave my stuff alone. And the next moment we violate other people's stuff.

41:36

So that is the idea that there are innate categories that we contradict ourselves about.

41:42

And so that Calvinistic view that says that there are structures in our minds that we have violations logically of where we contradict ourselves is the basis for accountability, but not for the positive construction of a definition of God or for a positive construction of the definition of the law.

42:02

But rather, we rely upon the word coming to us and we rely upon the

42:08

Holy Spirit to regenerate us to then be able to understand that word properly so that we can have a proper definition of God and a proper definition of right and wrong.

42:21

And we have the gospel. And so what's going to happen is instead you're going to say a

42:26

Thomist position on natural law is the empirical one is going to say you could positively construct a right definition of God without any revelation from Scripture.

42:38

And in fact, Thomas is not only going to say that he's going to say human beings are a blank slate that have no information in them before their experience.

42:47

And so experience is the only thing we have. And we construct our definitions and our concepts.

42:54

We construct these things out of our experience. And we reason from our experience to having a definition of God and a definition of what is good and therefore what is right and wrong for us to choose in particular moments.

43:07

And so I have a number of criticisms for that that would take a significant amount of time. But the point is, those are those four definitions.

43:14

So does natural law and natural theology come from feeling, from our experience and sensation, from reason alone?

43:20

Or is it the structures that are written on our hearts that are only able to be properly verified from the

43:28

Scripture alone? Now, when you say that Aquinas believed that we were inherently or innately a blank slate, how does that jive with his belief, which he must have had being a

43:42

Roman Catholic, of original sin, a teaching that we who are

43:48

Reformed Protestants share, but we would be more clear in our understanding of that doctrine by calling it the way that I believe the

43:59

Bible describes it—total depravity, a much more exhaustive title for the teaching.

44:07

But how could you be born with original sin and yet be a blank slate?

44:14

Yeah, so that is, I think, an inherent contradiction in the Thomist system. And I think that's one of the many reasons why, when he died in 1274, that he was saying that this is, that all his work was straw.

44:32

He was saying that all the stuff he had written, he didn't finish, I can't remember which book he was in the middle of, but he had something he was writing and did not complete it.

44:41

I think it's the Summa, actually, that he didn't complete. And so the reason is because he had started, he worked a long ways through, and he's like, yeah, what

44:49

I've done so far is straw. And I think what happened is he started to build, rather than building on the firm foundation of the

44:56

Word of God, he started to build on Aristotelian empiricism and to seek to use that to construct a system of doctrine and to meld it together, to meld it together with the

45:09

Scriptures. And so what he has is an incoherent mess. And I think that what you just asked is an example of the incoherence of that system, that Aristotle and others would argue—you find this also very clearly, for example, in John Locke, the idea that man has to be a blank slate in order for his sense experience to be unbiased.

45:32

Because if his mind has other content before he starts to sense, then he's going to, by his presuppositions, by his biases, he's going to interpret the sensation and his experience, and therefore it's going to be no longer unbiased.

45:48

That's exactly right. Man cannot be the image of God and be a blank slate. God, being the image of God, that's rationality, and you cannot be rational unless you have thought content, goals, and make choices.

46:00

And so to ever be blank is to not be the image of God, and that creates all sorts of problems.

46:06

And furthermore, there is the corruption of man's mind, man's nature, and that includes the mind of man that comes, that makes us that we're not a blank slate because of total depravity, because of original sin, the constant transgression of the law that occurs.

46:20

And so we have all sorts of systematic problems. If we want to adopt empiricism, the idea that sense experience alone is the source of knowledge, it creates a number of systemic problems.

46:33

And so, and there are all sorts of critiques of trying to say that that's the source of knowledge, but the very most foundational one is plainly, if we have sense experience, we either are interpreting it because through our presuppositions, or we have no presuppositions and therefore can't interpret and are just sort of an unfiltered sensing being.

46:54

And the idea that you can go from not having reason to having reason through experience is a part of the nonsensical problem set.

47:02

So I think that a lot of Thomists have not thought seriously about the weaknesses of empiricism at a deep level, and we can go into that further, but I think that at a popular level, most of the issue is natural theology's definition, natural law's definition, and the effort to try to define right and wrong apart from Scripture.

47:20

Well, let's go to at least one of our listener questions right now. We have

47:27

Vance in Whitefish, Montana, and Vance says, so far, it seems the primary element of the discussion in regard to Thomism has been how we know what we know.

47:42

But specifically, what, if any, problems do you see in Thomas Aquinas's understanding of the

47:49

Trinity? Yeah, this has been something that has been at the focal point with a lot of the arguments between brothers in Christ.

48:01

If you want to take extreme positions, and of course there's every flavor in between, but you have

48:08

Thomists saying that if you do not use Thomas Aquinas as a lens to understanding the

48:16

Godhead, you are more prone to become a tritheist or a pantheist, and then you have those on the other side who oppose

48:26

Aquinas, saying that those who are his devotees, his proponents, are more likely to develop an understanding that is unitarian or modalist.

48:41

Do you agree with any of that? So, I think that Thomas has a problem, and I'm trying to think about how to explain those problems.

48:55

So, the problem of his definition of the Trinity and how he tries to deal with it comes from his relationship of knowledge to his relationship of what he believes about the nature of reality.

49:08

So, in philosophy, you have three major zones of study.

49:15

The three basic questions of any philosophy are what is true, what is real, and what is good.

49:22

So, a Thomist is going to say that what's true is that which we can know through our sense experience.

49:30

And Thomas is going to say that there's sort of two ways, right? God revealed the information, and we can also get information.

49:38

He revealed the information in terms of the Bible, but he also provided the information in terms of sensory experience. So, the

49:43

Bible is for those who are dumb, and being able to reason to it from our experience is for those who are smart.

49:49

And God provided two ways to know, whereas a lot of people are going to say you defend the

49:54

Bible by getting to it from experience. And so, but Thomas, in his doctrine of how do you know, you lead into the nature of reality.

50:09

So, metaphysics is the question of what's real, and ethics is the question of what's good. So, metaphysics is the study there of what's real, and the relationship between how you know and what is real is going to be the connection between knowledge and reality.

50:26

So, to give you an example of that, basically, we think about the idea of if I know something, and I know it through my experience, then what

50:40

I have is I have an image of it from my eyes, or a sound of it, and I have a memory of the sound through my ears, or whatever sense it is, and you've got these things, and you piece these sense images, or sense perceptions together, and you group them into a category, and that's how you make this definition of a particular thing, or category of things.

51:05

And so, you don't ever get to the real thing, so your information in your mind is a representation of the thing.

51:18

And if it's a representation of the thing, there's this, you know, think about there's a difference between the thing itself and what you have in your mind.

51:28

So, think about a table, right? If you had a table in front of you, you'd look at the table, and the image in your head of the table is not the same thing as the table.

51:38

And so, what you have is this idea that your mind doesn't possess reality in it, it has truth, and truth relates to reality, it accords with reality.

51:55

So, this view of the relationship of truth and reality is the Thomist, the

52:01

Aristotelian view, it's called conceptualism, and conceptualism is this idea that truth accords to reality, but truth is not reality.

52:09

In fact, could we pick up on conceptualism when we return from the midway break? Sounds good.

52:15

Okay, and once again, if anybody wants to ask a question of David Reese, if you want to get in line, there are others waiting already to have their questions asked and answered, but if you want to join the party here, send in your email to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

52:32

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If you live outside the USA, only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter. Keep in mind, folks, please be patient, because this is the longer break than the other breaks in the show, because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

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Dr. Joe Moorcraft. I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listener here in a tie in County Kildare, Ireland, going back to 2005.

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For more details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit Heritage Presbyterian Church dot com.

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That's also the email address where you can send in a question to David Reese, chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And before the break, you are going to give us a very important definition,

01:11:27

Pastor Reese. Absolutely. So, Chris, thank you. We're talking about the doctrine of the

01:11:33

Trinity. And if there's anything necessary in the Thomist view of the Trinity or in the definition of terms that is necessary to defend the

01:11:42

Orthodox view. And I was trying to explain that I think is actually a problem in terms of how

01:11:48

Thomas Aquinas uses the terms associated with the Trinity. And so the background for that to understand the critique

01:11:53

I'm about to give is that you have to understand the relationship between truth and reality. And the truth and reality has three different theoretical relationships.

01:12:02

And so the terms, the three terms that are being used to talk about the relationship between truth and reality is truth the same as reality.

01:12:11

That's called realism. The next one would be, does truth accord with reality?

01:12:17

That's called conceptualism. And the last view called nominalism would be the view that there is no discernible relationship between truth and reality.

01:12:28

So realism is actually presupposed in the Calvinist view of the Lord's Supper.

01:12:34

We're talking about the real presence of Christ. How is Christ present in the

01:12:39

Lord's Supper? Well, he's not present in terms of his body being the transformation of the bread and wine into his body and blood.

01:12:48

It's not present because his humanity is everywhere present. Instead, how is

01:12:53

Christ present? He's present by faith. That's because we are thinking the truth about Christ. And when we think the truth about Christ, that reality of Christ is present in our minds by faith.

01:13:05

And so realism is the idea that truth and reality are the same. Conceptualism is the idea that truth accords with reality or it has a discernible relationship.

01:13:15

And nominalism is the idea that truth and reality have no discernible relationship. So realism typically is going to relate to either rationalists or people who are biblicists, presuppositionalists.

01:13:30

Conceptualism is going to relate to empiricism. So if you think that truth comes through your experience, you're going to try to say, well,

01:13:38

I can know truth through my experiences, and I'm never going to get reality in my mind, but I can have experiences that are related to that reality.

01:13:49

And so that idea that I get truth and has a relationship to the real stuff outside of my mind.

01:13:56

And then nominalism says, I have experiences and because I can never get to the real thing,

01:14:01

I can never demonstrate the relationship. And so those are sort of the three views.

01:14:07

And those get debated in the Middle Ages. And that's an important part of sort of the background. You have people like Ockham arguing for nominalism, stuff like that.

01:14:16

So you heard of Ockham and Ockham's razor. So anyways, that's the background.

01:14:21

And so this idea relates deeply to how you know and what reality is made up of.

01:14:28

So when you come from sort of an Augustinian perspective as opposed to a

01:14:35

Thomist perspective, where you're saying that truth is reality, what you're able to do is to say, when

01:14:44

I'm thinking about God, I'm actually thinking God, that the essence of God is able to be understood.

01:14:53

And so I can believe what God has revealed. And when I believe what God has revealed, I'm thinking

01:14:58

God. And whereas a conceptualist is going to say,

01:15:03

I can never speak of God in a way where what

01:15:10

I'm saying about him is able to be properly the same in terms of what

01:15:18

I'm thinking and what he is. And furthermore, when I talk about God, the terms

01:15:24

I use about him, this is the conceptualist view, the Thomist view. When I use terms about him, the terms never mean the same thing when

01:15:32

I'm talking about God as when I'm talking about a creature. So if I say

01:15:37

God is smart, it doesn't mean the same thing as if I say Chris Arnzen is smart. And so you go, well, obviously, right?

01:15:43

Because God is infinitely smart. But the Thomist is going to say, no, the term isn't just a term of a difference of degree, but it literally doesn't mean the same thing.

01:15:52

You're not even talking about degrees of things, like one being a finite amount of A and another one being an infinite amount of A, they're not the same.

01:16:01

And so that leads to this idea of anytime we're talking about God, it's equivocal, because the things we're saying about God don't make sense to us because the way we use the words in the context, you know, aren't going to be the same.

01:16:14

And so there's this doctrine of analogy where you say, well, there's no, it's not the same, but there's a similarity.

01:16:21

And so when you talk about God's attributes in a Thomist perspective, the words you're trying to find some way of making it so that even though the words don't mean what we would mean when we talk about anything else, that somehow there's still a discernible meaning.

01:16:38

And so I think this leads to a nonsense problem where we're saying things, and we don't even know what we mean.

01:16:45

And so when we talk about the essence of God, we list out his attributes. The Thomists are going to say that his essence is, you know, you're going to list out a bunch things, he's all powerful, he's all knowing, he's everywhere present.

01:16:58

But then you've got to say those words, knowing, powerful, present, don't mean when you talk about God, the same thing as when you're talking about anything else.

01:17:08

And so my problem with the Thomist view of the essence of God is that it's something where you're essentially saying you can't know.

01:17:17

You can't know what God is, and you can't understand any of the claims about God, because the words are not univocal.

01:17:26

They don't have the same meaning as when we talk about other things. And that creates a number of problems for reasoning as well. So that idea, their view, they're trying to make it so that you have the essence of God is something that ultimately we can't speak about.

01:17:42

And so that's a complex problem to try to explain without having a philosophy class, or a theology class, or an apologetics class where I can talk to people and have back and forth of the questions on it for a long time.

01:17:52

But that's one of the reasons why I think the doctrine of the Trinity in Thomas is not as good or clear as if you were to read for example,

01:18:00

Augustine on the matter. And so I think the best book in the Trinity, again, is Clark's of the Trinity. And I think

01:18:06

Augustine's of the Trinity is fantastic as well. And I think Thomas is far less clear on it because of his view of the essence of things, the substance of things.

01:18:14

Now, some of what you just described seems to very strongly connect to the claim.

01:18:24

And by the way, if there are any Thomists listening who want to correct, or clarify, or disagree with anything that is said today, just send in an email, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:18:38

But it has been said that we are to be treating the different elements of the

01:18:50

Godhead in a sort of a flat way where everything is the same.

01:18:59

The mercifulness of God is the same as His wrathfulness and so on.

01:19:04

It makes no sense when I hear this. Is this part of the problem that you were just discussing?

01:19:12

So it sounds like maybe you're talking about the doctrine of the simplicity of God. Yes. And so the

01:19:17

Thomists will often talk about the simplicity of God. And I would actually, the question is, what does that mean, right?

01:19:25

So what is the simplicity of God? So historically, the simplicity of God has been the idea that that one, when you talk about God's attributes and you talk about His essence, there is no difference.

01:19:40

Thomists want to say that everything else except for God, there's a difference between attributes and essence.

01:19:47

I do not hold to that view. I believe that that's true of everything. That the essence of a human is a list of their attributes.

01:19:53

That's what the definition of humanness is. And it's the same for God. So they want to claim that that's only true of God.

01:20:00

So that doesn't, I don't hold that. I don't know. That argument doesn't make any sense to me. I'm happy to talk about it with other people, but I don't think that's the case.

01:20:07

But secondly, as regards to simplicity of God, the other thing that gets thrown out is the idea that when you list out the incommunicable attributes of God, so the attributes of God that are distinct, that are distinctly divine, that God has and no creatures have, that they imply each other.

01:20:27

So if I say I'm talking about somebody who's all powerful, that also means I'm talking about somebody who's all knowing and who's also everywhere present.

01:20:34

And it was infinite, eternal, unchangeable, as being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. So that idea that those attributes imply each other, that's the simplicity of God.

01:20:43

Some people want to make that mean something else. And so when you're talking to people who call themselves Thomists, frankly,

01:20:48

I find a lot of people who call themselves Thomists to be philosophically naive. And I don't think that they understand a lot of the meaning of what they're talking about.

01:20:57

They throw around a lot of philosophical terms and theological terms, but there's a lot of not defining.

01:21:04

And so notice most of this time, I'm trying to carefully define terms. And that's what kind of slows things down as you're going, okay, well, what do you mean?

01:21:14

And so the question of divine simplicity is often simplified down to, okay, what do you mean?

01:21:20

And if we mean that God's incommunicable attributes imply each other, then

01:21:28

I agree with that entirely. If what we mean is that his attributes are his essence,

01:21:34

I agree with that. But if we mean something like, you know, ultimately his attributes are, all of his attributes are implicit in any one of them, that's not true.

01:21:45

There are things about God that are not his incommunicable attributes. And his mercy is not one of them.

01:21:51

We human beings can show mercy. And so to make mercy an incommunicable attribute of God would be a category error.

01:21:59

And so what we need to do is to carefully differentiate between the things that are divine that cannot be shared with creatures and the things that are divine that can be shared with creatures.

01:22:10

And so, you know, justice, mercy, rationality, these are all things that creatures can have.

01:22:18

Whereas omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence are things that creatures cannot have.

01:22:23

You're God, by definition, if you've got any of those. And they each imply each other. They're trying to figure out which attributes are included in the divine simplicity versus not is a helpful exercise that should be worked through.

01:22:35

And I think they've been captured, frankly, in a lot of the confessional documentation that's already done. So if I'm missing your question, I'm sorry,

01:22:40

Chris, I'm just trying to make sure I'm getting what you're talking about. No, you haven't missed it. Before I go to a listener question, perhaps we could go back to some of the accusations made by people on opposite sides of this divide.

01:22:58

Obviously, since you're not a Thomist, you would not believe that a non -Thomist understanding of the

01:23:07

Godhead leads to tritheism or pantheism. But would you agree with the extreme accusation on the

01:23:17

Thomist side against non -Thomists that without the aid of Thomas Aquinas, you are in danger of adopting an understanding of God that's tritheist or pantheist?

01:23:32

How do you respond to that accusation? I mean, I think that Nicaea and Athanasius and Augustine were doing just fine.

01:23:45

They were doing fine half a millennium before him. And so I don't think that that's the case.

01:23:54

I think that if you look at what the Summa has to say about the Trinity, I don't find it particularly helpful.

01:24:01

I don't find it particularly to be the most useful way of reading about it.

01:24:07

And I think that his view of substance or essence or the use of the word subsistence,

01:24:14

I don't think that those things are the most helpful way of articulating things. And I think that what we find is, what's an essence or a substance?

01:24:24

It's a definition. And what's a person? It's a mind. It's a thinker. And I don't think we needed

01:24:31

Thomas for that. So that is something I just, I don't see the contribution.

01:24:37

I don't see what's helpful. And I think his definition of essence is not something that is really well done.

01:24:44

And I think that his view of concept in terms of the relationship of how we think versus what's real, makes it so that God becomes unknowable.

01:24:52

And so I think that actually, Thomas has laid on a cloud of unknowing and he has undermined our ability to clearly communicate about these things.

01:25:02

And so I don't think that Thomas is the most helpful person on this. I think that reading, you know,

01:25:12

Athanasius, reading Augustine, reading Nicaea, reading the Westminster Standards, reading what

01:25:18

Clark wrote on it. I think those are the most helpful places you can go. Now, would you agree with any of the accusation, which is perhaps an extreme from non -Thomas, that the

01:25:32

Thomist understanding of the Godhead could lead to modalism and Unitarianism?

01:25:40

So I haven't looked at the critique of what that is in terms of towards Thomas's view.

01:25:48

And I would have to examine that more carefully. So I'm sorry, I probably should have done that before coming on for this. But I think that on a basic level,

01:25:55

I would say my greater concern is that Thomas has problems in terms of his epistemology and his relationship of reality.

01:26:03

And I think that when you look at how he defines substance or essence, that he doesn't seem to, and in his definitions of persons, they don't seem as clear.

01:26:13

So as far as the specific claim of, you said modalism, what was the other one? Unitarianism.

01:26:20

Unitarianism. I don't see Unitarianism in Thomas, but his definition of person seems unclear because of the way that he uses the words substance and subsistence.

01:26:33

And so it's more that I think it's a mess. I think it's not clear.

01:26:38

I think it is unhelpful. So I think, yeah, you could define his terms in such a way as to lead into either. And I think that there's a problem with what he thinks is the nature of reality.

01:26:47

Is there some like substance, like is there like spirit ball substance that is distinct from the definition, as distinct from what is

01:26:56

God? The answer to that question. If you say God, the substance of God is some sort of like spirit energy ball stuff or whatever, that becomes a real big problem that has all sorts of negative implications.

01:27:08

And I think he has a hard time kind of avoiding that in terms of what he thinks of as essence and substance. And I think that when you are a conceptualist, you're gonna have a hard time with that kind of a thing.

01:27:21

And so, but the idea of modalism, I don't see that in the Summa. When you read the

01:27:27

Summa, he's clearly differentiating between persons. But the question is, what does he mean by a person?

01:27:35

I don't think anybody who is not a Thomist is accusing Aquinas of consciously being a modalist or a

01:27:42

Unitarian. It's just that the argument has been made that his views are frighteningly similar to the arguments used by modalists and Unitarians.

01:27:55

And I've heard from apologists who engage Muslims in debate that they can't even conceive of a

01:28:04

Thomist grappling with a Muslim over the concept of the Trinity.

01:28:11

Well, and I think that's going to part me because of the way that Aristotle's definitions of the nature of reality have taken hold in Islam.

01:28:23

I think that a lot of the Islamic apologists are deeply dependent upon an

01:28:29

Aristotelian view. And their view of tradition and of the formation of the Quran is typically an empirical methodology.

01:28:37

And so the empiricism is deeply embedded in a lot of the Islamic apologetic.

01:28:44

So I think that's there. I think that a lot of people like to argue about the metaphysics issues.

01:28:50

But I think unless you're already clear on the epistemology issues, the issues of how do you know, those problems aren't as clear, aren't as obvious.

01:28:59

And so when I'm critiquing Thomas, I'm going to say methodologically, the basic problem is that his authority is appealing to human experience.

01:29:09

And that's why the cosmological argument is the most famously associated thing with Thomas. He's taking

01:29:14

Aristotle's argument from motion and trying to move it and apply it to the Christian God. And so I think

01:29:19

Thomas Aquinas is most famous for transubstantiation and the cosmological argument. Those are the two things that people talk the most about.

01:29:27

But I think that the problems with his view of God are going to relate to the fact that that leads into how he's got to view the relationship between truth and reality.

01:29:37

And so I think that there are a number of problems that flow out of this into ethics. And I think I can have a more useful or incisive critique of his ethical view than I could probably on his metaphysic, which

01:29:48

I find to be less understandable. I don't find his metaphysics to be very understandable. OK, we have

01:29:56

Veronica in Mexicali, Mexico, who has a question. If we can learn from the

01:30:02

Jewish historian Josephus, if we can learn philosophy from the

01:30:09

Roman Catholic G .K. Chesterton, and if we can learn some things about politics from the

01:30:16

Mormon Glenn Beck, why can't Reformed Christians learn from the Roman Catholic theologian

01:30:23

Thomas Aquinas? You certainly can, right? If you read the

01:30:30

Summa and you don't learn anything, you probably weren't paying attention. And so I'm not trying to say that.

01:30:37

And I think that a lot of people, if they listen to various sources that were just referenced there,

01:30:43

G .K. Chesterton or Glenn Beck, or you have Thomas Aquinas, can you learn things there?

01:30:50

Yes, but how do you know if what they've said is good or not? OK, so I can listen to Glenn Beck all day long and I can listen to audio books or read books by G .K.

01:31:00

Chesterton all day long and I can go read Thomas Aquinas. But how do I know if they're right? Do I know if they're right because it feels good?

01:31:08

Do I know that they're right because it lines up with my sensory experience and I'm able to demonstrate it empirically by my scientific method?

01:31:16

Am I able to reason it out if I were, as R .C. Sproul is saying, if I were sitting alone in a

01:31:22

Dutch oven thinking, would I be able to kind of reason it from what

01:31:27

I think? And I think that the answer is no. The way you test all of those things is by Scripture.

01:31:34

So can you learn anything by reading G .K. Chesterton? Sure. You know how you know whether it's true or not, whether it agrees with the

01:31:39

Bible. And you search the Scriptures to see if these things are so. If you're gonna read Thomas, you might be able to learn some stuff.

01:31:45

But the question is when you read him, is what he's saying from Scripture or is he inventing it?

01:31:51

Or is he taking it from the Philosopher, capitalized when he's talking about Aristotle? So I have no problem with reading non -Christian sources.

01:32:00

Please don't interpret me as saying that. What I'm saying is we have to judge what they say by the

01:32:07

Bible. And we have no way of knowing if they're right or not, except for if what they say is what the

01:32:13

Bible also says. And I don't mean literally, oh, here's a verse that says the exact same thing. Either the verse says it, or you can demonstrate it by good and necessary inference from what the

01:32:24

Bible says. So the systematics of studying the Bible. So yes, feel free to read other things.

01:32:29

But I'll tell you what, if you haven't read your Bible a lot, and if you haven't already studied

01:32:37

Reformed theologians and the Reformed confessions, then I would suggest to you, wait to read

01:32:43

Thomas Aquinas until after you've studied the Reformed confessions. And some

01:32:48

Reformed theologians, and you've read your Bible a lot, don't go out and read a bunch of junk because you think you might learn something from it when you've got, you know, all the excellent food just in front of you.

01:33:01

You know, you eat the good stuff. Then, you know, if you're nurtured, if you have nutrition, then you can enjoy some junk.

01:33:08

And you might find some use there. But that idea that we need to go to the good sources first.

01:33:15

And let's be real, most people in churches do not read very much. And so if I have a congregant that's going to read like three books in a year, and one of them is

01:33:24

Thomas Aquinas, that was a waste of their time and they should have gone and read something better. Now, just keeping on that same thread, shouldn't there be flashing red lights and alarm bells going off when someone, any historical figure, is being elevated in importance almost to the degree,

01:33:54

I'm not going to say that Reformed Thomists are saying that Thomas Aquinas is absolutely essential to rightly understanding the scripture and even our confessions.

01:34:08

But it seems that the rhetoric comes close to that. Shouldn't there be a flashing red lights and alarm bells going off when the individual that anyone is raising to such a high status of importance is someone who denied the gospel as we know it?

01:34:28

I mean, from what I understand, the Council of Trent, centuries later, had the identical understanding of justification that Thomas Aquinas believed and taught.

01:34:39

Shouldn't that be a matter of great concern? Absolutely. And I think, you know, the idea, so, you know, what the person is saying, who says we have to understand

01:34:49

Thomas in order to understand our own confessions, you know, what they're really saying is that medieval scholastic language is what needs to be understood.

01:34:57

And Thomas Aquinas had a significant impact on medieval scholastic language. But this is an error.

01:35:03

There are scholastic terms that were used that there were disagreements about definitions on, and there were also terms that were accepted.

01:35:13

But Thomas was not always the one defining. Sometimes he was the one who brought a term in. And then there was sort of like this effort to write about it.

01:35:20

So when you look at scholastic language, you know, not all the time, when you read the Reformed guys that are in the second and third generation of the

01:35:27

Reformation, and they're using the language of medieval scholasticism, they define the terms and sometimes they reference terms.

01:35:35

Some of the terms have generally accepted definitions. And some of them, they gave their own definitions to or argued against the definitions.

01:35:43

And so there's this like pretense that there was like a universally accepted set of definitions that Thomas Aquinas invented and gave wholesale to the medieval

01:35:53

Europe and that everybody just accepted all those definitions. That's not the case.

01:36:00

And so, yes, he talked about terms and he did systematic organizing, but he was not the first one to do that.

01:36:06

And he was not the only one to do that, but he did so in a way that was impressive. And you have medieval scholasticism engaging with him a lot.

01:36:15

And so that sort of that, you know, Thomas brought Aristotle in and Aristotle dominates the academy after.

01:36:23

And so the Protestant effort is to sort of abandon the Thomist position and the

01:36:30

Aristotelian position and return to a more Augustinian view. And so when we try to make it so that he is the definer of all the terms and pretend as though just because he used some of the terms that therefore we have to use the terms in the same way he did.

01:36:44

I think that that is a misunderstanding of the history. And in fact, when we return to those definitions and bring them into the

01:36:51

Protestant academy, that leads to modernism. The problem is the Reformation died when we tried to mix a dual source theory in and the church started to decline.

01:37:01

And we are not at the beginning of the decline. We are at the tail end of a decline. There has been a decline since the end of the high watermark.

01:37:09

So when was that high watermark? When did the Reformed church reform the most to get to its highest point? I'm going to say it's the

01:37:14

Westminster Assembly. You might say it's at the Glorious Revolution with 1689. But the point is, there's a high watermark.

01:37:21

And the question is, has the church been advancing or has the church been losing its position? And I'm going to say the adoption of a

01:37:28

Thomist methodology, Aristotelian empiricism into the Protestant academy brought a decline.

01:37:33

And it's not the manifestation of the great power that we saw bringing in three generations of massive growth and improvement in the church and maturing.

01:37:42

But instead, it's a returning back to the vomit we were saved from.

01:37:48

And that what it's doing is it's undermining our defense of the use of the Scripture as the only authority of faith and doctrine and practice.

01:37:55

We're going to our final break. If you have a question, send it in immediately because we're rapidly running out of time. ChrisArnson at gmail .com.

01:38:02

We'll be right back. Don't go away. Hello, I'm Phil Johnson, executive director of Grace to You with John MacArthur.

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01:50:03

Welcome back. Before we have my guest Pastor David Reiss explain natural law and ethics and politics,

01:50:13

I just want to clarify something from for a listener, Miguel in Center Barnstead, New Hampshire.

01:50:20

He wanted me to repeat the website for Solid Ground Christian Books. No, Miguel, it's not solid -brown, the color brown, books .com.

01:50:32

It's solid -ground -books .com. solid -ground -books .com.

01:50:40

Thank you for inquiring about that. Also, I want to remind our listeners, you've been hearing for years now the ad for the

01:50:47

Historical Bible Society every day in our show. Please remember that that organization was founded and is run by Daniel P.

01:50:55

Buttafuoco, attorney at law. If you are the victim of a serious personal injury or medical malpractice case anywhere in the

01:51:02

United States, please call Dan at 1 -800 -NOW -HURT 1 -800 -NOW -HURT or visit his website 1 -800 -NOW -HURT .com

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1 -800 -NOW -HURT .com. Please mention that you heard about his law firm,

01:51:14

Buttafuoco and Associates from Iron Trump and Zion Radio. Now, Pastor Reese, if you could explain for us the impact of natural law on ethics and politics.

01:51:32

I can't hear you. Absolutely. So there you go. Thank you. Sorry about that. So absolutely, Chris. So basically, first, we left off with the idea that, you know,

01:51:39

Thomas Aquinas has a heretical view of the gospel, so he has another gospel. And so there's no credible basis to say that he's a

01:51:46

Christian. Secondly, in addition to that, we know that he stopped his own work on the

01:51:52

Summa Theologica before he completed it on the basis of the fact that he thought that what he was doing was straw ultimately.

01:51:58

And he, in, I think it was the year before he died, he had a, he claimed to have a vision in which he then said that the basis of that was the vision made him believe that.

01:52:08

So we have all sorts of problems of the doctrine of authority, visions, his experience. The vision made him believe it was straw or the vision made him believe what he wrote?

01:52:17

Made him believe it was straw. He stops. So, but so there's sort of this, like, he has this claim of visions and all these problems.

01:52:25

But, but before he stopped his work and his defense of his own view in terms of natural law, and he's essentially trying to say the way that we can demonstrate what is good and what is evil is by observing things, coming up with a definition of what that thing is.

01:52:41

It's nature. And then based upon the definition of the thing from our observations, see what is good for that thing.

01:52:49

And based upon what is good for that thing, based upon the goal that that thing would have, then you can pick, figure out what's good for that thing to do.

01:53:01

And that's the theory of natural law that he has. And the theory of natural law applied to politics is one of six ways of trying to come up with a justification for the coercive power of the state.

01:53:15

And of those six ways, you have the issue of first of all, anarchy that says you can't have a justification.

01:53:22

The state shouldn't exist. It shouldn't exercise coercion. You have pragmatism. It's just, you know, power comes with the end of a gun, right?

01:53:29

So realpolitik, you might say. So anarchy, pragmatism, natural law that says, you know, hey, the nature of man is that man is a rational, political animal.

01:53:39

And therefore we need the state. And, you know, Aristotle's conclusion and Thomas's following is that man is a part of the body politic and depends upon the body politic and is a part of the body politic.

01:53:52

And so the needs of the group outweigh the needs of the individual. And so you have this problem.

01:53:59

And so Thomas ends up saying things like you can steal when it's necessary because of the idea that necessity justifies taking from other people based upon this sort of telos end -oriented nature of man view.

01:54:14

And then his political theory follows after it. So you end up with this sort of this problematic system of natural law, which would be good to spend some time on.

01:54:22

But then historically, the other three efforts to justify political power or social contract, divine right, which is sort of the absolutist king's statement that, you know,

01:54:31

God gave me the power so I can do what I want, or divine law. And so the way this is coming up, the reason this has become such a big controversy is because the

01:54:40

Thomists want to use natural law in the political sphere. And the people they're calling biblicists want to use the

01:54:46

Bible in the political sphere. And we're saying, you know, the Bible is the authority both for ethics and for politics.

01:54:52

And they want to say there's a natural law that can go out here. And this is where this this is where the rubber meets the road.

01:54:58

This is why there's so much interest here. And so the discussion about the earlier things are important because you can determine who's right and who's wrong by studying the epistemological questions and by studying the metaphysical questions.

01:55:11

And you go into the ethics and whether the Bible is the authority there and then in politics and the politics is the hot button issue everybody wants to talk about.

01:55:19

But these other things that we've talked about at a deeper level are sort of the real questions that help us to understand the basis of it.

01:55:26

But there's a very big attraction to being able to use natural law. The attraction is I'd like to not have to use the

01:55:31

Bible. I'm embarrassed. Yeah, and by the way, I think we should just renounce or denounce the slander against those who are

01:55:42

Reformed Biblicists that we agree with some of the fringe groups who distort

01:55:51

Sola Scriptura and really deform it into Solo Scriptura by believing we can go out in the woods with the

01:56:02

Bible alone. And that's all we need to have a proper understanding of exegeting the

01:56:08

Word of God. Nobody that I know that's Reformed believes that because the Bible itself teaches the need for teachers and so on.

01:56:17

The Bible teaches is a process of the maturing of the church. And so if you read Ephesians chapters three and four about the purpose of officers and their role in maturing and the idea that the church is going to mature over time that the officers are used to do that and to throw away the work that's been done before by officers is to kind of like throw away a road when it's been made, right?

01:56:37

If you say, I'm gonna hack a road through the forest myself or the jungle myself as opposed to walking on the road.

01:56:43

If the road isn't going where you wanna go, don't go on that road. But if the road is going the way you wanna go, go on that road, don't waste the time of making a new one.

01:56:51

And so the idea that there are Orthodox teachers that have come before us and they have already figured things out.

01:56:58

How do we know that? Well, we judge it according to the scripture. But if they have already accurately communicated what the scriptures teach, don't throw that away.

01:57:06

That's despising the work of the Holy Spirit in others to sanctify them and to help to mature the church.

01:57:11

So we need our forbearers and we need each other. We need the church together. We need to work together.

01:57:16

And last but not least, we have Rory in Paradise, Nevada, who asks, what did the reformers and the

01:57:24

Puritans think about Thomas Aquinas' theology? So there was a mixed bag.

01:57:31

So when you read Luther, for example, he despises Thomas. And I think you find the same sort of thing in a lot of ways with Calvin.

01:57:41

You'll find Calvin citing Thomas in some ways positively. And you'll also have him critiquing him.

01:57:48

But overwhelmingly, the reformers and the Puritans are going to say Thomas has a false gospel. Thomas has a superstitious and grotesque view of the sacraments.

01:57:57

And so you find way more critique. And so overwhelmingly, that's the case. The problem is when you get into academic, scholastic, reformed thought, you start to have some people trying to pull in his view of natural theology.

01:58:12

But that is not, that is not the natural theology that you find of Luther or Calvin or overwhelmingly of the first, second and third generation reformers and with the

01:58:21

Puritans. What you do find is a mixed bag of it. And as you move into the Enlightenment era, there's more and more effort to try to bring in empiricism and to try to justify the

01:58:32

Bible or to defend the existence of God using the cosmological argument and the

01:58:37

Thomist arguments. And so you see in the late Reformation and you see in the

01:58:43

Enlightenment period, greater revival, especially in the scholastic zone and the academic zone.

01:58:51

Well, it has been an absolute thrill to have you back on the program. I look forward to your many return visits,

01:58:58

God willing. The Iron Trip and Zion Radio. Please repeat, if you would, your church website and the website for Armored Republic.

01:59:08

PuritanPHX .com and ArmoredRepublic .com. Please follow me on x at real

01:59:13

David Reis at real David Reis. Well, thank you so much for being such a superb guest, as always,

01:59:20

Pastor Reis. And I want to thank all of our listeners, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

01:59:25

I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater