Biblical Law and Justice, Tim Keller on SJ&G, Discussion of Presuppositionalism

Biblical Law, False Witness, and the Justice of God

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is September 25th, 2018, and those of you listening at a later time period, years down the road, you know what happened here. We, living through history right now, obviously do not know what is going to happen, but I will confess to being somewhat... not confused.

I understand exactly why this is, but very, very deeply disappointed in a lot of what I'm seeing from Christian people regarding current events in the United States and the specific issue of justice, not the social justice stuff, we'll talk about that a little later, but the issue right now in the United States is the nomination hearings in regards to Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court of the United States.

For those of you outside the United States, those of you inside the United States, nominations to the Supreme Court were not an overly politicized or a controversial event until the 1980s when the left began to politicize them with the situation with Justice Bork and then with Justice Thomas.

The right has refused to follow suit. It is always the left that is doing things like they're doing now in this political theater, but not just political theater. They recognize the Supreme Court is the only mechanism they have for the continuing transformation of American society, that is the overthrow of the republic.

They recognize, you know, they're not dumb people. The founders, John Adams, I've quoted it many, many times, said the Constitution is only sufficient for religious and moral people. It is completely insufficient for the governance of any other, and it is now attempting to govern a people who are neither religious nor moral nor ethical, even at the highest levels.

And so the wheels, they're wobbling, and things are going on, and we see this stuff taking place. But what concerns me is, again, primarily because of emotionalism. The next generation seems to not think but emote, thinks that emotion is the primary mechanism of Christian expression rather than biblical teaching.

I'm just stunned, and part of it, and I keep using the term stunned, I shouldn't. I am, I recognize that what I'm seeing and hearing comes from people who are generally ignorant of the Old Testament as a whole, but especially the law, the Torah.

I would imagine that only something like Habakkuk or Zephaniah is less known than Leviticus or Deuteronomy is, or maybe some places in 2 Chronicles. But there are favorite passages that we have in the Old Testament, and then there are the passages nobody even bothers to read anymore, let alone ponder or consider.

And given certain forms of dispensationalism, there are many, many, many people who just don't think that the Mosaic Law is at all relevant. It's all passed away, we're not under law, we're under grace, and therefore why should we even bother reading these things?

Not recognizing that it is those passages of Scripture, which our Lord and Savior considered to be the very words of God, that when interpreted in a consistent fashion, provide us with tremendous insights that have been enshrined in English common law and hence are the foundation of our own legal system.

And so to see people, I watched a woman on television last night being interviewed, to see people completely willing, and I recognize, I hope you recognize, that the fundamental driving force in our experience right now is the fanatic religious dedication to abortion as the sacrament of the left.

And anything that maybe even remotely might threaten it is the greatest heresy in the world, and it's worthy of calling an absolute crusade to destroy. And that's what we're seeing in our land right now.

Personally, by the way, just in passing, I could be wrong about this, no one really knows, but I see Judge Kavanaugh pretty much cut out of the cloth of Kennedy. I think he'll probably be put on Supreme Court, but I'm just sort of sitting back going, could be interesting, could be interesting, might not be what we end up thinking, that wouldn't be the first time, wouldn't be the first time.

Kennedy was thought to be a lot different than he ended up being. But anyway, that's neither here nor there at the moment. The simple reality is that we have a number of people expressing a willingness to overthrow fundamental elements of justice in our society, specifically due process and the presumption of innocence.

They likewise seem, and these are Christians, even Christians are willing to do this, and it's a sad thing to recognize that 98 of the Christians with whom I would speak, or people who at least claim to be Christians, have nothing to draw from from their study of scripture to even begin to address the topic.

Let me give you some examples. In the law of God, in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 19, if you want to look along, listen to these words. No, I'm not, you don't need to. A single witness shall not rise up against a man on account of any iniquity or any sin which he has committed.

On the evidence of two or three witnesses, a matter shall be confirmed. Now, we know Jesus repeated that. He even brought out in John chapter 5, John chapter 8, a single witness shall not rise up against a man on account of any iniquity or any sin which he has committed.

How can that be? People would get away with stuff. Again, if that's the way you think, you are not thinking as a Christian. You may be a Christian, but you're not thinking as a Christian. Yes, evil can get away with being evil in this life.

The underlying foundation of anything we're going to read in Scripture is that God is going to judge. There is going to be a final day of judgment. Any judgment that we engage in in this life is simply a temporal approximation of what is eventually going to be done before the throne of God.

That would leave some people without getting justice. No, they're going to get justice in the next life. As long as you don't really think there's going to be a next life, and as long as you don't think that that kind of justice really matters, then you're going to be very, very unhappy in this world.

Very, very unhappy. Because you're trying to bring cosmic justice, which only God can bring and will at the great white throne judgment, into now and put that power in the hands of men. We weren't designed to have it.

We can't do it. We have too much ignorance. We have too much error. We have too much sin. You don't want that power now. But once you buy into secularism, once you buy into the evolutionary theory, man is just an animal.

There is no transcendent meaning. That's all you got. You got nothing more. You got nothing more. So, a single witness shall not rise up against a man on account of any iniquity or any sin which he has committed.

Now you see, God already knows it. Justice will be done. But you can't have a single witness. That pretty much ends everything that's going on right now from a justice standpoint, from the law of God.

It's all single witnesses. And what's worse, what I'm hearing, and I can't confirm this, but I've heard a number of sources saying this was some kind of repressed memory thing. That you sit around with a psychologist for sessions and you bring these memories out and didn't we already learn how ridiculously absurd that is years ago?

I guess not. On the evidence of two or three witnesses, a matter shall be confirmed. And, next verse, Deuteronomy 19, 16. You shall purge the evil from among you. I didn't write it. That was written long before I came along.

I may be old, but I ain't that old. False witness is an evil amongst the people of God. Because it is an abuse of the one system of justice, the demand for honesty, the demand for integrity, that is to mark the people of God.

And so if someone rises up and tries to get a certain punishment brought against you, and it's found out that they were a false witness, it didn't happen, then the punishment you wanted given to them is to be given to you.

Oh, but that would mean that people wouldn't report things. Yeah, if you can't prove it, you don't report it. Oh, but, but, but. And what's the but, but, but based on? But then they won't get justice.

Not in this life, but they will get justice from God, the judge of all the earth, who does right. That's why we are seeing what we're seeing today. We are seeing a wholesale willingness to overthrow all basic standards of justice that we have held since the Magna Carta.

Why? Because the worldview has changed, folks. This is, we are in that transitionary period. So we've still got a system that was built by people who believed that justice would be done in God's time, and that our justice system is to approximate his as best we can, but that there have to be safeguards built in so that it cannot be abused and bring the innocent into improper judgment.

But the worldview that substantiated that, we've rejected. And we haven't put in a system that will then be consistent with that worldview. Folks, what's consistent with that worldview, you don't even want to know about.

It will not have liberty. It will not have freedom. It will not have peace. It can't, because it does not correlate to the world God has created and the people God has created. But that's where we're going.

And we're going there fast. Like I said, watched a lady last night. Hey, I think Judge Kavanaugh should have to prove his innocence. Well, good luck with that. Good luck with that. 35 years ago. People say, well, you can investigate stuff that's that old, not of this nature.

If you had a little stained blue dress, you might. But you don't have that. And of course, that's the wrong side of the political spectrum. So we don't have to worry about that anyways. Everybody over there is just free game.

You can do whatever you want. But we don't have that in this situation. You do not have that kind of, there's no physical evidence here. It's all unclear, clouded memories. That's all it is. There's nothing more.

That's it. So you don't have the kind of evidentiary material. It's not like one of these cold cases where you go back and get DNA out of a skeleton. Or any of that kind of stuff. You find somebody's buried box that has all the information in it.

There's nothing like that. In other words, justice cannot be done sitting there going, we need the FBI to investigate. It's absurd. It's ridiculous. But the reason that people are doing it is because we're in this in-between age where we've lost the worldview that makes sense of the structures we have.

And we haven't succeeded in destroying the structures yet to build new ones, which will be horrible. And that we don't want to see destroyed, but that's up to God. Then notice Deuteronomy 19 -20, The rest will hear and be afraid and will never again do such an evil thing among you.

You mean you're supposed to learn from the punishment of others? Yeah, yeah, that's there. That's there. Now, especially in regards to the time issue, Waiting for all these years, going through therapy and coming up with memories and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

Let me read you Deuteronomy 22, beginning of verse 23. Deuteronomy 22, beginning of verse 23. If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death.

The girl because she did not cry out in the city and the man because he has violated his neighbor's wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you. So notice the location in the city. The assumption is that if someone cries out in the city, there's going to be a reaction.

Sadly, in many of our cities, things are so bad that the reaction will be to close the windows, bar the doors and hide. But in Israel, the reaction is assumed to be that people will come to the aid of the person who cries out.

So if this adulterous situation arises in the city, then both are punished. But notice what happens right after this, verse 25. But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die.

But you should do nothing to the girl. There is no sin in the girl worthy of death for just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this case. When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out, but there was no one to save her.

So the assumption of the law is, out in the field, there's nobody to hear. I mean, you got to remember, there weren't that many people back then. And if you're out in the field, you're alone. The assumption is there's nobody else nearby.

So the law assumes. Now, you go, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if they plot to take advantage of just that? She might get away with it. Yep, she might. The point is, it's better that she get away with it in this life, because she's not going to get away with it in the next life, than to have her cry out, she is raped, and then she gets executed as well.

The point is, the law is saying, leave the door open for an evil person to escape, rather than punishing an innocent person, because that sheds innocent blood. Every January, don't we have that big push to read through the Bible in a year?

I guess we don't make it to about February? Because it doesn't seem like anybody knows these verses are there, or cares that they're there. How many of the people in our society right now could look at that and go, that's Deuter, Deuter what?

Deuter, Deuter, I don't know what that is. Who cares? It doesn't matter. There's a problem. There's a problem. And if you think, well, I'm just a New Testament Christian. That's why Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy all the time.

And Leviticus, so on and so forth. So, as I listen to people saying, let's make people, any accusation automatically disqualifies you. The insanity of that is hard for me to understand, it truly is. And if you have fallen into that, may I just really strongly suggest you step back and think that through for a second?

Especially if you call yourself a Christian. Do some reading. Do some reading. I just don't even know what else to say. So, some thoughts along those lines from the scriptures. A video came out over the weekend, I think maybe it was Sunday, I think it was on Sunday.

A video came out of Dr. Keller from New York City. And it's a cell phone video, so it's not overly, you know, it's not professionally made, but it's understandable. And I have the volume maxed out, so hopefully you'll be able to do something with it.

It's not the best recording, obviously. But it is Dr. Keller talking about the statement on social justice and the gospel. And I commented on this on Twitter, because basically what he does is he, I think, illegitimately makes reference to something called speech-act theory.

My understanding is he's not making a proper application here at all, but the way he presents it is that you can have the meaning of words, but then you have the actual impact of the words. And the impact of the words may actually be the opposite of what the words actually mean, but that that's more important.

And so what you have here is you have a pastor basically telling his audience that the statement on social justice and the gospel is inappropriate, because even though he can't provide specifics from the words that he would disagree with, it's what the words do.

And what the words do is that they tell you that you shouldn't be concerned about racism or the poor or injustice. So the literal argument is the words don't say this, but that's the effect. To which you go, once again, we have entered into, we've gone down the rabbit hole a long ways here, and Alice is now talking to us, and words just don't seem to have any meaning anymore.

And it gets pretty frightening when Christians are so buying into the narrative of the day that they will actually apply such concepts to fellow ministers with decades of ministerial experience, fellow ministers that they themselves have spoken with at conferences and everything else.

But now in service of social justice, we can read their words and their words will say X, but we can dismiss what's actually being said because they actually mean Y. So let's take a listen to what Dr. Keller said at this, and hopefully we'll be able to play it for you.

You'll be able to hear it and so on and so forth. It's less than three minutes long.

They got technical terms for it. They talk about, in other words, you could say, you know, I love the way you look. And that may be perfectly true, but it depends on what you're trying to do with them.

And under certain circumstances, that could be a rather, it could be, that could be a kind of coercive statement. So in other words, there's what it says isn't true, and then what is it trying to do? So when I go through there, if you go really, really strictly, I think just about anybody would take about 80 percent of it.

You say, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. And then there's even some places you really push and you say, kind of see why they would say that. It depends on how they define church and things like that. But in the end, what concerns me most about it is not so much what it's saying, but what it's trying to do.

And what I fear is, and I think they may be responding to some sins on the other side, is at this point I feel that the Christian church is being, because our country is so polarized politically, that increasingly the church is becoming an extension of the various political parties.

And so I've said this before and I may say it again. If you talk about the evangelical church, for example, there's now becoming a red evangelicals and a blue evangelicals. It's almost like there are churches that are sort of lining up to become more extensions of a particular political party than they are really looking at the word of God says.

Because I actually do think that if you really take a look at, there's a lot of things the Bible says about sex and gender that really come out pretty, sounding politically today, conservative. And a lot of things the Bible says about race and justice and the poor that today come out sounding extremely liberal.

And therefore the church has to, at the very end of my talk I try to say, the church cannot identify so completely with one party. And I think that's what this thing ends up doing. It's not so much what it says, it's what it does.

It's trying to marginalize people who are talking about race and justice. It's trying to say you're really not biblical. And it's not fair in that sense. So that's the reason why when somebody starts to go down it with me and say, would you agree with this, would you agree with this?

I would say you're looking at the level of what it says and not at the level of what it's doing. And I do think what it's trying to do is it's really trying to say, don't make this emphasis. Don't worry about the poor.

Don't care about the injustice. It's not really that important. That's what it's saying. Even if I can agree with most of it, I don't like it. So that's what it's doing that I don't like.

The articles that they have written, you know, that have even expanded upon points. This is coming from a Christian from a from an allegedly reformed person. To where the words are OK, but I just sort of feel like this is what it's what they're doing.

And, of course, we're used to this now. We hear this from the left all the time. It's emoting. It's feeling it's it's. But he didn't say that. But but that's what I'm sure that's what he intends. And and so you just put this lens in front of everything.

And again, as I said before, the whole reason that we got together in Dallas and started work on this, this project was most of us. Certainly, I had made the false assumption that within reformed circles, there was this dedication to the idea that words have meaning.

And that if you're going to present something to be believed by God's people in the reformed context, that you need to be able to make a strong exegetical case. For that, that that argument and that belief, that teaching, and since there isn't going to be an exegetical case, this kind of redefinition of genders and and sexuality and all the revoiced stuff and and now the living out stuff, which is just one step down from your voice and and all that kind of stuff.

We just figured our dedication to to exegesis would be a sufficient bulwark, a sufficient wall to keep this from happening. Well, I suppose on one level, you could say that it would have been. But would you like to hear your pastor speaking as Dr. Keller just did?

Yeah, you know, you're just looking at the level of the words. Well, that's a good place to start now, isn't it? Because because once you get once you get away from the actual words as things start getting really gooey, don't they?

Yeah, they do. They start getting really, really messy at that point. And so, you know, the next day he had this tweet about how the cross is God's giving up power. And, you know, you just think of all the places where the Bible talks about the cross being the very power of God unto salvation and and power of God to the elect people of God and first Corinthians chapter one and stuff like that.

And you just go, I think I know exactly what he's saying there. He's this is this is putting biblical teachings into the context of power, oppression, you know, privilege. This is what happens when you start taking these external filters and making them the primary filter through which you're looking at things and then expressing things because it gives you points with your people.

It gives you points that people who want to hear you using that kind of language. Now, of course, he had his defenders. Well, I think it has to do with this. And it's like, if you listen to him talking recently, you know, what's what's the current big push, you know?

And that's that's what the current big push is. And so it was very disappointing that Dr. Keller had no criticisms of what the document actually says. That's generally what we're getting from people. The criticisms end up taking different different forms of, well, what it should have said or it said too much.

But but actually, you know, when people have tried to dig into the text, it's been fairly easy to demonstrate that. Well, did you read the section before the section after or, you know, like, did you read the next sentence type of thing?

Yeah. And it's it's not difficult to identify the external factors that are that are involved here. And so what you hear there at the end, you're just looking at the words. What's that's good. And Dr. Keller, tell you what, we'll just stick with looking at your words because that's what we're going to be judged by.

And we don't have anything else to look at. So I'm not sure how you think you can get past that. But hey, there you go. There you go. OK, well, with all of that done now in the first first half hour, we can now get started because there's a lot to get to.

Over the over the weekend, I started to notice I forget how this happened, to be honest with you. I started seeing these, I think it may have been I think it may have been because I had seen a link to an article on a social justice subject from someone who is opposing the social justice movement.

The neo-Marxist version by name, Cody Liebold. And I remember having just glanced at an article or something, and so the name stuck. And then my daughter and I were talking and she mentioned the same name.

And so it was sort of stuck in my mind there. And so when I started seeing I forget, I'm trying to remember what. Brought this about, but. I was communicating somehow with with with Jeff Durbin about something, and he had said something to me.

And anyways, I started coming across this stuff from the new Christian intellectuals. And if I'm guessing correctly, the primary people in this movement are all under 30. And one's already talked about replacing me, so I'm feeling I'm feeling young, though.

I. Think I could probably outride any of them, but anyway, I'm not quite old enough to kick off quite yet. But but, you know, I've got got lots of this white stuff down here and they they don't they don't have that.

In fact, I'm not sure that Cody could actually grow one of these. Nothing personal, Cody, but you look really young on your on your picture there. But they're they're getting ready to replace us and they're the intellectuals.

And finally, I ran across this thing on on Facebook, and I'm just going to read to you. Which is this is from Cody, which is more important, the battle against cultural Marxism or the battle against. Presuppositionalism.

Well, one is an effect and the other is a cause. Cultural Marxism is an immediate threat to my life. But presuppositionalism is a greater and wider threat long term. Yeah, I'm not I'm not changing it.

I'm reading it directly. I agree with the well-known presuppositionalist Jeff Durbin. Jeff Durbin is now that young kid that showed up out there is now a well-known presuppositions. Congratulations, Jeff.

You just need a little more of this white stuff and you're going to be. That'll really help with the credibility really well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with the well-known presuppositionalist Jeff Durbin that there is a way to argue for God that is immoral.

We just agree. We just disagree about which method is the immoral one. So he's saying that to argue for the existence of God as a presuppositionalist is immoral. And it's worse than cultural Marxism. I see presuppositionalism in professors and pastors as running interference for a growing trend of fideism in congregants.

It dulls our swords, diminishing our ability to fight the external battles or to keep young souls in the church. Now, so the young people that are going into the universities and losing their faith is because of presuppositionalism in the church?

I'm sorry, Cody. You do not have near enough life experience to even get close to making that comment. 99%, 99 of those individuals were not in reformed churches where presuppositionalism was being taught.

Okay, 99%. The rupture of young people is primarily from what we would call evangelical churches where they've been entertained in children's church and then young people's church. They've got basically no doctrinal foundation.

They've never been challenged. They've just been entertained all the way through. And now all of a sudden they're thrown into the wolves and they have no foundation, no meaningful Christian worldview of any kind whatsoever.

To blame that on presuppositionalism, I'm sorry, is just fantastically absurd. I mean, this is imbalanced on a really big scale. I mean, you're way too close to this. You're looking at the bark of a tree and you're missing the forest, man.

I mean, this is not even close to balanced. And I ain't the only one that's ever told you this. I happen to know that. I know many young people left the church and I can't say they were given a compelling picture of what faith is or why it makes sense.

But that you have a thousand times greater opportunity to have been given a meaningful presentation of the Christian worldview in a reformed church than in a non-reformed church. And amongst the reformed people is where you're going to find presuppositionalism.

It is an inconsistent system in a non-reformed... I know there are non-reformed presuppositionalists, but I don't get how that works. Because presuppositionalism, when you ask the question, what am I to defend?

It is defending the reformed gospel, the fullness of that gospel, sovereignty of God, deadness of man and sin, all the rest of that stuff. That's not what's being taught in the vast majority of these churches, that these people are leaving.

Too many churches are atheist factories. That is why I'm zealous against presuppositionalism. The stakes of the battle are high. Our camp is not in order. So I saw this and I posted it on Facebook and I said, What?

And what's interesting is, on Thursday, my plan is to do the Radio Free Geneva. And it's going to have to be a long one. Well, I'm not sure how long it's going to last. But respond to Mike Winger's video that has been sent to me 47 ,000 times.

And people keep saying, I want to hear what you have to say about it. It's like, stop. I've already said I'm going to be dealing with this. I saw it. I'm sorry. It's not difficult to deal with. And if you're reformed and you don't see what the problem is, I'm concerned that maybe you've embraced a system you don't understand or something.

I'll just be straight up with you on that because it's pretty obvious where the problem is in the argumentation. It's not super strong argumentation. There's a basic error right at the beginning. It's repeated over and over again.

Don't even have to play the whole thing because it's just repeated over and over and over again. But we'll get to that on Thursday. So I had said I need to listen to the video. And so on Saturday, I put that.

And then people had said, hey, did you hear he had a conversation with Sy Ten Bruggenkamp? And so I found it, converted it, and put that on my iPod as well. And I went for a really long ride. So I had plenty of time to listen to both of them.

And found the presuppositional discussion actually more interesting than the other one that I'll actually be addressing. And so I was already thinking along these lines because listening to he and Sy going back and forth on presuppositionalism, he had made some comments on Romans 1 that I was like, I think maybe I'll include this too in the Radio Free Geneva because this is a really important issue.

And so we'll tie that together. Well, then at the same time, all this other stuff comes out. And I see all these people starting to make comments about presuppositionalism in Twitter and stuff. And they have no idea what they're talking about.

I mean, none. Now look, let me just say off the top. I realize there are different flavors of presuppositionalism. If you read K. Scott Oliphant, you've got covenantal apologetics. Different terminology that's used.

You've got Van Til and then you've got Van Til and Clark going at it. And then you've got their interpreters everywhere from Greg Bonson. A bunch of people. I've talked to a bunch of people over my lifetime who sort of feel like they've got the inside track on the interpretation of what Van Til really meant.

Because Van Til's original language wasn't English and his English writing isn't all that great and most of us aren't going to be reading it in Dutch or whatever it was anyway. And so I'm well aware of the fact that you cannot simply go, well, this is presuppositionalism and I get to define it.

There are going to be differing emphases given the individuals to whom you're speaking just as there are all sorts of, you know, it's like listening to classical versus evidential and all the rest of this type of stuff.

And there are dividing lines, however. And that's what I think people are missing or what the real dividing lines are. And once you lay them out, I think it provides clarity. Now, my understanding is that the guys at Choosing Hats has already had a dialogue with these young guys and that'll be coming out, so that'll be useful.

And I would direct people to other people other than myself for a number of different reasons, one of which I'm going away for three weeks, but the most serious reason is I've taught Christian philosophy religion many, many times on the graduate level, but I'm a presuppositionalist not because of some philosophical framework that I've developed.

I'm a biblical Trinitarian and I'm a biblical presuppositionalist. Biblical exegesis is where I think it's at, I think, for the people of God. You open the Word of God, I've seen it change people. And the teaching that has the longest lasting effect, I would believe, would be declaring the whole counsel of God.

Yes, I just saw something on Twitter. Pedro saw it right before the program, almost lost my lunch, but decided I didn't want to even touch it, so I get it. I shouldn't watch. I should actually, I'm about to go over here, so we'll probably need to move over here.

That way I can't see Twitter. My OCD won't kick in, or whatever it is. I am a, yes squirrel, I am a Twitter biblical presuppositionalist. And when I have presented this material to classes and seminaries literally since the late 90s, I've always done so pretty much in the same fashion.

And I've done it on this program in years past, but we have a lot of new listeners. And just because I did it once, 10 years ago, I've got to realize that doesn't mean everyone's going to remember what was said back then.

And so what I want to do with the rest of our time today, however long it takes, is to go through three primary texts of scripture. One of which is, I was interacting with one of these young men online, and I watched a debate he had done where he made some, what seemed to be very odd commentary on Romans 1.

Basically saying it was Christians, not only non-Christians, but Christians suppress the knowledge of God in the context of Romans 1, and what was included in the natural revelation. And I kept asking him on Twitter, can you show me someone who has exegeted the text in the way that you have?

Because I can give you, everyone from Calvin to John Murray and all sorts of other people, critical commentaries, critical published commentaries that can be examined, that all go along the same lines as what I've published.

If you want my exegesis of Romans 1, God Who Justifies, right there. Entire chapter on Romans 1, check it out. He wasn't able to give me anybody. Well, what are you objecting to? No, I'm asking who has done it like you've done it.

And as is often the case with young people, it didn't seem to be the recognition that it might be good that you not be off on your own. It might be good that if, you know, you've got the buffer zones of remaining in the mainstream of reformed exegesis and things like that.

It might be a good thing to do. So, we're going to look at, we're going to start with Romans 1 because it is absolutely central. I know I've done it before, but I'm going to make specific application to the issue of how we defend the faith.

And as I said, and as I've said in critiquing William Lane Craig or anyone else, apologetics is a defense of the faith. Therefore, your theology must determine your methodology of apologetics, not the other way around.

It is a great danger when your apologetic methodology determines your theological conclusions. That happens way too often, way too often. So, we have a gospel, and the gospel that I seek to defend, I believe to be a full gospel, in the sense that it begins with God.

It begins with the triune God. It begins with God's self-glorification. It is grounded in the final reality that in the ages to come, that triune God is to be glorified in everything that he has done in time.

And it is not a man-centered gospel. It cannot find its focus in man. Man is graciously and gloriously and mercifully and lovingly redeemed in the gospel. Man is likewise the recipient of just wrath and anger and punishment.

But man is not the center of the gospel. The triune God is the center of the gospel, and the triune God's singular redemptive act in the incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and ascension to the right hand of the Father is the central redemptive focus.

All of history looks forward to the cross and backwards to the cross. That's all about God. That's all about God, and it's not about man. It is not about man. Man is a creature. Man is a dependent creature.

Man is made in the image of God. But man is a fallen creature, and we are not the central determinative factor in even the definition of what God has done in this universe by any stretch of the imagination.