Thomas Aquinas, Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:32

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is The Dividing Line after Christmas.

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It's the third day of Christmas, if you are, in fact, in some way observing a little bit different than most

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Americans do. I remember when I first realized what the 12 days of Christmas were, and that Christmas is supposed to be a season, a feast of many days.

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And I think there really is a diminishment when we, you know,

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December 26th, you're packing everything up. Now, if you started, you know, in the middle of November, okay,

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I can understand that. But we have a family in our church that does the 12 days, and I enjoy watching that.

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And I think that's something we should talk about doing next year or something like that if we possibly can.

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I think that's a really positive thing. But anyway, I hope you had a wonderful time with your family.

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I certainly enjoyed seeing Little Ransom. In fact, I almost posted,

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I didn't. I should probably close that door because I'm getting an echo out of the other room. But we're doing this with Rich Remote today, so no one will be bothering me through the glass.

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You'll find me to be significantly more focused. Things like that.

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Anyway, he can still talk though, but there's no camera. At least I don't think there is.

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Well, you know, come to think of it, he could probably find a way to do it, so I won't tempt him to do that. Anyhow, hopefully you had a great time.

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We had fun with the grandkids, and especially Little Ransom, he's getting a little personality and was in church

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Sunday night, because, you know, that's when Apologia meets. Oh, very funny.

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There's not much you can do, because there's, I mean, I can look either direction. It's pretty easily done. So, you know, you could put something up on the screen,

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I suppose, and just skip it that way. Anyway, but he was there at the church

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Sunday night, and a friend caught some pictures of me singing with him, and that was, well, he wasn't singing the hymns, but he certainly was pretty amazed at all the people singing hymns, which was pretty cool.

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So, good time to be had with all. And obviously, this time of year, we also begin thinking about next year, and hopefully looking back upon the past year, which began with a lot of question marks as to what would be coming, some hopes that certainly were not fulfilled in regards to the hope that many people had that maybe the brakes would be applied in the mad dash to totalitarianism that seems to be happening in Western culture.

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And we certainly are an even more divided nation than we were a year ago, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

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There would have to be a major, major, major shift in how people view themselves in the world for that to happen, because we are literally looking at a situation where you have a large portion of the people in Western cultures today who have been robbed of foundational realities that define our humanity.

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And in fact, I was trying to have a conversation with a pastor back

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East. I think he pulled out of it, as far as I could tell, but I asked an honest question.

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You know, I had said something about, oh, I mentioned how conservatives, quote -unquote conservatives, in media will use the pronouns of transgender people that they demand.

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And so if you have a person who is a male who pretends to be a female, they will use female pronouns.

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And they do this on Fox News, they do this all over the place, and I'm like, why? This is what

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Solzhenitsyn called living according to the lie, because it's a lie. It's not a female, it's a male.

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That's reality, that's science, that's fact, that's theologically the case, that's historically the case, biologically the case, that's just everything that can be that should inform us says this is a male, and yet people will treat this individual as a female.

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And I asked, you know, why is it? And I had a Christian pastor say, well, it's because a lot of us just feel like you're doing this all wrong.

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Okay. So show me from Scripture. Tell me, would

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Jesus have used pronouns? If someone had come to Him, He knows them better than they know themselves.

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Would He lie to them? Would He engage in their lie? And it was weird, because His answer was, well, what did

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Jesus say about Caesar being an abomination? Well, He didn't. And I'm like, um, okay, but He said the law was good.

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The law says homosexuality is an abomination, so any type of gender -bending, destroying thing is an abomination before God, so what's the point?

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And really, you know, I was asking, so are you really saying that Jesus would have affirmed this kind of stuff?

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And it is fascinating to try to have conversations.

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They don't go very far, because you simply have people that are capitulating to societal pressures, and there are real societal pressures.

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There really are. I mean, we all know outside of Twitter at the moment, and even then there's still possibilities, we all know that outside of Twitter right now, that every other social media platform, every medium that we have to communicate to people outside of our own heads, is controlled by people who have been, who believe the lie, live according to the lie, and will live by any lie that they're told to live by, as long as there's enough power behind it.

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Because without objective truth, and secularism has no grounds for objective truth, even science is malleable in a secular world, without objective truth, all you have left is raw power.

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Just, you have to enforce things by the exercise of power, killing, death, imprisonment, silencing, whatever.

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And sadly, the people coming out of the public educational system, which is not any longer an educational system at all, it's completely an indoctrination system, just don't even understand it, they don't know enough about history to recognize it, and so just repeating the same mistakes of everyone who's gone before them.

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And we are to be a prophetic voice to speak to those situations, and to, even when

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God has pronounced destruction on a nation, remember how many of the prophets prophesied to Israel in the context of the destruction of Israel, and yet they were called to be faithful.

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And we look back at them, and we honor them for the fact that they were faithful to the calling

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God gave them, but how many of us want to be faithful in the same context? How many of us want to lose everything, and in essence not see anything come in our lifetimes, necessarily directly from our sacrifice?

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And yet so much of what we have came from people who gave with an eye to the future.

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That's one reason why eschatology is important. You don't have an eye to the future if you give in to the constant temptation, we are in the last days.

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This is it, there's nothing beyond this, we're it.

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I don't know if you can, you can see that, can't you? I see different colors there, yeah, there we go.

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I guess we'll stick with green today. Sorry, I forgot to turn that on. If we think we are the last generation, then we don't have an eye to the future, and so we don't think in that way, and we need to, because those in the past who had an eye to the future built the foundation of the institutions that have blessed us so much, and I just wonder 100, 150, 200 years from now, who will they look back upon that was attempting to build something that they will be blessed by today?

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Sort of important. I was just looking something up right before the program started, and I ran across a number of things were stated over the past couple of days on Twitter regarding Thomas Aquinas, Cornelius Van Til, and Greg Bonson.

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Now, I realize that the vast majority of people have not been able to access, well, they can if they want to, but just it's a matter of time, maybe haven't been invited to.

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Apology at Church hosts the vast majority of Greg Bonson's materials online.

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Free accounts, you can just access thousands and thousands of hours of Dr. Bonson's lectures, not all of the greatest audio quality, but you know,

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Rich, we should have kept those ghetto blasters. We should have at least wrapped them in plastic or something, just so we would have them to show.

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The I'm sure I'll get in trouble for having used the term we used back then. It's it looked just like the thing that the that the guy had in Star Trek.

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Not the search for Spock, but the one after that return journey home. That's right. It was so funny.

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And the time thing where they came back in the in the Klingon bird of prey and the whales and all that kind of stuff.

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That was that guy that had that big old ghetto blaster, you know, the big tooth on his and Spock reaches over and knocks him out and everybody claps.

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And it was great. It was very funny. And they were called ghetto blasters.

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That's what they were called. And that's how we made our tapes. That is how we first we first started offering our tapes for people that cassette tapes.

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I realize some of you have no idea. But we still have them. I know I know where they're hiding right over here.

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Or do we put them in there? I don't know. Anyway, one of the two places we still have the old cassette tapes around. And that's how we made our our cassette tapes run on ghetto blasters.

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And that's certainly the same era in which a lot of Greg Bonson stuff was recorded.

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You know, the great debate with audio quality, man, that poor that poor debate has been run through more filters.

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You can't even recognize his voices anymore. It's been run through so many filters to try to clean it up and make it make it a little clearer, not quite as fuzzy.

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It goes back a ways. And anyway, there was comments made about Thomas Aquinas, Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bonson.

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Of course, Bonson was a student of Van Til, as are many of the leading apologetic voices,

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I would say, in reformed world, at least consistently reformed, in my opinion.

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And so one of the one of the issues that came up was

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Dr. Brossello said very snarkily, and he created a lot of the confusion because, as normal, he thinks snark is of preeminent value, and made a comment.

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It was in response to somebody else, and I had seen it, and I had said I agree with that, so on and so forth, but someone had made the comment that Reformed Baptists need to be reading more of Van Til and Bonson than they do of Thomas.

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And his response was, I prefer Thomas's biblical commentaries to Van Til's biblical commentaries.

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Now, of course, Van Til was an apologist, and he wrote primarily in apologetics, and so he doesn't have biblical commentaries specifically, which was part of the point, and that, you know, that allowed the escape hatch, but what but the underlying statement was being very clearly made that, you know, you need to be reading some of Thomas's biblical commentaries and things like that.

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And as most of you know, we've gone through a number of texts, here, reading

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Thomas's biblical commentaries and pointing out how, for example, in Romans chapter four, just right past justification by faith.

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Why? Because of interpretational lenses, traditional lenses, that would, for example, cause

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Thomas to not see the very reason why Paul quotes from Psalm 32 in Romans chapter four to teach justification by faith alone, without works of the law, in opposition to Rome's position.

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And instead, he sees different kinds of sin, original sin, venial sin, mortal sin, which has nothing to do with Paul's argument whatsoever.

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In fact, Complete Land does Paul's argument. I never hear the new neo -Thomas that are pushing him say anything about that, and go, oh yeah, true, yeah, there's a lot of tradition that comes in.

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And all I ever see, to be honest with you, is, well, there's a lot of good stuff in there. I'm reminded of the fact that I will sometimes listen to Roman Catholics in our own day, and many of my

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Roman Catholic friends see the same insanity that we see.

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If you've got any light from this at all, then you realize that what's going on around us is truly insane, destructive, just horrible.

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And as a result, I will hear them saying things, and I'll go, yeah, yeah, and I'm tracking all along.

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Mm -hmm, yep, yep, oh yeah, that's a good way to put it. But inevitably, inevitably, there comes a point.

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Now, I might be able to get through one story where it doesn't happen, but inevitably, you listen long enough, and you're tracking along, and then all of a sudden, they hang a hard left.

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And all of a sudden, you're praying to Mary for her intercession. You're praying to the saints.

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You're introducing papal categories and theologies. And it's just...

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I guess in my more fundamentalist days, I would just, you know, chalked it up to the

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Antichrist or something like that. Now, it's just sad, because I would like to hope for something better, and I'm just constantly faced with the reality that the dividing line is still there.

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The fundamental source of our knowledge of God and our theology, it's different, and will always be different.

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And it can't change without Rome ceasing to be Rome, or Protestants apostatizing on their own self -commitment.

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And so, it's the same thing when you're reading Thomas. You can be reading along, going, yeah, mm -hmm, okay, mm -hmm, yeah, that's true, yep, yep, that's good, and then all of a sudden, off it goes.

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You don't even see it coming. You're tracking along, and it's not that what you were tracking along with was any better, more clearly expressed than, you know, if you're reading a commentary on Gospel of John, which was,

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I think, specifically mentioned on Twitter. It's no better, more clear than what you'd have in Murray or Amu or Leon Morris.

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I'm not sure I went with three Ms there. It just sort of came out that way. Certainly, I can't think of almost any place where it's more insightful, consistent.

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There is one thing where you're not going to... if you're looking for consistency of exegesis, consistency of concern for authorial intent, you're not going to get that with Thomas.

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And a lot of the neo -Thomas have abandoned that anyways. They don't realize, they've abandoned the exegetical method to give some justification by faith, but they'll get to that eventually.

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No matter what, they'll figure that part out, hopefully sooner than later. But, so I was looking at what

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Aquinas wrote on the adorable sacrament of the altar. Adorable coming from Latin does not mean what adorable means in our day.

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We think of little plush toys as adorable. That's not... adoration. The sacrament of the altar that should be adored, that is worshiped, because Christ is present in it, in a way in which he is not present with the church in any other fashion within Roman Catholic theology.

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Now again, just a reminder for those who don't listen to most of what I have to say, or those who only knee -jerk react to what

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I say without listening to all of it, or just listen to what somebody else says I say. We can go from there.

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Aquinas is in a transitionary period, and while the

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Council of Trent claims him as his own, and certainly today, especially Dominicans, you talk to any of them and tell them that they're a

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Baptist, they're getting into Thomas, and they're all just like, come on in, the water's fine, he's ours.

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And they find out that, you know, all these Baptists are saying you should read this Roman Catholic priest and that Roman Catholic priest, and this guy knows everything about this, and they're just like, no, keep it up, keep it up, we appreciate your assistance, and it's true.

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And that's not... by the way, that's not reading widely, okay? When you suggest sources, and you combine your suggestion with the statement that we've been wrong on this, and they've been right all along, you just don't even seem to understand what you're doing to a young mind at that point.

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Because young minds can make proper connections, and as I've said a number of times recently, if what you're truly saying is that the contemplative theology and Aristotelian metaphysics, and hence hyper -complex formulations in philosophical language about the nature of God, which never even came out of an

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Apostle's mouth, and they wouldn't have understood it if someone had said it to them, if you're making that the highest expression of Christian theology and faith, then it is inevitable that if the people who've always been right about that had always had that right, then that doctrine of God is more important than anything you say about what that God has done in time.

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And so to say, well they were right on the doctrine of God, but wrong on the gospel, is not a tenable position.

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It will not last. You can try to do it, and some of you are doing it right now, and some of you are already having your students asking you these questions.

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And you can put up a valiant fight if you wish, but the reality is it will lead to the inevitable conclusion that if they're right on the big things, and you're saying they're wrong on the small things, and I need to look at why they were right on the big things, and oh, they're right on the big things not because they did not hold to Sola Scriptura.

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So I need to take that out, oh, and now I can see how they're right on the smaller things too, including sacramental forgiveness, priesthoods, justification, the conflation of justification and sanctification, all those things that go along with that.

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And then once you no longer have Sola Scriptura, something else will take its place, and if you're reading

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Thomas, it's already right there, you're gonna end up with Sola Ecclesia. But, but, but, but, but, having said all that, he's in a transitionary period, so he is not as far down the road as modern

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Roman Catholicism, not in the Marian dogmas, certainly a long ways down the road, but there are certain aspects of modern

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Marian theology he did not hold to, and, you know, what Rome likes to say is he did not discern it.

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That's because it hadn't been defined yet. Well, it hadn't been invented yet, in some ways, and so he just, he's not as extreme as Trent, certainly as Vatican I, and now today, it's sort of hard to even track with this, because no one knows where Rome is.

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If you think you know where Rome is, you're, no one can predict where Francis is going to go next, it's not impossible to predict based upon where he came from, what liberation theology looks like coming out of South America, and stuff like that, but still, he's not the easiest person to predict, and certainly, the people that he's put into a position of voting for his successor, who knows where they're going to go, we just, we just don't know.

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So, the trajectory, the trajectory of Rome itself is difficult enough, and so, in some ways,

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Thomas would be moving away from where the trajectory is going, because it's leaving some of its own historical foundations behind.

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Anyway, so that's one of the reasons that you can find stuff, you can find language, you go, yeah, okay,

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I agree, that's good, yeah, and you'll find Thomas applying proper verses, but you know,

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I thought that when you were looking for a commentary, you pretty much expect that all the time, right?

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I mean, do you buy a commentary based upon the fact that, you know what, 78 % of the time,

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I'm gonna agree, it's not, that's not the basis that I used, you know,

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I remember when I preached the Hebrews, the commentaries that I found to be most useful,

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I would say, I agreed with 98 .5 % of the time, and so it is strange to hear people saying, well, you'll find some great stuff in there, and I just repeat what

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I've asked before, and no one wants to comment on this, no one wants to even say I've said it, as far as I can tell, but show me something

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Aquinas taught us or expressed to us in a way that had not been done better before him, and especially after him.

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I just don't think there's anything at all. Oh, but his doctrine of God. Well, it's his contemplative, speculative, philosophical,

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Aristotelian doctrine of God. Okay, great, fine, like I said,

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I'd rather it have something to do with the apostles and the, the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

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So, anyway, so I was just looking something up, and like I said,

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I was looking at Thomas Aquinas on the adorable sacrament of the altar, and you know,

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I'm reading through, and there's lots of truth.

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I mean, he lays out some of the sacrifices of the

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Old Testament, and he's got the references right, and you know, things like that, so on and so forth, but then, you know, you're just reading along going, okay, this is what you'd normally see, all right, yeah, this is what you find a commentary, and then boom, three things to be learned from this.

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One, to do penance. If we be dead in Christ, we believe that we shall also live together with Christ.

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I reckon that this Romans 6a has something to do with doing penance, and I reckon,

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I reckon the sufferings this time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed to us, Romans 8 .18. So the suffering of penance?

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See, there's an entire sacramental concept connected to this that, again, goes back to traditional definitions of sin that, again, are not completely non -apostolic, and the argument from Rome is they don't have to be, and if you believe what

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Thomas did with his doctrine of God, why not with his, why not with this? Why not with his view of sacraments?

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If you're going to sit there and say Thomas is the pinnacle, and admit he resourced

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Aristotelian metaphysics to give us the clearest explication of evidently what

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God's revelation of himself is. If that's true up there, why isn't it true down here? What's the difference?

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I just happened, you know, literally in the past, in just a few minutes before the program started, I was looking at that, and there again is one of those places where it just hangs a left, and so if you think that I'm in some way misrepresenting the resourcement movement, let me just remind you of what

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James Dolezal, a self -professed Thomist, said in All That Is in God in his introduction.

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He said additionally the method of this work is that of contemplative theology.

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The contemplative approach to theology has been somewhat obscured in recent history by the rise of biblical theology as a specialized method of theological inquiry.

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So we have this concept of contemplative theology. Now again,

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I went to Fuller. I've heard of contemplative theology. It's nothing new there, but it's true that probably most evangelicals haven't heard of it, probably haven't heard it from the pulpit, and then you have the use of the term biblical theology, which is then defined by Dr.

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Dolezal in a scholastic academic fashion that I would think any holder of the

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London Baptist Confession would react to, because the scholastic academic definition of biblical theology is not...

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If you read the first chapter of the London Baptist Confession of Faith, and then you ask what did they think biblical theology is, it would not be the modern definition, which is focused upon what biblical authors...

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Well, it's really, honestly, it's based upon the idea that you should not harmonize the biblical authors.

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In fact, you shouldn't even necessarily harmonize them amongst different books if they wrote different books. So in a lot of modern theological writing in the academy today, you'll have not only will you chop apart the

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Pauline corpus, Pauline canon, the books that Paul wrote, you'll say he didn't write these books based on vocabulary differences or something like that, as if...

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I wish there was a program that did that, because you could run it on almost any critic's own books and prove that they didn't write most of what they're getting paid royalties on.

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But anyway, but you certainly can't then concern yourself in any meaningful fashion with harmonizing

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Paul and James. And so biblical theology is an atomistic...

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it only meant this in this context, and there's something more to it, which is what sometimes people accuse those of us who would call ourselves

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Reformed Biblicists of, but that's not true either. We believe that there is an overarching truth to Scripture, there's no question about it, but it is only expressed in the words of Scripture and comes forth from those words, and our

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God's big enough to use men to speak from him in such a fashion that the first thing that you must do, as with all human communication, is determine the intention of the author in communicating to his audience.

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And since it's men spoke from God, then you need to know what the authors believe.

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That of course is what Calvin believed, there's no question about that. So the rise of biblical theology as a specialized method of theological inquiry over against contemplative is an important distinction, and I think anyone, for example, utilizing

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Dr. Dolezal's work should be very straight up front about that, that this is a work of contemplative theology.

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It is very philosophically oriented, and it's in that book, page 55 and 56, that these words appear.

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The doctrine of God's simplicity arguably reaches its summit of expression, summit of expression, and sophistication in the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

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Several factors enabled Thomas to nuance the doctrine in ways that many of his Christian predecessors had not noticed this, no reference to the apostles.

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Perhaps the most important of which was the recovery, recovery, interesting phrase, isn't it, recovery, of Aristotle's metaphysical framework in which all finitude and composition is understood as a combination of principles that give actuality of being, act, and principles by which a thing receives actuality of being, passive potency.

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Now those are definitely Aristotelian categories. They had been enunciated long before the

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New Testament, and you would think if God wanted us to interpret the New Testament in those categories, might have been a way to do that, might not have had to have waited 1 ,200 years to get around to it.

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This conceptual framework did not alter the essential claims of the doctrine, I would question that, though it did enable

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Thomas to explicate it in more precisely existential terms. Okay, well, there you go.

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There's what we're talking about right there, is this kind of recovery, as if something's been lost.

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And of course, Aristotle's viewpoints were in a sense lost to history until brought back into the more modern period, primarily through Muslim writers, writer on the time of Thomas, which is why he was very much involved in doing that.

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So anyway, that's why I was looking at Thomas for him, and also in recognition of the fact that I mentioned this morning that we were going to be talking a little bit about where Reformed Baptists are going to be going in 2023.

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There's obviously been since December of 2020, well,

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I'm sorry, December of 2021, but really going back to 2015, for those of us who were busy doing other things, didn't realize the shift taking place.

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There's been a division, and I have argued, and I don't think anyone has successfully counter -argued, a change in emphasis and perspective, certainly when it comes to scriptural sufficiency, solo scriptura, centrality of defining

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Christian theology on the basis of that which is the anustos, hermeneutics, that is based upon faith, that scripture is

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God's Word, and therefore it's consistent with itself, and yet a defensible understanding of that in the sense that we don't take our creeds and confessions and make them the lens through which the

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Bible is to be interpreted, but the Bible always has to be the final word that interprets even our creeds and confessions.

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Those were unremarkable, a lot of that language is just straight out of the first chapter of the

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London Baptist Confession, and the Westminster for that matter. They were unremarkable amongst

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Reformed Baptists until recently, and now they're just openly denied by some, just openly, just that's biblicism, you blasted biblicist, and so I think it is vitally important for us to consider what the new year will bring, because it doesn't seem to me that there is going to be a diminishment in the mad dash of Western society towards self -destruction, and very clearly in what's broadly called evangelicalism, though I'm not sure how useful that term is any longer, honestly.

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There is very clearly a sliding going on, foundationally, and as we see people who used to, and I don't know if you see it, but I see it all the time, all the time,

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I saw within the past few days a minister saying, you know, five, six years ago

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I was right with you, but I've come to the conclusion that we're fighting the wrong battles, and when you press that, what they're really saying is,

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I've come to the conclusion the scripture just isn't clear enough. The result of that is always, at first, a contraction of what you think scripture is clear on.

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The problem is when you just have something as obvious and foundational as the gender binary,

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God created the male and female, there's no question on this.

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There's no argument. There's no way around this.

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It is fundamental and foundational from the start that this is a part of God's creative plan.

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You don't have to go, well, no one really knew that until Matthew chapter 19. No, it's in Genesis 1.

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It's in Genesis 2. It's throughout the law. It's throughout everything in scripture.

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It cannot be questioned. You throw that out, and you're done, as far as having any type of biblical theology is concerned.

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And so, as you see that happening, you ask the question, why? Why would people be doing that?

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Why would people be losing their footing? And inevitably, it all comes back to whether you believe

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God has spoken. And I just know there are a lot of people that when that pressure is placed upon them, the pressure of freedom, the pressure of being able to continue to have a voice in our day, that it's real pressure.

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It really exists, and it's so much easier to draw back and to say, well, you know, the church has been wrong about a lot of things, and maybe we were wrong about this, too.

40:44

Fundamental foundational things, and it all goes back to, you know,

40:50

I've said many, many times, the vast majority of Bible colleges and seminaries in the

40:55

Western world, English -speaking world, there is no belief in the consistency of scripture.

41:03

There is no belief in inerrancy. Scripture is, in many ways, very moldable to where you want to go with it, and so there's no reason for those folks to stand firm.

41:17

But I think even amongst those who have in the past taken stances, we will continue to see this, and hence the issue of biblical sufficiency and the need to stand firm on that subject and not be subject to a yoke of authoritarian slavery.

41:48

That is the creation of a traditional system that you can start off saying is subject to scripture, but once you say that without it, you can never really understand scripture, that's a circle you're not going to be able to stay within very long.

42:10

It's going to collapse on you. It's going to collapse on you, and some people go running off to natural law arguments, and you know, once you do that, there's all sorts of places you can end up landing and being welcomed by those that are already there.

42:30

That's the case. But I think that it's going to, by definition, has to remain a vitally important topic, because it will determine where we end up going.

42:49

So just before the program started, maybe a couple hours ago, a

42:58

Reformed Baptist pastor tweeted out, in response to my announcement, that we were going to talk a little bit about where would, where are

43:17

Reformed Baptists going to go? Are they going to continue this pursuit of Thomas? What will be the results of that in 2023?

43:28

And again, that was prompted by this statement about Van Til, Monson, and Thomas, and my agreement that we will be blessed by the reading of Van Til and Monson.

43:46

And by the way, I forgot to sort of finish that point, and that being that when you read

43:56

Thomas, you end up with these left -hand turns. I went that far, and I forgot to go back and say

44:02

I don't have that while reading Van Til and Monson.

44:09

There are entire lengthy, in -depth series, exegetical series from Greg Monson.

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Anyone who says that Monson only proof -text stuff just shows their abysmal ignorance of Greg Monson.

44:26

Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. That shows that you're just a popularist. You know, one of these guys,

44:32

I was once a presuppositional. Great, fine. And with Van Til, I remember one of the first things

44:43

I was struck with in my first struggle through Van Til as a young man, and part of that was just the unedited nature of things, and the language issue, and stuff like that.

44:58

But I remember what I was struck with, and see, I was already dealing with Roman Catholicism, so I had an advantage.

45:05

I was already having to take my faith outside of the seminary, and outside of the local church, and already dealing with Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roman Catholicism.

45:19

So all the external challenges, and so maybe that just caused me to appreciate it all the more.

45:26

But it was self -evident that for Van Til, not only is

45:34

God the self -contained, all -sufficient Trinity, but his word, again, call this my advantage or my disadvantage, but I'll call it my advantage now.

45:48

I was at Fuller, and so you learn to recognize the language of those who really believe that Scripture is inerrant and inspired, because I'm fighting that battle in seminary.

46:11

That's not where my seminary was at, so I'm the odd person out.

46:17

And so I was so blessed by and encouraged by the obvious high view of Scripture, and the centrality of Scripture to Van Til, that I just don't even,

46:31

I can't even respect someone who can so blithely dismiss, oh,

46:37

Bonson, Van Til. Thomas is really interested in the Bible. It's just so foolish.

46:45

Oh, such immaturity. It's astonishing, really, just wow. Somebody, somebody speak into somebody's life there.

46:53

Anyway, right before the program, watch for those whose entire ministry platforms are predicated upon sowing seeds of discord,

47:04

Proverbs 16, 6 and 19, among brethren. The dividing line really lives up to its name these days.

47:11

So there's an accusation of sin, and then there's the accusation that the entire ministry platform is predicated upon sowing seeds of discord among brethren.

47:23

Last week, there was a pastor on Twitter, and I had retweeted something about some absurd, tyrannical action of the

47:36

Biden regime. Well, just the regime anymore, I mean, because the stuff we've learned from Twitter, talk about a revelation, the stuff we've learned from Twitter files is that this stuff is going on under Trump as well.

47:51

It's just, it's the regime. It's the state, and the state will always preserve the state, and will always grow its power at the cost of the freedom of its citizens.

48:03

I mean, that's just history. And I had retweeted something, and this pastor said, all you ever talk about anymore is politics.

48:16

And what was interesting is my response was, you know, it's funny that you'd say that, because when

48:24

I'm talking about the Thomist revival and the Neo -Thomist

48:30

Baptists and things like that, I get told all I ever talk about is Thomas Aquinas. So how does that work?

48:39

That's the danger in always saying, in ever saying, I suppose, you always do this.

48:47

It's so easy to point to exceptions. I've done it, we've all done it. But it's a self -refuting action, because it's very easy to point to exceptions.

48:57

And the reality is that this is the first program that we've discussed this in quite a while, actually.

49:06

You know, last week we talked about Quirinius, and the census, and stuff like that, and we're just focused on other topics, other issues.

49:20

And so it's just so self -evident that to say one's entire ministry platform is predicated upon sowing seeds of discord, especially when, in this topic, all these brethren used to be on my side.

49:35

They used to support me when I was saying the same things. They're the ones that changed.

49:41

They're the ones that have changed their perspective. So who's sowing seeds of discord if you're the one making the changes? It doesn't make any sense.

49:49

It doesn't. They know that. They know that. But we're just resourcing our sources, if you say so.

50:00

But the dividing line, of course, refers to the conviction we've had since a number of years before this individual was born, that the sufficiency of Scripture, whether God has spoken, is the dividing line.

50:23

You will always be able to find a means of godly unity on the key and defining things amongst those who believe

50:38

God has truly spoken, and He has spoken with clarity. But that becomes a dividing line when you say that that's not the case.

50:48

The term, we came up with it, I think, it's been a while.

50:57

It's coming up on, well, next year, 40 years. But my recollection was that primarily at that time we were dealing with Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, and the issue was, in both of those instances, that both those groups, one openly and one not so openly, deny the sufficiency of Scripture.

51:16

And I'm pretty sure it was, in fact, I know it was the title of the radio program, there was no internet, and then became the title of the newsletter that we put out for quite some time.

51:30

Man, was that a job. Oh, wow. And that's what the dividing line is about.

51:39

And so, yeah, it was in this same context, then, that we had, well, here, by the way, here's the initial tweet,

51:53

Nuthetic Counselor, December 23rd, my fellow Reformed Baptists would highly benefit from reading less

51:59

Aquinas and more Van Til and Bonson. To which Josh Sommer had said, Van Til hardly ever interacted with the biblical text.

52:09

I'll let you. Bonson touched it here and there.

52:22

Again, you know, some people just are willing to pontificate upon things about which they know nothing, and they do it in public.

52:32

Aquinas integrated his exegesis into his dogmatics through several volumes of biblical commentary.

52:41

Thomas seemed much more interested in the Bible. Okay, so this young man would admit that three years ago he never would have said anything like this at all, and wouldn't have not even understood how anyone could say something like this.

52:57

So someone has changed. And see, here's my concern. I'm much older than this gentleman, and I have seen

53:06

I've seen this attitude, and I've seen this language many times over the past four decades, and I know where it goes.

53:17

And if not in him, in people like him. It is imbalanced at its absolute best.

53:32

And when it comes to the fundamental realities realities of how the

53:39

Christian life is to be lived, this led Thomas to monasticism, which is not biblical.

53:51

There's nothing in Scripture about priests and monks and a celibate life.

54:01

The normative Christian life is a Christian family, children, raising them in the fear and knowledge of God.

54:13

It led him to Eucharistic adoration, which we were talking about earlier. And so when you're talking to someone like Cornelius Van Til, I'm not going to sit here and try to compare the hagiolatry that has developed around Thomas.

54:39

Miracles and all sorts of stuff like that. But I will tell you what I've heard from the people who actually knew him.

54:48

And these are people I've talked to. I mean, he didn't die all that long ago. Dr. Oliphant tells the story that he invited

55:04

Van Til down to Texas to do a conference. And Van Til said he would come, but that he would need to go on his daily walks.

55:21

And he said that even as an elderly man, he said he could hardly keep up with him. And that they were walking along in neighborhood, and I'll take that back.

55:36

He said he did that even as older age, but this was actually in Van Til's neighborhood. So it was when he was a student.

55:43

One of his neighbors had stopped him, or they'd stopped to talk to one of his neighbors. And one of the neighbors said to Scott Oliphant, well,

55:55

I know one thing. He's been talking to you about Jesus. So he was known that that's what this man would be talking about.

56:03

He'd be talking about Jesus. Now, I think it's important that when you talk about Jesus, you can talk to people in such a way that they can come to know him truly.

56:21

And modern Roman Catholicism, even in Thomas, you still have the intermediaries of the saints of Mary.

56:33

You have the sacramental system. And even when you make the best arguments you possibly can, that all that stuff is just simply meant to illustrate this truth or that truth, the fact remains that there is a vast difference between a system that will give rise to something like Alphonsus de

56:54

Liguri's The Glories of Mary, and a system that will give rise to the clarity of the gospel proclamation that you've seen from Van Til's students.

57:09

Gospel presentation that brings you to having peace with God through the finished work of Jesus Christ, not a perpetuatory sacrifice upon a

57:20

Roman altar requiring the presence of a priest. For those who think that the doctrine of simplicity is more important than that,

57:31

I feel sorry for you, but I am not with you. I am not with you.

57:40

Biblical doctrine of simplicity, great. That's part of monotheism. Defended that forever. This philosophical stuff that you are wandering off into and saying is absolutely necessary if you have a true knowledge of God, and then you're willing to make secondary something like introducing people to a

58:03

Jesus they can actually know and can have peace with God with. Yeah, it's important stuff.

58:10

Really important stuff. It's in that same context, then, that I saw another pastor had made a comment to Dr.

58:31

Braselis. As a pastor who preaches weekly, I've come to love two commentators over the past few years, Matthew Poole and Thomas Aquinas, and Dr.

58:44

Braselis responded with a picture of a kid wearing property of Tiber River swim team.

58:50

So, again, whenever anything is commented upon regarding Aquinas, you get the

59:02

Tiber River swim team. It's meant to be humorous. It's meant to be snarky.

59:08

I suppose someone could argue it's actually meant to make a point, but the point

59:13

I'm trying to make, and that I hope people hear in 2023, is, and I said this earlier, and I think this needs to be heard and understood.

59:28

If you present Thomas Aquinas as the pinnacle, the summit of a vitally important doctrinal development so that, in reality, there has been, in the context of Newman, a development of theology over 1 ,200 years to its pinnacle of expression in Thomas Aquinas, and this is the very doctrine of God itself, you are putting your students and your listeners in the position in the position, whether you want to or not, of having someone make the argument to them, if that's the case on the highest level of Christian revelation, that there is a traditional doctrinal development, then

01:00:38

Sola Scriptura is not true, cannot be made to be true, cannot be affirmed to be true, and if you allow doctrinal development in that area, then you must allow doctrinal development in lesser areas, and that includes sacramentology, soteriology, eschatology, ecclesiology.

01:01:01

All of the ologies become subject to the same kind of traditional development synthesis, synthesis, and there isn't any way around that.

01:01:18

There isn't any way around that. Obviously, we reject that.

01:01:27

I reject that, and I would imagine there are those on the other side who are saying, oh no, no, no, we're just, we're not going that far, and so I can say, you know, if what you want to do, if you feel that for you and yours, you need to resist, you want to identify

01:01:55

EFS, you want to revisit what happened in 2016 and following, and you want to say this is bad stuff, okay.

01:02:11

You can go back to 2016, and when it all blew up,

01:02:16

I'm like, I was automatically in a position of going, well, you know,

01:02:23

I've always held Calvin's view on this, and so there's no room for any of that for me.

01:02:30

The sun is autotheos, and I was warning in 2016, you can listen to the vying line.

01:02:39

I haven't gone back to grab him, but I remember very clearly, and I remember exactly why I remember it very clearly.

01:02:45

2016 was my best cycling year. I have been downhill ever since. Sad. It was just my best fitness year.

01:02:53

I was the strongest, lightest, strongest, leanest in 2016, and it's just, it's fading in the rearview mirror.

01:03:04

Aches and pains and injuries all over. It's great. Anyway, don't have the best genetics for long -term success in athletics,

01:03:14

I'm afraid. Done well, but I can see what's coming.

01:03:20

Anyway, what I remember was, when we rode the triple bypass bike ride in Colorado, I was riding with a pastor friend.

01:03:30

In fact, a couple people in his church, too, up in Boulder, and we rode the first climb up Juniper Pass, down to, past Echo Lake, down to Idaho Springs, and that's for climbing, and this is a steep climb.

01:03:48

If you've ever ridden the road out of Bergen, Evergreen, up over Juniper, Squaw and Juniper, you can turn left to head up to Mount Evans, or turn right, and you go down to Idaho.

01:04:03

It's a pretty steep climb, and there's thousands of people on this ride.

01:04:10

And so here we are, we are having an in -depth Trinitarian theological conversation, and if we were passing people, or they were passing us, you're not, nobody's going all that fast, except for the hotheads.

01:04:24

You could hear what people were talking about, and people are normally talking about, if they're talking at all, most people just gasping for air, but if they're talking, it's normally some light thing.

01:04:35

We are talking Trinitarian theology in the middle of the triple bypass bike ride, and people just looking at us like, what was that?

01:04:44

These are weird people. So I remember very clearly talking about what

01:04:49

I had already said on the dividing line before I headed for Colorado. So this would be June, right when the whole thing was happening.

01:04:57

And I was saying, you know, it seems so obvious to me that you should not and cannot argue backwards from the nature of human relationships into God.

01:05:18

The image of God is saying we bear the image of God. Duh. But there are aspects of the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit that you just, it seems incredibly foolish to me to expand those out, and to say, well, that means this needs to be the truth as it exists amongst human beings, and how they are to relate to one another, and things like that.

01:05:46

And so I was, I was arguing that point from the start, and I think if,

01:05:53

I think Calvin's perspective actually provides more than a sufficient biblical grounds for the rejection of EFS.

01:06:03

You don't need Thomas, but there are people who have decided you have to have Thomas to stand against any form of EFS, ERAS, whatever terminology you want to put.

01:06:20

And I remain absolutely convinced, and will continue to make the argument, whether you want me to or not, that the sheep will hear the

01:06:33

Master's voice in his word, and that an argument that is drawn from the intention and perspective of divine scripture will have significantly greater and longer -lasting impact in the lives and minds of the sheep than any complicated, obtuse, philosophical formulation mankind will ever come up with.

01:07:07

That's my conclusion. And since I think I'm really right about that,

01:07:15

I can just remain consistent in saying and doing what

01:07:21

I have said all along, and there will be no problems. There will be no problems. And that's what we intend to do in 2023, and I think there's a lot of folks out there.

01:07:35

In fact, I saw one comment that was encouraging to me.

01:07:43

Someone had said, someone had taken a shot at me.

01:07:51

Yeah, Julie married to Thomas, but not a Thomist. Had commented to Pastor Sommer when he accused me of sin.

01:08:05

She said, I don't know, there's something about hos eleutheroi, that's my ID, which by the way means as free men, from Peter, if you're wondering, being willing to snatch others from the fire that resonates me.

01:08:21

So yeah, that is what we want to seek to do, and it just seems to me that there's a,

01:08:27

I think there's a lot of people, because I look at this, I look at some of these tweets by the other side, and this is gonna,

01:08:36

I know how this could be interpreted, but this is just factual observation. There will be less than 10 likes, three retweets, and now that you have the, what do they call it?

01:08:53

Interactions? What is Elon Musk referring to it as? I'm not sure what the thing is, but tells you how many people have actually seen it and looked at it.

01:09:07

Most of the time, not always, but most of the time, the other side is very small numbers.

01:09:15

I think we have to keep that in mind. This doesn't resonate with people.

01:09:22

Oh, they're gonna, I can predict the tweets right now. Oh, I was talking with this brother. No, I'm sorry, it doesn't resonate with people.

01:09:35

You have to force it down their throats. You have to convince them this is really, really important, and it just doesn't resonate, doesn't resonate, so there's no reason to despair.

01:09:48

There's every reason to be hopeful for a recovery of balance, and that, certainly from a historical perspective, this isn't the first time there's been some type of explosion of, wow,

01:10:01

I never read this guy before, he's awesome, type of thing that, you know, takes off for a while, and the books get published, and it goes its way.

01:10:14

Let me just use one name. Prayer of Jabez. How many,

01:10:21

I wonder how many people got the 47th re -gifted version of something from the

01:10:27

Prayer of Jabez recently. What's that? I don't know, but man, for a while you thought it was, it was everything, it was everywhere.

01:10:37

What publisher was it? I think that was, wasn't that, that wasn't Multnomah, was it? I think it was somebody up in that area, though.

01:10:44

They, they made a mint for what, 18 months, two years max, and now you talk to almost anybody, what's that?

01:10:53

Unless they're as old as we are, and they don't even remember it. Ah, it happens, it happens, so we press on, and we press forward.

01:11:02

All right, so Lord willing, we will be back again on Thursday.

01:11:12

I, I know if you live in a state like Arizona, that the week after you're going to be exhausted, because I, you know, when, when they first passed the law that said you could have firecrackers,

01:11:26

I, I was like, yeah, why not? You know, it's Arizona, so what? I'm getting to the age where it's, get off my lawn, and I'm gonna stick that firecracker up your nose.

01:11:42

I want to sleep, I want to go to bed at 9 30, I don't want to be woken up at 11 45 with M60s going off in the alleyway behind my house, rattling my windows, and scaring my pets half to death.

01:11:55

Yeah, the circle of life, you'll see, every one of you young person, you'll see, you will see, that's the one, that's the one thing that us old, us aging people can go is, you'll see, just,

01:12:16

I thought the same thing, and it'll catch up with you, right, Rich? You already knew that, you were already shooing people off your, off your lawn a long time ago, that was, you know, that's how it works.