The Cost of Swimming the Tiber w/ Anthony Rogers

The Cost of Swimming the Tiber and the Cameron Bertuzzi Conversion

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala and today we are gonna be talking about a very important topic. It's kind of weird, I think all the topics we're talking about on this channel is important.

I don't ever think we talk about something that's like, well this is somewhat important, but we're gonna have fun anyway. This is a specific, a specifically important topic and this is the issue of Roman Catholicism and more specifically issues relating to the conversion of Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity to Roman Catholicism.

This is not a bash Cameron episode. As a matter of fact, I don't know Cameron personally. I've had very few interactions with him through like Facebook Messenger while trying to like set something up or ask a question or something like that, so I don't know him personally.

I'm sure he's a great guy. I know people who know him and they all say he's a great guy, you know, that that's not the issue, but what we're really going to be talking about is what is the cost of swimming the Tiber?

What is the cost of leaving a Protestant theology, and we would argue of course a biblical theology in exchange for the Gospel of Rome, and so hopefully we can see what those two Gospels, okay, what I would call the biblical gospel and what I would call the Gospel of Rome, what are the differences and why is it important for us to actually draw the line on those issues.

It is very interesting to me to see the different reactions that people have had to Cameron's conversion, some extreme on one side or on the other, and then there's kind of these this side of like indifference like, oh okay, well he converted from Christianity to Christianity.

It's all the same thing, so we're gonna talk a little bit about that as well, but before we do that I want to just remind folks the Epic Online Calvinism Conference with James White, myself, Dr. Guillaume Bignon, Scott Christensen, and Saiten Bruggenkate is going to be on January 21st.

Folks are already signing up and you can sign up right now at revealedapologetics .com. You just click on the pre-sup you drop-down menu and you could RSVP your spot. This is also a very helpful way to support Revealed Apologetics, so everything that you do in terms of giving helps me do what I'm able to do, and it actually pays the bill.

So all right, so if you're interested in Calvinism, I'm a Calvinist, my guest is a Calvinist, you know, we're not so big on titles, but I do think that if we hold to a Calvinistic perspective it's important to be able to explore and defend various aspects of that.

So just throwing that out there if you're interested, you guys can sign up and support in that way. All right, well without further ado, I'd like to invite my friend Anthony Rogers. Anthony, how's it going, man?

Your mic is off. Yeah, there.

We go. Your mic is still off. Oh good, because I stuttered anyways. There we go. No, you're good. How's it going, man? It's going great. Well, I just want to let.

You know I've been binging some of your debates and I'm sure most of my listeners know who you are, but if you don't and you're listening, I highly recommend that you go over to Anthony Rogers' channel and check out his debates.

He is an excellent defender of biblical Christianity in general, the doctrine of the Trinity, specifically the deity of Christ. He interacts with Muslims, Unitarians, and all sorts of perspectives, and so he is just a, he's an ace in my opinion in terms of his ability to defend a biblical position, so you definitely want to check that out.

So let's talk a little bit about capturing Christianity in general. I was not an avid listener. I have listened to many episodes, but it's not one of those channels that I was drawn to all the time. What's your experience with listening to Cameron Bertuzzi and the.

Content on his channel? Yeah, well, so I'd have to say much the same. It wasn't a channel I watched a lot. I didn't have anything against Cameron or the channel per se. There are some differences, you know, even when Cameron was a professing Protestant, you know, some things I didn't hold in common with him at the time, but I just wasn't an avid listener.

You know, there's so much stuff out there that nobody should be slighted to hear that somebody wasn't watching them. That's true, yeah. I'm sure he wouldn't mind. I just want to be clear about that. You know, it wasn't anything about him or anything like that.

It's just there's only so much time in a day. Right. So yeah, it wasn't a channel that I watched a lot, but I did watch stuff. There were a few things that caught my attention, so I did.

Watch it. Right, right. Now, Cameron is famous for something in particular, is that among the online apologists and online YouTubers, I am told that he has the best hair, and I have to agree. He's got good hair.

He's got good hair, so I'll.

Give him that. And by contrast, there was a Unitarian one time. I was in a group that's a Unitarian group. I'm, of course, not a Unitarian, but somebody announced that there was going to be a debate between me and somebody else, and this guy said, is that Anthony Rogers guy, the one that looks like he got beat up in a drunken stupor by three guys in a bar?

So that's my claim to.

Fame. Okay. All right. There we go. Well, let's jump right in. So again, nothing against Cameron. There were some warning flags that I noticed when watching some of his content, and of course, when he started doing a lot of the Roman Catholic stuff, and a lot of people have said this, they saw his conversion coming from a mile away, and I would say I would agree.

That was something that I saw coming as well. But again, I don't want to make this about Cameron specifically. I want to ask you about the cost of swimming the Tiber, which is kind of a figure of speech of converting to Rome.

Can you steel man for us the gospel according to Roman Catholicism, and then we'll interact with that a little bit, maybe bring in some scripture and contrast Rome's gospel with what we would take to be a biblical gospel.

And before you do that, I did mention that Anthony and I are Calvinist. I want to make a qualification here. As a Calvinist, I am not the kind of Calvinist, and Anthony is not the kind of Calvinist, and I'm sure he's gonna agree with what I'm gonna say even though he doesn't know what I'm gonna say.

I'm not the kind of Calvinist that believes if you don't believe in Calvinism, you're not saved. I know there are some people who hold to that position. I think that there are a wide range of perspectives within the umbrella of Protestantism that have a genuine gospel, and that we disagree over important issues, but issues that brothers can disagree over.

And you can correct me if I'm wrong if you don't hold to that position, Anthony, but I'm pretty sure you do. But Anthony, I think you're gonna agree with me here, and you can correct me. We both agree that Roman Catholicism is different than, say, a disagreement we may have with, say, like a Pentecostal brother or a Presbyterian or a Baptist.

Would I be accurate there, Anthony? Feel free to correct me or disagree. Okay. Yeah. All right. And why is that the case? Why is the manner in which we differ between, say, different denominations different than how we.

Draw some very clear lines. For example, we can say definitively that anybody who denies the deity of Christ is outside the fold of Christianity. Now, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox individuals, others would agree with us on that sort of thing.

And the reason, that's not just arbitrary, but Jesus in John 8 24, for example, said, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. And there, it's an absolute I am statement. So it's I am without a predicate.

Jesus is a affirming his absolute deity. He suspends the forgiveness of sins on one's belief in that proposition. So when we say somebody who doesn't believe in the deity of Christ is not a Christian, that's a sin qua non of the Christian faith.

By the same token, Paul made it very clear that the gospel is central and essential to the Christian faith. It's one of those things without which not, right? If you don't have this, then you don't have Christianity.

And he makes that clear in a number of places. But one thing, 1 Corinthians 15, when Paul outlines the facts of the gospel and their theological import, he says, I deliver to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins.

Don't miss that theological interpretation. He's not just affirming the factuality of Christ's death, but its significance vis-a-vis forgiveness of sins. But I deliver this to you as a first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.

He was buried and he rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures. So this, Paul said, was a first importance. Earlier in the same epistle, Paul said, I determined to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified.

In Paul's mind, the problems that were afoot in the Corinthian church all needed to be addressed by bringing them back to this fundamental insight, namely the crucifixion of Christ. And likewise, in Paul's magisterial defense of the gospel in his epistle to the Galatians, Paul makes it clear in verses 6 through 9 that it's just this momentous.

Those who don't affirm this gospel are not saved. Those who affirm it are, right? He even uses, this is one of the rare times that Paul uses the phrase anathema. Elsewhere Paul will say things like, if any man loves not our Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema or let a curse be upon him.

But it's not a very common expression in the New Testament. It'll become very common later in church history. Paul, in Galatians 1, 6 through 9, says that those who peddle another gospel are anathema, which means accursed or cut off from God.

Right. Now, okay, so you may mention, so when we define the gospel, we define the gospel, I mean the Bible defines it for us in 1 Corinthians 15, but we would easily agree that Catholics agree with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, right?

So, you know, this is what I've delivered, that Christ died, that he was buried, that he was raised. Where is the difference then? So a lot of people who are not in kind of apologetic circles, they'll just look at Roman Catholicism and say, like Protestantism, and say, well what's the difference?

What do you think is the fundamental difference between a Roman Catholic perspective and a Protestant perspective, in terms of just being two religions?

Yeah, so one thing to go back, note that I underscored with respect to 1 Corinthians 15, that Paul doesn't just suggest or throw out there the idea that the gospel are the bare facts, the historical facts of Christ's life, death, burial, and resurrection, but also their divinely inspired interpretation.

God tells us what these things mean, and there are any number of ways that Protestants differ from Roman Catholics on their understanding of these things. Now, 1 Corinthians 15, it should also be said, is shorthand, right?

Like when Paul says, I determined there's nothing among you except Christ and him crucified, there's a lot packed into that, that Paul will unpack, and he does that in his epistle to the Corinthians and in other epistles.

And so when you look at how Paul unpacks that, then it becomes painfully obvious that we're affirming something, and Rome is affirming something else. Now, one thing that I would also want to point out is, this is not just us being cantankerous or mean-spirited, because Rome itself, or herself, threw down the gauntlet, and the Council of Trent, Rome hurled her own anathemas in the direction of Protestants, saying that those who affirm what we affirm are anathema.

Alright, and I have a question there. So I hear Catholics say that they view Protestants as, you know, separated brethren, but at the same time, I mean, I've been to seminary, I've studied church history, I know about the Council of Trent, and I'm confused because I hear a bunch of different things.

I hear from Protestants, oh, Roman Catholicism, yeah, we disagree on some important stuff, but they're still brothers. And then I hear Roman Catholics say, yeah, they're separated brethren, but then you read the Council of Trent, and they say, well, you're anathema if you believe in, you know, Sola Fide.

So what's going on here? Is there some, like, inconsistencies here? What is the nature of that, what seems to be kind of a contradiction amongst different perspectives there?

Yeah, and of course, I would say, because I have no problem saying, and I think it's honest to say, that there is an inconsistency here. However, the Roman Catholic would say that we're just misunderstanding a term like anathema, as it's used in the Trinity decree, but I don't think that's the case.

The fathers at Trent, and by fathers I just mean the people that convened at Trent that deliberated and crafted the document and signed off on it and so forth, they weren't just saying that Protestants are a little wrong and, you know, we can pat them on the head and, you know, have, you know, all sorts of fun together, but, you know, there's just a few things that we don't like.

And biblically, first of all, the term anathema means to be accursed. Yes. So if Rome is admitting that the word doesn't really mean accursed and just means excommunicated, well then that just shows another example of Rome being at variance with Scripture, but secondly, the Roman Catholics who say that it just means to be excommunicated have a problem because Rome's official position has always been that those who are outside of the church don't possess salvation, and so they also have to try and iron that out.

They have to make these sorts of things work together. But when Protestants are called.

By Roman Catholics separated brethren, the word brethren seems to indicate you're still brothers. It means you're still saved, but you're an error come back home, so to speak. You know what I mean? Is that what separated brethren means, but you would say that the idea of separated brethren is inconsistent with.

Rome's official stance on the issue? That just points up another problem. Rome often pretends that believing in the infallibility of the Pope or the magisterium of the church solves all sorts of problems, like the confusion allegedly created by belief in sola scriptura, which makes everybody his own infallible interpreter.

That's the charge of Rome, but Roman Catholics don't agree in their interpretation of papal pronouncements or the creedal statements. So there are Catholics who would interpret separated brethren one way, and Catholics who would interpret separated brethren another way.

I would say if I were a Roman Catholic, because I feel obligated to be consistent with what had come before, I would say in light of Trent and its pronouncements of others as anathema, that the sense of separated brethren has to mean brethren who are going to hell, you know, as difficult as it might be to still call them brethren.

That would be necessarily, I think, what you'd have to conclude, but I don't think that's what a lot of Catholics conclude today. And maybe at some point we'll get into this, but I also don't think, because you were gonna ask me about what Rome's view is of the gospel, and so forth, but I think that there's even a problem, because I think Trent says something that many contemporary Roman Catholics don't.

The Roman Catholic Doctrine of Justification

Okay, so interesting. So.

What is the gospel according to Roman Catholicism? I want... there was someone said something that kind of made me want to do this, what we're doing here. Okay, because I don't interact with a lot of comments on Facebook and stuff, not because I don't want to, and people message me all the time and I don't respond.

I just don't have time. Like, the only things I have time to do are this, right, at like 9 in the evening, and then I'm a full-time teacher, I'm doing all sorts of stuff, so I don't really have time to, like, debate people on the internet.

But I do read a lot of stuff, and I read things that are confusing to me sometimes, because I think I knew the issues on that. It seems this person who seems to be informed says this other thing over here.

So when someone said something to the effect, remember who it was, when they were referring to Cameron's conversion, they were like, oh wow, you know, he converted from Christianity to Christianity, you know, kind of like making the idea that, like, what's the big fuss about, you know, it's he's still a Christian.

And I'm thinking, like, for me, how I understood the gospel according to Rome, which you're gonna explain to us in a few moments, I always saw Roman Catholics as objects of evangelism, because I understand what the gospel is, and I understood what Rome was claiming, and I'm like, there's a conflict there, at least from a Protestant perspective, and a Roman Catholic perspective.

These seem to not be the same. I'm confused. Are Protestants saying that, say for example, justification by faith alone is not a dividing line issue, that you can deny that and still be a Christian and hold to the true gospel?

It's kind of confused. So that's why I was asking, like, give us a steel man presentation of the Roman Catholic doctrine, or the gospel according to Rome, and then let's set that side by side with what we think Scripture teaches, and kind of show they're not in conformity with one another, and this is why this is such an important issue.

Can you do that for us?

Yeah, so in a nutshell, I hope it's gonna be a nutshell, who knows, by the time I get there. The first thing that has to be said is that justification itself is not, as Protestants believe, something forensic.

We believe that justification is God's declarative act with respect to those who are trusting in Christ. For Rome, it refers to a process that begins, continues, it has an end, and it's in some ways like what we normally think of as sanctification, though even here I don't think it's exactly the same thing.

But justification is a state into which one enters, right? Formally you're a child of wrath, and you enter into a state of grace through baptism, right? This is the initiation of the process, and then grace is infused into you.

It's like a substance that's infused into you, which literally eradicates sin in the soul. So the Roman Catholic, when they talk about the remission of sins, it's not what Protestants ordinarily think, that our guilt has been absolved and so forth.

Rather, sin has actually been eradicated from the soul, so the person is really delivered from sin, and now the grace of God in him is something that he is now exerting, working out if you will, performing good works, and meriting eternal life.

So I mean there's more to be said there, of course, but that's in effect the Roman Catholic position. Now so when a person sins, this creates a problem, because remember, justification involves the eradication of sin and so forth, and if it's a venial sin, this is addressed by means of things like Mass, the Eucharist, right?

Going to Mass, and that sort of thing. But if it's a mortal sin, then this actually destroys the grace of justification that's operative in the soul, and now that needs to be restored by more radical means.

You know, a person who dies in the state of guilt, having committed a mortal sin, will go to hell, right? Somebody who dies not having discharged the temporal penalties due to sin in this life will go to purgatory until those temporal consequences have been taken care of.

And so in this process you have not only the individual's own merits that factor into the equation of meriting final justification, you also have, you know, potential purgatorial sufferings, you have the merits of the saints, so Mary and the saints also contributed to this treasury of merits.

I always consider it quite stingy of the Pope that he has access to this treasury of merits, and he's not just freely bestowing them on people, instead he's granting indulgences to people on the condition that they do X or Y or Z.

This is one of the things that sent Luther off, was when Tetzel was in effect selling indulgences, which for people meant time off in purgatory, you know, and so forth, and so, but the Church supposedly has the ability to dispense these merits, and why aren't they just, you know, doing so much more freely?

Almost as freely, I would expect, as God himself with respect to the actual merit that saves us, which is the merit of Christ. God isn't begrudging in bestowing that merit. Those who believe will be saved.

So by contrast now, the Protestant position is not a denial that God delivers people from corruption. This is not justification, but certainly God is saving the whole person, and from the whole problem that the fall introduced, but the issue of justification has to do with the matter of guilt, right?

But when we sin, we become guilty, and that means that we are, you know, consigned to punishment. We incur punishment. We deserve punishment, and in justification, God remits our sins, that is, he cancels the debt, he expunges the guilt from our record, and he accepts us as righteous, not because of anything in us or done by us, but because Christ died for our sins, he took the penalty, and lived the perfect life, and that righteousness is imputed to us through faith.

And so God, on the basis of the righteousness of Christ, imputed to us, declares us righteous. It's an instantaneous, once-for-all act. So the Protestant view is that justification is declarative. Rome's view is that it's a process.

It's initiated by baptism. According to Protestantism, it is received by faith. It involves the remission of sins and the imputation of righteousness on account of Christ's death and life. According to Rome, it involves the actual purging of sin from the soul, and the impartation or infusion of grace into the soul, enabling the person to now work for and merit eternal life.

In Protestantism, there's no such concept of meriting salvation. It's a free gift, and so on and so forth. So that's it in a nutshell.

Okay, so I know there are two different levels of talking about Roman Catholicism. There's the scholarly literature, which is very technical, and you have to define these very well-defined terms and categories that we need to use, and then there's kind of the popular interaction, you know, between people on the Internet and kind of the average person, you know, you have kind of like average conceptions of what many Protestants think Roman Catholicism is, and vice versa.

Do you think that when Protestants characterize the Roman Catholic view of salvation as like, you know, Catholics believe in faith plus works, do you think that's an accurate summary of their position, or do you think that us Protestants, in understanding the Roman Catholic view of salvation, I think we need a little bit more nuance in how we explain that?

What.

Do you think about that? Well, a person could certainly say a position, even their own, with more nuance in one setting to, you know, to another, and we may not like it when somebody's giving our own position and not giving that extended nuance, but I mean, we do that ourselves.

We can state our position quite succinctly, and then we might need to then get into greater nuance when somebody's saying something we think that doesn't really hit our view, but Trent is clear in the sixth session.

It very clearly speaks of good works meriting eternal life, and so it is a system of works righteousness. Now, Rome did have a high view of grace, and this is, I would say, to the chagrin of many professing Protestants today.

When we say that we embrace other Protestants who aren't Reformed or Calvinistic or something like that, I would qualify that by saying this. There are stronger versions of non-Reformed or anti-Calvinistic Protestantism than some of what passes for anti-Calvinism today.

There are some pretty radically bad forms of Protestantism today. I wonder if there's even anything worth calling grace in those systems, but evangelical Arminians, for example, of the past have held a very robust view of grace, which I think excels that of Rome.

I'm just talking about the matter of grace, not the specific issue of justification and so forth, but I'll give you an example. Charles Wesley. I mean, I heard a guy the other day, not long ago, who is a Protestant who is denying prevenient grace, but Wesley, who is a stalwart of evangelism, friend of Whitefield and so forth, who nobody could ever call into question his Reformed bona fides, they were good friends.

Wesley had a clear sight of the fact that man, apart from grace, cannot believe the gospel. He was an Arminian. He believed in free will and all the rest. However, there are some today who would reject that sort of thing.

Now, Calvinists, of course, believe in prevenient grace. The difference between us and the Wesleyan view would be that we believe that that grace that prevenes, that comes before, is particular and efficacious, whereas in the Wesleyan system, it is universal and non-efficacious.

It can be resistible. It's more kind of like the issue of irresistible grace versus resistible grace. Yeah, so there are differences, but I mean, the reason for saying this is there is a very clear, at least, advantage of one version of non-Reformed Arminianism to other forms that I think excels Rome, but Rome does have a high view of grace in the sense that, I mean, you could read Trent, and at times it seems to echo the Council of Orange.

Right now, the Council of Orange, many may not know. Go back and read that. I wouldn't say that it's perfect in every way, but it has...many people are going to read that and think that this was written by, you know, Luther or Calvin, right, or Knox or Zwingli or Wieser or whatever.

No, it was written a millennia before them, but Rome at times will echo things that you can find in the Council of Trent, so they do believe that grace is involved in the whole process and that it's critical and all the rest, but the question is whether they're consistent with this, and once you get to something like the doctrine of justification, it becomes immediately apparent that, you know, grace is no longer grace in this system, right, so having, you know, spoken somewhat favorably of Rome in this respect, I want to make it clear, I mean, I don't think in the matter of justification they're consistent.

Plus, there's the.

Peace with God, Assurance, and the Problem of Presumption

I want to ask about something that's very important to all Christians, right, is this idea of what it means to have peace with God, right, so let's move away from kind of all the details of and the intricacies and the difference between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Having peace with God is a biblical category. It is a thing that brings, I mean, me as a Protestant, brings me comfort that I have peace with God. How does a Roman Catholic understand what it means to have peace with God, and what are some issues that you would take with how a Roman Catholic would answer that sort of question?

Yeah, so, well, first just...

Because real quick, before you answer, because this came across because I was invited to a church years ago, and you gotta check out this church, it's a great church, you know, great people, great sermons, whatever, and I was gonna visit this church, and of course I finally made it.

I was like, oh, I'm here, okay, I'm gonna meet up with this person, and of course I couldn't walk into the church because right outside the church there was a Roman Catholic man holding a huge sign saying the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church that has been guided by the Holy Spirit throughout the centuries.

This is the whole thing, and I was like, I need to talk to this guy. I can't just walk into this church and ignore that this guy's out here, and so I had a... By the way, we had an excellent and respectful and cordial conversation, but I remember asking him, you know, do you have peace with God?

Do you know that you're saved? And he says, I wouldn't be so presumptuous to say that I could know, and I thought, I was like, wow. Now we had a good conversation, and it continued, but I don't want to get into that.

That really brought me aback. I was like, wow, not only do you not know you have peace with God, you almost think it's arrogant to think that someone could know. Now, I'm not sure if every Roman Catholic would say that, but I thought that was fascinating, and so that's where I kind of produced my question.

So getting back to my question, so how does a Catholic understand peace with God, and why would.

We take issue with that according to Scripture? Yeah, so one thing I'd say real quickly is that according to Trent, you cannot without divine revelation know that you're saved, so they would call that the sin of presumption, and it's tied to their view of the gospel and the fact that it is suspended on your performance and whether you pull this off.

You know, as you're running along the rat wheel hoping that you're making progress, you could always fly off, right? You could stop moving your little feet, then the wheel will shoot you in the other direction, so that's the situation that the Roman Catholic is laboring under.

Now, but I would say quickly after this that really the sin here, and it's similar to what you hear from garden variety pagans, right, where they say things like, you're arrogant for believing that Jesus is the only way, or you're arrogant for this reason or that reason.

The real arrogance here is believing that you can assert something contrary to what God has said, right, that your word is more certain than His word, and it's really not just arrogance but faithlessness.

When somebody says, well, we would say, and we can point to it in Scripture clearly, God has promised to forgive the sins of those who believe in Jesus. God has promised to save those who believe in Jesus.

Somebody who says they believe in Jesus but don't know if they'll be saved is in effect, you know, speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They're giving with the one hand what they're taking away with the other.

Paul says the one who confesses with their mouth and believes in their heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, that person will be saved. So it's really a sin on the part of those who reject that, you know, and say that we can't be certain of that.

Now, I mean, of course, what they're going to do is they're going to say, well, I don't know that I really have faith, you know, this, that, and the other thing. We could talk about those, but those are secondary, right?

If a person's believing in Jesus, they have the right to say that they have eternal life and so forth. And we can talk about what are the fruits and evidences of a true and saving faith and all that kind of stuff.

But that, again, that's an after, you know, that's down the road discussion. But the idea of peace with God, really, this is the rub, right? One of the things that makes it impossible for me as a Protestant coming from where I've come from now to look at Rome and find it all appealing, you know, we were talking before the show about what is appealing about Rome to other people and so forth.

And some people find this, that or the other thing beautiful. But I look at the gospel of Rome and it's not beautiful to me, I got to tell you. I think they need the stained glass windows, not that I have anything against stained glass windows, but all the other trappings that go along with it, right?

To present something to the senses that are palpable because their gospel isn't it, right? And I'm saying that, and it's not wrong to make an appeal of this sort. In Paul's defense of the gospel to the Galatians, he appealed to their experience, right?

Of course he's grounding it ultimately in scripture, but he says, I want to know one thing from you, right? These people that he's saying, you know, who's bewitched you, right? Christ was clearly placarded before your eyes as crucified.

The gospel was clearly proclaimed to you. He says, I want to know one thing from you. Did you receive the spirit and perform miracles by the works of the law or by hearing with faith? Right? Was it by the works of the law that you received the spirit, which is the chief, you know, one of the chief blessings poured out by Christ on his people.

You know, did you receive the spirit by the works of the law or by hearing with faith? Works or faith? That was Paul's alternative, right? That's how he set it up. And he's pointing to the fact that when he went to the Galatians and proclaimed the gospel to them, this was their experience.

The promise of the spirit that was made throughout the old covenant became a reality for them. And so Paul's pointing to that and, and saying this, that you received this, this by faith. So when I think of my own experience analogously as a, you know, one of the things that always bothered me, I'll be quick here.

Cause I'm not trying to give my testimony, but the, one of the things that always bothered me was when I would listen to other people, as they made excuses for why they were in the trouble they, cause I got in a lot of trouble.

And was, was facing all. You, you don't look like a troublemaker at all.

I look like a guy that got beat up by three guys.

Listen, I'll let you continue. I'll let you continue. But I knew you were a straight up thug when you had that debate with that. What was that guy that it was on the Trinity. You called in, you, you, you called in.

Oh, that was Brandon Tatum.

Brandon Tatum, you had this like wool hat on, you had like this hoodie on, even the comment section was like, bro, you just got bodied by this dude from the street. Like it was so hilarious. You looked like a thug.

You don't look like someone who knows theology and I don't mean that insulting, but when you share and you debate and stuff like that, it's, it's clear that you studied these issues, but you do look intimidating and you look like you probably had a checkered past.

No, this is 30 years out now though, but there are some things that are just still, like, I love my beanie, right? I was wearing the beanie. You mentioned it in my discussion with Brandon Tatum. The reason was I was in, we were in another place.

I was in the basement. It was really cold that time of year, but I love wearing my beanie. So I had the beanie on and I called him up on just a fluke, you know, I called in. He didn't think you were going to get on.

Yeah, I didn't think he was going to bring me on. So I wasn't necessarily looking the part, but my wife will sometimes tell me that, you know, I changed this or that because I might draw unwanted attention.