The Death of Pope Francis, and the Provisionist Gospel

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Started off talking about the passing of Pope Francis, but then connected the topic to the Provisionist denial of the need of the supernatural work of the Spirit of God to bring about spiritual life, showing that in reality, Provisionism has a less biblical anthropology than Rome does.

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Well, I'm deaf. Well, between the two of us, we're a mess, aren't we? Rich was saying he's blind.
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I'm actually in the regular studio for once, and I'm looking at what
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Rich has been up to since when I leave. You know, my wife does stuff to the house when I leave and Rich does stuff to the office when
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I leave. It's it's very strange. But anyway, it's good to be with you late, late in the day for us anyway.
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It's pretty warm day here in Phoenix. Well, ninety one, something like that. Nothing compared to what it will be in the not too distant future.
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But here we are. I needed to get a program in. ReformCon will be this weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
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And down in Tucson, Arizona, I'm looking forward to getting together with folks down there. I've got some dear friends flying in from Denver.
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That I haven't seen for a while, and I'm going to really be enjoying getting an opportunity to get together with them and everybody else who will be there.
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Very important stuff to be talking about. Obviously, the reason we needed to do a program this afternoon is
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I was awoken this morning by a friend of mine sending me a text at exactly six a .m.
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concerning the death of Pope Francis. Now, I remember clearly hearing the announcement of Benedict's resignation back in twenty thirteen.
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That that was a different transition. When you you literally at a point had two popes and a pope emeritus.
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And that was an interesting situation. But I remember when
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John Paul II died. When did John Paul II die?
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Which was 2005. I thought I was sitting there going 2005,
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I think. But I don't I don't mess with I don't mess with dates too much anymore, though.
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I do need to mention that I was misled and misled you a few months ago.
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It's a minor point, but we were discussing Mormonism. And I said that E .D.
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Howe published his book, Mormonism Unveiled, in 1834.
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And someone who will remain nameless, but sits on the other side of that window isn't right now, but normally sits on the other side of that window, said corrected me and said it was 1835.
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And I was like, that's not what I remember. So now there is an arbiter of such things called
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Grok. And I've been having some conversations with Grok about Mormonism recently.
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Fascinating stuff. I learned stuff. I really did. But he confirmed that I was correct.
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Now, it's interesting. I caught Grok in an error. He said min, in facsimile 2, was figure 5.
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It's figure 7. And he accepts correction well. I know we had a discussion as to how he could become confused about it.
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Anyway, I remember in 2005 when
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John Paul II died. Now, from the time that we started dealing with Roman Catholicism, which would have been late 1980s, so I would say probably 87, 88 was when the late
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Benny Diaz put pressure on us to start talking about Roman Catholicism.
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We were dealing with Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses. That's all really we were looking at at that particular point in time.
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I had not yet graduated from seminary. And so from that point until 2005, there had only been one
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Pope. And that gave Roman Catholic apologists a consistent foundation.
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They weren't having to Pope -splain very much. Certainly not like what they've been having to do since 2013 when
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Francis became Pope. Francis was Pope for just over 12 years.
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And John Paul II, yeah, he threw out some conservative stuff, some liberal stuff.
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He was trying to keep a big ship with a lot of different perspectives on it going pretty much one direction.
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But I remember when he died, for the next number of weeks, every
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Roman Catholic apologist on the planet got their 15 seconds of fame on various news channels.
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And I tapped over to Fox News while I was driving around today. I'm going down to ReformCon.
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I'm taking the RV. And so there was a bunch of stuff in the
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RV. It doesn't need to be in the RV. And I probably could have saved myself a half mile per gallon if I had taken the insulated hose out earlier than I did.
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Insulated hoses are great, only when you need them. And other than that, they're really heavy. But anyways,
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I was doing a bunch of running around today. And so I was listening to Fox News to see what their coverage was.
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And of course, almost all the professed Christians on Fox News are
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Roman Catholics. And you start hearing the exact same stuff that I remember hearing in 2005.
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At the time, we had started doing the Great Debate series on Long Island, what, about 96, 97, 98?
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Somewhere around there. So we were still doing that. And so a lot of these apologists that would show up on...
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I think it was Fox back then. Was Fox around 2005, or were they on something else? I don't remember.
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They're guys I knew, guys I had debated or had written articles about or in response to them and things like that.
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And you're hearing the exact same stuff. They were...
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I thought it was Fox, but... We're hearing the same things now.
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They had a cardinal on Fox News. And of course, there's no pushback. There's nothing like that.
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But, well, you know, 2000 years, successor of Peter, unbroken chain.
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And... Look, I understand how either incredibly blind zealots or just people who've never done any reading outside of Catholic answers tracks could repeat that kind of stuff and could say, oh...
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And they don't know anything about the Council of Pisa, Constance, the Babylonian captivity of the
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Church, the pornocracy, the number of anti -popes. They don't think anything about the
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Aryan resurgence after the Council of Nicaea. They don't know anything about Church history.
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They just know what they've been told and so they just roll with the narrative,
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I guess. But you can't tell me this cardinal... I think it was Kirk, if I recall correctly. Again, I was driving.
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They know better. But this is going to be what's repeated over and over and over and over again for the next few weeks.
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And I think it would be wise if Christians were prepared to engage meaningfully at this point in time.
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But let's just be honest. Probably in the history of Protestantism, whatever in the world that is, there's never been a time when evangelicals were less prepared to address the subject of the papacy.
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I mean, who cares? A vast majority of people involved in evangelical churches know nothing about the
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Reformation. They know nothing about the Inquisition. They don't...
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Most Reformed people do not know that the Church in Geneva sent a constant stream of dedicated missionaries straight from Geneva, straight south into Italy.
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And 99 % of them died a martyr's death in Italy. They don't know that because they don't think
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Calvinists are evangelistic. But that's what happened.
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And so, as a result, the most simplistic claims that are made in defense of the papacy...
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Again, ignoring that the papacy was unable to extricate itself from its own divisions during the
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Babylonian captivity of the Church, which led to first the Council of Pisa, which then produced a total of three popes, and then eventually the
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Council of Constance, the same council that burned Jan Hus, an evangelical Christian at the stake for believing in salvation by grace through faith alone, healed the schism by getting rid of all the popes and electing a new one.
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Which meant the papacy was unable to fix itself. And there was, for a while, somewhat of a hope that conciliarism might become the ultimate authority within Roman Catholicism.
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That councils, rather than the pope, would be the ultimate authority. But not only did that change rather quickly, primarily for political reasons, but by the time you had
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Vatican I in 1870, so much for conciliarism. It's done with.
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So, all that stuff is in history, but who...
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Come on, let's be honest. How many Roman Catholics know about that? And how many Protestants know about that?
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Very few. Very, very few. And so, what used to be the substance and the essence of debates and conversations between Catholics and Protestants in the
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United States, because people knew about these things, and Protestants, believing
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Protestants, were aware of the fact that their confessions of faith... Yeah, they actually had confessions of faith.
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...made reference to Roman Catholicism or used language that was responding against Roman Catholicism.
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They were aware of these things. It was one of the things you learned about in church. Now you have pizza parties for the kids, back then you had catechism.
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It was a different world. And so, the most simplistic claims that will go unchallenged on Fox News for the next few weeks were easily responded to by Protestant Christians in the past.
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It was not unusual for a
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Baptist or a Lutheran or a Presbyterian conservative believing
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Christians to be able to, off the top of their head, provide an in -depth response to the
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Petrine Promise in Matthew chapter 16 without having to go to YouTube or anything like that.
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They already knew what the issues were. That's not the case anymore.
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And so, you're going to hear Matthew 16, 18 repeated over and over again. The prayer for Peter's faith not to fail is going to be repeated over and over again.
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And you're going to hear people saying, well, you need to understand that Matthew was originally written in Aramaic or Jesus' words to Peter were originally in Aramaic.
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And so, we don't have to worry about what canonical Matthew says in Greek.
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We can discern what the
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Aramaic would have been when Jesus says, You're Peter and upon this rock. The play of words, and stuff like that.
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We don't have to worry about the fact that this was a minority reading in the early church, which it was. And there are honest
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Roman Catholic historians that admit that it primarily originated the reading that Rome uses today.
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In Rome, with the Bishop of Rome, probably Stephen, middle of the 3rd century.
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All that kind of stuff. There are honest scholars that admit all that. Just like there are honest scholars that admit that the papacy itself as an institution could not have come into existence without the widespread long -term use of forged documents.
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That's true. The modern papacy could not have developed without the donation of Constantine and without the pseudo -Isidorean decretals.
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The history of forged statements put into the mouths of early church writers long within Roman Catholicism.
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And Rome has now admitted all that. But it doesn't change the fact that the papacy is still there.
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It could never have gotten to the point that it is now without the forgeries. The forgeries are gone. The foundation is gone.
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But there is a papacy. It ain't going anywhere. It doesn't have a foundation. It's not standing on anything.
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But there it is. Anyway, this was the kind of stuff.
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A lot of Protestant Christians could have responded to this kind of stuff.
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No, wait a minute. Matthew 16. Peter. If this makes
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Peter the rock upon which the church is built, isn't it strange that instantly
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Jesus is saying, Get behind me, Satan, to Peter. You're mining the things of men not the things of God.
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Why is it that in the only canonical version we have of Matthew 16 that what
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Jesus actually says, verse 18,
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I also say to you that you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.
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Now, we could get into overpower it and be able to withstand it because I think it is best to understand
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Matthew 16. Gates are not offensive weapons. Gates are defensive weapons.
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If you can call them weapons. They're defensive bulwarks, items, whatever. And the point is that the very realm of death will not be able to withstand the onslaught of Christ's church.
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For some eschatological perspectives that doesn't make any sense.
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The idea of invading hell with a water pistol isn't really what people are thinking about.
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But I definitely believe that that's exactly what it's referring to. But why does it say
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Epitalte upon this rock?
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It says Hati sui Petras You are
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Peter. It would be so easy to say Kai epi you
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Sui you, upon you, Peter I will build my church.
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That would be so easy. Why does he go to Epitalte? What is that referring to?
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This rock? Well, the context is the revelation that has been given to Peter.
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He's the passive recipient of the revelation of the Father that Jesus is the Messiah. The Christ, the
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Son of the Blessed God. The Son of the Living God. Verse 16
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You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. That was revealed to him. There's the rock.
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That's the foundation of the church. That cannot be abandoned.
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And so that's what this rock is in verse 18. Now, it's interesting. I mentioned this years ago when
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I debated Jerry Matitick on the papacy in Denver, Colorado during the papal visit in 1993.
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It was John Paul again. Chris Karagounis was an author who had written an article arguing that if Matthew was written in Aramaic the
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Aramaic here would not have been the Petras Petra, but Minra which would not have had the same parallel.
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That is constantly claimed by Rome even though you don't have an Aramaic original for the
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Gospel of Matthew. They sort of function like they do, but they don't. And then, verse 19 also very important.
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Dosos soy tas claras tes basilias ton uranon.
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And I will give to you, soy, singular the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
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And hundreds and hundreds of years later someone tried to connect this with Isaiah chapter 22.
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That's the big, big, big, big thing. Well, okay, I was going to say it's the big, big, big thing now but I can't necessarily say that's the big thing now.
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I still hear Roman Catholic apologists doing that. I first heard that being claimed by Scott Hahn and Jerry Matitix and stuff like that in the late 80's, early 90's.
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The Isaiah 22 connection to Matthew 16. And as far as I know, and I haven't dug into it recently, it was well over half a millennium after the time of the apostles before someone ever even tried to make a connection there.
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It may have been longer. I may be being extremely generous at that point. And the reality is the church didn't do that because it's so obvious.
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Jesus holds those keys today. According to Revelation chapter 3, he quotes from that text.
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He has the keys. This is after Peter's dead. What do you do? Take them back? No, they're supposed to be passed on.
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But Jesus has them, even after Peter's gone. So you can chop the New Testament up if you want to.
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Try to get rid of that little problem. But still, it still says, I will give.
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Not I am giving. It is future tense.
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And I'm looking here. Every variant still has doso, which is future.
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And of dittany. So the big question is when people assume, well see,
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Jesus gave Peter the keys. I go, when? When? Well, Matthew 16.
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No, it's future. He says, I will give, not I am giving. I will give you the keys.
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When did Peter receive the keys? And people come up with different answers.
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Those that are aware know that later on in Matthew, the keys are mentioned again in the context of giving authority to all the apostles.
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Not to Peter alone. Because if they were going to be given to all the apostles in the sense that the keys are the proclamation of the kingdom of God, the proclamation of the gospel, then it would make perfect sense that Jesus is talking to Peter.
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He's talking about what Peter has received from the Father as a revelation as to who Jesus is. The other apostles receive the same thing.
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And so when that time comes, they all receive these keys at the same time in equality.
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Rome has anathematized that view. But that's the one that makes sense.
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Because otherwise you have to go, yeah, Jesus says he's going to give the keys, but we never record when it happens.
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Okay, well, that's problematic. But it's future. It didn't happen at this point.
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And again, this was the kind of stuff that was common knowledge. Because there was a day when you didn't have the internet, you didn't have television, you didn't have radio, and you talked with your neighbor down the road.
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And if they were a Roman Catholic, you had these conversations. And you considered it important.
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You considered it valuable. Now we don't talk about anything with anybody, to be perfectly honest with you.
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Let alone stuff like this. And if we have arguments like this, we have them on the internet. So you never have to look somebody in the eye.
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It changes everything. It really does. So you're going to hear all this stuff.
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But I would highly recommend to you, I'm not going to repeat this stuff here, but I debated
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Mitch Pacwa on the papacy in the very late 90s. I think it was 98. It might have been 99, but I think it was 98.
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And again, I've met a number of Roman Catholic priests that were just awesome people.
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Really were. And Mitch Pacwa, I've said over and over again,
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I have tremendous respect for the man. He never played games in our debates.
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He didn't pull cheap debating tricks. Just have tremendous respect for him.
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And so those debates are really valuable. Because you don't have to be scratching off all the stuff that gets in the way.
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You can actually just listen to the exchange and decide for yourself. So I'd highly recommend listening to that debate.
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You can put it on 1 .25 or something like that. We didn't speak. I was probably still speaking fairly quickly at that point in time.
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I've slowed down purposefully. That may have been early enough in my
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Well, you know. No, you know what? I think I already had. I already had by then.
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I'd had the conversation with the older gentleman at Denver Seminary. You probably could put it 1 .25.
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Not miss too much. And work through it. Maybe take some notes. Because the next few weeks, this is going to be all over the news.
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And that means it might be an opportunity for you to speak with a loved one, speak with a neighbor, a coworker.
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Or they may bring it up to you. And you don't want to be sitting there without anything to say, without knowing what to say.
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That's not something you want to be in a situation to do. So track it down.
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It's not the super highest resolution. That's alright.
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All the material's there. And I think you'd find it to be a helpful thing to do.
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So consider that and look at it. Now, I'm somewhat shifting topics here, but not completely.
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Rich, I don't think you can do anything here as far as allowing me to show this, huh?
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We talked about it before the program. You gave me the time index and stuff.
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I'd like to show it, but I think all we can do is play the audio. Would you agree with that?
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And of course, Rich may be pulling weeds, talking to his wife, playing with his cat.
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His cat is huge. His cat is like three of my cats. All in one big cat body, in essence.
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And so maybe the cat has attacked Rich. I don't think he did that.
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Cowboys, I'm sure, a nice, very, very big cat. But I'm getting no responses from Rich.
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He has been raptured. We can have a discussion of that at some point.
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The problem is, if he's not there to turn up the volume on my computer, I'm not even sure you're going to be able to hear this very well.
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But we're going to run with it anyways and look at the screen. Look at what screen?
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Oh, okay. Look at that screen up there. Alright, so there it is. We'll see how the sound is.
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I just realized the sound... Pipe it to the
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ATEM. We don't have an ATEM on right now, but I think it's this one. Alright, that should work.
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Your ATEM. You mean send the sound to MC, HDMI, SDI, 6G,
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We'll hope that that's going to work. Oh, by the way, before I play this, before we completely abandon the
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Francis thing, I did need to mention this. A few weeks ago, my son sent me a text that he had seen an article that said that one of the leading candidates to be the next
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Pope was Cardinal Pizzaballa.
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Pizzaballa! Now, I understand he's quite the interesting fellow and I guess speaks modern
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Hebrew and all this kind of stuff, which is fine and dandy, but I just think it would be really awesome.
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I know they changed their name, but... Pope Pizzaballa!
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You can't say it without becoming Italian and raising
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Pizzaballa! That would just be so fun!
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It would be so great! Pope Francis' original name was boring.
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At least Ratzinger! He was the German shepherd and stuff like that.
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I get that. Pope Pizzaballa!
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It's probably not going to happen, but it would be a lot of fun if it did happen. Let's just try to do that.
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Pope Ravioli? Now Rich is running with it.
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At least he's not here to talk and pull up the microphone and I have to go, yeah, yeah, okay.
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Actually, he's left... When I turned the lights on, all the lights for his little secret project, which isn't all that secret, turned on.
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Maybe he could do something, I don't know. Pope Pizzaballa! I'd like to see it happen.
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It would be really good. Shifting gears while I cough here.
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How in the world do you transition out of a discussion of the death of Pope Francis and, of course, the extremely important character and nature of his successor?
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I've already heard the Roman Catholics saying, no, no, no, he didn't stack the deck even though 80 % of the cardinals...
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By the way, this is not how it was done for the first millennium. There were no cardinals getting together in a conclave and voting.
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They were elected by the people of the city of Rome. Cardinals are non -apostolic, much later development, and all this kind of stuff.
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When you hear about 2 ,000 years, they just don't know what they're talking about. They're either being blatantly dishonest, or in the vast majority, they just have no clue.
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None whatsoever. Just how it is, and we gotta deal with it.
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Anyway, when his successor is chosen, will it be established that he has permanently changed the direction of the church?
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One of the chief people on the supposed frontrunners,
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I noticed, even though he was from Africa, which is normally very, very conservative, had connections to the
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LGBTQ stuff. So, whoever it is is going to be examined very, very carefully.
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If they follow the standard that leftists have used elsewhere, they'll be very careful in the first papal encyclicals, public statements, and stuff like that.
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Even if they want to continue nudging everything to the left, they'll try to do it slowly, lest this guy end up running into just a massive brick wall.
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And did you see what Vigano said? Wow! Francis is now answering for his many crimes against the church and stuff like that.
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Yikes! He went for it, really, really did. It was pretty amazing.
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Anyway, once that individual is chosen, what does this have to do with us?
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Well, there's a lot of things it has to do with. A lot of things in regards to homosexuality, abortion, most of the conservatives on the
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Supreme Court are Roman Catholics, this kind of stuff. Then, of course, you had
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Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, too. Those things are important.
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Those are bellwethers. There's no two ways about it. But if you've read the Roman Catholic Controversy that I wrote so long ago, my issue is all the same thing.
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What is the gospel and how does a person have peace with God? The Roman Catholic system does not give you peace with God.
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It does not have a finished work that is actually, in and of itself, perpetuatory in behalf of a specific people.
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The Roman Catholic understanding of grace now, again, most
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Roman Catholics today, who knows? Liberation theology does not give you the same historical
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Roman Catholic understanding. But if we're looking at Trent up until the modern period, if we're looking at historic dogmatic
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Roman Catholicism, I remember so clearly sitting in the radio studio of KPXQ in downtown
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Phoenix. Well, Camelback, 20th Street or something like that.
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24th Street. I think what had happened was
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Norm Geisler had been on the Bible Answer Man broadcast. He had responded to a caller and emphasized that the
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Council of Trent had anathematized anyone who would say that you could be saved apart from the grace of God.
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And that's true. But what he had not then gone on and said and needed to say, which
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I then did, was that the
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Reformation was never about the necessity of God's grace.
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The Reformers didn't make it about that. The Reformers did not say to the world,
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Rome is saying grace is unnecessary because they knew that wasn't the case.
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The entire sacramental system was a system of distributing grace. So it would be pretty silly to make that kind of statement.
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The issue of the Reformation and if you've not heard me say this before, you need to hear it now because I have been saying it fairly regularly for a very, very long time.
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The issue of the Reformation was never the necessity of grace. The issue of the
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Reformation was the sufficiency of grace. That's one of the most important things you can come to understand about that time period and about what took place is that the
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Reformation was not about the necessity of grace. It was about the sufficiency of grace.
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Can God's grace save without human addition?
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Does God have the capacity to be a savior without human addition?
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The majority of Protestants in my experience have abandoned that Reformed view.
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I've told stories about how that's worked out over the years. But that still is the issue.
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Necessity? Almost everybody affirms that. The Pelagians didn't versus sufficiency.
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One of the interesting things that came out of my debate last year with Leighton Flowers on John 6 was an audience question.
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There was a lot of commentary about it after the debate. I'm going to play if you want to go watch this
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White Flowers debate Does John 644 Teach Unconditional Election? This is 2 hours, 15 minutes, and 29 seconds in.
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You can verify this for yourself. But let's listen to the
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Now again, this is in the context of he has 60 seconds,
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I have 30 seconds because it's addressed to him. So you hear what the question is, listen to the response, then my hyper fast 30 second response.
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Then let's talk about it and make the connection. Dr. Flowers, is
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Christian conversion a supernatural work of God, i .e. a miracle?
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I believe the gospel is the inspired word of God that's brought to all of the world.
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So that's supernatural. The inspiration of scripture is supernatural. The incarnation of Christ is supernatural.
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We need all of those graces of God coming before. We need revelation, we need light, all of which comes by supernatural means.
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Therefore we respond to those supernatural means by which we are either judged for our unbelief or, well done my good and faithful servant, enter into your rest.
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And so the whole reward punishment system of Christianity makes no sense on Calvinism because basically they're being rewarded for something
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God unilaterally causes to happen and punished for, again, something God unilaterally causes to happen.
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And so I think, once again, you just have to look at the whole of the text and all of the text together to understand the plain meaning of your responsibility in light of God's supernatural truth that all of us have to respond to.
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An answer wasn't given to the question. The question was, is conversion a supernatural action?
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And provisionism doesn't have an answer to that. Well, I think it does, but they don't want to actually admit it.
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Because, yes, men are dead in sin and that's why there has to be a supernatural conversion experience.
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So, yes, conversion, thanks be to God, is a supernatural action.
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Now, obviously, I would like to have said much more at that particular point in time, but, you know, 30 seconds is not a long period of time.
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Now, like I said, there was conversation about that after the debate.
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A lot of people caught that and went, that's interesting. And it's not that it's all that shocking, what was being said there.
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This is what is called semi -Pelagianism. It is not, it does not come out of the
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Reformation. Its continuity is with Roman Catholicism. But what was said by the leading spokesperson for provisionism today,
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Leighton Flowers, is that, well, the gospel is supernatural.
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Not conversion. Because anybody can do that. Anybody can believe. Everybody has the ability to believe.
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So, you want to affirm something miraculous. And so, well, the virgin birth is miraculous.
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And the incarnations are miraculous. The Bible is inspired, and it's miraculous. And the resurrection is miraculous.
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There's miraculous power being expressed everywhere. Yeah, but that's not an answer to the question.
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And if you are, again, familiar with the debate at the Reformation, well, you know,
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Erasmus and Luther. Luther said to Erasmus, you've put your finger on the heart of the matter, the hinge upon which it all turns.
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Was it the freedom or bondage of the will?
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Had to do with man's abilities and capacities. And the Reformation was saying,
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God has to free the will. God has to work supernaturally by the
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Spirit of God. Using the Word of God, the
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Gospel. These are the tools that he uses. And those things have been provided supernaturally.
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But you can provide all the tools you want to a dead man. He's still a dead man.
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And in semi -Pelagianism, man, I wish I had the ability to write on a screen right now.
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But in semi -Pelagianism, imagine this.
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I used to draw this with stick figures, and so maybe I can describe it well enough. It didn't take a whole lot of artistic capacity to express this, because I don't have any artistic capacity.
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Think of three pits. Pits. You know, a pit that you can fall into. The Pelagian pit has a man standing down at the bottom.
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And he's there because of the example of sin around him.
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But it wasn't because of his relationship with Adam. It wasn't because he was born a sinner. It wasn't because he was born dead in trespasses and sins.
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Anything like that. He's down there because of the example of sinners around him.
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And you see Jesus on a ladder. But Jesus isn't coming down to get him.
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He's just lowering the ladder down to him through the example of doing good things. And he can just shimmy on up that ladder if he wants to.
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That's the Pelagian view. Then you have the semi -Pelagian view, which developed after the
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Augustine -Pelagius controversy in the 5th century. And you see it
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Council of Orange, 6th century, and then continuing on from there. Because it's the natural bend of man to move away from sovereign grace to Pelagius.
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That's just the natural bend of man. And so you've got a guy down at the bottom of the pit, and he's got a broken leg.
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He's got a broken arm. You can throw a ladder down to him, but he can't hold on to it.
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So Jesus has to come down and help him. Jesus isn't just going to bring him up, but he will assist him by grace.
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Prevenient grace, the grace of the sacraments, and he'll put a splint on the arm, stuff like that.
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But it's still a cooperative effort. And then in the third pit, you've got a guy laying at the bottom of the pit, and he's got a daisy growing out of his chest.
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He's dead. He's a corpse. And you see the ladder coming down, and Jesus comes down the ladder, raises him to spiritual life, and releases him from the pit without needing any cooperation on his part.
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These are the three pits. Augustinianism, semi -Pelagianism, Pelagianism. So I have a tweet from Leighton Flowers from April 14th.
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A week ago today, I didn't see this happening, but a little bit of a back -and -forth developed.
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I made some comment on Twitter, and Leighton probably did a two -and -a -half -hour video,
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I don't know, and I don't care. But here's what he said.
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Mankind didn't need a fallen sin nature to choose to sin.
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Let's just stop there for a moment. If we're talking about in the garden, that's true.
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This, of course, raises the whole question, which is, in my mind, the complete black hole of Leighton Flowers' theology.
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And that is, was there a divine decree? What's the basis of that decree?
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He just does not have answers to that stuff. That's why he is constantly flirting with open theists and stuff like that, because he just knows.
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He can't go there. It's technically true that mankind, as represented by Adam in the garden, didn't need a fallen sin nature to choose to sin.
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Now he's going to try to make a parallel. Whether it's a biblical parallel, logical, rational, his use of allegory and stuff like that is infamously bad.
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So too, fallen people don't need God to miraculously give them a new nature in order for them to respond positively to his own appeals to be reconciled through the gospel.
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The first thing that's painfully obvious is the attempted parallel is non -existent.
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It's non -existent, at least to anyone who reads the Bible. There is no parallel here.
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He says so too, but there's no foundation for the so too. He says fallen people don't need
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God to miraculously give them a new nature in order for them to respond positively to his own appeals to be reconciled through the gospel.
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So what does being fallen mean? What's the parallel to Adam?
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We're not told because there isn't any. He doesn't think this stuff through at all.
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It's astonishing. But what does the
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Bible say as a result of being fallen? What is a fallen man? What did
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Jesus say to the Jews in John 8? If you sin, you're the slave of sin.
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Only the Son can make you free. But wouldn't that be God miraculously giving them a new nature? Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
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That's exactly what it is. This is the same statement that was being made in the answer in the debate.
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That's why that audience question was very, very good. And Flowers is just being consistent here.
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Fallen people do not need God to miraculously give them a new nature.
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So in the pits, that's Pelagianism. That's full -on, full -throated
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Pelagianism. Fallen people don't need God to miraculously give them a new nature in order for them to respond positively to his own appeals to be reconciled through the gospel.
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Their old nature, fallen as it is, enemy of God, dead in sin, slave to sin.
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Just think of the words the Bible uses to describe what it means to be fallen in Adam.
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Death, slavery, incapacity, inability.
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This is the Bible's language. But it's not the provisionist language.
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Now, what does all this have to do with what we were already talking about in regards to Roman Catholicism?
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I had a brief exchange with Turretinfan on Twitter. He was also commenting on this thread.
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Because you notice, Phil Johnson got into it. Phil Johnson, of course, you'll notice his new icon. Phil has joined the
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Chromedome Club. I think the way I joined the
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Chromedome Club was a whole lot easier than the way that Phil joined the Chromedome Club. But he clearly is trying to look like me with the big white beard and stuff like that.
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Of course, summer's coming, so I've trimmed mine back. I've gone back to the goatee. You don't need any extra insulation in Phoenix from basically
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April, May, June, July, August, September, October, and well into November.
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Anyway, then you can grow up for a while and get ready for Christmas and then get ready to shave right back up.
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Anyway, so Phil had said, fallen people don't need God to respond positively. Your words, not mine.
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So they went back and forth. Flowers is all I was doing. No, it is what he was saying.
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All you've got to do is listen to how he answered that question and recognize what he's saying.
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The supernatural element of the gospel is simply the giving. In Rome, the supernatural element of the gospel is the sacramental system.
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But they also believe in prevenient grace, the necessity of prevenient grace.
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They're semi -Pelagians. They're not full -on Pelagians. I had a brief chat with Turgeon Fan and I said, so would you agree that on this issue, not on purgatory or not on the papacy or priests or transubstantiation, but on the key issue of grace that provisionists are actually below the
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Roman Catholic view? If the biblical view is here, here's the
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Roman Catholic view, semi -Pelagianism. Is this where provisionism is? Agreed.
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On this topic, they are not as close to the truth as Romans. They have a lower view of the necessity of grace and hence a higher view of the capacities of the fallen creature than the
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Council of Trent has. That's what I mean when I say these folks are not coming out of the
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Reformation. I know the churches that they're in right now historically did follow that path, but as far as the theology, doctrine, teaching?
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Nope. Nope. Nope. Not there. Not there. You've got to see it.
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Fallen people don't need God to miraculously give them a new nature because therefore the old nature is completely capable of responding positively to his own appeals to be reconciled through the gospel.
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You can be a slave of sin, dead to sin, enemy of God, heart of stone.
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A heart of stone can choose to become a heart of flesh. That is what Leighton Flowers is saying.
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That is Pelagianism. Period. End of discussion. Just be honest about it and say,
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Yep. Who cares what the name is? That's right. Who cares what the name is? I don't care what you call it.
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But that's why we cannot cooperate together and we are not proclaiming the same message at all.
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Just be straight up front and say, You know what? The Reformers completely blew it.
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I reject them. I reject their gospel message. Mankind in the fallen state is capable.
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The heart of stone can make itself a heart of flesh.
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It's not stubborn. The heart of stone can long to become a heart of flesh and therefore become a heart of flesh.
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You don't have to take it out. You don't have to have a miracle because that is a miracle, by the way.
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It's a miracle to take a heart of stone out and make it a heart of flesh. It's a miracle for the valley of dry bones to come together and become living, breathing human beings.
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It's a miracle for the slave to sin to be unenslaved, to be set free by the
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Son of God. It is a miracle for those who are spiritually dead to be made spiritually alive. It is a miracle for those who have the old
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Adamic nature to be made a new creature in Christ Jesus. Those are all miracles.
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They're the work of the Spirit of God. People need to see just how vastly different these perspectives are and how they will fundamentally change how you present the gospel to people, how you present repentance, what it is, what it's dependent upon, fundamentally.
01:00:06
Big difference. Big, big difference. The last two or three times that we have done the program remotely...
01:00:20
I'm here in the studio. Rich is at home. Rich lives a long ways from here. I didn't want him to have to drive all the way down here because I didn't know when
01:00:26
I was going to be able to get done with all the stuff I was doing with the RV and all that stuff. The last few times we've just gone out with a whimper.
01:00:41
He got the music to play at the beginning, but the last couple of times it didn't work.
01:00:49
It was dead as a doornail. I don't know if this is going to work or not, but here's what's going to happen.
01:00:56
I'm going to say, thanks for watching Dividing Line. I don't know when we're going to be able to do another program.
01:01:03
I might be able to do one Wednesday night from Tucson in the
01:01:08
Mobile Command Center. That is a possibility. We'll see. I'll be down there in plenty of time to do it, but I don't know if there's going to be stuff that I have to do as a speaker before it gets started.
01:01:21
I don't know. We'll see you next time.
01:01:29
Then the time will come for the music to start. If it just gets really quiet, I'll go ahead and hit the music on my end.
01:01:38
Maybe that will work. All that will mean is you'll hear it twice.
01:01:46
We're just being honest about how we're doing. No, not. No, not.
01:01:51
Do it. No, not do it. I love the clarity of the instructions
01:02:01
I'm receiving. It's not working here. Do it. We are just so completely open here.
01:02:12
We've been doing this so long. What does it matter? Here goes the outro, folks.
01:02:18
Ready? There it is.