June 22, 2022 Show with Jeffrey D. Johnson on “The Dangers of Incorporating Pagan Philosophy with Christian Theology”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister, George Norcross, in downtown

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

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

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 22nd day of June 2022.

And I'm thrilled to have back as a returning guest my friend Dr. Jeffrey D. Johnson.

He is founder of Free Grace Press. He is the founding pastor and pastor of preaching and teaching at Grace Bible Church in Conway, Arkansas.

He is also the president and professor of systematic theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas.

Today, we are going to be addressing the very controversial theme, the danger of incorporating pagan philosophy with Christian theology, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

Jeffrey D. Johnson. Chris, it's all my privilege to be back with you.

So thankful for you and for Iron Sharpening Iron. I appreciate that, and I hope that we continue to bump into each other, manning our respective exhibitors' booths at various conferences all over the country.

Yeah, it's always a pleasure to see you at conferences. Yeah, the feeling is mutual.

So tell our listeners, first of all, about Free Grace Press. Yes, Free Grace Press, as we're entering into our 12th year of existence, we started publishing one of my own books as a self -published book, but it turned out that we started thinking we could publish other people's books and bring back some classics reprints, and so we began to do that.

We do about two or three books a year. Now we're doing right around 20 books a year. We're aiming to do 24.

It's kind of our goal, two books a month. So we've upped our production. We now have a team of six people, it seems, working on this.

We've got a warehouse but now looking for a bigger warehouse, so things are growing with our publishing company.

Things are pretty exciting about what's laying ahead for us, the books coming out in the near future.

So that's exciting. At FreeGracePress .com we have, I think, about 60 books right now that we offer.

And so that's exciting for us. Now how can our listeners view the catalog of Free Grace Press?

Well, you just go to FreeGracePress .com, and then there's a link to all of our books.

We have them in categories, theology, commentaries, children's books, systematic theology.

So there's a lot of categories. We started with a lot of theological books, but now we're getting into books for the family, books for children.

So we're seeking to be a very well -balanced Christian publisher from a

Reformed Baptist perspective. So that's FreeGraceBooks .com.

Free Grace Press. Oh, I'm sorry, FreeGracePress .com. Yes.

Okay, great. And now tell us about the congregation where you pastor in Conway, Arkansas, Grace Bible Church.

Yeah, I've been pastoring a church that started in my living room 22 years ago, the year 2000, so it's easy to remember how old we are.

So we're going on our 22nd year. COVID kind of was a problem for us.

It added a lot of members to us. Rather than shrinking, we grew. We almost doubled in size, it seems.

And now our sanctuary holds like 375 and 360 -something, something of that nature.

But now we don't have enough room to hold everybody in. So we've grown a lot in the last couple years.

And so that's encouraging as well for us. So I'm assuming that you grew during the

COVID crisis because you didn't shut down. Well, that's right. We stayed open, and people found us that way.

We're looking to be in church and other churches. We're not willing to be open or scared to be open.

So that worked in our favor for us if you think about church growth.

But now we have the difficulty of placing everybody.

I grew up where I went to school and they told us this 80 % rule. Once you're 80 % of capacity, you won't grow anymore with your parking lot, with your seating.

Once you're 80%, you have to get more space. But we're at 120%, and people still keep coming.

So I'm not for sure what's going on. Where do they fit? Well, we rotate different groups to the seminary and live stream it.

We may do two services, but we surely don't like two services. And so we're rotating.

So one group sits in the seminary building every six weeks, so that it's not every week you're sitting in that building.

So it's not ideal. It's not the way we want it to be, but it's what we're doing. Well, now tell us about Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

Okay, that's right at five years old. We've been in our current building for the last,

I think it's three years. We're celebrating three years of the building that we now occupy.

And so we're right at, in the fall, we predict to have 60 students. So that's our, we're growing.

The seminary's growing as well. We almost have a full faculty. We started with just principally me teaching, but now we have four full -time faculty members on site, you know, residential faculty members.

We also have James White, one of your friends, that's a faculty member, but he comes in.

It looks like it'll be twice a year. And we've got Scott Annual, works with G3 Ministries, that comes in, he's teaching in class.

Yeah, I just interviewed him yesterday. Yeah, so he's a great brother. And then Dr. Owen Strand is one of our residential faculty members.

Dr. Jeff Moore over New Testament. Preston Kelso over Old Testament.

So we just need a biblical counselor. And that's what we're working on.

And I think we'll have a full faculty. We've got several staff members that help run this place.

It's pretty exciting. And you've got to tell Dr. Owen Strand that he promised me to come back on the program when

I met him an evening with John MacArthur at Northern Kentucky University, so I'm going to hold him to his promise and I hope that he comes back on soon.

Yeah, I'll get on to him. I'll get him for you. Now, it's not evident in my ears, but some listeners are saying that you keep fading out.

I'm getting emails. So if you could make sure that your mouth is always near whatever mouthpiece you're using, whether it's a phone or a microphone or what have you.

I'm not sure what the situation is, why I'm getting these reports from listeners, but try to make sure that you're as close to whatever you're speaking into as possible.

Okay, I'm using some earbuds. Maybe that might be a problem.

I don't know because it's not a problem in my ears. It's just what some people are reporting who are listening.

Okay. Well, also let me give the websites for your church and seminary.

GBCConway .com is the website for Grace Bible Church in Conway, Arkansas.

GBCConway .com. And also, regarding the seminary, Grace Bible Theological Seminary, GBTSeminary .org.

GBT for Grace Bible Theological Seminary .org. GBTSeminary .org.

Well, as I said, our theme today is quite controversial. One of the reasons that it's quite controversial is that it is a bone of contention.

It is an area of divide among those that profess to be

Reformed Baptists and even confessional Reformed Baptists. And it likely goes beyond just that scope.

But the theme is the dangers of incorporating pagan philosophy with Christian theology.

And if you could, perhaps start with a definition of philosophy and then define theology.

Yeah, thanks, Chris. Well, that's why I say pagan philosophy because I'm not anti -philosophy because philosophy is like mathematics or any other discipline.

It's just, it's asking questions. Philosophers are asking questions and there's nothing wrong with the questions that they ask.

In fact, philosophy is asking the most basic and fundamental questions that could be asked.

It's not worried about what color my car is. That's not the central problem of philosophy. It's worried about why there's a car or existence to begin with.

It's asking ultimate questions like, is there a God or what's the cause of the universe?

It's asking questions of who's in charge of morality and how do we know what we know?

So it's asking fundamental basic questions and the answers to these questions will shape everything else that we believe.

And so it's asking these questions and the Bible simply has answers to these questions.

So it's not that philosophical questioning is wrong or bad.

Our philosophers are bad. Philosophy simply means the love of wisdom. And so that's not what we're attacking or we're not anti any of these things.

But what we mean by pagan philosophy, we're looking at answers that are derived outside of divine revelation.

Either revelation is given to us in nature as we believe God has revealed himself to us in nature, that there are certain truths that we know in nature.

That's what we find in Romans 1. That's right. Romans 1, Psalm 19, and Acts 17 and so forth.

We know by nature without the Bible that God is at least two things.

He's transcendent. He's outside of the universe. He's not a part of the universe.

And we know that he's personal. And we know that he's providentially, according to Acts 17, he's providentially, personally in control of the universe.

Now we know both truths, that God is outside the universe, but yet personally involved in ruling the universe.

This is something all humanity, the Bible says, we all know, every language group, every person, every age category knows.

And we know this because it is written in nature, and it's a knowledge that is communicated to us instantaneously.

I'm not saying that it's innate knowledge, that we don't need nature to know it.

We do need nature. We need the world, the universe, to know this. But it's knowledge that's communicated to us instantly.

Like when my father calls me on the phone, and says, hey, son, how are you doing? I know instantly it's my father who called me.

He doesn't have to say, this is dad, or this is Don Johnson. I know instantly by the sound of his voice who it is.

The human race knows instantly about God by the observation of this revelation communicated to us in nature.

First of all, are you actually the son of renowned actor of Miami Vice fame,

Don Johnson? Oh, you know, when

I was a kid, that was the common question I always got asked. But I don't get that anymore because very few people know who the actor

Don Johnson is. But yeah, my dad's name is

Don Johnson, but not the actor. I knew that. I just thought I'd throw that in there.

Yeah. So we know God through that way, and we know God more clearly in scriptures.

So we have two ways in which we know God, and it's both ways, however, is communication from above.

God is revealing, communicating, speaking to us. And both forms of communication is infallible and authoritative and undeniable.

Now, we can suppress it and we can verbally deny it, but God knows we're lying to ourselves. He knows that we do know these truths.

Okay, so that's one way of knowing God. Pagan philosophy is an attempt to know

God by acting as if there is no divine communication.

In other words, seeking to discover God from the ground up and basically building their own construction of God.

And the problem with that method of seeking to know God, this idea that God is transcendent and the idea that God is also imminent or near,

He's far and near, that He's different, but He is also personal and relatable.

These two conceptions or these two truths, pagan philosophers cannot reconcile.

They're not able to explain how God can be both. And so by using their own method of starting from the ground up, they are going to end up counseling either

God's imminence or God's transcendence. And every form of pagan philosophy does this.

If you look at the different models of God outside of Christian philosophers, outside of the

Christian assistants, like let's take Thomas Aquinas and the medieval scholastics out of the picture and just look at pagan philosophers that are not seeking to reconcile their philosophy with the

Bible, none of the pagan philosophers get anything close to the

God of the Bible. None of them have anything that resembles the

God of the Bible. They have deism or pantheism or agnosticism or some form of impersonal deity, but very few of them, in fact, very few of them or any of them can get to a personal

God who remains independent and separate from the universe.

You either go all the way that he's pantheistic, that he's one with the universe and central to the universe and the universe is central to God, which is heretical, or you get to a

God who doesn't even know the universe or is unaware of the universe or doesn't care about the universe, some form of deism.

And so that pagan philosophy takes us away from what Revelation teaches us, that God is both transcendent and imminent.

So theology, in contrast, would be a study of what Revelation teaches us?

That's exactly right. So this is not a tack on reason or logic.

In fact, it's my position that only theology or that which is derived from Revelation, natural and special Revelation, gives us a coherent worldview or system of God that is consistent with itself.

Every pagan model of God is inherently inconsistent with itself.

It runs into problems, not just problems down the line, it runs into problems that contradict some of its foundational teachings.

So it's inherently absurd. And so we have to have

Revelation, and natural Revelation reveals that God is both transcendent and imminent, but it doesn't tell us how he can be both.

But the Bible comes in with the doctrine of the Trinity, which in my understanding is the explanation of how

God can be both different but similar outside of the world, but yet relatable and personable.

So theology gives us the answers to the questions of philosophy.

And throughout the years as a Christian, I have noticed that very often the tensions and disputes and debates between theologically reformed

Christians and evangelical Arminian Christians, when it comes to those who are actually published, those that are authors, those that are on the faculties of seminaries and sometimes the president of seminaries, the charge has been very often by the reformed side that the

Arminian side is making too much use, if not exclusive use, of philosophy.

And there appears to be a lot of eisegesis going on on the part of the philosopher where he is taking his presupposition that according to his own understanding of things,

Calvinism could not be true. It could not possibly be the theology that describes the

God of love that they know. And so they begin to try to force all of Scripture to follow in line with their philosophy.

And whereas the reformed exegete is typically trying to just stick with texts and exegete them properly.

Am I correct in that tension that seems to have been going on?

That's exactly right. I've been listening to more and more philosophical theologians reading their books, and you've got two types of people who are seeking to synthesize philosophy with Scriptures.

And I'm seeking to say let's get pagan philosophy out and let's just stick to Scriptures as our sole authority.

But those who are using philosophy as their metrics are often trying to fit

Scriptures into their philosophical systems. And this is what you talk about with Arminianism.

It's this belief of what it means to have libertarian free will. And they have this definition according to philosophy what libertarian free will must be for that to be.

And that becomes a presupposition. And now that has to be true. That is a cardinal fact that you take into Scriptures as something you cannot deny or you cannot throw away.

Then ultimately you're going to subject Scriptures to that paradigm or to that presupposition, and then that will lead you to deny

God is sovereign and that God preordains and predestines. And it will lead to a rejection of God's freedom of sovereignty if you take that as a precommitment.

I see that in all areas of theology where you have this commitment that you gained from some source outside of Scriptures.

Or maybe it's some philosopher you've read or your own intuition or your own reasoning.

And that becomes a non -negotiable. And once you take something that's a non -negotiable into Scriptures, you're going to end up going to read the text and a lot of that non -negotiable.

And then we should say, no, we're going to the Scriptures as the non -negotiable.

Everything I bring into Scriptures has to be judged and corrected. So I have all kinds of beliefs I take to the

Scriptures. Not every one of them is bad. So I'm not saying clear your mind of everything. It's impossible to clear your mind of the blank slate.

So I'm going into Scriptures with all kinds of conceptions. But the

Scriptures has got to challenge every one of those conceptions. And some may stand and some have got to get rid of.

But how do I know which one stands and which ones do I throw away? Well, it has to be the text.

So the text has to be the authority that is non -negotiable.

Even if I don't understand it. The Bible is unique. It's the only authority and it's the only standard that I must believe even if I can't reconcile it with my other beliefs because it's

God who says it. Therefore, I know He's right. Therefore, I have to believe it.

It's like, well, can you explain the Trinity in every particular detail? Well, I don't know if I have to believe it.

Can you explain exactly the beginnings of sin? Well, I don't know if I can.

But I do know God is sovereign and He's not the author of sin. Well, how do I know that? Well, because the Bible teaches both of these.

Well, how do you reconcile God's sovereignty and man's responsibility? Well, I can seek to do what

I can. And I think I can come very close to it. But in the end, even if I can't, I know that Scripture's true.

And that is the non -negotiable. And so often, you know, I read people over and over and over and they're really twisting

Scriptures and molding Scriptures like a wax nose to fit their system rather than adjusting their system to fit

Scriptures. Yes, I mean, whenever I have had an encounter with an

Arminian and we're going back and forth about the differences we have between we who are

Calvinists and they who are Arminians, the definitions will come up by the

Arminian, or should I say just those outside of the Reformed faith, because I have found that most

Arminians do not like to be called Arminians, whereas we who are

Reformed typically, not always, but typically do not mind being called Calvinists, even though we know that our beliefs come from the

God -breathed words of Scripture, but we have accepted over the years that nickname of Calvinism.

But when a verse or verses come up, such as in Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 8, you read, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.

And the non -Reformed person will say, well, it's not meaning what you think it's meaning,

Mr. Calvinist, because a gift has to be willingly accepted in order for it to be a gift.

Now, there you have a definition that is not in the Scripture. There's no verse or even context in the

Scripture that provides a definition like that, that a gift must be willingly... So, therefore, they have this bizarre scenario of not only the lost person accepting

Christ, they have the lost person accepting his faith in Christ, which makes no sense. As if an angel appears before them and says,

God has sent me this gift of faith to you. Do you willingly accept the faith?

Obviously, that scenario never occurs. And it also stems from their misunderstanding.

They think that God... Well, they think that we believe that God forces us against our will to believe in him rather than the biblical truth that he gives us a new heart and makes us willing.

So, wouldn't you say that that's a philosophical area where the Arminian or the non -Reformed person is presenting a situation that has nothing to do with biblical exegesis, but has to do with a philosophical definition of a gift, meaning that you must be willingly receiving it for it to be a gift, which is not even a true definition?

That's right, yes. It's somewhat circular reasoning in the sense that it would take faith to receive the gift of faith, so where do you get the gift of faith to receive it?

Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I think that part of the problem...

There's a lot of problems that we have when we enter into the scriptures. Part of it is that we want to be autonomous.

We don't want to give up on our own local autonomy.

I think part of that attraction to philosophy, one, there's this intellectual autonomy that I don't need

God's revelation. I don't need to submit to a gift of God saying, this is the way it is, and we go, oh,

I wouldn't have known that if you wouldn't have told me, but now that you've told me, I can make sense of the world around me.

People don't want that revelation as a gift. They want to be able to work their way to their own understanding of what they want

God to be or what they think God is, and they want to suppress the gift of revelation and unrighteousness and build their own conception of God, which ends up being an idol or a false god.

And I think that's part of just the Armenians desiring to have autonomy and control of salvation.

If I'm going to be saved, I need to be the one who is the ultimate determining factor in my own salvation, or otherwise

I don't want a salvation that I think is something I'm not in control of.

And that's back to the fall of humanity, that we're fallen human creatures, and we're seeking to be

God. We're seeking to be autonomous. We're seeking to be in control. We're seeking to set the terms, and we don't like giving that up.

We don't like to be in submission. We don't have to demand that, hey, God isn't in control. I have to surrender my thoughts and my life, my authority to his authority and bow to him.

And I do believe Christianity is a rational, coherent religion.

And I think God doesn't have to explain everything to demand faith. He doesn't have to explain everything for us to say, hey,

I'm going to bow down to the fact that God is transcendent, independent of the world.

He's autonomous. He doesn't need the world for his own existence. But yet he's able to be relatable and personable, and I can have a conversation with God in a real meaningful way and have true fellowship and communion with God.

These things may appear to be contradictory when it comes to pagan philosophers, and you can't have both.

You can't have your cake and eat it, too, as far as pagan philosophy is concerned. But Scripture has revealed both, and I think it's coherent because of the

Trinity. And so it's not irrational. It's actually rational. But even if I can't solve that riddle,

I can say God knows. He is God, and I'm not.

Therefore, I'm going to trust that what he is saying is true, and my feeble, finite mind is mistaken.

It's not that we throw out logic. It's the fact that my mind is too small to comprehend all the factors and all the true claims that are necessary to pull all the mysteries out of Scripture.

And one thing, an analogy that might hopefully bring an end to the ridiculous responses by the non -Reformed about a gift requiring free acceptance on the part of the one receiving it, just imagine a scenario where you are unconscious on an operating table, and I donate my blood to you or an organ or even pay for the surgery, and you're unconscious.

You're not freely accepting these things. So therefore, you're still receiving a gift, aren't you, even though you're unconscious?

I think that's just one thing for them to think about. But we have to go to our first break, and when we return, I want to know specifically how

Reformed people may be abusing or misusing philosophy, and not only that, but making it apparently a requirement for us to rightly understand the word of God.

And now we're going to really get ourselves in trouble, possibly. But if anybody has any questions for Dr.

Jeffrey D. Johnson, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the entire program is Dr.

Jeffrey D. Johnson, President and Professor of Systematic Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas.

If you have a question for us regarding the dangers of incorporating pagan philosophy with Christian theology, submit it to chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

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And Dr. Johnson, before the break I said that I'd like you to now reveal to us how you are seeing things that you would deem to be very problematic amongst fellow

Reformed Christians that involve the incorporation of pagan philosophy with Christian theology.

Yeah, you're seeing it more and more. We're seeing it essentially with seeking to integrate

Aristotelian philosophy on the doctrine of God, which Aristotelian philosophy is really deistic, that God is an impersonable being that can only contemplate about himself and is unaware of the universe and all that is transpiring in history and time.

And so the God of Aristotle is not the God of the Bible, but the various philosophy that got

Aristotle to come to this deistic ultimate being is being incorporated in the church, principally through scholastic schoolman

Thomas Aquinas, and that's being revived today. And what's troubling to me is you have an authority that says this is who

God is, and not just his existence, but this is what God looks like. Here are the attributes of God based upon this model of God that logically leads to deism.

However, deism is incompatible with the Christian God of the Bible, so we need to correct

Aristotelianism. We've got to correct it through scriptures. So we need to not just embrace

Aristotelianism. We have to integrate it in Christianity, which means

Christianity has got to change it or shape it. But what

I believe is happening is not only is Aristotelian philosophy being reshaped and reformed in a way it's not meant to be reformed.

It's incongruent with the system itself. It ends up impacting the

God of the Bible. So you're seeking to synthesize two distinct worldviews that have fundamental different perceptions and conceptions of God.

And when you try to mesh these together, both the Christian God is perverted or twisted, and the

God of Aristotle, his conception of God, is also messed up.

So you neither have the God of the Bible nor the God of Aristotle remaining because I believe these two systems are incoherent.

And that to me is very dangerous. I don't see Christians wanting to synthesize

Islam with Christianity. I mean, maybe there are some out there seeking to do that. But if you're seeking to merge two systems of thought together, especially if they're contradictory at not secondary issues or tertiary issues, but they're contradictory at the primary levels, at the fundamental levels, how do you do that without twisting both systems in a way they're not meant to be twisted?

By the way, there are people out there who have a concept known as Chris -Lom who are trying to do the very thing that you mentioned.

But now how specifically have Reformed Christians or even other

Christians that you would deem as your brothers and sisters in Christ, how are they specifically developing false understandings of God using the framework of Aristotelian philosophy?

Well, it's a basic argument that we can get to God through empirical reasoning, through kind of starting off on natural science, that let's study the universe.

Let's not submit to divine revelation that there is some concrete things that we know about God before we get into the

Inquirer. We don't need a syllogism, we don't need empirical evidence in formulating some type of scientific conclusion.

There are certain truths that God gives us through nature instantly, and that,

I believe, is the foundation of all of our other knowledge. We begin with the knowledge that there's a God and that he's the creator, and that makes sense of the world around us, and we take that for granted or as a given.

We don't need to prove it. It's already been given. We just bow down to it and accept it.

Now, if we don't accept what God has given, now let's try to come up with a God through proofs and through our own explanation, and so Aristotle sought to do that through the study of the universe.

So he was a scientist, and the thing that he learned through observation of the world that everything in the world is in motion.

And he also learned that everything in motion is caused by something else that's in motion, but he can come to the conclusion that's not an efficient explanation of everything because there's no beginning explanation.

It just defers to explanation down the road. So you can't have an infinite regression of causes.

Therefore, there must be a first unmover or first cause that itself is not in motion.

And by that method of coming to the existence of God, you're already defining God as a

God that is unable to move. And Aristotle said, yeah, God can't move.

He's stuck. He's in a stagnant, immobile, unmoved position.

That's why he's called the unmoved mover. He can't move himself. He can't move the universe. He can't create. So Aristotle says, yeah, this being cannot be the active creator of the universe.

He's the moving cause, which means he exists, and he's the moving cause because he's what

Aristotle called the final cause. The whole world is seeking to become like God, is loving

God, aspiring to be like God. So the world is trying to be like God, whose pure actuality in everything in the world is potentiality seeking to become pure actuality.

And the whole world is moving towards God. So God is moving the world without him being aware that he's moving the world.

It would be like a pretty girl walking into a room, and all the guys look at her.

But she's not trying to make them look. She's just unaware that they're looking. But she's the cause of their looking, even though she's not doing anything actively to make them look.

So God is the final cause of the universe, though he didn't actively rule it into existence.

He didn't actively exert energy in the creation of the universe. And so that proof that proves the existence of God proves the wrong

God. It proves a deistic God. Now Thomas Aquinas wants to take that and go, hey, let's integrate that proof into Christianity.

But he incorporates that unmoved mover attribute into Christianity.

He's like, well, the Bible doesn't teach that God is incapable of moving. So Thomas Aquinas has to somehow adjust the

Bible to conform to Aristotle's understanding of an unmoved mover. But he also has to readjust the unmoved mover to be the creator of a nonexistent universe out of nothing.

So that's the rub of two fundamental opposing systems trying to be meshed together.

And that ends up leading to all forms of extra attributes that the

Bible doesn't teach. And what happens when you do that, you begin to interpret when the

Bible speaks of God's activity like the activity of predestination, which is the activity that God does before he does another activity of salvation.

So in God, there is an activity of foreknowledge. Well, according to Thomas Aquinas, there cannot be such a thing as foreknowledge.

Because you have an act taking place before another act, and that would mean a change or a movement in God.

And there cannot be movement in God. Therefore, there's no such thing as an act before another act or succession in God.

So therefore, God has to be timeless. And then that leads to a confusion between God's essence and God's operations and God's activity.

Now, I would want to make clear that most of the people who do this will verbally say, we don't want to confuse

God's essence with his works. Who God is in himself is not what he does.

The act of creating is not essential to who God is in his essence.

But once you have this immobile, timeless being that cannot do things in succession, then you have a hard time separating who

God is from what God does. Because God is, in the very definition of God, he is pure actuality.

He is who he is without differentiation. And so his knowledge and his activity is as much as who he is as any other attribute.

Therefore, that modal collapse leads to kind of this idea of a modal collapse where God and his works become one and the same.

And once you get to that point, how does that not make God dependent upon his works, his free works?

And once you get him dependent upon his free works, then that means creation is necessary to God.

And that leads to some form of pantheism. In fact, let's pick up on your comment about pantheism when we return from our midway break.

Please be patient with us, folks. The midway break is always longer than the other breaks because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

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That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Dr. Jeffrey D. Johnson. The questions should be on the dangers of incorporating pagan philosophy with Christian theology.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. And before I go to any listener questions,

Dr. Johnson, before the break you just made a statement that had something to do with the dangers of drawing a conclusion about God that involves pantheism.

Yeah. See, there seems to be a desire, when we go back to where we started, where there's this desire to integrate

Christianity, the worldview that we get or we receive from revelation through natural revelation and scriptures, which those two forms of revelation agree with one another.

And when you seek to incorporate pagan philosophy that rejects revelation, and it comes with conclusions like deism or pantheism or atheism into Christianity, there's something, there's going to be a war.

And believe it or not, there are people who seek to do this. Peter Forst, for example, is a Christian pantheist.

Like, well, how does pantheism… What was his name? Peter Forst. Forst, just like the woods and the trees and Forst?

Right. So you have people like him or Paul Tillich. Paul Tillich is an atheist, a

Christian atheist. Can you imagine that? So you have people who do not even believe that God is an existing being, but still believe the word

God, the term God, is useful, and scriptures are useful, even though he doesn't believe there's an actual being called

God. Or Peter Forst who believes that God and the universe are essentially the same.

These are incompatible systems. So how do they even use the Bible? Why even call yourself a

Christian? Why would you even go to the Bible? Well, what they do, they end up taking everything that the

Bible would say that contradicts pantheism or, for Paul Tillich, would contradict atheism.

They turn it into a metaphor. Everything's metaphoric. These are not… Obviously, he's not talking about a, for Paul Tillich, personal

God. He's not actually talking about a real being. We know that this being is ineffable, and he doesn't really enter into the process of existence.

So he doesn't exist, and so the whole Bible becomes metaphorical. And so my question is, when you integrate pagan philosophy with scriptures, the ultimate question becomes, who is in charge or controls the metaphors of the

Bible? Now, that's important because we acknowledge that there are many metaphors in anthropomorphic language and scriptures.

The prime example is God's hand's not too short, that he can't help us, and that God has eyes, and God has these bodily features, and he's communicated as having arms and eyes and ears.

But we know that that's anthropomorphic language, that's a metaphor, that God is without body.

You know, God's without body, parts, or passions. We affirm that, that God is a simple being without physical components and parts.

And so we know that when the Bible speaks of that, it's a metaphorical language. Well, how do we know that God's without a body?

How do we know that? Do we know it because Aristotelian philosophy tells us that, or because the

Bible tells us that? Well, we know that God's without a body because the Bible says

God is a spirit. And we know that God doesn't contradict himself, and we know that God uses metaphors.

So it's easy when the Bible is controlling the metaphor, the Bible is in charge of what is metaphoric, anthropomorphic, so that the scriptures interpret scriptures.

So ultimately, who's in charge of the metaphor is scriptures themselves. But what happens when you try to integrate philosophy with Christianity or the

Bible, it becomes the philosophy, such as atheism, or Paul Tillich, or Peter Forrest, it becomes pantheism that controls the metaphor.

And then, or Pseudo -Dionysius, who was a Neoplatonist, who took, you know,

Neoplatonism, or Neoplatonism, and sought to integrate it into Christianity. And he essentially said

God's beyond all knowledge, and all of the language of scriptures is metaphorical, and it really doesn't teach us anything of the true nature of God as God is in himself.

And so what you end up doing when you take pagan philosophies and integrate them into Christianity, you have the pagan philosophy itself controlling the metaphors of scriptures.

And that's, you know, even though they would say, hey, scriptures are going to critique and correct the handmaiden philosophy, it seems to, in reality, in practice, it seems to be the handmaiden philosophy,

Greek philosophy, that is shaping the interpretation and the exegesis of scriptures.

So, with this who's in control of the metaphor question, the simple solution is the

Bible. Let God speak for himself, and the clear passages will help us understand the unclear passages, like Jesus saying,

I'm a door. That's a metaphorical phrase. We know that because of everything else that we learn about who

Jesus is. And so I think that is a key way of explaining how

Christian philosophy has no real place. I mean,

I'm sorry, pagan philosophy doesn't have a real place in Christianity. Now, in regard to Aristotelian philosophy, isn't this how the

Church of Rome has sought to explain the idolatry, or we would call it the idolatry, of transubstantiation that takes place in their minds in the mass, which makes the bread and wine objects of worship and idolatry?

Yes, I was just reading that today, and John Duns Scotus, who was also a contemporary of, well, actually, he was born about a few years before Thomas Aquinas died, and it's basically 20, 30 years later in his life after Aquinas.

But Duns Scotus was talking about his understanding of a consubstantiation, so he kind of rejected transubstantiation, kind of like Luther did, in a way.

But I'm not fully convinced I understand his understanding of this yet, so I don't want to speak too much about it.

But as I'm reading this, Duns Scotus is saying that when it comes to these truths, certain truths of this nature, are we relying, you know, he's going back and forth in his mind, relying upon Aristotelian logic or scriptures.

And so, as you said, we would not have the doctrine of transubstantiation if it wasn't for Aristotelian metaphysics.

Yes, the substance and accident phraseology that is used by Rome to try to make sense to people, to deceive them.

Obviously, I'm not saying that they're intentionally deceiving them, but when they see real bread and real wine, they are to believe that is really, truly the body, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ.

We have Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, who says,

I know that pretty much universally evangelicals say that God has no body.

Now, I do not believe in the heresies of Mormonism and others that says that God the

Father has a physical body. But would it not be more appropriate than saying

God does not have a body to say that the Father and the Spirit do not have bodies, because Jesus Christ, after his ascension into heaven, retained his physical body and is forever the

God -man? Yeah, that's a very hard and difficult question. I think it's best for us to say

God does not have a body, because in the Incarnation, the second person of the

Trinity does not cease in any degree, in any way, from his divine nature.

The apostolic union is somewhat of a mystery, at least it is a mystery to me. You have one nature, two persons.

I mean, one person is two natures. It's fully God, fully man. And by being fully

God, he remains a spirit.

One of the most amazing passages is in 1 John, where Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, and he says this phrase that we often read right past.

It says, except the Son of Man, which is talking about himself, which is in heaven.

So he is basically declaring that in his human flesh, he's right there present with Nicodemus, but in his divine nature, he is omnipresent and still with the

Father in heaven. So the divine nature remains the divine nature and incorporeal, simple, without body or parts.

And so we want to uphold that and not confuse the divine nature with the human nature. But it is proper, with the apostolic union, to say that Jesus is the mad

God. And what is most humbling to me to consider is that the second person of the

Trinity didn't drop off the human nature in his body after he ascended to heaven, and say, hey,

I did that, I'm done with that. No, he's forever the God -man. And that, to me, is quite remarkable.

Well, we have an anonymous listener who says, I'm remaining anonymous because I am right in the thick of things involving the disputes that you are addressing amongst

Reformed Baptists. I was just wondering, are there specific heresies or dangers of heresies that those whom you are critiquing today are accusing you and your fellow believers of participating in?

I'm not for sure I understand the question. It seems like the listener is asking you, are there specific heresies that you are being accused of because of your rejection of the insistence of Aristotelianism, the

Socratic method, Platonism, Thomism, all that stuff? Yeah, I mean, here's what's difficult.

I understand wanting to be anonymous. Sometimes I wish I was anonymous these days. The difficulty is, is one of these conversations should be with more humility and more conversations with unity rather than throwing each other's disagreeing with one another into the heretical pile, or counseling each other.

People are afraid to talk about it because they're going to get canceled or they're going to get browbeat, and that's just unfortunate.

And many people out there are just uncertain what to think, and so they're afraid to say one thing or another, afraid they're going to get mistreated, and I think that's terrible.

And so I think both sides have to worry about dangers. I mean, there's dangers to the left, there's dangers to the right, and obviously we don't want to fall into some type of Aaronism, or we don't want to fall into some type of Tritheism, we don't want to fall into Pantheism on one side and Deism on the other side.

And so you've got these two tensions, that God is transcendent,

God's eminent, that God's outside of creation, but He's also providentially controlling all things, and He's relatable,

He's a covenant God that enters into real relationships with His people.

He created us for us to have communion, in fact, that's what Jesus prayed in John 17.

So you have kind of this tension, and we don't want to fall into Open Theism or Process Theism, and so some who disagree with me may say,

Jeff Johnson's sliding to Open Theism, and I'm like, no, I don't want to slide there,

I've put my boundaries there, I believe God is immutable, that He's simple, I want to hold to these attributes that I think are essential to the transcendence of God.

But on the other side, I could easily be uncharitable and say the other side is going to fall into Pantheism and Atheism and Deism, and I think that's uncharitable as well.

I think the other side is truly seeking to preserve the godness of God, that God is the creator,

He's transcendent, He's not like us, and so their motive is good and right, and I think they're truly seeking to say something that preserves the transcendence of God, and I'm listening to that,

I'm going, wait a minute, you've got to also hold to the eminence of God, you don't want to make God into a creature, He's not like us, but also we don't want to go into Deism, and so maybe we're fighting this balance here, and when we're conversating among ourselves, we're pushing our side, and that's causing the other side to push your side, and it's just not a helpful way of doing it, maybe we can learn from one another, but it seems to come down to four attributes that's in contention, and it's the attributes related to the transcendence of God.

Both sides want to say that God is a say, that He is independent and self -existent, both sides agree to that, both sides hold to the omniscience of God, on the presence of God, and the goodness of God, there's not a contention on these attributes, they're affirmed vigorously on both sides.

It seems like the real debate is reduced down to four particular attributes, and that is the timelessness of God, the simplicity of God, and the ability of God, and the impassibility of God.

Now the open theist, and neo -theist, and the process theist, and pantheist, they're all going to deny four of those, all four of them, they deny them, and say all four of them are extra -biblical, and pagan philosophy influence, and I'm like no,

I don't think those four are altogether pagan influence, I think the Bible teaches the immutability of God, the simplicity of God, and the impassibility of God, but there are strong views, strong versions of immutability, and there's a soft version of immutability.

There's a strong view of simplicity, and a soft view, and most people don't realize that here you've got

Thomas Aquinas, who had a strong view of simplicity, but here's another Catholic theologian, a schoolman named

John Duns, who had a soft view of simplicity. He would say yes,

I believe that God's without body parts, he's without temporal parts, he's without spatial parts, affirm all three of those, but his essence is not identical with his attributes, and not all his attributes are identical with one another, there are real logical distinctions between the attributes of God, and Aquinas wouldn't say that, so that Duns' goddesses upholding the bond simplicity, here's a pre -reformer, upholding simplicity, but in a soft version of it.

Well, okay, maybe you can hold to simplicity without holding to the strong version, which

I tend to think the strong version of simplicity has a hard time not collapsing

God's essence with God's operations, what God is with what

God does. Now, this is the understanding that God's love is the same as his wrath, and his mercy is the same as his wrath.

I don't even understand that. How is, when we convey the gospel to a lost person, and we begin to speak to them about the nature of God and correct false notions about God that they may have, false presuppositions, how do we even explain that without people thinking that we're out of our minds?

I don't mean to insult anybody who holds that view, but I just don't even, I can't even comprehend it.

If you say that the mercy and wrath of God are the same thing, well, they are extended to two different people.

The elect receive his mercy, the reprobate receive his wrath, and there are totally different consequences.

So I don't even understand how you can say they're the same. Yeah, how does heaven and hell actually identical in the, you know, like you said, the love of God and the wrath of God are the good favor of God with the wrath of God.

How are they identical in God? Well, Duns Scotus says that that's impossible. And so he's rejecting that hard form or strong form of simplicity.

And I think, okay, there is a way of holding simplicity, that God's without body. You know, he's not a physical creature.

He's a spirit. And wherever God is, all of God is, you know. This is amazing, mind -blowing thought that all of God is, is all of his attributes.

I believe they're all coessential necessary attributes. And each attribute defines the other attributes.

God's love is sovereign. God's love is just. Everything that God is can be described as God's love.

But you could put any of God's attributes in the middle, and all the attributes equally describe one another.

And so they're codependent and coessential. But to collapse them in together destroys all meaningful conversation and understanding of God.

Unless God becomes agnostic, or God becomes unknowable, like Pseudo -Dionysius would claim, that we really don't know

God. And all of language of scriptures is just anthropomorphic. All of language of scriptures is metaphor.

And thus the Bible just is meant to jumpstart our mind into the unknown, and you get into some form of Christian mysticism.

And I don't think that God's revelation is designed to lead us to a deception that we can only know a picture of God, that we can never know the actual

God. And so that's why I think a strong view of simplicity, it leads to these consequences that I don't think are helpful.

And so let's uphold simplicity because the Bible teaches that God is a spirit. And that wherever God is, all of God is.

If God is in the room that I'm in, he's all my presence, I don't have a part of God.

And over there where you're at, you've got the other part of God. He's without spatial parts.

He's without body parts. And so I uphold that. And so I think there's a way of talking about these things without saying, well, the other side,

Jeff Johnson's side, he just denied simplicity. I think, no, I've never denied simplicity.

Now, has that actually been an accusation? Oh, yeah. People say

I don't believe in the immutability of God because I think God is able to act, and he has free acts of the will.

And I think Aristotle's view of divine simplicity would lead to God cannot act.

Any activity of God would be a change in God. That's confusing

God's actions with God's essence. God's essence does not change. He is who he is and always will be who he is.

But to say that God is, is one thing. To say that God's actions can't change is quite another thing.

So I believe God has operations. And at the bare minimum, they're in a logical succession, at least a logical succession.

Forbiddation is a logical act prior to the act of creation, at least logically. It may not have to be chronologically prior, but at least logically there is.

One comes before two. They come together. Maybe they're instantaneously can't have one without the other, but there's a logical priority to one taking place before two.

And so there is some deep concepts that we have to think through.

But we need to have these conversations rather than just saying the other side doesn't know what they're talking about and they're denying cardinal truths of orthodoxy or they're outside the great tradition, which

I think that's very unhelpful. And we have to go to our final break right now. It'll be a lot more brief than the other breaks.

If you have a question for Dr. Jeffrey D. Johnson, please send it in immediately because we're rapidly running out of time.

chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com We'll be right back. Don't go away.

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Welcome back, and Dr. Jeffrey D. Johnson, we have a question from one of the most loyal of the

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listeners in Asheboro, North Carolina, Grady. Greetings, brothers.

I would have thought that this would be coming from new believers that are coming out of cults or the

Catholic Church, but you said a person that is claiming to be a Christian atheist is also doing this.

Are there other Christians believing these unbelievers? And I'm not sure exactly what

Grady meant by his question, but maybe you do. Yeah, well, Paul Tillich is a crazy neo -Orthodox, and very few reform, but we're not paying much attention to Paul Tillich.

So I'm not saying Christian atheism is widespread, or that's even something to take note of.

I'm just using him as an illustration or an example of trying to blend incompatible systems together.

And you've got Christian Platonism, Christian atheism, Christian pantheism,

Christian Aristarcheanism. You know, you've got Christian to any other of these isms, and I think that's just something

I'm just trying to make a point when you be very careful to avoid, that scriptures themselves are sufficient to give us all the answers to all the philosophical questions.

So it's not an attack on philosophy or reason. Christianity is very rational, and philosophy asks important questions.

So we need to have a philosophy. It needs to be a philosophy that is derived from revelation as the authority, and not seeking those who suppress the truth and unrighteousness as trustworthy gods to shape our understanding of the

Bible. And so the goal is to not synthesize opposing world views together.

I mean, we're all prone to do this. We're all prone to do this.

I think in the early church, you had people like Justin Martyr, who was a philosopher, become a

Christian. You have people like Origen, and before him, you have Clement of Alexandria. You've got these church fathers that begin to integrate their philosophical positions because they were philosophers prior to accepting

Christ. And rather than just leaving aside all their philosophical preconceptions, they brought them with them and integrated them into Christianity.

I think we have to read Origen, and we have to read Clement of Alexandria with discernment.

They're not just exegeting the scriptures. They have baggage, and some of that baggage is very evident.

Like, okay, wait, look at what Clement is saying here. Look at what Origen is saying on this side. That's clearly not anything that confessional

Reformed Baptists or Christians would uphold to today. And so I think we're all prone to do that.

And one way, like I said, I'm not saying, you know, I'm charged, some people charge me as a Biblicist.

I'm not saying that I'm able to read the Bible without false perceptions and false prenotions.

I have tons of them. And when I read the Bible, I'm surely bringing those into the text. But hopefully

I'm seeking to, as I learned the Bible, I was like, wait a minute, that was wrong. What I thought yesterday was wrong.

This text clearly tells me that that's not the case.

And so I'm subjecting everything that I'm bringing into the text to the text itself.

And is that 100 % perfectly possible? Probably not. But we should aim to do exegesis more than we do eisegesis.

Draw out of the text, not put into the text. That's the key to good exegesis.

As I said to Sam Waldron recently, when I interviewed him, I hate the fact that amongst

Reformed Christians, the word Biblicist is being used as a pejorative term, as an insult.

I mean, it seems counterintuitive to somebody who believes in the inerrancy and infallibility and the preciousness and the gloriousness of the scriptures to be using

Biblicism as a negative term. Yeah, I may start adopting it for myself.

I may just start saying I am a Biblicist because if you mean by Biblicalism seeking to keep pagan philosophy out of theology, then sign me up.

That's what I am. That's what I've been talking about this whole interview. So yes, I'm a Biblicist. Am I saying that we don't have secondary authorities?

We're not thankful for confessions? I know that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants.

I'm not unaware of the history of theology. And that's another thing that I think needs clarification.

We've got the other side that is saying that they're in the great tradition, but it's as if someone like James White or myself are outside of the great tradition when we are upholding and confessing our confessional standards.

What part of the confession do I disagree with? And then they say, well,

I believe that God's without body a part of passion. Uphold that. Then they would turn around and say, well, you're not upholding it as it was originally intended.

Well, I'm like, wait a minute. How was it originally intended? And they go to Thomas Aquinas as the explanation of that.

Well, no, Thomas Aquinas wasn't the only understanding of simplicity of that time.

You have, like I've already said, you have Don Skotas who disagreed with Don, with Thomas Aquinas on simplicity.

And they had a variety of understandings of the doctrine of simplicity. Let's break that down further.

What do we mean by simplicity? And I don't think there's this unified great tradition where everybody was on the same page.

I think there's been some good research done of a lot of the framers of the

Westminster Confession. In fact, not all of them. They often affirm body without body parts of passions, but I'm not sure they all go in and have that strict form of simplicity in the same way

Thomas Aquinas did. And in fact, don't we know that some of the Princeton divines did not, and even

Charles Adams Spurgeon, not that these men were in any way infallible, and they were, you know, incorrect on things being sinners, but they are still considered universally by Reformed people, heroes of the faith, as far as I know.

That's right. So the great tradition or the tradition of the Christian faith is not as uniform and simplistic as we would somewhat think.

There's a diversity of positions, and I could support everything

I believe about immutability, simplicity, through various men who interpreted scriptures throughout church history.

It's like we're not alone in our understanding. We're not just saying something so novel or new that no one's ever said this throughout church history.

But it's being framed that we're Biblicists, we're denying our confessions, we're outside the great tradition, we're borderline unorthodox, and so that's just language that doesn't help the conversation.

It doesn't help us from learning from one another. I believe the other side truly and sincerely wants to uphold the deity of God, the immutability of God, the simplicity of God, the transcendence of God, and these are things that are important to uphold.

We don't want to fall into open theism and process theism. So I agree with them.

We've got to hold to our strong view of transcendence, but we don't need to do it at the expense of God's eminence and relatability.

And these are fairly recent accusations being made against you and those in your camp.

There seemed to be much more harmony even as little as five years ago from, or should

I say between, Reformed Baptists in modern -day history, you know, those that date back to the mid -20th century when there was a resurgence of Calvinism amongst

Baptists. It seems that there was a lot more harmony than there is now. I know it's sad, and I've loved—I don't want to be a part of the problem in, hey, my position, there's no room for differentiation and differences.

I believe there are. I believe this is—we're talking about things that are difficult to understand.

We're talking about things that probably 50%, if not 80%, 90 % of most Christians haven't even considered.

And so we're dealing with some complex things, and the more complex and difficult it is to comprehend and understand and explain, the more charity and kindness needs to be shown.

When we're dealing with the doctrine of justification by faith alone, some of these things, I think there should be more, like, we're not bending here.

And I don't want to bend on what I personally believe, but I know a lot of people—I'm a super -lapserian.

I know a lot of people who are infralapserians. I understand that position. In fact, I can be somewhat—if that's a legitimate position,

I almost fall into that position. But I don't think that super - and infralapserians should fight one another, because we're dealing with some complex things that's easy to be wrong on, and here we're dealing with, okay, two understandings of the doctrine of simplicity.

None of us are denying simplicity. We're just—there's a strong form, there's a weak form.

Okay, we're exactly—what are we affirming in simplicity? That there's no bodily parts, there's no spatial parts, there's no temporal parts.

Okay, we can affirm some of these things, but are we saying all the attributes are identical with one another?

We may not be going that far. And we are out of time, brother, and I want to make sure

I give our listeners your websites. Don't forget about freegracepress .com, freegracepress .com.

Also, don't forget about gbtseminary .org, gbtseminary .org,

and also gbcconway .com, which is the website for Grace Bible Church of Conway, Arkansas, gbcconway .com.

Thank you so much for being such a superb guest today, Dr. Johnson. I look forward to your frequent return to the show.

I want to thank everybody who listened today, and I want you all to always remember for the you are a sinner.