Dr. Turek on Calvinism Taking the “Easy” Way, Pope Francis, and Others , Say “Go to Thomas!”

Well, you will notice that there are thankfully no fires behind me, and we have no intention of starting any any conflagrations, anything like that. I'm going to have to ask people exactly how they did that, because, you know, you could see smoke, you could see wind.

I just I just want to know how close Doug came to the conflagration. Did you see it? Oh, yeah, it's yeah, here you see it now. Yeah. Yeah, I'm it's no quarter November up in Idaho, and Doug did mention in the in the opening that he's 69 years old.

It'll be 70 next year. So maybe that's his way of saying they're going to they're going to hold off on really big exploding things and stuff for his 70th next year. I, I don't know. But we're not we're not doing anything.

We don't really have anybody to to do special effects. We have no fire. We have no special effects. We don't we don't do sound effects around here. What? Oh, functioning lava lamp. We have the lava lamp.

There is a lava lamp. Yes, it's it's it's not we didn't get started early enough for it to be lava ing yet. But the fact during the winter, I'm not sure it ever really gets lava ing very much because it has to be warmer.

So anyway, welcome to the dividing line. We've got lava. Yeah, it's actually just wax, but we can call it lava if we want to. Anyway, here we are. And just quick reminder, we are we are Lord Willen. You know, I was talking to one of the pastors, one of the elders, one of the guys, sorry, I'm not sure what position he holds in the church, but it's one of my students at GBTS.

I was talking to him today about my stop at their church on the way back from St. Charles. And I said, just make sure to have about 20 gallons of diesel. That's maybe one of the main things we need. Actually, my truck carries 36 and I already bought a five gallon can, by the way.

I haven't showed that to you yet, but that'll that puts me up to 41. And what? Yellow, yellow, yellow diesel can. Yeah. And so there there is going to be the real basic needs as we look at the insanity going on in our in our nation.

Just make sure you got enough fuel to get back. That'll that'll be the big thing. So looking forward to being in Lubbock and Emory, Texas, Jonesboro, Arkansas. Those are on the way back. So we go out St. Charles, do our regular first weekend of December at St. Charles like we have for 22 years now.

We were late last year for physical reasons. It was in just February of this year, actually. And I've been there since then. I did an evening on one of the last trips as well. But those folks just put up with me whenever I show up.

And I don't know how I took them, took them over like that, but they they put up with me. So it's great. So looking forward to this next trip. And once again, sincere thanks to everyone who supports us in doing this and getting out there in those churches and addressing the topics we're addressing.

Calvinism, Evangelism, and Frank Turek’s Misunderstanding of Reformed Theology

Lots of things to get to today. I'm not going to spend too much time here, but I do think it is important to, you know, we we have spent. I wonder if anyone has gone back and added up the number of hours we've spent responding to talking about discussing the claims of Layton Flowers and the provisionists.

You'll notice we haven't done that a whole lot recently, because to be honest with you, there's only so much to be said. There's only so many ways to demonstrate that provisionism is a man centered, incoherent, unbiblical mess of gobbledygook.

And we've done that over and over again. We've done it in debate. And whenever you address, especially Layton Flowers, you can expect three, four, five, six, seven, eight hours of rambling, normally non sequiturs in response that, just to be honest with you, at my age, I'm not interested in wasting the time listening to all that stuff anymore.

But once in a while, a video popped up with Frank Turek. And I just don't understand, Frank. You know, we met one time when I was at SES back when they had on campus students and stuff like that. You know, Michael Brown and I had the had the debate.

And we it was it was a good time. And he seems like a really nice guy. And we talked a little about sola scriptura. We talked a little bit about reformed theology, I suppose, in passing. But ever since then, whenever I have responded to anything Frank Turek has said, for example, I think one of the most useful clips out there.

Is the comparison of Frank Turek's response to David Silverman and my response, David, so we both debated David Silverman. And he asked us the exact same question, and we responded to that question in completely different ways.

And I think Silverman was had no idea what to do with my response. Not that it wasn't clear. It was and he did not respond to it, but he was used to dealing with the Arminian non-reformed, non-presuppositional evidentialist argumentation that Dr. Turek presented.

And in comments on Roman Catholicism and a number of other issues, we've we've responded. We've indicated our interest in discussing the issue, but silence crickets from from Dr. Turek. So I'm not expecting this to go anywhere, but it's useful.

And what I don't understand about it is. What is said by Dr. Turek here is. I would expect something like this from Norm Geisler, because Norm Geisler stopped thinking about reformed theology decades and decades and decades before he died.

And so. He. Just wouldn't listen. I've I sat there and tried. And it just the veil comes down and just they're just not listening. There's there's nothing wasn't anything going on there. So when you when you hear just horrible misrepresentations of.

What it is we believe in and why we believe it, you just have to go. You have to go, why? What is the motivation? And in many instances, it just simply seems to me that the people on the other side, they don't want to listen.

The funny thing is, that's what he's saying about us. Except the vast majority of reformed people have come out of. Yeah, sure. They're they're reformed people that were raised within the reformed tradition.

Sure. But the vast majority of people came out of a synergistic perspective and abandoned that. And hence, know very well what the objections to reform theology are. And those of us have written on it.

Potter's freedom gives clear evidence of listening very carefully to Norm Geisler's objections, and I think they would be very similar to Frank Turek's. And so it's it's fascinating and hopefully it'll be useful.

It's a short clip. What? Did I pipe the audio over? Well, I don't know. I'm trying. Is that office TV? That one. All right. Well, we'll see if that works. So here is Leighton Flowers, who again talks about the time when he was a Calvinist.

He wasn't. I've talked to too many people who knew him at that time. He's never been able to produce any meaningful documentation that he ever understood the reformed worldview and function from it and presented it.

He may have thought himself five point Calvinist, but he doesn't have a clue what that means. Never was. Just all there is to it. But he still does the I'm the former Calvinist stuff, and it's sort of sort of silly.

But anyway, let's let's listen to this and respond to Leighton Flowers and Frank Turek.

Have the the the motivation for evangelism like I should, right? If that's the case, it might just be easier to say, I can explain this. God just hasn't selected them.

If you have two viable options in front of you, two viable interpretations in front of you, one one of which has actually been more popular throughout Christian history among scholars. Now, think about this.

I'm having to it's so loud. I'm having to hold the earpiece like three inches from my ear. Leighton wants to do the. There are lots of ways of interpreting scripture, you see, and there's there's no one one consistent way.

And so now he's so now you have scripture is unclear, and then we can look at church history. Well, you know, remember, Leighton Flowers is a big fan of the Calvinist came from the Manichaean foolishness that we've debunked for quite some time now.

And so it there's there's no way to engage. We've whenever we've engaged Leighton on church history stuff. It's been embarrassing for Leighton. He doesn't know church history, and he's made incredible mistakes regarding church history.

But there is no question that depending on how you define church history in the broad spectrum of things, there is no question of the fact that man centered religion is far more popular amongst men than a theological understanding of God's sovereignty and man's inability outside of the sovereign grace of God.

No argument about that at all. But that's an argument for our side. OK, that's that's that's an argument for our side. It is it is there is no question. That. God's truth regarding his sovereignty over his people.

Has to be reiterated over and over again, because the tendency of man is to always insert himself into the glory of God. And so we have to hammer away on. It is by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God, not of works, as any man should boast, because we have the tendency of boasting. That's our argument. And he doesn't even seem to realize that. Like I said, if he had ever actually been reformed, he would understand that.

Again, I have no reason to believe whatsoever. That he ever that he ever was. But there you go.

Namely, the view that we hold to the more free will perspective, if you will, has always been more popular throughout church history than the more predestinary and or the deterministic kind of interpretations.

If you have both of those in front of you and you're and you're actually studying the best of both scholars from both sides, why would you choose the one that seems to make God the author of sin, that seems to impugn his character, that seems to possibly undermine other very strong texts that indicate God's frustration for when we don't choose to follow him?

And so once again, you have this there isn't. Leighton knows he cannot refute. Ephesians one, he's tried and has just face planted and failed at at the process. And you saw what happened with Romans 9 and Romans 8 and all the.

So what you have to do is you have to go, well, there are equally valid interpretations, you see. And not equally. Now, now he'll point to this person's interpretation over there and this first interpretation over there.

But then they'll disagree with each other on all sorts of things. There is one consistent interpretation on these issues on the other side. That is consistent with the nature of God. Now, remember, Leighton was one who just recently was saying, yeah, the Southern Baptist should never have gotten rid of the open theist.

You know, it's a perfectly valid philosophical speculation and discussion and blah, blah, blah. And we've been saying forever and a day, you know, it just it's just so obvious where he is and and where he's going to end up.

There's just it's so plain to anybody watching it. But then you'll then you get these arguments. Well, it impugns his his his his character. I think creating a universe filled with purposeless evil is the greatest impugning of God's character ever.

And as soon as you throw back at that, well, well, well, you know, we're not and you can't get them. You can't get them to commit. He won't. He's so wishy-washy on his actual doctrine of God that it's well, you know, that's a good thought over there.

And all he can say is, but we what we can't say is what the Calvinist says. He can't tell you positively what actually to believe. But what we can't say is that we just we just have to be, you know, we have to redefine grace and make grace dependent upon man's responses and and all the rest of the stuff that we've spent years documenting.

We're not going to go back over it again. But this is setting up a real straw man situation and Dr. Turek's response should be well, you know, this I'm not really sure that's a accurate way of putting things.

But when you're on somebody else's show frequently, you don't get that.

And the wrath of God and the punishment of God for doing things that he supposedly determined for you to do that. You couldn't help.

I don't know why they choose it late and I can speculate. It might be because it's easier, right? And it might easier in the sense that well, look, these people are just on their way to hell. There's nothing I can do about it.

You know, I'll throw a Bible verse at him. See if you know, see if if maybe they'll respond. I don't know if they're elect or not. But if they don't respond, I guess they're just not elect. So I don't really have the motivation for evangelism like I should, right?

If that's the case, it might just be easier to say, I can explain this. God just hasn't selected them. But and it also makes me feel better. Well, he selected me, right? He selected me and I don't really have any free choice in it.

But gee, I'm pretty special now.

Now, this kind of straw man is just reprehensible. Dr. Turek, you just I don't know who you're trying to convince here. You're certainly not reaching anyone who's reformed because we know that this thing is getting close to the same conflagration that we saw behind Doug Wilson in today's video.

You get this award today, Dr. Turek. You are straw manning badly and you're demonstrating a fundamental level of ignorance. You know, it's Dr. Turek. We start our services at Apologia by reading from a book that clearly you've never seen and never read titled The Valley of Vision.

And it's a collection of Puritan prayers. The nine-year-old kids in my church. Would look at what you just said and go that man doesn't understand mommy. Because they would know they've heard enough Puritan prayers to know that that's not what that's what reformed people believe for a second.

Oh, it's easier. Really? Really? That's why every day of the week. There are teams from Apologia Church out at at strip clubs and out in Mill Valley and at abortion mills. And and that's why we're planning a church in Salt Lake City.

And that's that's why because it's easier. What? And the whole idea. Well, it shows me that makes me special. Again. Anyone who's done any meaningful reading at all any serious scholarly reading or any just serious reading at all knows that that is a horrific misrepresentation.

It's interesting. When we had the the that opening reading from The Valley of Vision this Sunday, Dr. Joe boot mentioned to me. That he now lives in a in a place in England where he can walk across the street go to church and it was the former rector of that church a conservative Anglican Church that put The Valley of Vision together.

He's the one that collected all those prayers. And if you just take the time you would you would see that those prayers will over and over and over and over again refute what you just said. And in fact, if you understood Reformed Theology at all, you would understand unconditional election.

It's not because I'm special. It's because I'm not special. I didn't fulfill any conditions. There wasn't anything in me that drew God's election. So you need to understand Dr. Chirk what your your flippant shallow misrepresentations are saying to us.

This is not a man who understands what he's talking about and I don't understand why it is but given the things you've said, it's interesting. This is the day after Reformation Day. Given the things you said about Roman Catholicism, you don't understand what the Reformation was about.

You don't understand what Luther and Erasmus were dealing with. You understand why Luther said that Erasmus had touched upon the heart of the matter, the hinge upon which it all turns. And what was it?

The freedom and bondage of the will. The exact thing you all are talking about. And you all are on Erasmus's side. You're on the Roman side against the Reformation. I hope you weren't dressing up as Martin Luther or anything yesterday.

Because you all are on the other side of the chasm. You are opposed to the Reformation. You're not a part of the Reformation. I know Leighton's tried to get around that again, another face-plantingly bad attempt.

Because on the first written debate of the Reformation, this entire video is on the side of Erasmus against Luther. That's just a fact. So I don't know who you're trying to convince here. Maybe you're just trying to cheer up the troops that are already convinced that we need to avoid talking to those Calvinists or listening to what those Calvinists are saying, whatever.

But for those of us who are listening to this, this is just another example of, well, here you go with more evangelicals that just have no earthly idea what it is we're saying. They're not listening.

And that's a shame. Okay. I'm speculating. I'm not a Calvinist, so I don't know what's in their head. Yeah, I'm not a Calvinist. I don't know what's in their head. That's the problem.

You could know if you wanted to. Let me point something out. We tend to write books. There are lots of memes out there about, you know, if you can't afford seminary, get into an argument with the Calvinist and he'll lecture you forever for free.

That kind of thing. And it's true. So again, there's no reason for you to be sitting there going, well, I'm just speculating. I don't know. When the documentation demonstrates your speculation is not only based on ignorance, but it's based upon a rejection of the easily available, obvious information that if you just, you know, take the time to look at it, you might not say this kind of stuff.

Maybe it might be that they've never heard the other side. That could be the case. Yeah, no.

I mean, I honestly can't think, I'm trying here. I cannot think of any reformed person that is in such a cave that they have not heard. I mean, using the same example, one of the things that I do when I'm in town at Apologia, I did Sunday, is we have a catechism question in the bulletin.

I think we're on question 35 on effectual calling right now. And man, it's a rich, rich, rich, rich question. And the answer is really, really deep on monergism and the role of spirits. And so what I do is I go through pretty much phrase by phrase with the response and then the verse that we memorize and make sure that as we're memorizing this, we're not just memorizing things by rote, but we understand its relevance.

And over the years, I've been there heading for five years now. I have repeatedly explained to people why it is that people struggle with the things that we're saying. What are the views of those people out there?

And I don't have to misrepresent them. There's no reason to. The more clearly and fully and accurately you represent the other side, the more devastating your critique and answer can be. And the more useful to the people.

So as I'm going through effectual calling, I'm talking about, okay, this is where people are coming from and this is how the gospel is presented and you don't have an effectual call. Because that's a work of the Spirit of God doing these certain things.

For example, the phrase I looked at Sunday was enlightening their minds with the knowledge of Christ. This is something that has to come from outside of us. And I'll talk about what synergists like yourself believe about man anthropologically.

Now, by the time we're question 35 in the catechism, we've already dealt with the deadness of man and sin and things like that, obviously. But this is a part of what we do. We make sure that people accurately understand.

And again, many of them have come from that. But that's a part of being truthful in how you deal with these issues. And it would help a lot if we all attempted to do that.

Maybe they haven't tuned into Soteriology 101.

Well, I think back when I was a Calvinist, I would think it was probably the latter. I hadn't really been introduced to the other side. And therefore, I adopted that.

Again, I hadn't been introduced to the other side. Really? Really, Layton? You were raised on the Puritans, right? You were. Only thing you had read outside of Pilgrim's Progress was the Institutes of the Christian Religion and maybe a few articles by B .B. Warfield, right?

Sorry. That interpretation because it was the one introduced to me first. And that's the reason that I adopted it. I don't think I ever had the motivation of being lazy or trying to avoid evangelism when I was a Calvinist.

I don't ever remember that being a motivation, though it could be the motivation of some. I have no idea. We can't read the minds of Calvinists as to why they choose one particular interpretation over another.

It's just been my experience in the time doing this that very few of, especially the young internet type Calvinists, have actually given time to really examine the deep theological robust scholars from the other side.

Thomism, Pope Francis, and the Evangelical Recovery of Aquinas

Yeah, those robust scholars, you'll notice that they have a real broad view of things. So there's all sorts of views of God you can come up with, you know, and you can play around with open theism. And the problem is Leighton can't come up with a firm foundation to stand on and tell us really about God's sovereign decree.

Or does he really know the future? Why does he know the future? He's come up with all sorts of theories that we've just demonstrated are so far out to lunch that it's not even funny, but that's that sound scholarship that none of the rest of us have ever examined.

It's like, yeah, okay.

They have mostly kind of surrounded themselves in an echo chamber of other Calvinists telling them what the other side believes.

Yeah, that never happens amongst the Soteriology 101 folks.

And that's one of the reasons they treat us like we're doofuses sometimes is because they just assume that we're as dumb as the scholars and the leaders within their world, their community are telling them about us.

And that's one of the reasons I started the program is to say, hey, there's some really sharp guys like Dr. Turek and many, many others who do not hold to a more deterministic reading of the text. I don't really have.

Yeah, okay. Well, there, you know, wasn't much there. And in fact, it was more latent than it was, Frank. But Dr. Turek, you really, if you're going to address this issue, brother, you've got a lot of reading you need to be doing, a lot of reading you need to be doing because your words just demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the basics of this issue.

And so I would highly encourage you to consider those things. It would be very, very, very, very helpful. There wasn't enough there for a Radio Free Geneva or anything like that, but we just wanted to want to get to that.

This morning, I was directed to an article. Let me see if I can. Yes, I was directed to an article on the Vatican Files website. This is not a Roman Catholic website. Okay, so you need to understand that.

And Leonardo de Chirico wrote an article titled, Go to Thomas! Who will follow the Pope's invitation? Go to Thomas! Who will follow the Pope's invitation? This is very timely. Nothing could be more explicit.

Go to Thomas! This warm invitation was issued by Pope Francis to participants of the International Thomistic Congress, September 21st and 24th. That was, you know, last week. Well, not last week, last month, not very long ago.

These days, it's almost ancient history, isn't it? Yeah, sadly. September 21st, 24th, during an audience at Vatican, in his address, the Pope extolled the thought of Thomas Aquinas as a sure guide for Roman Catholic faith and a fruitful relationship with culture.

Citing Paul VI in Lumen Ecclesiae, 1974, John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 1998, who had magnified the importance of Thomas' thought for the contemporary Roman Church, Francis stood in the wake of recent popes in emphasizing superlative appreciation for the figure of Thomas while adding his own.

This is nothing new for centuries Roman Catholicism has regarded Thomas Aquinas as its champion. His voice is often considered the highest, deepest, and most complete of Roman Catholic thought and belief.

Cannized by John XXII as early as 1323, he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pius V in 1567 to be the premier Roman Catholic theologian whose thinking would defeat the Protestant Reformation. Now, if you look at the date, 1567.

Ring any bells? Any time frames? That's 50 years after the beginning of the Reformation. So the Counter-Reformation has begun in the Council of Trent. And the Council of Trent, of course, codifies Thomas' perspectives as the bulwark against the Protestant Reformation.

During the Council of Trent, the Summa Theologica was symbolically placed next to the Bible as a testament to its primary importance in formulating the Tridentine decrees and canons against justification by faith alone and other Protestant doctrines.

In the 17th century, he was considered the defender of the Roman Catholic theological system by Robert Bellarmine, the greatest anti-Protestant controversialist who influenced many generations of Catholic apologists over the centuries.

I would say up to the present time. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris, in which he pointed to Thomas as the highest expression of philosophical and theological science. Notice the order there.

Notice that at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, you've had a shift. The PhD program to philosophical theology rather than systematic theology. And in the center of that is Thomas Aquinas. I'm sure Pope Leo XIII would be very pleased with Midwestern right now.

The Second Vatican Council stipulated that the formation of priests should have Thomas as the supreme guide in their studies. The students should learn to penetrate them, i .e. the mysteries of salvation, more deeply with the help of speculation, under the guidance of St. Thomas, and to perceive their interconnections.

Speculative theology. I've seen that somewhere recently. Oh yeah, that's in the introduction to Dr. Zolzal's book. Speculative theology. That's what the Second Vatican Council said in the formation of Roman Catholic priests.

Just fascinating. Of recent popes, this has already been mentioned, considering this, what could Pope Francis say but go to Thomas? Francis indicated not only the need to study Thomas, but also to contemplate the Master before approaching his thought.

The Master isn't Jesus there. The Master is Thomas. Thus, to the cognitive and intellectual dimension, he added a mystical one. In this way, he caused Thomas, already a theologian imbued with wisdom and asceticism, to be seen as even more Roman Catholic.

This mix best represents the interweaving of the intellectual and contemplative traditions prior to Roman Catholicism. We're walking past here to remind you once again of the definition of great tradition exegesis offered by Dr. Craig Carter, a graduate of a Roman Catholic institution for his PhD, which uses the exact same terminology and language and categories as we have by popes and councils of the Roman Catholic Church.

Point it out. It's just a fact. Just mention it in passing. The International Congress had the exploration of the resources of Thomas' thought in today's context as its theme. I could see them meeting at Midwestern.

Thomism is not just a medieval stream of thought, but a system that is both solid and elastic at the same time. All seasons of Roman Catholicism have found it inspiring for the diverse challenges facing the Church of Rome, including the Reformation First, the Enlightenment Project Second, and now post-modernity.

Oh yes, we hear much about post-modernity too. As a result of the Congress, we will continue to hear more about Thomas and Thomism, not only in historical theology and philosophy, but also in other fields of knowledge that were once far from previous interpretive traditions of Thomas.

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing fascination with Thomas Aquinas and Thomism by evangelical theologians, especially coming from the North American context. They seem to be attracted to the great tradition he represents.

This phenomenon should be studied because it signals the existence of internal movements within evangelical theological circles. Protestant theology of the 16th and 17th centuries had a critical view of Thomas.

In a sense, Thomas could not be avoided, given his stature and importance for theology, but he was read with selective and theologically adult eyes. Rather important there. Then, for various reasons, there has been a certain neglect, not only of Thomas, but with pre-Reformation historical theology as a whole.

Today, in the face of the pressures coming from secularization and the identity crisis felt in some evangelical quarters, Thomas is perceived as a bulwark of traditional theology that needs to be urgently recovered.

That's the very language that we're hearing all the time, right? Recovery. It is often overlooked that Roman Catholicism has considered Thomas as its champion in its anti-Reformation stance and also in its subsequent anti-biblical developments, such as the 1950 Marian dogma of the bodily ascension of Mary.

Rome considers Thomas as the quintessentially Roman Catholic theologian and thinker. There's no question about that. Absolutely no question about that. And, of course, when you just point out that 95 of the books being recommended in the recovery of Thomas are written by Roman Catholics, that does seem to sort of fit together with the author's thinking.

Go to Thomas is an invitation that even a growing number of practitioners of evangelical theology would take up. The point is not to uncritically study or absolutely avoid Thomas, but rather to provide the theological map with which one approaches him.

It is necessary to develop an evangelical map of Thomas Aquinas. If Rome considers Thomas its chief architect, can evangelical theology approach him without understanding that Thomas stands behind everything Roman Catholicism believes and practices?

And so one of the questions, you know, I posted that article and then I posted the following tweet. Quote, in light of this article, let me say it directly. If your Protestant theology needs Thomas to define its doctrine of God, you have no reason to be a Protestant.

Ooh, that's pretty blunt. Yeah. But let's think about what it said. By the way, I am wearing my Reformed Biblicist t-shirt today. So that seems to fit really well. You haven't washed yours? Yet. Oh, okay.

Why do you have to? Oh, okay. Rich evidently has to wash his before he wears it for some reason. It's not like we got it off a dead body or something. You never know where it's been. Anyway, so I'm wearing my Reformed Biblicist t-shirt.

And so I guess it fits. If your Protestant theology needs Thomas to define its doctrine of God. Now, did I say if your Protestant theology of God doesn't absolutely ignore the medieval period, then you have no reason to be a Protestant?

No. Again, we have so many straw men. It's smoky in the internet these days. We need a big fan of truth to just suck all this smoke out from all the straw men that are being burned. We are not saying that you need to burn the Summa.

We are not saying that you need to ignore Thomas Aquinas. We are not saying that anyone who studies church history should know what the five ways are, should know how, especially anybody who's particularly concerned about Christian apologetics today, has to recognize the influence that Aquinas has had.

Massive influence on Norman Geisler and any type of classical apologetics approach. And if you listen to the dialogue between Greg Bonson and R .C. Sproul on apologetic methodology, you have to recognize the impact of Thomas on R .C. Sproul's categories of thought.

So you can't ignore any of these things. And nobody's saying that you should. What we are saying is that when you take Thomas's teachings and Thomas's formulations and make them the end point of a process of development so that he becomes the pinnacle of the expression of theology proper.

No, he's not the pinnacle of the expression of anything else from their perspective. He's not the pinnacle of the expression of the view of scripture. He's not the pinnacle of the expression of ecclesiology, sacramentology.

And he's certainly not the pinnacle of the expression of soteriology. And so we are hearing people who want to chop Thomas's theology into pieces. Something he never would have agreed with. And say, well, you know, you would agree with 88 of what Thomas Aquinas said.

I have no idea how you come up with any of that stuff. But you can put that other 12 aside. Here's the problem. Here's where we're going to run into problems. And we've been talking about this for a long, long time.

If you say that Thomas's specific formulations and especially the emphases that he produces, that he enunciates are definitional of orthodoxy. So that if you question Thomas's proclaiming of divine simplicity a doctrine that the vast majority of my critics today if they were in ministry 10 years ago had never heard of and never preached admit it, you know it's true.

If you take his making that absolutely central based upon, if you're honest, categories either of medieval thought or of Aristotelian categories and say, this is where we have to go if we're going to be true Trinitarians and if you question any of this you're a Neo-Sassanian you don't believe in these things you aren't confessional, blah blah blah okay, that's what's going on.

And we all know that's what's going on. Well, any of us that are involved in this a lot of other people are like I don't know what's going on and I get it, I understand but it's happening and it's impacting schools and programs and all sorts of things in the process that's the issue and if if you make the argument and it's a good argument that your doctrine of God has to be foundational to all your other doctrines if the Roman Catholics have the doctrine of God right and the Protestants don't then upon what basis are you seriously going to argue that we've got the gospel right and the Roman Catholics don't?

Isn't that an honest question? And the Roman Catholics are going yep, yep, yep they're loving this they're just sitting there going yo, can't wait can't wait till next Easter to invite you all in if there have been people who have said the Catholics are right about the doctrine of God but the Protestants are right about the gospel and you're like how does that work?

How do you make that argument in a meaningful fashion? And so I posted that because if your Protestant theology needs Thomas to define his doctrine of God then it's not based upon scripture as the sole and sufficient source.

So you read the first chapter of Westminster you read the first chapter of London you read any of the sections on scripture for any of the great Protestant traditions. And what you're saying is we don't really believe that because we actually believe that to have a true and sound doctrine of theology theology proper you need Thomas Aquinas you've got to have his formulations.

So evidently nobody before Thomas had the whole thing figured out. But there you go. And so if you need Thomas for the foundation of your theology you're not gonna you don't have a Protestant foundation so you can continue to be a Protestant if you want to.