Quick Commentary on YouTube Banishment, Once Again on Scriptural Sufficiency

Greetings and welcome to The Vying Line. My name is James White. We are trying new stuff today because yesterday, when we began the program, I ran through a few brief notifications at the beginning of the program.

Wasn't the central aspect of what I was talking about, anything like that at all. But I specifically encouraged people to be making archival copies of all the studies that are coming out right now regarding excess mortality, pericarditis, myocarditis, all of the athletes' lives that have been ruined through vaccines and things like that.

And I really wasn't thinking much about it. Back in 2021, we had bifurcated the topics. So if I was gonna be talking about the great reset and vaccine mandates and stuff like that, that I would do that only on Odyssey.

And we wouldn't post that on YouTube. And if I was doing just theological stuff, we'd post that on YouTube and then that would automatically go over to Odyssey. And I don't know, I just forgot about it.

Wasn't really thinking about it anymore. And that was a big mistake because someone out there, some cowardly little Weasley person who would never stand before me and try to debate any of these issues, and they know it, that's why they do the things they do, reported us immediately to YouTube.

And 10 minutes later, we're gone. We're banned for a week, strike against our channel, blah, blah, blah, blah, for medical misinformation. And so that's why we are doing something differently today. And it's our first shot at it.

So we'll do our best. We'll see what happens at the very least. Hopefully we're getting everything recorded and be able to post it somewhere at some point. If it doesn't work live, we'll do the best that we can.

I do thank everyone who yesterday, once I looked at my phone, obviously I silenced my phone. Once I looked at my phone, I got people from Germany and all over the place saying, hey, they took you down.

And well, there you go, that's how it is. And so we have important stuff to talk about. I will just very, very, very, very, very quickly run over what I said at the beginning of the program yesterday.

One was what I just said, collect all those papers, grab them now, because I really believe that if we have the kind of blatant, cowardly, leftist, communist censorship that we're experiencing now, we will have it 10 times as bad after the elections.

Because all those people, all those Karens out there, they're just biding their time. And once the election is over and whatever damage that's gonna do, if it does any at all, if we even have free elections, that'll all be in the past and they will be back with a vengeance.

Mark my words, mark my words, that's where it's going. And so grab that stuff now, if for no other reason than to remind you of how much you're being lied to, right, left, and center about all the mandates and everything else that's going on, grab those things.

Then I mentioned very quickly, one thing I'd forgotten on the program the previous day, when I was talking about firearms, guns, self-protection, and that is that the greatest group that is threatened by the removal of our ability to protect ourselves are women.

You have to understand 9 -1 -1 is a state-sponsored prayer line, that's what it is. The state sponsors it and somebody there can pray for you as you die. Because when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

And that was before 2020. Now when seconds count, the police may be hours away. So guns are a tremendous equalizer for women to protect themselves, to protect themselves and their families and their children.

And so the disarming of the populace primarily, well, not primarily, but in a great way, threatens women as a major group. There's so much anti... The misogyny today is coming from all the people on the left.

They're the true misogynists. When you can call Bruce Jenner a female and talk about women of the year, and one of them is Will, the swimmer, that's true misogyny. That's the real anti-woman stuff. And that's what we have going on all around us.

We have a new Chilean dictator that was just installed down in Chile. What's the first thing he's doing? Disarming the populace, disarming the populace. Every tyrant does it. There's a reason for it. Joe Biden is not mentally competent to be a tyrant, but the people pulling Joe Biden's strings are tyrants.

And that's what they wanna do. And it's frightening, and especially frightening are the red flag laws that they wanna pass, which is basically the minority report being put into operation, trying to predict what people will do without knowing their heart, without knowing the future.

And we have a now fully secular, utterly rebellious against God regime in most Western nations, and in the United States as well, certainly in Canada and Australia. And you give them that kind of power, they're going to identify everything you believe as hate speech, and therefore use that as not only a means to disarm you, but also to imprison you.

Keep that in mind. One last thing I did mention yesterday was Dr. Ward on Iron Sharpens Iron. I didn't even get, I've been so busy, I didn't even get a chance yesterday after the program to see if I had been right, but I think Dr. Ward was on for two days in a row with Chris Arnzen.

Go to ironsharpensironradio .com. I haven't even had a chance, I'm Lord willing, I'm gonna get a chance to listen tomorrow morning. Got a little drive to do, that'll be expensive. Everything's expensive today.

But I've got a little drive to do. And so, Dr. Ward's work on this, quote unquote, confessional bibliology, the TR Only movement, is just excellent, it's devastating. I honestly think if you just simply read just the one article he did on it, it's the end of that movement.

It should be. Of course, I think the article that I did in response to Jeffrey Riddle should be the end of that movement, too. Because there is no consistent methodology that they have to respond to it.

But it's good to have other voices saying the same things. And so, I would highly recommend that you go do that. This isn't where I started yesterday. At this point, I transitioned into something else.

The Authority of Scripture as God's Own Speech

But let me start with words of truth. The London Baptist Confession of Faith says these words in Section 1, Paragraph 4. Chapter 1, Paragraph 4. The authority of the Holy Scripture for which it ought to be believed depends not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God, who is truth itself, the author thereof.

Therefore, it is to be received because of the word of God. What is the therefore? Whenever you see therefore, you got to find out what it's there for, right? Therefore, it is to be received because it is the word of God.

What is the therefore referring to? It's referring to the authorship. The scriptures, the Bible, is absolutely unique in all of God's creation because this is God speaking to us in time. When you think about this book, it's written over the course of 1 ,500 years.

1 ,500 years, 40 different authors, three different languages, two primary languages, one minor language. And it spans a tremendous period of development in human history. And yet, the one who rose from the dead said that this is God's speech.

And it is so much God's speech that you can take words recorded in here that were written a millennium and a half before someone was born and hold them accountable for those words as if God had spoken them directly to that individual.

That's chapter 22. So this is, by its own testimony, theanoustos. It is God breathed. It is men speaking from God as they're carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so we believe it's the word of God because of its nature.

It is not dependent upon the testimony of any man or church or tradition or confession or creed. When we understand the supernatural nature of the scriptures, and when we, in our amazement, recognize that men spoke, you can tell, it's particularly clear in the New Testament.

And maybe my work in the old is just not sufficient enough to allow me to see it as clearly. But it's particularly clear that this was not dictated. This was not automatic writing. Men spoke, but they spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

And they spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, which means without question that what we have in this book is exactly what God intended us to have. It would have been no more accurate, no more the result of the intention of God if it had been simply dictated in a mechanical fashion.

But that's so far beneath what we actually have in scripture. God's so much bigger than that. And so the psalmists, plural, and their experiences, Paul in his experience, Mark in his fast brevity of narrating events, the apocalyptic language of John or Ezekiel these are all very different from one another.

And it's a beautiful unity, but its author is God. The means of its giving is through men, but its author is God. And so it is to be received because it is theanoustos, because it is the very breath of God.

That's why it's to be received. It's not to be received because someone tells you to receive it. Have any of us received it because we were told to receive it? Yes, but as we grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, as we grow as believers, any less optimal basis for our faith is to be replaced by a more consistent and optimal basis for our faith.

And so you're blessed to grow up in the church. You're blessed to have the testimony of your parents and your grandparents, as I did. And the church and examples of godliness and all those are wonderful things.

And in some contexts, people call those traditions, but you have to grow up. You're called to grow up. You're called to mature. And eventually what you recognize is this is absolutely unique. It is a gift from God.

It's his self-revelation. The one who died and rose again testifies to that reality. You need to have Jesus's view of scripture, not anybody else's. And as a result, you accept it because of what it is.

You recognize its nature. You recognize the fact that it was not all given all at once. It took time. And as a result, you're blessed because wow, what a tremendous blessing to live in our day. You know how few followers of Yahweh God down through history have had all of this in one place?

Had exhaustive concordances and everything else. What a blessing. But none of that's the basis upon which you are to accept it. You accept it based upon its nature. And so you can recognize, yeah, as a kid, you know, I just saw my first Bibles in the other room.

I should have grabbed it. I've shown it to you before. But I just happened to notice that I was moving something on a table and there it was. And I didn't know, I had not read it yet. It was too young to read a book that big.

And I was told that it's the word of God by my Sunday school teachers and by my pastor and by my parents. And that is an acceptable mechanism of communicating truth. But I can't stop there. And that's not what makes it what it is.

God uses that, but that's not what makes scripture what it is. It is not to be believed depending upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God. So part of sanctification is the purification of the foundations of one's belief, right?

Wholly upon God, who is truth itself, the author thereof. So God is truth. He's the author of this. Therefore it is true. And therefore it is to be received because the fact that God is its author. And what God does is true, okay?

This program is called The Dividing Line because I recognized long, long ago that the dividing line between truth and error is to be found in whether one believes that the Bible is what I just described it to be.

And though when we first started, I had not yet had to do all the study at Fuller Theological Seminary that I ended up doing for my first master's degree and therefore exposed to all of the quest for the historical Jesus and all the rest of that kind of stuff and all the Neo-Orthodoxy that was to be found at Fuller Seminary, even back in the 80s.

Significantly more conservative back then than it is now, if you can believe that. So I hadn't seen how important that dividing line really is. That and everything else that has happened in my life since then has demonstrated, yes, that is the dividing.

And so I think some of the most important work we've done in this ministry is in defense of solo scriptura. All of the Roman Catholic debates that we've done down through the decades have, again, illustrated the vital importance of solo scriptura and the subtlety of those who seek to in any way diminish the doctrine of solo scriptura.

Roman Catholic apologists can be very, very subtle in their argumentation. And there aren't too many Protestants running around who have already been exposed to discussions of formal and material sufficiency, for example, so that upon encountering a well-read Catholic apologist could explain why the scriptures are both materially and formally sufficient, or what that would even mean, or how the sufficiency of scripture would interact with the fact that the Bible itself says that God has given us a church, that God has given the elders in the church authority to teach and preach the word of God, to discipline, to reprove, rebuke, exhort, et cetera, et cetera.

These are issues that we've been forced to deal with down through the years, first dealing with Mormonism, then Jehovah's Witnesses, and then Roman Catholicism and Islam, et cetera, et cetera. And so we have been very focused upon this reality because I have seen what happens once this becomes degraded in the view and in the functional theology of an individual, and not degraded in the sense of, oh, a conservative Roman Catholic apologist believes that this is the inspired word of God.

In fact, it would even say it's inerrant. But then when you start pushing, since this is just the written tradition, and over here you have the oral tradition, and to know what this says requires the magisterium.

The magisterium can define this infallibly, both as to what its meaning is, as well as to its extent. So the infallible magisterium is the lens that interprets and defines the written and the oral. Well, at that point, you no longer have sola scriptura, you have sola ecclesia.

You have the church as the final authority. And so when you have lenses, and I was called an arrogant man for saying that I don't have lenses. And as we've pointed out many, many times, I've never said that.

Everyone has lenses. Doing meaningful exegesis is the mechanism whereby you seek to correct that lens so that what you're seeing on the page is what God intends you to see upon that page. And to understand, that's how you protect the objective content of divine revelation from one generation to the next.

If you allow generational construction of compound lenses, eventually the actual intended meaning of the original words is completely lost. It's completely lost. Doing meaningful, consistent, disciplined exegesis is how you peel back the layers of those lenses.

And that can be very painful for a lot of people. So all of this to say that everything that I said at this point amongst my own tribe of Baptists in general, there's always been liberal Baptists, well, always, certainly during my lifetime and for the past 150 years, there have been liberal Baptists, leftist Baptists, that aren't even functionally Trinitarian.

So we won't even include them in the conversation. But Baptists, believing Baptists in general and Reformed Baptists in particular, everybody would have just simply said, amen. When do we get to the next topic?

Scripture Received Because It Bears the Marks of God

But things, they be a-changing. Things, they be a-changing. Just earlier today, 11 .30, 5 a .m. according to this scan. I don't know what time zone that was in, this screenshot. Josh Sommer, a Reformed Baptist pastor, tweeted out, we receive scripture because it bears the marks of the God we know through nature.

We receive scripture because it bears the marks of the God we know through nature. Now, my experience recently, I was just watching a friend of mine on Twitter attempting to reason with Pastor Sommer and the reaction that he got was sure sophistry.

It was the essence of sophistry. I don't even think that it contained much in the way of objective meaning, but it just sounded so wise. But it's sophistry. So I'm not gonna bother to ask for a further definition because so far, Pastor Sommer has demonstrated that that's, it's not his intention to really clearly communicate to anyone, really.

But we receive scripture because it bears the marks of the God we know through nature. Now, this is a fairly short English sentence. I'm gonna bring it over here so that I can look at you when I see it at the same time.

I wanna know what it means to receive scripture. I know what that used to mean. We receive scripture as the word of God because it is the word of God. That's what the Baptist confession says. So we receive it as authoritative.

But this is saying we receive scripture because it bears the marks of the God we know through nature. Now, the God we know through nature, Romans chapter one, the revelation of God that we have in what's called general revelation through nature is limited for the unregenerate person.

It's limited to the fact that he exists. We're to honor him as God and give thanks. That's what Romans one says. And the unregenerate man refuses to do that, suppresses that knowledge and engages in all the forms of rebellion that result in the manifold catalog of sins that is found in Romans chapter one.

So deep is that rebellion that Romans 1, 26, 27 uses homosexuality as an example of the twistedness that goes all the way down into the very essence and nature of man, which we celebrate in the United States for an entire month.

But this says we receive scripture. So let's say that this is referring to Christians, referring specifically to confessional reformed Christians. We receive scripture because it bears the marks of the God we know through nature.

How do we know God through nature? All reformed men down through time have recognized there's just all sorts of important definitional aspects of the nature of God we do not know through nature. Well, when I say all, there have been reformed men that got into the gospel, the star stuff and a few weird, odd things like that.

But sound balanced folks recognize that everything we talk about in regards to God is triune and these things, this is given to us in special revelation, not in natural revelation or general revelation.

And since it's we receive scripture, the God we know, we know first and foremost through scripture, not through nature. And when we look at nature, if we're talking about regenerate people, we are looking at nature through regenerate eyes and what regenerates us.

Remember the definition a couple of weeks ago of the great tradition that I used, that I read from Craig Carter. It literally presented the idea that by accomplishing this spiritual exegesis, you bring about regeneration.

And it's frighteningly imbalanced and misleading. The priority biblically is the word of God. Being born again by what? Not by your contemplation of nature, but by the word of God, by the scriptures, by the presentation of the gospel.

And so we know God because he has revealed himself to us in and through Jesus Christ. And we know that through his word. And once we experience spiritual life, then we can look at the world around us and we see the consistency of the revelation of scripture in God's world around us.

But we see that because of what God has done in us in regeneration by the work of his spirit. And the categories in which we place everything that we see around us are given to us by special revelation.

It is prior to anything else. This is why when Josh Sommer put up a video, said, I'm no longer a presuppositionalist. That's because you never were, you never were. This is the issue of presuppositionalism.

This is the issue of the priority, not only the primacy, but the necessary ontological priority of revelatory scripture over any man's contemplation of nature. It's only scripture that gives us the category of regenerate and unregenerate.

The only way we can talk about how man can look at nature is whether he's regenerate, unregenerate. Hopefully nobody is suggesting that unregenerate man can look at nature and discover the marks of the God we know through nature.

What marks? That's what's going to make you accept this? Because it does say because. We rescribe scripture because it bears the marks of the God we know through nature. No, I reject that 100 ,000%. That's not what the confession says.

That's not even confessional. Not even close to confessional. We recognize with spiritual eyes, the consistency of what we can see through nature, but it's because we're looking with spiritual eyes given to us in the categories of what's in here.

So we receive this because this is our shepherd and the sheep here is voice, not because we are looking at nature. And why would anyone even want to go that direction? I don't understand any of this. Why give up what we've always had for this kind of stuff?

I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying to warn folks. We're trying to, this is getting scary because yesterday, we had this tweet and it wasn't from Josh Sommer. It was from Steve Meister. Steve Meister is one of the pastors at Emmanuel Baptist Church up in Sacramento.

He's associated with IRBS. His co-pastor is one of the board members, I believe, IRBS. And so he posted these words. You know, solo scriptura in scare quotes is not explicitly biblical language, expresses a doctrine that is logically deduced from scripture's words and has been received in the church by tradition.

Now, thankfully there was some follow-up because as is, Rich is letting me know he's still there. I guess he just doesn't want to feel like he's being completely left out today. So he changed the camera angle, but I'll be looking over here after this anyways.

There was some follow-up because what's been happening since December or so is that you'll get this back and forth going between Steve Meister and Richard Braselis, who also is with IRBS. And so he posts this.

Before I read some of the follow-up, which is helpful and we need to look at it, I just want to look at the tweet itself. Solo scriptura is not explicitly biblical language. If what you mean by that is the terms sola and scriptura are not found immediately adjacent to one another in the scriptura, okay, I suppose that's true.

It expresses a doctrine. Well, I suppose sola scriptura in a sense is a doctrine, but it's much more than that. It is a recognition of ultimate revelational authority. It is a recognition of the nature of scripture as being absolutely unique in the possession of the church and intentionally so on God's part.

And it's not so much logically deduced from scripture's words, unless you're going to say, well, when you exegete 2 Timothy chapter three, it says the man of God using what is theanoustos can be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Well, we deduce from that. Okay, if you want to say that, I think it's direct teaching. It's didactic revelation. We're not just deducing something from it. We're not having to put some things here, things here, and you put all that together and you end up with this.

But what does it mean it has been received in the church by tradition? If that is simply a historical statement that those writers in church history from the primitive period onward that have embraced and taught this concept did so recognizing that people before them likewise taught and believed that same concept and hence are calling that tradition okay, but that's not even what he's going to say.

He's going to say later on in response to someone named Terry and Cole, he says, yes, it was obviously addressed in the Reformation the formal principle and has been passed down to us equals tradition sense.

So he's not talking about the primitive church. He's talking about the post-reformational church. So the pre-reformational church didn't believe this? I mean, obviously there is a degradation over time as tradition is elevated to the status of lens, status of containing revelation interpretation not found in scripture and necessary for the proper interpretation of scripture, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You can even see, for example, a difference between Aquinas and his view on this and Trent, even though Trent accepts Aquinas they have to go beyond Aquinas because the Aquinas, because he's not in the midst of a Reformation battle does not have to develop the authority questions as thoroughly as Trent's gonna have to later on.

And that's why there are people who have just, well, of course, tried to say that Aquinas taught all sorts of things, even calling Aquinas a Protestant. Wow, okay. People who otherwise wrote good things, John Gershner did that.

And it was just, it's laughably bad, but there are people that just become that dedicated to the idea. That they engaged in the same type of hagiolatry that people did in the past. All those who made Thomas Aquinas a quote-unquote saint.

But anyway, his violations of solo scripture are not as egregious as Trent's because of the context in which he's in. So you can even see a development there. But I'm gonna argue very strongly that in the early church, you have examples of individuals who still understand not only the absolute primacy, but priority of scripture over tradition.

Even if they are not consistent with that, they recognize that that is an apostolic teaching. And so it concerns me when a Reformed Baptist would say, well, yeah, Reformation, formal principle, but it's been passed down to us, traditioned to us since then.

I would definitely disagree with that because that would fundamentally mean that the Reformation was the origin of this doctrine. Or maybe that it was not known before that or whatever. I don't know. I don't know.

But when you say it has been received in the church by tradition, well, first of all, the authority of scripture and solo scriptura and the authority of scripture are absolutely, absolutely, categorically peas in a pod, twins, intimately connected.

You cannot separate them. And the confession says, that's due to the fact that God's the author, not because the church passes it down as a tradition. That's not, and has been received in the church. That's very specific language.

And I'm not sure that that's language that is really helpful at all in light of the historical background of the Reformation. And it's having to deal with the concept of tradition. So Richard Braselis responds and says, so one, the words solo scriptura are not contained explicitly in scripture.

Two, the words, however, express a doctrine in scripture. And three, someone put them together to indicate something in scripture and others received the language and the concept embodied in it. You know where he's going.

You know, Trinity is not explicitly biblical language, expresses a doctrine that is logically produced from scripture's words and has been received in the church by tradition. Why are we doing this? Because the only way to take these, this type of rhetoric that's not going to lead us into absolute disaster, is for it to be inane, basic observations that have no meaning.

That there's no reason for us to be observing this. It's a basic given that everybody gets and it doesn't matter. And we all know that's not what's going on here. That's not what's going on here. Because Steve Meister, Josh Sommer, Richard Braselis, they're all the ones talking about solo scriptura and nuda scriptura and all in an attempt to say, no, no, no, no, no.

We need to recognize that there is this really vital, important role of tradition. And you don't want to be guilty of nuda scriptura, solo scriptura. Now, again, you can go back decades to the scripture alone book, to the debates that we've done on these issues back in the nineties.

And it is a common misrepresentation of Roman Catholics. That when we are talking about solo scriptura, that that means that scripture exists outside of God's intention for the church, outside of God's intention to build the church and the kingdom of God, outside of God's decree to be conforming a people to the image of Christ, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it has nothing to do with any of that. What it does say is that there is only one thing in the possession of the church, the theanostos. And there is nothing that is superior to it. And that every tradition has to be subject to and correctable by scripture itself.

And what that means is the Nicene dogmas are not the lens through which you interpret scripture. The Nicene dogmas are dependent for their authority upon scripture. That's where the dividing line is going to be.

Because I've already seen people in this group saying the way you do solid interpretation of scripture is you recognize that the Nicene dogmas are the lens that is necessary. Now they go back to Irenaeus and try to use Skopos.

Again, I addressed all this stuff in the nineties and demonstrated that what Irenaeus was talking about is sub-biblical, it's basic biblical revelation and had to specifically do with the context of the beginning place of Gnosticism.

It's a completely different worldview. It's taking all these scriptures and ripping them out of the worldview in which they were written and putting them someplace else. So you can't do real exegesis within Gnosticism because of that.

That's not what we're talking about here. And that's not what's going on when we talk with Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy for that matter. So the dividing line is going to be when you hear people saying, well, yeah, well, yeah, if you don't have the Nicene dogmas as your framework, then you're not going to get to, because look, if you're going to say, as Craig Carter has said, that the final Orthodox form of the Trinity does not come about until Thomas.

So you've got Nicaea, you've got Chalcedon, you've got all the developments of medieval period all the way through Thomas. And then you get to what God wants us to have. If you're going there, you do not believe in sola scriptura, you do not practice sola scriptura and you will never be able to defend it.

And that's why I said yesterday, you start going down this road and people look at this stuff and the Roman Catholic apologists out there and they're sharp, they're sharp guys. That's one of the reasons, I'll be honest with you because a bunch of them are watching right now.

You're sharp guys. And that's why you're even more responsible right now because you know what your Pope is all about. And you know your current Pope doesn't believe what the Pope before him believed or the Pope before that.

And especially the Pope's a hundred years ago, you know it because you're sharp and that means you're accountable for it. And that I don't understand, God have mercy on you, but they're sharp guys. And I specifically stated, I said, they're sitting back and they're grinning, they're grinning at this because they know what that language is about.

They know where it's being borrowed from. Yeah, it's been received in the church by tradition and the Roman Catholic apologists that's there going, oh, I'd love to debate this guy because he'll turn you into a pretzel.

He'll have you stand on your head so fast, you won't know what happened to you. So please don't do it. Don't, they may be contacting you right now. Hey, you know, you sound pretty academic. You're probably a lot nicer than that James White guy.

Let's debate, don't do it. You don't know what's gonna happen. So there's also a, I think a dangerous confusion here in what Braselis says, because the doctrine of the Trinity is a biblical doctrine in the way that Warfield, I think very rightly identified it as being biblical because it expresses the essence of the meaning of the scriptures as they are interpreted accurately and accurately, not in the sense of tradition accurately, but accurately as in, this is what the words meant in their original context written to the original audiences and therefore there is a consistency across all the scripture.

That's what the doctrine of the Trinity is about. I can't tell you how many times Roman Catholics have taken the doctrine of the Trinity and said, yeah, we agree that it's true, but you Protestants don't really have the solid basis for it because the Bible is not clear enough.

You need to have the magisterium. You need to have the clarification of tradition. And if you're sitting there playing footsie with the idea that the Nicene dogmas have an existential existence apart from their consistency to scripture that becomes the lens necessary to the right interpretation of scripture, you have no way of defending that against those Roman Catholic apologists.

None, nada, niched, they'll take you apart and they know it because they know you're not being consistent. They know you have sold the farm. You may not know that because you have gotten this idea in your head that, wow, over the past decade, we have found what all the Reformed Baptists before us, our forefathers knew it, but then we forgot it.

And now we are the smart ones. We've figured it out. And so we're gonna run with it. And you're just like, okay, guys, yo, guys, there's more to it here, have you thought? And it's just like, nope, nope, not gonna go there.

So Terry and Cole had said to Steve Meister, so this is an attempt at clever, no theologian, biblical or systematic has argued soul scripture means tradition is flushed. That is the ultimate Catholic straw man.

What it means is all tradition received wisdom and theology, biblical, systematic or natural is subordinate. That is subordinate in the sense of must be examined by, passed the test of, and is not the lens through which you must be looking to accurately look at scripture.

And Meister's response is, I agree, but unfortunately many Christians and pastors do dismiss tradition on that basis, having confused solo scriptura with nuda scriptura and unaware of what they assume.

Well, I've certainly been accused of that. We've refuted it. I've not seen anyone even get close to rehabilitating those accusations, but that's the claim that's being made. So it's, you've confused solo scriptura with nuda scriptura.

So if you say that scripture is sufficient in and of itself and is to be believed solely because God is its author and that therefore every tradition, including all the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and everything that came before the New Testament, including Plato, Aristotle, and everything they said, must be subject to, corrected by, and is under the authority of the scriptures as they were written, not as they're interpreted by a great tradition, but as they have had the same meaning, the same objective reality that has been passed from generation to generation, the once for all delivered to the saints faith, not the we will get it figured out in 1200 years faith.

That's solo scriptura. Nuda scriptura is, I don't have to worry about what God's doing in the world. I don't have to even concern myself with anyone who came before me. All I need is this under a tree with the Holy Spirit and I've got it all figured out.

That's Nuda scriptura. Are there people who believe that? Yeah. Are they serious people? No. Are they involved in this debate? No. So I'm not sure why you keep bringing them up. You guys are doing the straw man thing.

We all see it. We all know it. And we're calling your bluff. So this is where the line's gonna be drawn on this very issue. And when you hear anyone, mark my words, listen carefully to the languages being used in regards to tradition, in regards to tradance.

Tradance is a mechanism for the communication of and passing along of the content of tradition. All right. Listen, when you start hearing people saying, that it's God's intention that there be a tradition that provides the context for scripture.