Radio Free Geneva: Pastor Ronnie Rogers at Truett-McConnell College

I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ.

I have a problem with them. They're following men instead of the word of God.

I'll be the one standing on top of my feet, standing on a stump and crying out, he died. Those who elected were selected.

First of all, James, I'm very ignorant of the reformers. I think I probably know more about Calvinism than most of the people who call themselves Calvinists.

Ladies and gentlemen, James White is a hyper-Calvinist. Now whatever we do in Baptist life, we don't need to be teaming up with hyper-Calvinists. I said the other day in class that I don't understand the difference between hyper-Calvinism and Calvinism.

It seems to me that Calvin was a hyper-Calvinist. Right, I don't think there is typically any difference between Calvinism and hyper-Calvinism.

Read my book.

And now from our underground bunker deep beneath Bruton Parker College, where no one would think to look, safe from all those moderate Calvinists, Dave Hunt fans, and those who have read and re-read George Bryson's book, we are Radio Free Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to say for his own eternal glory.

God's Sovereignty and Human Autonomy

Yes indeed, welcome to Radio Free Geneva. That's always a good way to get started. And I'm wearing a nice warm sweater today because it's time to make 70 here in Phoenix. And for us, that's winter, man.

That's great. Of course I had to crank the AC down. Yeah, I know, I know, you always wear shorts. Anyway, good to have you with us. Today on the program, I'm going to review a sermon delivered by Ronnie Rogers at the Truett McConnell 2015 Fall Chapel Series posted online.

I was looking just for the program at Pastor Rogers' blog. And he says in an article posted yesterday, this emphasis upon determinism stresses Calvinism's inability to perceive God as portrayed in scripture.

It seems to me while neither side is heretical, our views of man emanate from our different views of God.

Quite true.

The scripture seems to portray God as more than capable of creating man with such freedom, restoring it after the fall and still having always known everything man would do. God is all-powerful and all-knowing.

This includes the actual potential counterfactuals of otherwise choice, contingencies, what he will and will not cause, permit, and what he will make conditional, even to the point of what option man will choose within the range he permits.

He further knows what options flow from that and what man will subsequently choose out of that contingent range of options, new reality or sequence of events for man. Now, what we have in Pastor Rogers is the result of people in the Southern Baptist Convention, the side that's losing, let's just be honest, the side that is diminishing.

And when a side is diminishing, it starts getting a little bit more and more panicked, shall we say, as we saw yesterday on the program with a particular individual's announcement of his run for presidency of the Kentucky Baptist Convention.

What they start doing is looking for new arguments and new means of argumentation. And as we have seen with various people within the Southern Baptist Convention, concepts of Molinism, concepts of trying to make it sound like there is another side to this.

And what you're hearing here is elements of Molinism, counterfactuals, there's a whole system. But I don't think most of the people that are using these terms really know or embrace the system out of which they come.

And they want to try to hold on to the strong statements of Scripture, though in this situation they rarely exegete those texts, where God says that he is in control of all things, that he does his own will, that he accomplishes his own will.

They want to make his will being giving us free will. So God wills to give us libertarian free will. Now that's not what, I cannot imagine that anyone would seriously argue that in Psalm 135, 6 or any of the other texts where God specifically says that he does his will, Psalm 33 for example, the direct contrast is between the will of man, which God frustrates, isn't free, it's not autonomous, and God's will, which man cannot frustrate.

That's the exact, if you ask the author of that Psalm, would you agree that what God wills to do is to give man autonomous will, he'd look at you like, are you serious? That's the exact opposite of what I said.

How did you miss that, basically? But they somehow want to try to hold together these differing views, and affirm on the one hand that God is still sovereign, because most people know that it's somewhat suicidal, biblically speaking, to deny that God is sovereign over all things.

It reminds me of my seminary professor, my systematic theology professor, he was way off to my left, but he was talking to us about process theology, and he was really into process theology, and knew it real well anyways, and had read all the leading proponents and stuff, and could really describe it well.

And he normally did the pros and cons type thing, that's how he'd teach, here's a particular doctrine, here's the pros, here's the cons type thing. And when he got to the cons on process theology, he said, now of course the biggest negative about this is the fact that the God of process theology does not bear any resemblance whatsoever to the God of the Bible.

Which is a good way to put it. And once you deny the sovereignty of God, you're talking about a God who really doesn't show any similarity to the God of the Bible. And so there has to be some affirmation of the sovereignty of God in what you're saying.

But what you need to do is you need to limit the realm of that sovereignty so that it becomes God's choice to make man sovereign in the central issue that brings God glory, and that is salvation itself.

So your ultimate goal is the protection of and elevation of man into the position of having the final choice. God cannot have the final choice. If God has the final choice, now you're going to have to be theocentric, everything's going to have to come down from the purposes of God, and that's it.

You end up one of those dreaded Calvinists. So we can't have that. So we have to elevate man, and therefore we have to limit the range of God's sovereignty to the giving of man of that level of autonomy that he then can control.

The Father can desire the salvation of all, the Son can die to obtain the salvation of all, the Spirit can attempt to convict and bring about the embracing of that salvation by all, but all of that has to be controlled by the almighty will of man.

That's man-centric, that's anthropocentric versus theocentric. The Father decrees the salvation of his elect, the Son dies to perfectly bring about the redemption of the elect, the Spirit comes and applies and brings to life those who are God's elect.

There is perfect harmony in the Godhead, the Father, Son, and Spirit are perfectly successful in everything they seek to do, and there you go. There's, I think, pretty obviously what the Bible teaches, but that's not an anthropocentric position.

That's not a man-centered position. That is a God-centered position. And especially when you live in a society filled with people who are celebrating the autonomy of man. And is that not what we see in our society all around us?

Is that not what Bruce Jenner is the very spokesman of? I was going to say spokesperson, but that's too vague. Spokesman of human autonomy. I am who I say I am. We live in a society of people who celebrate human autonomy.

And therefore, God's autonomy and God's sovereignty, probably not the most popular thing in that context. And so, Pastor Rogers is right when he says that our views of man emanate from our different views of God, as well they should.

But as we're going to see in this sermon, Pastor Rogers never really gets to God's view of things. He builds everything from man's view. And if you've seen anything in the Radio Free Geneva's we've done over the decades now, that's one thing you see over and over and over again.

That synergists, he calls himself an extensivist. I have no earthy idea what that's supposed to mean. I suppose that has something to do with the atonement, but I don't know. He's a synergist, and synergists must begin with man.

And they cannot begin with God. It will always be man-centered. Your view of God will always be determined first by your view of man, and never the other way around. And so, I think that's very important to keep in mind.

All right, let's get to, now what I'm going to do, the only way to get through this is to go really, really fast. And so, thank you for everybody who tweeted in, Facebooked in, everything else, to show me how to play videos fast.

And so, Brother Rogers is going to be speaking at almost twice the speed that he was speaking at originally. But I'm speaking fast too, because that's just how we got to do it. So, this will be fast, but it will be fully understandable.

So, I will say to everyone who is in the mood to write in and complain about anything this week. Stop. Don't do it. Okay? There's no reason to. Just don't. Do not, you know, yeah, I've got my phone, and yeah, this program could be interrupted.

Don't complain about it. If you don't like it, stop watching. Okay? It's a voluntary thing. Okay. All right. Let's get to it here.

Freedom, Determinism, and Compatibilism

Today, I want to speak to you on the subject, did God choose to give man freedom to choose?

That's perfectly understandable, isn't it?

Did God choose to give man freedom to choose? I'll be looking at two different passages. You may turn to them. One of them is Genesis chapter 2. We'll look at that first. And that, of course, is in the Old Testament and prior to the fall of man and woman in sin.

And then the second one will be in the New Testament, subsequent to the fall into sin. And that is John chapter 12, verse 35 and 36. I want to differentiate between two perspectives. One of them is called Calvinism, and the other is generally referred to as non-Calvinism.

Being a non-Calvinist, I refer to myself as an extensivist. And I will employ that term to generally represent the non-Calvinist view this morning. To the question, did God choose to give man the freedom to choose?

Both Calvinist and extensivist would answer yes. But we mean very different things. So to highlight that difference, I want to expose you to the three perspectives regarding man's freedom to choose. And this is brief.

The first one is known as determinism. And as the name says, it says that man's choices are determined. And whatever man does, in fact, choose, he could not have chosen otherwise. Therefore, man is not morally responsible for his choice.

Neither Calvinist nor extensivist hold to that view. The second view is called compatibilism. And compatibilism says that determinism and moral responsibility and free choice are compatible. And thus the name compatibilism.

This compatibility of determinism and the freedom to choose is achieved not by lessening the degree of determinism in compatibilism. It has the same degree as hard determinism. But rather it is achieved by defining free choice to mean that a person freely chooses so long as the person chooses what he desires.

Even though in the moment of decision, he could not have chosen to do otherwise.

Now let me just stop. I'm playing this at 1 .7 times. I realize it's a little fast, but it's the only way to get through it. Again, if you have any complaints, please write to somebody other than us. Now, again, notice the starting place.

Notice the approach. You don't start with asking the question, does God have a sovereign decree? You don't start by asking the question, does God have a purpose that he is seeking to accomplish in this world?

Has he defined that purpose for us? What, you know, overarching concepts of God's impassibility or anything along those lines. No, no, no, no. You start with man. All synergistic systems start with man.

And of course, I submit to you that no Christian theistic system can consistently start with man. If you make God the secondary aspect, I mean, look at any meaningful systematic theology. Does it deal with man before it deals with God, the creator?

That's backwards reasoning. And it will always lead to a fundamental degradation of one's overall theology to start with man. But that's what you're doing here. You're saying, well, there's three possibilities here.

Well, those possibilities can only be analyzed first and foremost in light of who God is and what Scripture says about God's sovereign decree and purposes in his creation. None of that has been raised.

None of that is even brought in. And so I submit to you that, you know, even if it's just a short chapel presentation and therefore it has to be shortened and summarized, that you can't do so. You can't jump into a topic like this and proclaim yourself to have come to a meaningful conclusion, which is what is done here.

When, from the Christian perspective, you are starting at the wrong point. You're starting from the perspective of and a focus upon the creature rather than looking at what God has revealed about himself.

There's lots of important stuff in the Bible about us. But it is only properly understood when it's seen in the light of what God has said about himself first. And this is one of the problems that we have here.

...differently. So according to compatible...

I guess once you pause it...

...antecedents or your past give you the nature from which the desires come in which you will freely choose to do this or that. Therefore, it is a predetermined free choosing. So what that means is, at the moral moment of decision...

Now again, I'll have to keep picking up the speed. There's a level of accuracy a whole lot better than most people, let's be honest. I mean, we've played some people on this program trying to describe compatibilism that wasn't even close.

But we can thank Pastor Rogers for having done some reading. But again, the inaccuracy comes in that when a Reformed person is talking about these issues, the ordering priority is the sovereign decree of God that forms the very fabric of time itself.

And so the issue is, how does God judge in regards to responsibility in light of what we learn from Genesis 50 -20, what we learn from Isaiah 10, we learn from Acts chapter 4, we learn from many other places where God hardens the hearts of individuals to bring about their destruction, and so on and so forth.

All these instances lead us to an understanding that God has a sovereign decree. He has a purpose in what is taking place in this world. And therefore, to answer the question of how man is held accountable in light of that has to be ordered by the divine revelation of the fact that God is working out His purpose in this world.

That He, according to Ephesians chapter 1, is working all things in accordance with His own will. That's the God we serve. And that's what gives order, and that's what keeps us from having to flip a coin.

Oh, well, we could go this direction, or we could go that direction. And that's sort of what you have here, is even in the description of compatibilism, you have this idea of, well, it's not a real freedom.

Because how could you define what real freedom is when you haven't started with asking what kind of real freedom does the Creator Himself possess that He could then give to His own creation? See, you cannot meaningfully accomplish anything through the analysis only of the creation when the Creator has revealed Himself, and you're ignoring what He said about Himself.

Every effort is going to require you, in essence, to ignore entire vistas of biblical revelation. And that's what you've got going on here.

...is to tell the truth or lie, believe in God or not believe in God, to commit a murder or not commit a murder, that person is determined to have acted freely so long as they did what they desired, even though they could not in the moral moment have done differently than they did in fact do.

This is the position of Calvinism, even though many Calvinists do not fully understand compatibilism, nor speak consistently with the perspective.

Now, what would be required to speak consistently and accurately on Pastor Rogers' part right here would be a recognition of the sovereign decree of God, would be to raise this issue. Because fundamentally he's saying there is no sovereign decree of God.

The fundamental argument of this sermon is there is no sovereign decree of God that determines actions in time. Now, this whole article, and by the way, it's RonnieWRogers .com. Just R-O-N-N-I-E-W-R-O-G-E-R-S, RonnieRogers .com.

Go read it for yourself. The article he posted yesterday, I did not know about it until about five minutes before the program, is fuller than what you have in the video. And so, he talks about he knows our present and future thoughts, and he has known such eternally.

How? He knows the Bible says that. But the problem is the how. And what he, and Flowers, and others are trying to do now is saying, we don't need to know how. We can assert it. And even if the Bible tells us that the how is due to his eternally being the creator, and that everything exists by his creative decree, no, no, no, we don't need to go there.

We can just simply say that God's knowledge is so far above ours that it has this mysterious ability to know these things without determining these things. So you just make the bold assertion that, no, God can know these things, but we're going to say at the same time that you could do something differently.

So if God eternally knew what you were going to do, you cannot do something differently without invalidating God's foreknowledge.

Okay?

If God knew what you were going to do, if God knew that someone outside my window was going to be playing the bongo drums right now, which is what's going on, if that person could not have not done that, yeah, it sounds like we're under attack out there, that person could not, if they decided not to play the bongo drums outside the window right now, then if God had known that from eternity past, and then it doesn't happen, then God was eternally wrong in his knowledge of what was going to happen in that event.

Now, Rich just went and took care of the bongo drum player. But let's say that in coming back from stopping the bongo drum player, Rich trips over a wire in the other room and falls and breaks his hip.

And it totally changes the track of the rest of his life. God couldn't have sovereignly known any of that if his foreknowledge of the bongo drum player could be invalidated.

Right?

So how can you say God can have perfect knowledge of the future? You can say he can have a pretty good knowledge of the future, you know, but now you're starting to play with open theism. Now you're starting to get into that area where you can either have to jump into the open theist camp, which these guys don't want to do.

They can't if they're Southern Baptists, by confession. Or you're going to have to jump into the Molinist camp and start playing with Molina and middle knowledge and counterfactuals and all the rest of that kind of stuff, which most people don't even begin to understand.

I mean, every time we have spent an entire program, which we've done more than once, on the subject of Molinism, we get all sorts of people writing in saying, the next time you do that, could you also provide maybe some free subscriptions to Advil or something to go along with the discussion?

Because I didn't understand any of that. You know, maybe that would help. I don't know. But again, you see the importance of where you start. And fundamentally, I would assert that when you don't start with God, when you start with man, as Pastor Rogers does, the result is going to have to be an overthrow of a particular spectrum of the biblical revelation.

And in this case, because that is God's revelation of his actual nature, it is going to have extensive impact upon apologetics, Christian philosophy, Christian worldview, the whole nine yards, the whole nine yards.

It's important stuff. That's why Radio Free Geneva is fun to do. But it's also pretty important.

Libertarian Freedom and the Image of God

The third point I want to make is called Libertarianism. And the Libertarians say that man is not determined. He is endowed by his creator with the ability to choose between accessible options. So, if you were looking from a Libertarian perspective, you look back on the moral moment of decision, when someone chooses, they are actually choosing between various options that are accessible.

And whatever, in fact, man does choose, he could have chosen otherwise. And therefore, man is obviously responsible. So, these are the three perspectives that you have to choose from. With the Libertarianism, Libertarians say that determinism and free choice are not compatible.

Extensivists say that the scripture does not reflect the determinism of compatibilism when it speaks about God or man.

Okay, so there's the assertion. The scripture does not speak about this. Well, but it does. And the only way to deal with that is to actually provide meaningful, consistent counter-exegesis of Genesis 50, of Isaiah 10, of Acts 4.

And I just don't believe, believe me, I know that anyone can come up with what looks like an exegetical discussion of a text of scripture. But what's the plumb line? Again, consistency. Do you use the same kind of exegesis in discussing Genesis 50, Isaiah 10, Acts 4, all the hardening passages, etc., etc.?

Do you use the same exegesis there that you use when talking about the resurrection of Christ, justification by faith, all the central issues of the Christian faith, or do you adopt some new kind of exegesis?

And that's what we're seeing. We've seen that, for example, in the homosexual area. People who want to pretend that they're still evangelicals. But when they start exegeting the text of scripture in a way that is completely different than the way that they handle anything else, there is your red light.

There is your mark that says, ah, you've changed your exegesis. That's inconsistency. That demonstrates that you're in error. A lot of people don't think that way anymore. I recognize that. People are primarily emotional.

But you have to have a plumb line. You have to have a basis.

God endowed Adam and Eve with the ability to choose between two real accessible options. Consequently, to answer the question, did God choose to give man the freedom to choose, one must go to the scripture and see what it says.

I suggest to you that anyone who goes to the scripture and reads it without theological importations into the verse will see that the clear, ubiquitous message of the word of God is that he has endowed man with the ability to choose between real options and he has conditioned whether he will bless or judge based upon man's choice.

This is a component of what it means to be created in the image of God.

Okay, so there's the assertion that if you just read the Bible without all your theological presuppositions, you would come to the conclusion that God has no sovereign decree, that God has no sovereign purpose.

If you read Psalm 33 without theological preconceptions, you would never come to the conclusion that God frustrates man's intentions, that God frustrates and puts to nullity man's purposes. You would never come to the conclusion that all of God's intentions and God's purposes will be fulfilled despite what man does.

You would not come to those conclusions if you just didn't have all the theological baggage. Obviously, from my perspective, it's very easy. Both sides say to the other, you're importing your theology.

How do you determine who is and who isn't? Who is consistent? Who can apply the same exegetical standards to all texts of scripture? And I don't believe that Pastor Rogers, if he were actually forced to go to those texts, to deal with those strong statements of God's personal freedom in the creative act itself, that he would be able to consistently engage those texts.

And obviously, I believe that when we look at all those texts he's referring to, the ubiquitous testimony of the Bible regarding man being called to make decisions. No Calvinist would say otherwise. God ordains the ends as well as the means.

Our decisions are real because God has chosen to create a real universe and interact in time with his people and to do so to his own glory. The incarnation proves that we are not puppets. The incarnation proves that what takes place in time is not merely some one-dimensional, two-dimensional, simplistic following of a computer program.

It is much deeper than that. It is much fuller than that. But unfortunately, people on the two extremes, the hyper-Calvinist and the person who opposes God's sovereign decree, all the forms of synergism that would follow that, all make the same mistake of simplifying, in an imbalanced way, on one side or the other, the biblical revelation.

These folks get rid of God's sovereignty. They get rid of God's purpose. They get rid of the perfection of his impassibility, his immutability. All these things of the perfections of God's being, that stuff becomes secondary.

It becomes really irrelevant in comparison to the experience that man has. On this side, the hyper-Calvinist, that's the all-in-all. And God's interaction with man, God's utilization of means, all that stuff, that becomes irrelevant.

So you end up with the cliff on both sides. Most people jump off this side. A few people jump off this side. The key is to allow Scripture to provide the guardrails so that you don't jump off either side.

And that's unfortunately not what you have in the synergistic position.

Okay, so there's one of the key issues.

Only the extensivist, a .k .a. the synergist who denies God's sovereign decree, can then assert that God redemptively loves all of his creation. Now, what I would like to see someday, what I think would be extremely helpful, probably won't happen, but what I'd like to see that would be extremely helpful, would be to see a debate between a strong, knowledgeable, not a liberal, but a strong, knowledgeable, inspiration-affirming universalist and someone like Pastor Rogers.

Because the Southern Baptists who have decided to, in an imbalanced fashion, make omnibenevolence the hallmark of all of the divine attributes, so much so that holiness and everything else just goes out the window, and have fundamentally denied to God the same right that the creature has, to have kinds of love, to be able to love some things differently than other things.

I don't see how these individuals can consistently stand against a universalist. Because if God has universal, redemptive love for all of creation, then for God to be fully satisfied with his own creation, he'll have to redeem Satan himself.

Because Satan's part of the creation. So God has redemptive love for Satan. And therefore, the strong argument can be made that God would not create a universe where his redemptive love could be finally frustrated and destroyed.

That in the end, it will finally be victorious. In other words, love wins. Someone said something like that recently. I'd like to see that debate. Because I think they'd have to say things in that debate that would shed really good light on what they're really saying in trying to fight off the hordes of Calvinists.

But this becomes the center thing. I do not believe that God's redemptive love, redemptive love, I believe God has love for all of creation, but God has different kinds of love. And the love that God shows to the Egyptian soldier prior to the Red Sea is different than the love he shows to the Israelite in bringing him through the Red Sea.

And if you can't affirm that, what can you affirm? I mean, some people get mad at me for pointing that out, but I'm sorry. What else are you going to say? Oh, that's the road to hyperism. No, it isn't.

I detest hyper-Calvinism. Don't tell me that's the road to hyperism. If you believe in election, you believe that. One way or the other, you believe that God's redemptive love is different and has a different purpose and outcome than other kinds of love.

You know, I mean, is there any way around that, logically? Oh, you can't use logic. Whoa, wow, we can use logic, the resurrection, the trinity, everything, but you can't use it here. Okay, all right, gotcha.

Got a problem with that, got a problem with that.

Human Decision, Responsibility, and Practical Theology

Talk about our self-experience for just a moment. In our deepest being as human beings, we sense that we are all day long, every day, making decisions between accessible options. We could do this or we could do that, and whatever we choose to do, we could have chosen otherwise.

Some of these decisions occasion praise and thanks, while others occasion only rejection or judgment, and rightly so, because we could have chosen otherwise. For example, you may not know this, but if you receive an F on a test, implicit in that is that your professor believes that you had a choice, and you should have chosen to study more, but you chose to watch some D-rated movie, The Tomato That Ate Chicago or something all night long, and you weren't prepared, but you had a choice.

See, it's implicit in the entire grading system. Now, while our senses are not 100 trustworthy, that attribute only fits scripture, neither are they 100 untrustworthy, because that would mean this unstoppable, undeniable, insuppressible sense that every human being on the planet has, that we are making choices between options is merely a delusion, and that we are all adrift in this what could be called a very mad, mad, unintelligible world.

Let me give you an example using the wedding. I think there's some young men here who would like to see that come one day, and when you do, and you find that woman, and you're standing there being married, and your bride's right before you, and you're a libertarian, and you're going to say those extraordinary words,.

I do.

And let me tell you, when you say them, men, your bride is rapturously lifted to the heavens of emotion. I mean, she knows that when you said, I do, you chose her, and you said, I don't, to many others.

And so when you're looking at her and you say, I do, what you'll see is a twinkle in her eye, and there'll be a little blush in her cheeks, and her little heart will be pitter-patter like a puppy dog's feet on a wet sidewalk, and I want to tell you, you are doing just fine right there.

It may be your finest hour. Now, down the street, there's a compatibilist getting married. And when he comes to say those extraordinary words, I do, if full disclosure prevails, he must say, I do. But of course, you know that I cannot not say, I do.

I mean, I am doing what I desire, but I cannot not desire. I mean, it is what it is. I mean, as long as we get married, dude, isn't that what we want?

Really?

Really?

Honestly?

What's obviously wrong about it? Hopefully by now we've done enough Radio Free Geneva's that everybody is sitting there going, again, obvious error here on Pastor Roger's part is, well, a lot of errors there, but we do not have knowledge of God's decree, and we cannot be judged for acting upon God's decree, because he does not reveal that to us.

And therefore, this idea of full disclosure, quote, unquote, is absurd on its face. It is mockery. It can't really seriously be taken in any serious fashion. Unfortunately, this is, again, the very kind of thing that you get a lot, however, amongst especially Southern Baptists right now who are just in a panic about the fact that so many people within the convention are coming to understand that God's actually God and we aren't, and so on and so forth.

So the whole idea that, well, I'm doing what I'm doing, but I can't really do anything other than that, is based upon the idea that because we affirm on the basis of scriptural teaching that God has a sovereign decree, that we therefore are to be judged to act upon the knowledge of that sovereign decree.

The problem is the same Bible says we don't know what that is. The secret things belong to Lord our God. The things revealed belong to us, our children forever. We are only accountable for what God reveals to us.

He reveals to us his law. The reason, for example, that the wedding ceremony is honorable is because God's law has said the marriage bed is undefiled, marriage to be held in honor by all, etc., etc. But the funny thing is, I'll bet you dollars to donuts.

I'll bet you dollars to donuts. That's an old phrase my mom used to use. I'm not sure if it's a Midwestern phrase or what. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that this man, in talking to a young man in his church at some point, has said something along the lines of, well, Tom, you need to be patient, you need to be prayerful, and you need to trust that God has that right woman for you.

I'll bet you he said that, huh? But you see, that assumes that God has a decree. That assumes that God has a purpose. That assumes that God has a will. And that what we want to do is bring ourselves in line with God's will.

Not that our will is sovereign, and we get to choose whoever we get to choose, and then he'll just go, well, that's just fine with me. Now, I'll bet you he's said that to somebody. You can't live consistently.

And talk about these issues. I'll bet you anything his actual practical theology is better than his spoken theology. That's just, I think that's probably pretty much just a given there.

There'll be a little less honey on the honeymoon if you follow me on that thought. And the only moon you're going to find is the one she knocks you to, and it is a one-way trip alone from which you never return.

So, what you have are these two irreconcilable perspectives operating within Christianity. By the way, if God did not endow us with otherwise choice, the deliberations that you think you're making about whether to agree with me or not, you think you're pondering all this, is a delusion, a phantom.

Because actually, if you disagree according to compatibilism, you cannot agree. And if you agree, you cannot disagree. But none of us thinks that.