James Dolezal’s Biblical Evidence for DDS

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Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon. We're in the big studio because we have some big things to be talking about today.

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As I mentioned on Twitter, even though it is January 6th, we are not talking about January 6th.

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And after having the television on briefly this morning, I turned it off and will keep it off probably the rest of the day just simply to preserve sanity.

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So if you likewise are looking for something to think about other than the insanity of the world around us, then hopefully you will find the program to be useful today.

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I did announce that, however, this is somewhat of a focused discussion today that may or may not have as broad a range of interest as some programs do.

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Very frequently we'll cover six, seven subjects in a program. We're going to be focused upon one today.

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And for some folks, it just may not be that much of an issue. But for right now, for Reformed Baptists, it has somehow become the issue.

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And that amazes me in light of the fact that you have had for decades people teaching the

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London Baptist Confession of Faith and teaching through it and working through its statements regarding the sufficiency of Scripture and the nature of God and the

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Trinity and God's decree and salvation. It's pretty common in Reformed Baptist churches to have

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Sunday school lessons. I think, if I recall correctly, when

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I first went to Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church at the end of the decade of the 80s, 1989 specifically, that they had just finished at that point a walk through the

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Confession of Faith. And so that's not an unusual thing to do in a confessional church.

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But all of those years, all of those seminary graduates and pastors and so on and so forth, when teaching through chapter two, did not emphasize or maybe did not even bring up the conflict and the conflagration that currently is going on amongst

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Reformed Baptists. And you will have men today who agree on every aspect of the

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Trinity and the divine decree and election and predestination and justification and sanctification and scriptural inerrancy and inspiration and might even agree on pretty much every aspect of eschatology, for crying out loud.

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And agree on baptism and the nature of the local church and the fact that you don't have

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Presbyteries in the New Testament and so on and so forth.

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Agree just all across the spectrum. And yet the fangs are out and the tongs are out and the stakes have been put up and the green wood has been gathered.

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All for one extended statement of one portion of a single word, really.

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And it really, I've had people contacting me saying,

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I read on Facebook that you're a heretic now. What happened to you? And I'm just like, what?

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I actually have Reformed Baptists who are believing Perry Robinson.

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Now, if Reformed Baptists have learned anything, I mean, I've been dealing with Perry Robinson or at least recognizing his tactics and his dishonesty for like,

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I don't know, 25 years plus? Maybe longer than that now, maybe over 30.

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I forget when it was that he jumped ship and did his stuff. But I can guarantee you, all

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Reformed Baptists, you don't need to believe anything that Perry Robinson ever has to say about anything. And yet people are.

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It is amazing the willingness within the community to believe the worst about one of your own on the basis of people completely outside your community.

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I don't get it. I've honestly given some thought to why is it?

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But you know what? I know it happens everywhere. I know it happens amongst

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Presbyterians, and I know it happens in charismatic circles or Anglican circles or whatever.

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It's not just us. But here we are in the situation where we're facing incredible external pressures.

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And yet it happened with the early church, too. The early church was facing incredible external pressures and yet had to deal with all sorts of internal issues, some of which, from our perspective, we would look back and go,

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Is it really all that important when you celebrate Easter? I mean, you're really ready to excommunicate half the empire over something like that?

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Well, some people were. And so here we are on a subject that, honestly, 99 % of the people in the pew have no idea what it is we're talking about.

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And don't see how it's directly relevant to even to their worship. They're far more basic because this is a dispute about an extended metaphysical speculation.

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Some people would say conclusion, but I would say speculation about the inner operations of God.

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And the vast majority of believers, the vast majority of Reformed Baptists, really would struggle to understand how this is central to my belief in the

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Trinity or the deity of Christ, the resurrection, the doctrine of justification, any of the things that I want to communicate to the world.

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Would really struggle, but it has become absolutely the test of orthodoxy.

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I found out, it's not that I ever look at it, but someone linked me. I'm not sure

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I told Rich about this, but someone linked me to my Wikipedia page. It's not mine.

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I don't have anything to do with it. I've never had anything to do with it. And I only think I've looked at it twice in my adult life.

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But someone informed me last week that it had been edited and now I'm described as a former

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Reformed Baptist. So I've had my card revoked and everything.

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And so a number of weeks ago, I said, well, okay,

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I'll tell you what. I don't move as fast as most of the young people do today.

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In some ways, that is in honor of how theological discussion was done in the past.

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But I made the announcement that what I would like to do is

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I would like to look at the biblical evidence that has been presented.

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And specifically, at that point, I was going to play a portion of the third lecture.

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At least that's how it's numbered. And that just could be because of how it was downloaded from Sermon Audio.

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I'm not a thousand percent certain about that. But from the 2015 Southern California Reformed Baptist Pastors Conference, where Dr.

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James Dolezal presented on simplicity. And in that third, again, that's the enumeration.

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Maybe it was the second or the third of his. I don't remember which it is. Presentation.

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He touched upon the biblical evidence for the doctrine of simplicity.

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Specifically, as he had defined it. And so I announced that.

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And it's astonishing how many people were completely unwilling to wait for that kind of interaction.

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It's not like this is the only topic we're discussing, but for some people, evidently, they think it should be.

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We've been doing a lot of other things, including dealing with the subject of Molinism.

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And in passing, I might just mention that we will have a graphic up probably this evening.

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Dr. Tim Stratton and I will be debating, is Molinism biblical? In Houston, in person.

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In barely a month, February 12th. And there will be an Eventbrite link that we'll be posting and making available to folks later on today.

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If you are in the area or want to come down there for that particular in -person debate.

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It's at the end of a... I'll have been on the road for three weeks at that point in time. We'll be up in St.

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Charles first, the first weekend, at Covenant of Grace Church. And then the next weekend,

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Conway, teaching apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

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And so that'll be the next weekend, down in Houston. And we'll also be preaching there, Lord willing, on Sunday before heading home.

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It'll be pretty much a solid month on the road. That means a solid month of mobile dividing lines as well.

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So there we go. So anyway, we have other topics to be addressing.

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We seek to have a global audience and do have a global audience.

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And so some people just didn't want to wait for any type of interaction.

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Interestingly enough, before I get to that, I had forgotten that I had written an article coming up on 20 years ago.

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19 years ago is when it was published. Chris Wisson found it. Not sure how.

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Sometimes scares me, the things he's digging up. But I had written an article for Ligonier on the

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Trinity and monotheism. And here was a paragraph from that article in 2003 that raised no questions, no hackles.

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No one put up the stakes and piled the wood. No one edited my

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Wikipedia page. If there was a Wikipedia page in 2003, I don't think there was, to kick me out of the kingdom.

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But here's what I said. Though some might find the emphasis strange, we insist that God's being is simple rather than complex.

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In saying this, we are not referring to the difficulty of the subject, but to the nature of God's being. His being is simple in that it is not made up of different parts or substances.

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Further, it is indivisible just because it is simple in this way. This may not seem like a very important observation, but it is.

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If God's being were complex, we would have to consider the relationship of the different parts of that being, and whether one is more important or definitional than another.

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We also would have to struggle with knowing whether one part was before another. Naturally, this complexity would introduce great difficulties when we would come to the matter of the relationship of the divine persons, which was what our article was specifically about.

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But you start off with an affirmation of monotheism before you begin discussing the existence of the divine persons.

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Like I said, no one had any problems with this.

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It is interesting, almost prophetic, however, that I concluded that article with these words.

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But those who seek to go beyond what God has revealed must be reminded that there are limits God has set by His own sovereign design.

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And it is the utmost in arrogance to seek to peer into the secrets

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God has withheld from His creatures. When our best efforts to understand and comprehend meet the limitation of God's revelation in Scripture, we must bow to that which remains shrouded in mystery, acknowledging our creaturely finitude reveling in His Godship.

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So once again, many thousands of Reformed folks read those words, and today wouldn't be received in the same way as they were received then.

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And the question is, why is that? Well, the primary reason for that is that since that period of time, a resourcement study has been done.

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Publications of the writers, the framers of the

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London Baptist Confession of Faith, materials that had not been available in English or widely distributed, became available and were published.

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And in digging into that, the argument that is being presented is, at least some of it, obviously there are framers that we don't have information from.

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And I suppose, what if something were to be discovered in a dusty library someplace that would give us more light on the perspectives of those who wrote the confession?

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Maybe we'd find out that there were disagreements on certain things. Who knows? I mean, that's how historical inquiry goes.

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But the basic idea is that, well, we've discovered that in reality, the framers accepted what would be what even

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Dr. Dolezal calls the strong doctrine of divine simplicity over against a weak doctrine.

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I mean, this seems strange terms, but the very fact that you recognize that there are different forms of this doctrine is important.

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And the central affirmation that has become the flashpoint is an affirmation that is based upon certain metaphysical conclusions.

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And I think this is clearly brought out in Dr. Dolezal's book, God Without Parts.

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And let me just read one section from that book so you can understand what the issue is.

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Because a lot of people are just asking, what in the world is going on? Quote, Thomas Aquinas' reason for holding the real identity of God with his attributes and his attributes with each other flows from his prior conclusion that God is ipsum essa subsistens.

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In a simple being, being and that which is are the same.

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For if one is not the other, the simplicity is then removed.

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But God is absolutely simple. Therefore, for God to be good is identical with God.

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He is, therefore, his goodness. Now, this is one of the reasons that I think most people struggle is that there's all sorts of incredibly technical language here, which, of course, does not appear in the confession.

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But the argument being made today is it stands behind the terminology that is there and must be assumed and hence must be accepted.

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Some other quotes for Thomas. And notice this is

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Thomas Aquinas we're talking about here. This is confessedly the background of the language that is being used in regards to the definition of divine simplicity and being said to be necessary to accept, to be confessional.

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For Thomas, existential simplicity requires that the identity account be applied to the divine attributes as well as the divine essence.

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Being, isness, it's the whole fun of doing Latin, I guess. Indeed, he seems unwilling to grant that any other account is rightly deserving of the name simplicity.

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And it would seem that there are a number of Reformed Baptists who would agree with him in that today.

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For Thomas, all properties are qualities that inhere in an essence and thus are removable, at least conceptually, without causing any deficiency in the essence qua essence.

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What does all that mean? Well, depends on who you talk to. Unfortunately, the number of interpreters of Thomas Aquinas are legion.

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And the number of different interpretations of Thomas Aquinas are legion. And in my experience, people who think they're experts on Thomas Aquinas and then interpret him differently than somebody else just automatically dismiss anybody else as having any knowledge of Thomas Aquinas at all.

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That seems to be the functional mechanism amongst philosophers and historians.

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Anyway, the flashpoint, therefore, is the assertion that on this concept of simplicity, that how

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I define simplicity is not enough. It's true as far as it goes. God is not made up of lesser parts.

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God is not like the statue in Scripture that you have the iron and the copper and the clay and so on and so forth.

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It's composite. And it had never crossed my mind in my years in teaching and preaching and doing theology that when you spoke of the attributes of God, when you spoke of his omniscience, possessing all knowledge, that you were in any way in a state of confusion to be able to, you know,

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I taught systematic theology for Golden Gate a number of times, and we used the abstract of systematic theology,

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Boyce's work. And so you have, as in most systematic theologies, you have a section that discusses omniscience, and we'll go through biblical texts and discuss maybe the concept of God's knowledge.

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And there are really important issues there. Does God know in the same way we know?

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When we talk about thinking God's thoughts after him, is that even really a possibility? Epistemology is an important thing, and the

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Bible has a lot to say about it, actually. But then you'd have a section on omnipotence, having all power.

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What does that mean? And you'd have omnipresence.

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And so you'd have the various omnis. And then you'd have other attributes like God's justice and holiness and mercy and grace.

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And normally wrath is treated as an extension from, in light of creation, justice.

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But this is how you would look at these things, and it never crossed my mind that what we were saying is

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God is a composite being made up of these as if they are parts.

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But for Thomas, that's exactly what you're saying. Because if the human mind can differentiate them, then they become parts.

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And I think the biblical worldview would say that these are true statements about the being of God, that God wants us to know and to understand and to live in light of so that we can worship him properly.

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So we can know him better. One of the things that separates the Christian God from the gods of paganism, they had the mystery religions.

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And the idea of knowing God was not a part of worship.

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Dependent on, obviously, the mystery religion you might be talking about. But the difference between paganism and Christianity, God reveals himself to his people so that in knowing him, we know ourselves.

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And so now the idea, in light of this controversy, is not that there are not proper distinctions between those attributes as we see them.

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So for example, in Dr. Dolezal's book, let me go back to it here because I've got two of them.

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And God without parts, on the front cover is one of these little things.

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And this is a prism. And so I was going to, unfortunately, in a room like this with all these lights on, you can't get a prism to do its prism thing.

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You need a focused source of white light. But on the front cover is a picture of a prism with white light coming in and then the spectrum reflecting out the backside.

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And fascinating little things. I used this in the sun a couple days ago. It worked really, really well.

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The idea is that the prism is representing revelation in the sense that the white light is the simple nature of God.

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And then it's being refracted through the prism of revelation so that we, lesser creatures than God, can differentiate the attributes of God.

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And then that takes us to Francis Turretin. And I quoted

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Turretin about two weeks ago now on social media where he very helpfully, in discussing this subject, differentiates between the opera ad intra and the opera ad extra.

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These are terms that we have used on this program before in talking about the internal operations of God versus external operations of God.

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And so when we talk about the opera ad intra in the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit within God himself, within the being of God, these are terms that are appropriate to use to distinguish between talking about God in eternity past and talking about God as he has revealed himself in the economic trinity, that is in creation and redemption and the different roles the divine persons have taken in bringing that about.

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And so when people want to talk about logically, and I suppose in a sense temporally, before creation, then we're talking about God in his own being.

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And obviously at that point we have a very small amount of material to go on, revelationally speaking.

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There are only a few texts that, as I described when I wrote my article on Philippians 2 years ago in the

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CRI Journal, beyond the veil of eternity, when that veil is moved aside just a little bit and we get to see, for example, communication between the

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Father and the Son, reflected for example in John chapter 17 or in Philippians 2 when we have eternally existing in the form of God, did not consider equality of God a thing to be grasped, but made himself no reputation.

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These are brief glimpses into that which is very hard for human beings who are limited by time and space and by our language to really fully begin to understand.

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And so the idea, still haven't gotten here, it's a complex issue.

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The idea that is causing controversy is the assertion on the part of the proponents of a strong doctrine,

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I would call it an extended speculative doctrine, not strong,

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I would call it an extended speculative doctrine of divine simplicity, is the assertion that in God, so Turreton talks about this, in God you have the attributes are equal or the same with one another.

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So God's omnipotence is his omniscience, which is his goodness, which is his mercy, which is his justice.

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And they have to be, otherwise God gets divided up into parts, on the assumption that proper distinctions of the reality of God's being divide that being.

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And that is the issue right there. That's why I read the quotes from Thomas and I took them from Dr. Dolezal, so he's the one that quoted it.

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That's the issue. And to just jump ahead, I reject that.

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I see absolutely no reason to go with Thomas there, do not have any reason to embrace that metaphysic, and that is the only reason that I can see that anyone asserts that ad intra in the being of God, the attributes of God, are one and the same.

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But, ad extra, as Turreton says, that is outside the being of God, these attributes are properly distinguished from one another.

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They communicate true things to creatures that are important and glorifying to God.

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So ad intra, ad extra. And so we, everybody, it seems, agrees that God is not made up of lesser constituent parts, that God is assay, he has his being from himself, it's not dependent, it's not like the ancient gods that surrounded

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Israel where the gods came out of the creation or were chopped in half and became half creation and half of something else.

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All that kind of mess. God has assayity.

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God's being does not change or age or get stronger or weaker over time.

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God is not limited, even by what he himself has created.

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We agree on all of these things, and we agree that God's being is simple.

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The difference is, there is one group of people saying, on the basis of, specifically on the basis, of the formation of metaphysical categories by Thomas Aquinas in the

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Middle Ages. They'll say, oh, but people believed this beforehand. In different ways, but not in the same way that Thomas put it, and for different reasons.

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I think a lot more work needs to be done on what some of those reasons were, but the background it is asserted to the

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London Baptist Confession of the face, use of body parts and passions, is the idea, the metaphysical assertion, that ad extra aside, we all agree about that, the assertion is ad intra, the attributes are the same.

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And I say, there is no reason for believing that, outside of Thomas' metaphysical assertions, and I believe it raises insuperable problems.

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My main problem, theologically, with the assertion, is that it's telling us that that which is true, internally to God, is false to us, and yet God is glorified by the revelation ad extra, that does not actually truly represent the reality ad intra.

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So, I think that's an issue, I think that's a problem, but it has never crossed my mind to say, and if you believe that stuff, you're out of the kingdom.

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Nor would it ever cross my mind to say, and you're not a Reformed Baptist, if you believe that.

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But the argument is being, well there were Reformed Baptists who wrote that confession, and they did believe that, therefore you have to believe that extended metaphysical assertion from Thomas Aquinas, you're not a

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Reformed Baptist. And my statement to Reformed Baptists is, if you will elevate the background of the confession to that point, you are dooming our movement to a slow death.

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You are. You are making it so narrow, and so brittle, that it will not survive.

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It will not survive, because 10 years from now, it's going to be a new issue. And some of you, sitting pretty today, will find yourself on the outs then.

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That's the problem. That's the problem. Okay, so, going to, what

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I was going to do, like I said, was play the audio from the 2015 pastors conference, and then

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I realized that Dr. Joel Saul was pretty much just reading straight from his book at that point, and reading very well.

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I didn't even realize that in listening to it. It was very well done. And may I say, not that this could do me any good, because this part, for some reason, just turns into fuzz and static on the part of many.

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Dr. Joel Saul is a brilliant scholar. He's a wonderful and engaging speaker.

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He's passionate about his subject. And by the way, this is his subject. I mean, this is what his dissertation was, and I've learned a long time ago to be a little bit careful about folks about the subject of their dissertation, because you just sort of get warped when you have that one topic these days.

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So, this is his baby, and he's brilliant, and he's insightful, and I'm sure he's just a great guy all along.

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We've never met, but I say all those things to say that for me, this is not an issue of fellowship, orthodoxy, or anything else.

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And I think a rational person would stand back and say, it seems that James White and James Dolezal agree on 99 .998

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% of Christian theology on the Trinity, the doctrine of God, Scripture, and everything else.

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And when you can end up with controversy and the kind of amazing behavior that I am seeing amongst people of the 1689 in their

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ID somewhere, when you've got that narrow a difference, that's what really, really, really, really concerns me, because I do not believe there can be any expansion in any meaningful fashion of a movement that is that brittle.

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There has to be some willingness for Catholicity with a small c.

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There has to be some willingness for that. I'm not sure what that is over there on that screen, but it keeps popping up.

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It catches right outside the eye. It's like, hmm, what's going on over there? All right, so, to Dr.

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Dolezal's book, All That Is in God, Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism, which, by the way, according to one source

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I've been reading, this phraseology of classical Christian theism came from the last century and was, in fact, originally a negative from open theists, but anyway, under the page, it says page 49.

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It says that in Kindle, so sometimes that's right, sometimes that's wrong.

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I like when the page numbers are there, but you can't always trust them. Page 49, biblical basis for divine simplicity.

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Well, again, I have discovered that if you dare ask for biblical basis, that you will be called a biblicist, as we saw, and this concerned me very much.

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I read it last week. When I raised that issue and asked for a biblical basis of saying where I was wrong and what

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I was saying, response that I got from one of Dr.

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Dolezal's fellow elders was, well, we think we can make a biblical case, but we ought not do so, and so we read that last week, and that very, very much concerns me, but here is what has been published by Dr.

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Dolezal on this subject. Having stipulated the basic sense of the doctrine, now,

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I just, I got through one phrase, but remember, the key issue is not just the basic sense of the doctrine.

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Everybody needs to keep their eyes on this. The key issue is the extended assertion, the extended speculation that takes us ad intra into the very being of God to assert that in the being of God, the attributes of God are the same, that what we glorify

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God for, and this is the other, by the way, I've been spending so much time on all these things that I try to remember to get all the facts in order.

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I said that one of my objections to the extended Thomistic application of simplicity is that it means that we are glorifying

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God and coming to know God on the basis of something external that internally is untrue in his actual being, which would mean we're not actually coming to know the being of God.

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What's more is, and this is the second aspect of that, they're related, obviously, the attributes of God interact with each other in the sense that God's justice and God's mercy, and under mercy, we put grace, love, covenantal faithfulness.

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I'm not sure exactly how you would want to break these things down, but you have clearly, and it is a part of what tells us about who

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God is, you have the interplay of God's justice and God's mercy.

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That's what the cross is all about, and if they're the same thing, that interplay's gone, so the interplay doesn't exist within God, and yet it's one of the main reasons that we glorify him ad extra, but ad intra, it doesn't exist.

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If someone just feels compelled to believe that all of God's attributes are one and indistinguishable from one another, more power to you, but please don't tell me that I'm somehow not presenting the fullness of God's revelation, and you can see a lot of this is gonna end up coming back to a discussion of so aren't our confessions supposed to be subordinate scripture, and therefore, if there are real, if these are real questions, if these are real issues that equally trained and equally aware people can look at the text and disagree on these things, how can that just be dismissed on the basis of, well, but the framers said it?

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Okay, all right, so having stipulated the basic sense of the doctrine, we must now examine the biblical motives underlying it, does the

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Bible really require adherence to divine simplicity? There is no single biblical proof text for this doctrine.

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It follows, rather, by way of good and necessary consequence.

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Now, I just stopped there just to remind my fellow Reformed Baptists that we've heard that language before, good and necessary consequence, and we dispute our

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Presbyterian brothers when they say good and necessary consequence and come up with paedobaptism, but it follows, rather, by way of good and necessary consequence from a number of other doctrines that are clearly taught in scripture, and though the cognitive realization of divine simplicity requires that we contemplate the implications of other doctrines, it is not for that reason any less biblical.

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Okay, but let's hear what's being said. The claim that is being made here is that the doctrine of simplicity is a secondary doctrine derived from more primary doctrines.

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I don't really think that's how they treat it, but that would be the only way to look at it, because, okay, let's remember, last week,

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I went through a number of different doctrines in regards to, for example, the hypostatic union, and so I've got this doctrine, this doctrine, this doctrine, and then these come together, and then you get the conclusion here that if you affirm this correctly, and if you affirm this correctly, and if you affirm this correctly, then they inevitably lead to this, and therefore it remains biblical, because if you don't confess this, you somehow have to either

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X this out or X that out or something along these lines. All right? So, what is a really, really, really, really, really good example of this is something that, obviously,

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I have used over and over and over and over again because it's true, and that is you have three biblical doctrines that are foundations for the doctrine of the

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Trinity. So you have monotheism. I can type.

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I type, right? It's probably because I type that I can't write anymore. Then you have three divine persons, and then you have the equality.

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It's really hard to do it at this angle. The equality of the persons.

44:05

So that if you deny any one of these biblical doctrines, you end up with a particular heresy, and so if you deny monotheism, then you'd have three persons and equality, and you get polytheism or tritheism.

44:25

Okay? And if you deny the equality of the persons, but you have three divine persons and monotheism, then you get subordinationism, and then if you deny the three divine persons, you've got monotheism and equality, you end up with modalism, like in oneness theology or something like that.

44:48

So I'm certainly going to be the last person on the planet to deny that.

44:57

You can look at the biblical revelation, and you can recognize these vitally important biblical teachings.

45:07

So I've taught people for years and years and years what you do when you're dealing with the Doctrine and Trinity is you take people to those biblical foundations.

45:16

You take them, you listen to what their objections are, and then in your mind you identify, what are they missing?

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And so our Mormon friends are missing everything on monotheism. Our oneness friends are missing their three divine persons.

45:33

Our Jehovah's Witness friends are missing the equality, and so that's going to tell you where you're going to go in responding to their objections to the

45:44

Doctrine and the Trinity. Okay? And so it's interesting that Dr.

45:52

Dolezal uses three biblical doctrines, and that becomes the basis of his view of simplicity.

46:03

So keeping that in mind, go back to the text.

46:10

All that is explicitly stated in Scripture, and all that must necessarily follow from Scripture, must equally be regarded as the

46:20

Bible's teaching. Okay, so the question is going to be, what does all that must necessarily follow from Scripture mean?

46:32

What is that going to include? Simplicity, much like the Doctrine and the Trinity, makes the best sense of the revealed data on God considered altogether.

46:43

I will spotlight three biblical doctrines that necessitate the truth of God's simplicity. So here are the three doctrines, and let's go ahead and do a parallel here.

46:55

I hadn't thought about doing this, but let's do the parallel here. I'm really going to have to find out if Samsung has a chalk -on -chalkboard sound that just automatically goes while you're writing.

47:13

I wonder if I could go, sort of like that, and just drive people. The sad thing is the young people in the audience have no idea, no earthly idea that genetically mankind cannot deal with the sound of scraping fingernails on a chalkboard.

47:31

It is... I mean, I haven't heard it for years, and I just heard it in my mind, and all of you as old as me did too.

47:41

Don't lie, you did. Maybe that's what held all of our society together back then.

47:46

Maybe that's why everything's falling apart, whiteboards. What do you think? Think maybe? Okay, never mind. We need

47:54

Robert Shaw from Jaws. He did that?

48:03

Thanks, Rich. Appreciate that. Oh, goodness. Okay. Divine independence.

48:25

Divine independence. Okay? Infinity. We'll put that one down here for the fun of it.

48:37

And the third is creation. All right?

48:47

So here are the three doctrines from Dr.

48:52

Dolezal's perspective that make the best sense of the revealed data.

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So simplicity makes the best sense of the revealed data, divine independence, infinity, and creation.

49:08

Let's see how this works. Independence. If God is aese, and by the way, aeseity is, again,

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Latin. You learn Latin and Greek, and all of a sudden theology becomes demystified or in some ways remystified because that was where so many of the problems in the early church were, is translation.

49:30

If God is aese of himself, then it follows that he does not derive any aspect of himself.

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Existence, essence, attributes, activity from another. Negatively, we indicate this by insisting that God is independent in being.

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We have seen in the previous chapter that he is not served by human hands as though he needed anything, Acts 17 .25.

49:55

He is the giver of being, not the receiver of it. For this reason, he is in no one's debt. The apostle

50:01

Paul asks in Romans 11 .35, who has first given to him, and it should be repaid him. No one supplies to God what he lacks.

50:09

He is indebted to none, Job 35 .7 -8, 41 .11. It would be odd if an affirmation of divine independence applied only to God's relationship with select creatures in certain situations.

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The sense of these passages is rather that God does not receive anything whatsoever from outside of himself.

50:31

I think that's fair. I think that's fair. Scripture affirms

50:37

God's independence in a variety of ways. God does not derive knowledge from outside of himself, and neither is he informed by creatures, as you see in Isaiah 40 .14.

50:46

His will is independent, and so is not compelled by any other, as Nebuchadnezzar declared after God humbled him.

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We've gone over this one a few times. All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing. He does according to his will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.

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No one can restrain his hand or say to him, What have you done? Daniel 4 .35. I agree with that one. Brought that one up in response to Dr.

51:08

Craig. Psalm 115 .3 emphasizes the independence of divine power by affirming that God does whatever he pleases.

51:17

His love also is independent of the creature. He says of unlovely and wicked Israel, I will heal their backsliding,

51:23

I will love them freely. Hosea 14 .4. The point is that he is not moved to love sinners by any loveliness that is in them.

51:33

Perhaps the most prominent biblical witness to God's independence is that revelation of the divine name, I Am, in Exodus 3 .14.

51:39

And I just pause to mention that we discussed earlier in the week,

51:46

I think. Was it early in the week? It was late last week. Well, we discussed recently. In this room, on that board,

51:53

Exodus 3 .14, Anahu, Asher, Ayahei, Egoaimi, so on and so forth, and the identification of the sun as the

52:08

I Am in the Johannine corpus and all those things. And we also mentioned that Exodus 3 .14

52:15

was central to Thomas' own self -understanding of his

52:21

Christian metaphysic at this point in regards to God's aseity and self -existence.

52:33

In the context, God is reassuring Moses and Israel of His all -sufficiency to accomplish the great work of their redemption from Egypt.

52:42

He grounds this perfect covenantal sufficiency on the perfect sufficiency of His own being, denoted by His name.

52:48

How can we be absolutely sure that God's covenantal promises and work on our behalf will not fail? Only if He is utterly self -sufficient at the level of His very being by identifying

52:57

Himself with His own existence, which is one implication of His revealed name.

53:03

There's the Thomistic element, I would argue, by identifying

53:10

Himself with His own existence. I Am that I Am.

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I'll let you consider whether that's really what is in view there, which is one implication, one implication of His revealed name.

53:31

God declares that He is wholly independent of others and thus that our faith in Him need not be ultimately grounded in some source of reliability that lies outside of or prior to Him.

53:41

Well, while that's true, I would personally argue that in the context of Israel and slavery in Egypt, there's probably a more basic meaning to the identification, and that is, this is something that Yahweh can say that none of the gods of Egypt, whom

54:03

God is about to embarrass with all the plagues, can say the same thing that Yahweh does. And so once again, we are faced with the question, if there is a perfectly contextual interpretation of a text such as Exodus 3 .14,

54:22

and if there is an application that's picked up in the New Testament that doesn't follow with some other extended understanding, just how far can we run with that?

54:34

How far does that become valid in our interpretation becomes the question.

54:42

That, by the way, I don't think would have been asked by Thomas. That was not a hermeneutical, exegetical issue in his context.

54:57

Very important to realize that the schoolman's exegesis is deeply damaged by the preceding millennium, going all the way back to origin.

55:14

And I thought we all agreed that the Reformation was extremely important in returning balance to, for example, looking at texts in the

55:27

Old Testament. And rather than looking for some deeper spiritual meaning, you start with what it actually meant in its context and then move from there.

55:38

The dependability of God's ways in redemptive history is rooted in his history transcending self -sufficient act of existence.

55:48

Does Exodus 3 .14 really talk about a self -sufficient act of existence?

55:56

How much of this is the mystic metaphysics and how much of this is actual exegesis of the text?

56:07

That's an important question, but no applications being made here that we can object to as yet.

56:17

The Second London Confession of Faith 2 .1 affirms this doctrine when it states that God's subsistence is in and of himself.

56:26

The confession further elaborates the same truth in 2 .2, God having all life, John 5 .26, glory,

56:32

Psalm 138 .13, goodness, Psalm 119 .68, blessedness in and of himself is alone in and unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creature which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them,

56:44

Job 22 .23. His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature. So as nothing is to him contingent or uncertain,

56:52

Ezekiel 11 .5, Acts 15 .18. Again, nothing of objection there other than to simply point out that the confession itself is differentiating between knowledge and blessedness and goodness and glory and life.

57:13

I guess we could just simply say, well, that's just all ad extra. Okay, well, but it's referring to these things and it's distinguishing between them just the way it is.

57:28

The implications of God's independence for divine simplicity should be clear if God possesses his existence, essence, or attributes.

57:37

Now listen, as so many determinations of being, okay, determinations of being, which they would be if they were in him as distinct parts and constituents, then in fact, he is indebted to that which is not

57:57

God for the fullness of his being. So you have to hear what's being said. The assumption here is that attributes here are being described as distinct parts and constituents.

58:15

In other words, lesser parts that when put together, cobbled together, make God. And again,

58:22

I don't know anybody who actually believes that, but that's certainly not what I believe. I've never believed that, and I do not have to embrace

58:32

Thomas' metaphysics to say that's not what the attributes are.

58:38

You don't have the attribute of justice sitting over there that you can put on a scale and it makes up part of God.

58:47

Even if you deny it physicality, it's not something that is separate that makes up God.

58:53

So we would agree. If you consider these things in that way, if you believe that these are attributes that come together to make up God, definitely got a problem with that.

59:07

But notice that has nothing to do with the extended application. It has nothing to do with the extended claim of the opera ad intra and the sameness of the attributes.

59:18

In fact, the paragraph before had distinguished between the attributes. So as I said last time, there is a chasm that exists between the biblical evidence and the extended assertion the attributes are the same, and we're looking for what that bridge is.

59:41

And right now we're looking for is that bridge biblical? I think most people would admit it's not.

59:47

It is metaphysical. But right now we're asking the more basic question.

59:55

Is it biblical? And do you have here the same necessity that we had when we had the doctrines that lead to the

01:00:06

Trinity up there? That is, I think, very, very important.

01:00:14

As for our trust in Him, if God is composed of parts, which as parts must necessarily be distinct from the fullness of God's being as God, then our confidence in Him must look to some source of being prior to Him in reality more fundamental than Himself.

01:00:30

This is what divine aseity and independence proscribes, thus all that is in God must be God. And so here this is something that was repeated often in the oral presentations, and that is that there is a pastoral, spiritual necessity of holding to the doctrine of divine simplicity because without that you can't trust

01:01:01

God. But then when you press upon that, it's based upon the metaphysical assumption that what you're actually dealing with is someone who would say

01:01:20

God is the big result at the far end of the equal sign of a bunch of addition of all these parts.

01:01:31

And so the assertion is if you part out God, then your actual trust is not in God, but in whatever one of these parts is along the way.

01:01:41

I don't know anybody who does that. I certainly never have. I've never seen it as a pastoral issue in all my years.

01:01:51

Pastoring Reform Baptist churches, I've never seen anybody who came to me and said, you know, I only trust in God's mercy, but I don't trust in his omniscience.

01:02:03

I've just never experienced that. But maybe it's a big issue.

01:02:10

I've just haven't. So must look to some source of being prior to him and reality more fundamental than himself.

01:02:22

This is what divinity and independence prescribes. Thus all that is in God must be God. Infinity. Classic Christian theism maintains that God is in every way infinite.

01:02:31

Scripture teaches divine infinity when it speaks of God's greatness is exalted above all creatures. God's glory is above the heavens.

01:02:37

Psalm 8, 1, 148, 13, and even the heaven of heavens cannot contain him. First Kings 8, 27, Second Chronicles 2, 6, and 6, 18.

01:02:43

His greatness is unfathomable. Psalm 145, 3, and no one can discover the limit of the almighty Job 11, 7.

01:02:49

Other passages that speak of God's infinity include those that attest to his fullness of being. God says to Israel in Isaiah 48, 12,

01:02:56

I am he. I am the first. I am also the last. Compare 41, 4 and 44, 6.

01:03:03

This fullness of being sets him apart from all false gods and indeed all finite beings of any sort.

01:03:09

This same truth is conveyed in the parallel expression of Revelation 1, 8, I am the Alpha and the Omega. Compare 1, 11, 1, 17, 2, 8, 21, 6, and 22, 13.

01:03:18

God is not an Alpha who is in progress toward an Omega point of being.

01:03:24

He does not advance toward an end of being with which he is not eternally identical. He is the fullness of being, or as Herman Boving so beautifully puts it, an immeasurable and unbounded ocean of being.

01:03:36

Touching the question of God's simplicity, whatever is perfectly infinite in being cannot be built up from that which is finite in being.

01:03:47

Question about that. But parts of a thing must necessarily be finite.

01:03:54

Every part in so much as it is neither identical with the whole nor with the other parts must lack the existence and perfection proper to those things outside itself.

01:04:03

And any whole is necessarily greater than its parts in some respect. So this is again, this is

01:04:08

Thomas's metaphysics. If the mind can turn the attributes into parts, then they cannot be distinguished from one another or God is not simple.

01:04:19

But if you simply recognize that the attributes are true descriptions, true realities of God's being, they accurately describe

01:04:28

God's being, which is not, and really at this point,

01:04:33

I guess really where Thomas comes in is if you really follow the argumentation back, there are a lot of people, for example,

01:04:47

Augustus Strong, when he rejected this extended application, said this tends towards pantheism because it turns

01:04:57

God into simple being and destroys all recognition of those attributes of God that glorify him.

01:05:08

It really leads, and the response to that is, well, that's just human language and you're just doing the ad extra instead of the ad intra stuff.

01:05:15

But there still is an element where you're saying that in God, the things that distinguish

01:05:23

God as God are not different, they're the same.

01:05:29

And hence, they couldn't distinguish him. So it really comes down to that, the idea of essence being that while Thomas tried to extricate himself from the obvious problems of Aristotle's God, I'm not sure he was actually successful in so doing completely.

01:05:49

So again, as long as you do not make the error of assuming that the attributes are lesser parts that added up make

01:06:04

God, we can agree completely and have no problems.

01:06:11

All forms of composition thus entail that each constituent part or principle be finite. What is more, no set of finite properties, however impressive, could yield an actually infinite being.

01:06:20

In order to be genuinely infinite, God must not be composed of determinations of being more basic than his own

01:06:25

Godhead. Again, without jumping into the metaphysical aspect, okay. Creation, the doctrine of divine creation also motivates the confession of divine simplicity.

01:06:36

Since God is the first being from whom all of the being flows, it follows that he must not derive his own being from constituent parts or elements within himself.

01:06:46

So, I suppose we haven't necessarily said this, but we're not saying that God's being is dependent upon the attributes or derived from.

01:06:57

Let's use that term. God's being is not derived from the congregation, the bringing together of attributes.

01:07:07

I agree with that. Doesn't mean the attributes are the same, but I agree with that. All things that exist in the world are said to exist by his will,

01:07:14

Revelation 4 .11. He is the one who calls that which is not as though it is, Romans 4 .17. That is, he makes created being to exist, ex nihilo.

01:07:23

Additionally, it is clear that he does not employ already existing materials in creation sense, as Paul states in Romans 11 .36.

01:07:29

Of him and through him and to him are all things. If God should be composed of parts, then these parts would be before him in being, even if not in time, and he would be rightly conceived of his existing from them or of them.

01:07:43

His existence would, in some respect, be bestowed to him as a gift he receives from another. This flouts the most fundamental biblical teaching regarding God as the all -sufficient source of all that is not identical to him.

01:07:54

Stephen Dubey observes that if God should receive his actuality of being from another, he would not retain his ultimacy and antidefinitiveness revealed in the work of creation that would yield that ultimacy to an essa, i .e.

01:08:09

act of being, back of God, a true absolute by which even God himself would be relativized, end quote.

01:08:16

When the second line of Confession 2 .2 states that God is alone, fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things, it can only do so consistently so long as it maintains that he is without parts.

01:08:29

Parts, as in lesser parts adding up to make him. I have offered only a small sampling of the ways in which various biblical teachings entail the truth of God's simplicity, but it should be clear that much of the

01:08:41

Bible's teaching about God is compromised if one denies his simplicity. I will turn finally to survey the affirmation of this crucial doctrine as found in a number of prominent theologians through the ages of the church.

01:08:54

That's the whole section. That's the whole section. So we can agree with all of these, but what we didn't get is what these things are out here, which we had with the doctrine of the

01:09:18

Trinity. And so where are we? Well, we have our biblical truths, and we know that there is only one

01:09:38

God, and we know that he is the creator, and we know he's unchanging, and we know he's eternal, and we know he is infinite.

01:10:02

We have all these biblical truths that we all agree on. Everybody agrees on these things.

01:10:11

I'm not debating with the Mormons right now. I'm not debating with the Muslims right now. We don't have to worry about what they have to say about these things.

01:10:23

And then we have the next category would be necessary truths,

01:10:38

I guess. So if there's only one

01:10:45

God, he's the creator of all things, then there are no other gods, for example. Now that's also stated directly under biblical truths over here too, but it's also brought about from that.

01:11:00

And you do have, I will, the best definition of simplicity that God is not made up of parts is entailed by all of that.

01:11:16

No question about it. But here, here we go. Here is the chasm, okay?

01:11:24

And over here, you have the extended assertion that ad intra, in God, all attributes are the same.

01:11:50

They're all equal, okay? Here's the chasm. None of this requires that.

01:12:02

None of it. I'm simply saying that unless I adopt a metaphysical bridge, it goes across that chasm.

01:12:26

And that metaphysical bridge has a name. Thomism and his categories and his insistence and his, though he recognized it, tried to deal with it, don't think it was successful, dependence upon Aristotelian categories of accidents and presence and all those other things that we reject when we talk about transubstantiation and things like that.

01:12:59

But anyway, unless I have that bridge,

01:13:04

I can't get over here. There's nothing over here that says to me, you have to go over there.

01:13:12

Nothing. There's the issue.

01:13:21

As far as I can understand it, there's the issue. And that's why, what are we hearing?

01:13:28

Anybody who's familiar with the stuff going on back and forth online and things like that, what are, what's, why are people who are saying the things

01:13:42

I'm saying, why are we getting called, well you're just, you're just biblicists.

01:13:53

You're just staying over here and you see you need to recognize the propriety of natural theology.

01:14:13

Because that's where it's got to go. Because natural theology, that's what gives you the bridge.

01:14:20

That's where it comes from. And natural theology is a strange term.

01:14:32

As we've talked about before, as I read the definition to you, it raises all sorts of issues.

01:14:43

What's natural theology based upon? Because if you take Scripture into consideration, then it's not natural theology.

01:14:52

What can the human mind, what can the regenerate mind come to understand by pondering creation?

01:15:08

Some would say, well, that's how you get Thomas' metaphysics. Problem is, the regenerate mind automatically has scriptural categories of existence that will now guide its examination of the natural realm.

01:15:29

And those scriptural categories should overwrite any external authorities that would then seek to subject

01:15:42

Scripture to some external standards. So it is obvious that it is quite appropriate.

01:15:54

God gives men minds and it's quite appropriate to ponder His truth and to consider

01:16:00

His creation. And there's great beauty in looking at creation.

01:16:06

But the reality is, God has told us in Romans chapter 1 what the extent of natural revelation is.

01:16:12

That's totally different than natural theology. Natural theology is not natural revelation. Natural revelation,

01:16:19

Romans chapter 1, tells men that God exists and we give thanks to Him. So does Scripture. So the regenerate mind, that's not the issue.

01:16:29

When we contemplate God's works and creations, we glorify Him. For what? His attributes.

01:16:35

We see His power and His mercy and His grace and we see the attributes of God and what

01:16:43

He's created. And we don't confuse them as a result. I would actually argue that doing quote -unquote natural theology, that is the regenerate mind, considering from a biblical worldview,

01:16:57

God's acts of creation ends up taking us the other direction. But the argument is that we need to have this appreciation for the great tradition of the medieval exegesis and everything else that was so deeply influenced by external categories and systems and terminology that it could create these categories, whereby you would say, well, it's a given that if we can distinguish between the attributes and they become parts and now

01:17:40

God is no longer simple and God must be simple because of all these other arguments that we've come up with and therefore we have to assert that ad intra at least, the attributes are the same.

01:17:57

There are so many other things to plug into this, but I just want to speak to my fellow

01:18:08

Reformed Baptist brethren. Whether you consider me one any longer or not does not matter to me.

01:18:16

You don't own the copyright. Good luck on that one. Upon what basis?

01:18:26

I mean, I was told, well, you should listen to this.

01:18:31

Okay, I did. You should have read that. Well, I had. Well, there's a book over here. Okay, all right, so I read that one too.

01:18:39

And for some people, the idea is, well, look, if you have, if you're reading this stuff, if you've got this stuff marked down and you've listened to this stuff and you don't agree, then you just need to leave.

01:18:54

So we agree on all of that.

01:19:00

All of chapter one and all of chapter two and all of chapter three. You owe all this stuff.

01:19:07

You have all this unanimity. But if you don't walk across that bridge and say this, goodbye.

01:19:24

There is no future, brothers, in any fellowship of churches that will demand that because this won't be the last thing.

01:19:35

There are other sources to be found. There are other books to be published. And one of the scary things to me is this is notorious.

01:19:48

You see, biblical theology has categories that limit it. That does not because that's coming out of here.

01:19:59

And I am concerned and have expressed my concern that in the promotion of this, we are directing young men to sources partly because of this, that will, over time, we're going to see what the result of this is going to be.

01:20:31

And it won't be a positive thing. So what do we have to do? I think we need a little bit of serious small -c

01:20:43

Catholicity, maybe. And I thought we had that. I mean, some of the most profitable, wonderful relationships that I have developed over the years have been with Presbyterians, with some of the old -style conservative -believing

01:21:06

Anglicans. And I've always thought, silly me, that the best way to promote the

01:21:17

London Confession is to positively present its consistencies.

01:21:26

Is this really the consistency? I know some of you really believe it is, and it's mighty important to you.

01:21:33

Okay, I'm saying fine. Go ahead and go there.

01:21:41

But are we literally going to say, and if you don't, you're out.

01:21:46

You're heterodox. That's it. Because you won't walk across that bridge.

01:21:55

That's really what's going to do it. I did get something out that I wanted to show you.

01:22:08

You have to pan back there. Oh, it tastes good.

01:22:18

Years and years and years ago. I don't know how old this thing is. It predates you, so I already had this when you came along.

01:22:29

So this is probably coming up on 40 years old. And you can tell from the tape.

01:22:36

It has good old electrical tape on it, and it's all dried up and crackly.

01:22:45

This is a Radio Shack. Does Radio Shack even exist?

01:22:51

I'm not sure it does. It's a Radio Shack component box.

01:22:58

And Alan Willis put this together for me, I'm pretty sure. And we called it the

01:23:05

Trinity Box. Yeah, I've kept it all these years. I thought it was interesting in light of some of the comments that were made and the prism thing.

01:23:16

So Rich says this came along before him. And so I was teaching a

01:23:22

Christian doctrines class. That's where you would have seen it first. In fact, that's where I first met you.

01:23:29

And I still remember. I remember you wearing your members -only maroon jacket and Mr.

01:23:35

Charismatic Scary Man. Anyway, little did we know that evening.

01:23:45

So what this is meant to illustrate, and I'm not even sure this is going to work. There, yes.

01:23:53

Turn the light on. I'm not sure how long this light is going to last, because it's an old light. But I would talk about how in the

01:24:01

Old Testament, we see these truths about God. We see

01:24:07

His attributes being revealed to us. But there is no prism.

01:24:14

There is no mechanism of distinguishing various aspects of the truths of God until you have the incarnation and the outpouring of the

01:24:25

Holy Spirit. And so I sort of have the lights. Did I turn the lights down? I'm not sure if I did. I did.

01:24:30

Okay, so I turned the lights down. And then, once you have the incarnation, then you have, ta -da!

01:24:38

Hey, looking at it over there. You see the constituent elements of the light.

01:24:45

The red, the green, the blue. If we had a prism, there would be more, but obviously

01:24:51

I used red, green, and blue. By the way, that's just film from putting over lights at the church at the time.

01:25:00

And the light falls out if I don't hold it in. That's why I'm holding it like this. But you see

01:25:05

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit because of the clarity of the historical revelation of God and Christ and the outpouring of the

01:25:15

Holy Spirit. And so we call this the Trinity Box. I'm not even sure it's overly safe now that I think about it, because there's electricity going straight into that little thing right there.

01:25:23

And I'm holding it, but anyway. So this was mid-'80s.

01:25:32

At the earliest, yeah. So there you've got before revelation, and then you've got after revelation.

01:25:42

So you have the Trinity Box. And it still works after all these years. It's still functional.

01:25:49

I actually have one in the other room. I almost brought it in. Maybe we'll do it in another program. Do you remember the

01:25:56

Eternity Box where you draw the thing out? Yeah, that's sitting on the shelf. That would be sort of hard to show,

01:26:07

I think. You'd have to have a light right on it, I suppose. Yeah, so the idea, look, there is nothing intrinsic in the extended assertion that there are things ad intra that require revelation to be known ad extra.

01:26:30

I'm not objecting to any of that, because this demonstrates that clearly. The issue is

01:26:38

I have not seen a shred of biblical argumentation or the combination of biblical argumentation with other biblical argumentation to result in necessary conclusions that will get me across that chasm.

01:26:59

I haven't. Therefore, I cannot look at someone and say,

01:27:04

You need to believe this. And I've listened to,

01:27:10

I've thought about bringing it up more than once, and I might be able to do so with sufficient haste here to not make us go too long.

01:27:25

I'm not playing anything. So many things here.

01:27:33

Oh, man. Did you see that Who is Afraid of Thomas Aquinas article? I'll talk about that a little bit later on.

01:27:41

But let me see if I can find it here real quickly. Was it before or after the clarification on James White from The Particular Baptist, one of those folks that dismissed me as a result of daring to think these things?

01:28:04

I think this is it. Yes. Yes, okay. So this is from the

01:28:11

Reform Forum. All right, here we go. I do not pretend to have wrestled.

01:28:20

Well, wait a minute. Before I, okay, the nice thing about Evernote is visit source.

01:28:26

Let me see if it gives me a name immediately. The article was called, yes,

01:28:32

Jeffrey Waddington, Divine Simplicity, Don't Think of God Without It. Okay, there you go. So I do not pretend to have wrestled with all the various challenges brought against this doctrine, but the doctrine is sound nonetheless.

01:28:45

Let me close these brief observations. If the triune God of Scripture is not simple, now, again, I believe

01:28:55

He is. Meaningful definition of that. Then it is possible for Him to disintegrate into a heaping pile of nothingness.

01:29:07

Okay. Can I understand that within my profession of simplicity? Yeah. God is not made up of parts.

01:29:15

He's not Frankenstein. He doesn't have justice sewn on to omniscience, sewn on to omnipotence, sewn on to mercy.

01:29:24

Yeah. Okay. Further, if our God is not simple, then it is possible for Him to change

01:29:30

His mind on the plan of redemption. I would think that would really be immutability, wouldn't it?

01:29:36

Sovereignty, immutability. Perhaps God will decide that those who believe on Christ will all go to perdition.

01:29:43

See how that's related to simplicity? But even further, if God is not simple, then His word is no longer the sure revelation of His will for us and for our salvation.

01:29:50

See, I'm hearing people turning this into, well, there are those who have described it as the gatekeeping doctrine that protects all the other doctrines of God.

01:30:10

It has become that absolutely foundational. And I confess that it is a second level from the scriptures right here.

01:30:24

There's simplicity. Yep. But it is not what controls and protects all these other things.

01:30:37

Unless you're, I suppose, you're going backwards with it. I just don't see how that functions in that way.

01:30:46

So, if you're sitting there going, my goodness, what is all this about?

01:30:53

It's real simple. Saying that all the attributes are the same is not grounded in biblical revelation or necessary truths that are derived from biblical revelation.

01:31:08

It is an extended application requiring a Thomistic metaphysic that takes you to that point.

01:31:15

But I deny there's anything over here that protects anything back here. We have protected all this stuff back here without ever having had to give a second thought to that.

01:31:27

So, Reformed Baptists are going to say, yep, we agree on 99 .99%. But that .01%, that's it.

01:31:36

If it was the Trinity, sure, it's not. It's not. No one can look me in the eye and say, if you think that in God, His mercy is not

01:31:49

His justice, then you're denying the Trinity. No one can look at me and say that.

01:31:58

If you're helped by that in some way, okay, fine.

01:32:04

But don't tell me that the biblical authors intended me to make that a statement of faith, and that I am in any way, shape, or form misrepresenting biblical revelation concerning the doctrine of the

01:32:17

Trinity and the doctrine of God, if I do not make that professional. And I think it's a whole lot easier to make my argument than it is to make the argument on the other side.

01:32:30

I really, really do. I really, really do. So, deep respect, again, to Dr.

01:32:37

Dolezal, brilliant scholar. But I simply say to you, if you want some of the clearest evidence from my perspective that this is not a biblical doctrine, is read

01:32:51

God Without Parts. Why? Because it is so thick, and so difficult, and there's so much.

01:33:02

I've got to cite this person, and that person, and so on and so forth. And it's all about, well, there's this view over here, and there's that view over there, and you've got this kind, you've got

01:33:11

IA, and there is just so much of the philosophical aspect that it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

01:33:22

We're not talking, we're no longer in the company of the apostles at this point.

01:33:28

We are in the company of the philosophers. Paul has left

01:33:34

Mars Hill, and we've stayed around, and we're talking. That's the reality.

01:33:43

And enjoy the conversation. Just don't say that what comes out of that is somehow definitional when it's on the other side of that chasm.

01:33:55

So, there you go. Right at 90 minutes or so, I hope that is useful.

01:34:03

I do not, in any way, shape, or form, want to see. I will say,

01:34:11

I do not want to see anybody on social media going after Dr.

01:34:19

Dolezal, and there's no reason to. The only issue here is, can you make this something that is necessary?

01:34:33

Certainly not for the kingdom. I hope no one's actually saying that. I hope not. But to accurately reflect biblical revelation on the doctrine of God.

01:34:44

Now, all of this then raises the issues of confessionalism, and the

01:34:51

Bible, and the analysis of confessions. And whether we can, in any meaningful fashion, say that our confessions are subject to scriptural correction.

01:35:07

Because, I would say, if your argument is, they all, unanimously, as the framers, intended to constrain a confession from anyone who holds to the

01:35:27

London Baptist Confession of Thomistic metaphysics on this point, then that needs to be something that's correctable by scripture.

01:35:36

And how do you do that? What's the mechanism? And will there be anyone who would be even willing to make the attempt?

01:35:45

That's the next big subject. Because some people have said, well, Semper Reformanda doesn't mean we're just changing doctrines every day.

01:35:51

No one's even talking about that. No one's talking about that. The question is, if you do resourcement that results in a whole new understanding of a phrase in the confession, is that new understanding subject to biblical correction?

01:36:18

Give me just one minute here. Well, one minute. I shouldn't say that. That's not fair. I'm going to take more than one minute.

01:36:27

People will say, but see, all of our forefathers have already thought through these things.

01:36:36

Haven't you ever dealt with Roman Catholics who have pointed out that the

01:36:43

Reformers had pitifully little to say about Mary? And, in fact, Luther continued to believe most of the common

01:36:51

Marian piety of his day. And Calvin did sort of go, well, whether that is or that is not.

01:36:58

Because, remember, the two big later dogmas, Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption, hadn't come along yet.

01:37:08

But, for example, a perpetual virginity of Mary, there was no huge Reformation discussion of this.

01:37:21

So does that mean we should just go with the conclusions they came to? No. Reformation is a process.

01:37:29

We, as Reformed Baptists, 1689 is not 1517, right?

01:37:38

There is a process. What makes us think that it froze in place in 1689?

01:37:47

So there's an ongoing need. And I'd like to know, because I don't know.

01:37:58

And given that a lot of this stuff was only recently published over the past 15, 20 years, was there some big discussion about this subject?

01:38:08

How do we know there was unanimity? Are there minutes available? I don't know.

01:38:17

But if we say that it is necessary to go to that level, no one will ever be able to really understand the function of a confession, because you're always going to have to be going, well, those are the words.

01:38:36

That's what it says. But then you have to go read this book for this word, and that book for that word. Is that really how it's supposed to function?

01:38:45

Questions, questions, questions, questions to think about. Just because people accepted something from their past doesn't mean that it had been critically analyzed and questions had been answered beforehand.

01:39:02

Right? I would think that's pretty obvious. There you go. All right. Well, there you go.

01:39:07

Thank you for watching the program today. And like I said, I hope it's useful. And we will,