Dr. Newman I Presume, More on David Allen and Romans

You know, I gotta admit, I don't know how any nation survives this stuff. Just before the program started, I look over, and there's a, on X, there's a Senator Annalise Ortiz. Ever heard of Senator Annalise Ortiz, Mr. Pierce?

Arizona State Senate, District 24, which starts at Peoria and 43rd. So I am within easy walking distance, my house is, of, I'm not in her district, but very.

Close.

It goes down through Maryville. So it's a highly Democratic area down there. But she's doxxing ICE. Yep, when ICE is around, I will alert my community to stay out of the area, and I'm not effing, and it shouldn't say effing, scared of you nor Trump's masked goons.

When did using F-bombs become just standard from the president on down both sides? I mean, I know that, like the Watergate tapes demonstrated that in the White House, Nixon and all his people would speak profanely all the time, but they never did in public.

I don't know, maybe you're right, maybe you're right. I'm not saying that politicians in the past were Puritans in any stretch of the imagination, but it's just become, especially on the left, but now everywhere, it's just, and you just, I grew up in a different nation than I live in today.

I really, really did. I saw some U .S. House of Representative, a U .S. representative in the House of Representatives speaking and saying that she's a Guatemalan first and American second. How, how do you take the oath of office and then say that?

That's a, that's an utter violation. We have people serving in, I mean, how do you, how do you inform Congress of anything that's secret when you have people who clearly are not actually even Americans?

I mean, they don't, they don't care that they are. They have a higher commitment to something other than that. I don't, I don't know how you hold it all together. I don't, I don't know how it's holding together, but I don't know.

It's just stunning to me. It truly, truly is. I was at church last night. I think some of you saw, I posted on Saturday morning that I got the call late Friday night that I would be preaching on Sunday.

COVID has hit Jeff's house. Hopefully it hasn't hit Jeff because Jeff's supposed to be up in Moscow speaking at the Grace Agenda stuff this weekend. But if I had gone to bed when I normally go to bed, I wouldn't have known until Saturday morning.

And so I talked a little bit about what I was going to do. And for those that are interested, generally when I am thrust in a position of speaking in a church service, unless it's, you know, they've asked me to address an apologetic topic or something along those lines, if I'm actually supposed to be speaking from the word specifically many, many years ago.

And I don't think I have, I don't think I have one in here now that I think about it. But there used to be, and they still have it, they still print it. There used to be something called the Reader's Greek New Testament.

And it was in a nice, one of those soft case-bound type things, it would lay open fairly easy. And they'd have words, the 50 or less word vocabulary down at the bottom of the page. But it was fairly large print, pretty easy to read.

So what I'd do is I'd just bring that and I'd pick a text. I think the first time I did this, again, it was like, oh, no, no preparation, okay. We'll read a portion of John chapter five. And what I'll do is I'll do a live translation.

I'll just start a live translate the Greek and make a few, maybe a few comments as I'm going through. And then we'll go back and exegete and make application. And I've just found that most Christians just love encountering the word on that level.

And if they know you haven't had opportunity to prepare or stuff like that. That's what I did. I did the end of John chapter 14, which just happened to be on my screen in accordance when I got the call.

And so that's not quite opening the Bible up and going, ah, that type of a thing, but.

Similar.

Rich, rich, rich text, obviously. And so I thought it went pretty well, got some real positive comments afterwards from.

A few people.

But once I got there, a lady came up to me and gave me a gift. She said she had seen this at, well, it's still got the Goodwill sticker on it for a buck 29. And she said, I felt like you needed to have this.

So here is no, no, the other one was much better. Much better. There you go. See platypus and the birthday party, platypus and the now, if you don't understand why this is humorous, you haven't been paying attention to recent debates that we've done, including right here in this very room.

He doesn't look very venomous to me. But if you don't get it, go back, listen more closely. If you really can, you may not want to, but listen more closely to the Cory Mahler debate and you will understand what somebody else did.

And so platypus and the birthday party, which I'll now give to my grandkids. I'm supposed to have my sixth grandchild by the end of the week. My wife is just sort of, she packed up last week and with all the goodies and cooking projects and flour and sugar and, you know, all the stuff to do with the girls to cook stuff when she goes out to help, it probably, unless my daughter does what she did with her first child, which was to labor for 44 hours, which she hasn't done since then, that was back in the day of all natural, you know, all this stuff, by the time the second one came in, I was like, get this thing out of me, you know, it's just like, we've, we've done the natural thing and 44 hours was, yeah, no, thanks anyway, shouldn't take too long one way or the other.

They just live a long ways from us now, relatively speaking. I mean, we're, we're still in the Phoenix area, but it's a 90 minute drive. So it's a, it's a good, good ways out there. Anyhow, so we're expecting a grandchild number six at the end of the week, a little boy named Kuiper and yes, you know what Kuiper comes from, you are undoubtedly aware of that.

And so prayers for a safe delivery and a healthy child and, and man, ransom's almost three now. I mean, that's just makes me feel even, even older than all the other stuff making me feel older these days to see how fast those kids are, kids are growing up and it's it's amazing.

It's a blessing and it's how God designed things to work. So anyhow, so not overly surprising. We find this tweet being posted a couple of days ago to an article by Father Calvin Robinson. I don't know what has happened with Calvin Robinson since he spoke at the Web and Salve Con get together back in, in April.

I remember when it was announced, you know, Jeff wasn't going and they replaced Jeff with Father Calvin Robinson. And remember he had posted stuff about, he agreed that the thief on the cross was saved through the intercession of Mary and when I first heard of him during COVID, he seemed like a conservative Anglican type guy.

And of course, when I think conservative Anglican, I think of my conservative Anglican friends down in Australia who believe in justification by faith, you know, the JC Rowell type Anglicans. Well, we were all wrong about that.

And he's far more Roman Catholic than he is anything else. And he got, I'm sorry, Aaron, I mean, you didn't put this up anyways. So I don't even know how to do this. Oh, and now it's gone.

No. Okay.

There it is. Let me see here. Copy image. No, that's not going to do it here. I'm just going to have to drag it over here. Yeah, there we go. Texas gerrymanders, Texas gerrymanders districts into giant Whataburger logo that might work.

That might work because I'm going to tell you something. I love Whataburger and I'm very, very thankful that they have opened a Whataburger very close to me now. I like their breakfast burritos and stuff like that.

But you go to Texas and there are a lot of Whataburgers in Texas. There really, really, really are. So it would make perfect sense. I'd love to see that happen. I'm sorry. I just looked over there and I was easily distracted.

But what?

I was going to ask the question, will even Texas Democrats come back for a Whataburger?

That's a good question. I think they probably would. I think they probably would, they'd go, oh, by the way, I'm not trying to sell this product. This is a 32 gram protein shake from IsoPure. Now, what's funny about this?

I hadn't used IsoPure protein in probably 22 years, I'd say, around there. That was back in my big days of weightlifting. But I started weightlifting again and not trying to get big like I did back then for other balance purposes, general health purposes.

But I saw some IsoPure on Amazon and I thought, I wonder if it's still as good as it was back in the day. Back in the day, they were in glass bottles, plastic now. So I ordered some in and I opened that first one up, got nice and cold.

Have you ever had experience where you taste something from a period of your life that was long ago and it's just like all of a sudden, all these memories and feelings just come rushing over you because you're, you know, sometimes it's a smell.

In this case, it was a taste because the taste hasn't changed. And it was just, I don't know, it's just weird to think about how human memory works. And I could sit here and make all sorts of spiritual applications to festivals in the Old Testament and all the rest of this kind of stuff, and I'm not going to waste our time doing that.

I'll just tell you this, I've been doing a lot of IsoPure the past few weeks. And not only is it really, really good, but it's been very kind to the digestive system. And so you'll see me reaching over there.

This is the lemonade one. It tastes orangey to me, not lemonade-y to me, but it's really good. You're looking for a pretty decent protein shake. Anyways, back to Father Calvin Robinson. We found out that he was way out there on the theological side of things, but he still ended up speaking.

And it just strikes me that once again, when it comes to what brought about the Reformation, the number of people, even in churches that call themselves Reformed, that still understand the importance of the key issues at the time of the Reformation and how they're important.

Today.

Very, very small. A very small number of people. And I have some friends who believe that the Integralist movement and what's going on with Rome and the ecumenical overtures that Rome's making toward Eastern Orthodoxy and toward Protestants and stuff like that, that it's all part of a planned movement.

And maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

I don't know.

But one thing that's very obvious here, you can see in this tweet, Calvin Robinson says, the Church of England should re-enter full communion with Rome, ditch its liberalism in place of Orthodox Catholicism.

Making England Catholic again may actually be the only way to save our once great nation from Islam and Marxism.

Wow.

I thought Christianity would do that. But Islam and Marxism. And you think about the history of Rome, the betrayal of people like Wycliffe that this represents and the Marian martyrs and stuff like that.

But hey, the via media never worked, if you understand the Church of England and Anglicanism, the middle way, via media, trying to keep everybody happy. It never worked. It was always on the leftward bend because we live in a fallen world that leans to the.

Left.

It's not going to lean toward the right and better Orthodoxy and more conservative commitment to biblical truth. It's always going to be leaning to the left. And so you see that in the Church of England today.

And we talked last week with Matthew Barrett's Defection to Anglicanism. We talked about different kinds of Anglicans there are and that there are still a few out there that harken back to the J .C. Riles and people like that of the past that had strong commitments to the Solas, the Reformation, and especially Sola Fide and justification, highest view of scripture.

They're still there. I would suggest that those that are there have to use far more energy than they should have to use just simply to remain Orthodox and to fight the constant drag to the left of their communion than they really should.

That shouldn't be your constant everyday battle, but it is in that context. But it does make you go, okay, ditch its liberalism in place of Orthodox Catholicism. Well, he says Orthodox Catholicism, who gets to define that?

Was the last Pope Orthodox? Was some of his famous teachings and encyclicals, were they Orthodox? Is he not aware of what post-Vatican II Catholicism at the highest levels has become? Inclusivism, universalism.

I mean, if you want to know where liberalism is, it is firmly entrenched in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. And so, entering full communion with Rome would involve submission to the Bishop of.

Rome.

Now, we don't know much about Leo yet, but one thing we do know, and I forgot to do this and I need to do this, I promised somebody on Twitter we would. Pope Leo has said that he is making John Henry Cardinal Newman a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church.

Aquinas is a doctor of the Church. Basically being made a doctor of the Church indicates that you're teaching, you have contributed in an extraordinary way to the promulgation of the Catholic faith. And so, most people don't have a clue who John Henry Cardinal Newman was.

He was a convert from Anglicanism, and he is most famous today for what is called the Development Hypothesis. We've talked about this many, many times. We talked about this back, oh, 20 years ago when we were dealing regularly with Roman Catholicism and with Roman Catholic apologists in regards to Sola Scriptura because they would talk about tradition, they would talk about Yves Congar and his views of tradition and the modern Roman Catholic Church.

And, like I said, we'll need to do a deeper dive into this, but fundamentally, what Newman did was he abandoned the historical field of battle. There's an excellent book, it is available online, called The Infallibility of the Church by George Salmon, who was an Anglican churchman, mathematician as well, interestingly.

One of the first good polemical books that I read in this field many, many, many, many years ago, and my copy is well marked, and Salmon properly identified Newman's theory as an utter abandonment of the historical field of battle.

So what you see today when you're talking to Roman Catholics is you see a deep dependence on Newman, but at times a complete ignoring of Newman. What do I mean by that? Most Roman Catholic apologists want to try to defend the idea that their unique doctrines were in fact taught by the apostles, that they want, that's just sort of a default.

Newman said that's not true. There was a seed of the later doctrines, whether it be on the papacy, the Marian dogmas, especially a lot of the later soteriological developments, he would say they were present in seed form, which means they wouldn't be recognizable to the people at the time, but that over time in the spirit and the magisterium and interpreting scripture, la, la, la, la, la, these things develop.

And, of course, as soon as word came out that Leo was talking about making Newman a doctrine of the church, you know, there's a bunch of people, oh, of course, doctrine develops, but that's a completely different thing from what Newman is saying.

Newman, we're not talking about the fact that as Christianity encountered pagan religions, Greek philosophy, that the language used to express the faith is going to change to answer the questions that were not a part of the original context of the revelation itself.

And so, yes, doctrine develops in that way. That's not what Newman's saying. Newman is saying that the dogmas that Rome now binds upon people's soul, de fide, were not known to the apostles. If you had asked them, do you believe X, Y, or Z, they would have gone, X, Y, what?

No earthly idea. It is development. And the reality is there doesn't have to actually be a substance to the development, which means you can have doctrines and dogmas that develop over time that this is in essence a form of new revelation.

Now, he would never have agreed with that formulation, but there's no way around this. And as Salmon pointed out, this was a radical departure from how Rome had defended her claims, where she always, and still, even after Newman still made comments like, and you heard it after Francis's death, this is how the church has done this for 2 ,000 years, and we've believed this for 2 ,000 years.

And Newman's going, no, he didn't. No, he didn't. Nobody back then would have known what you're talking about now. You're having to engage in anachronism, you're having to read stuff backwards. And so it was an abandonment of the historical field of battle.

So a lot of people are going like, wow, make him a doctor of the church. Is this another step in permanently formalizing the new directions that Francis himself wanted the church to go? We won't know until there's some major doctrinal developments in the future, but it is a big, that is a big deal.

That is a very big deal.

Big, big, big deal.

So Calvin Robinson, hey, if you say this, you might as well, I don't know why he doesn't just quit playing games, become a Roman Catholic. Well, to be honest with you, it's because if he did, we'd never hear from him again.

Right now, he can bop around and speak at conferences and stuff like that because he's not under any particular ecclesiastical authority. Before we get back to David Allen, I think this was today, yes, it was, Leighton Flowers posted a comment that I, again, just, you know, we just, you know, next time a Calvinist tries to convince you to adopt their difficult-to-accept beliefs.

Again, Leighton has done very few debates and most of them he's done against me. So I just remember one of my wondrous Pentecostal opponents, you know, using the same type of language, when a Trinitarian tries to convince you to adopt their difficult-to-accept beliefs, you know, what makes something difficult to accept?

If you are utterly committed and submitted to the Word of God, you're going to believe whatever it teaches, even when it goes against your flesh. So I agree that God's absolute sovereignty, timelessness, his decree, these all go against the flesh of man, which wants to exalt himself as the center of all things.

And if that makes it difficult to accept, okay. But that just simply demonstrates, once again, that provisionism is man-centered and rather than being God-centered, so it is. Ask them this, do you believe God has given me the ability to adopt Calvinistic beliefs?

Do you believe God has given me the ability to adopt Calvinistic beliefs? Okay, now before you read the rest of it, how would you respond to that? Well, what's really behind this is, within provisionism, their fundamental objection is against an eternal God who has a decree and is accomplishing his purpose in this world.

That's what they loathe. Loathe is a good word. Dislike, don't like, don't prefer, way too weak. There is a loathing, it comes out in their constant use of terms like determinism, rather than terms we use, sovereignty, rulership, decree, well, the Bible uses it too.

But what they loathe is the idea of a God who does not change, who does not learn, who is not growing, and who has an eternal purpose that he is accomplishing in this world. And that, well, it's the God of Ephesians 1 .11, works all things after the counsel of his will.

In provisionism, everything is worked after the counsel of man's will. I mean, that's the definition of provisionism, is that all things are worked after the counsel of the will of man. It'll always come down to that.

And so what's behind this is, well, look, if God is sovereign in all things, then what about the fact that not all Christians agree with you? That means God has sovereignly decreed that some of his children will not understand certain aspects of his truth in this life.

Think about that. That's as brilliant as saying God has decreed that his children are not going to come to an exhaustive knowledge of all truth in this life. In fact, we are told that we are to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If it was God's purpose to immediately imbue us with that full knowledge, how could we grow in it? It obviously is a process over time. And you should wrestle with the reality that, yes, it is God's eternal purpose, which we do not have access to.

We will only see this in the final analysis, how this works out in time. But we all used to at least accept the basic reality that God was giving us particular gifts and he didn't give all of his children the same gifts, and that he had a purpose in that, because it had to do with where we were going to serve in the body.

And so we used to not have a problem with that. Now I would imagine provisionists anyways have to have a problem with all that stuff. But if I come to understand a particularly important element of God's truth, do I do so because of something in me?

Or is it God's grace that reveals these things to me? See, there's no room for that in provisionism. But the idea is, well, no, you can, that's demanded. I didn't know if you're going to survive that, Rich.

That was, the windows were shaking and the cameras were moving.

Okay.

All right. When Rich sneezes, the world listens. Actually, what happens when Rich sneezes, the US Geological Survey has our number and contacts us and goes, is that Rich? And we go, yeah. And so they can just mark that earthquake off on the US Geological Survey as a Rich sneeze.

Anyways, because you didn't get far enough away for it not to be heard very, very clearly. Anyways, back to what you're saying. It is a gift of God's grace whenever his people learn more about him and come to understand truths about him.

And so if you ask a question like this, basically what you're saying is, God is under an obligation to give grace.

Huh.

Well, okay. One of the big arguments we've had with Mormons all along has been, grace must be free. Grace cannot be owed. Grace cannot be earned. Grace must be free or it's no longer grace. And so that's what's behind, when you really dig past the surface level clutter, do you believe God has given me the ability to adopt Calvinistic beliefs?

Should be, will God bless the desire of his people to come to know their Lord and his word to ever greater depth? And the answer is, yes, he will. But there are many who begin entrenched with so much tradition that getting them through that tradition would be a long lifetime project on God's part.

And he certainly has done so for many, many people. No two ways about it. Oh, you cause damage at Kirk's house. Knocked a window off his wall. Knocked a painting off his wall. People have always wondered what caused these things.

And now we can finally release the information to you that it's the pierced sneeze. And it is something to hear. It truly, truly is. Though that one, I think you went for four. It's normally three. Wow.

That was, wow. That was, okay. Anyways, back to Pseudorheology 101 here. If so, why haven't I done so yet? And why haven't most born again believers throughout history? I love the man who has such a minimal level of training in history.

Loves to throw out, he's just, you know, anybody can read Ken Wilson and go,.

What's great.

Sorry. But, but, you know, most born again believers throughout history. How do you know that?

You don't know that.

You don't have a clue. And let me point something out to you. It seems like the apostles teaching was a minority amongst many people in the early church. I mean, there was a period of time near the church, Gnosticism was the majority.

Does that make it right? Do you ever even think these things through? I'm sorry. It just really bugs me. When, when people do this kind of stuff. Isn't that proof of libertarian free will? If, let me tell you something, when you have such clear biblical teaching of God's libertarian free will and man's enslavement to sin, as you have in scripture, that a person can come up with a convoluted argument like this to go, isn't that proof of libertarian free will?

What you're proving is you don't even want to try to give biblical evidence because you got none. You got none and you know it. It's just not there. We have the God-given ability to adopt something we do not.

I'm not even sure what that sentence is. We have the God-given ability to adopt something we do not. Does that make sense? I'm sure he had some thought behind that. It just didn't get expressed too well.

If not, why not? And why are questioning what God has preordained? And man, you did not proofread this one. If not, why not? And why are questioning what God has preordained for me to believe? So why are you questioning or why are we questioning?

I don't know. It's not really written in good English. But the idea is, well, if all things in time are foreordained and God has predestined me to believe wrong things, and so why should we question that?

And once again, having corrected this a thousand times since 2015 or maybe even before, we'll just do it again. I guess it's been, yeah, it's been 10 years now since the Romans 9 debate. You don't know God's decree and I don't either.

Quit pretending like you do. We have God's revealed will. God's revealed will is that we teach the truth, that we seek to convince men and women, that we depend upon the Holy Spirit of God within the context of the church to open the Word of God and to draw out those who truly want to know and are truly willing to examine their traditions.

And when we speak God's truth, God's glorified in that proclamation. Our point, part, even if it is not his intention that that become the majority at a point in time where we live, I simply point you to Elijah.

Elijah only had 7 ,000 that had not bowed the knee to Baal. He didn't even know who they were. He thought he was the last one. Did that mean his message was any less true? Would he have had a basis for questioning God's sovereignty and providence at this point?

Well, again, a consistent provisionist doesn't believe there is a decree that brought about Elijah's position at that point anyway, let alone had that remnant that was saved that nobody knew about. Again, you start with man and you then explain God in light of man's free will.

Um, but yeah, this is the kind of thing you get it all the time from, uh, from need to pull that down. Thank you very much. Uh, we get that from, uh, from brother Layton all the time. Now, boy, there's a lot of stuff here.

Uh, I'm looking at stuff that I've marked and I am, I have decided I'm going to try to work through David Allen's section on Romans chapter eight. Um, it's extremely difficult because if, if I wrote a book on this subject and I said, I'm going to execute Romans chapter eight, you'd be able to find the pages where I would start in Romans chapter eight and then I would quote texts and I would deal with translational issues or maybe even textual issues if they were necessary and provide a positive, uh, exegetical statement where I'm saying, this is what Paul is communicating in these words.

Here is what it means. This is why it doesn't mean that and why it doesn't mean that, but that only comes after you say it positively means this. You're not doing exegesis if 99 of what you write is that, well, it can't mean this and it can't mean that.

Well, what does it mean? Um, but it can't mean this and it can't mean that. That's not exegesis and that's pretty much what you get with David Allen on this subject. Now, maybe he writes with great clarity on other subjects, but that would only prove our point and that is that there is such a deep tradition, commitment to a tradition like libertarian free will, um, some type of human autonomy outside of God's sovereignty that, um, that, that it overthrows any attempts whatsoever at exegesis.

And so I know where that section is and it's, it reminds me so much of my interaction with Norm Geisler on John six. I've told you about before I wrote to him. How come he didn't an exegete John six in this book?

I did exegete John six and I sent him, I sent back to him a reference, every reference in the book to John six, there was no exegesis offered. Look at the original printing and it's still the same. Now, uh, from Bethany house publishers of chosen but free, there is no exegesis of John.

Six.

You're not walking through that text. You can't even try. And, you know, he has said, well, if you publish, I will respond. And that was the end of that. And that was the last I ever heard from him, uh, at least directly anyway.

Um, so, but before that, I, I wanted to look at some of the things that sort of let, that came before the section on Romans eight. Now, um, so, uh, early on in the book, I wish it gave a 5 of the book.

That's, it didn't help much, does it? Um, I wish it just gave a page saying here in Kindle, but it doesn't. Um, here's the, here's the words, the thesis of this present work is that both Augustine's theological framework and the subsequent reformed interpretation of Romans, particularly Romans 829 through 923.

So there's, there's our text, uh, 829 to 923. So Romans eight, Romans nine are hermeneutically and theologically flawed.

Okay.

Well, if you're going to make that assertion, um, and of course the assumption here being all of reformed theology is just simply a repetition of Augustine, which simply isn't true, but they, they want it to be true.

This book is based on the idea that that's true. Um, then you're going to have to provide a hermeneutically correct and theologically solid positive exegesis that is consistent, that you derive using the same exegetical principles, right?

So I'm sure that's what the book provides, right? Well, the answer is no, it doesn't. It doesn't, as we will see. Augustine, it is argued, did not read Romans with the appropriate interpretive framework.

Now, if that includes the two part Romans idiocy, um, then yes, nobody until 2013 did that. Remember the guy on the beach in 2013. In fact, his theological predilections often led him beyond the limits of sound biblical exegesis.

Uh, David Allen's theological predilections often lead him beyond the limits of sound biblical exegesis. We've demonstrated that for years. So, um, it is amazing when you, you make that statement of others, um, you, you, you end up with that there.

Um, here's another quote, because Augustine did not depend on exegesis, but rather upon philosophical and theological assumptions, he ends up far afield from Paul's original purpose in Romans. That is exactly what I say about David Allen.

David Allen and provisionism, because David Allen and provisionism did not depend on exegesis because they don't, but rather upon philosophical and theological assumptions, which they do. He ends up far afield from Paul's original purpose in Romans.

That's true. So, you know, the question is who can consistently prove their point, but the accusation can go both directions, and I think we've already provided plenty of reason, uh, to recognize that that accusation, um, is relevant to, uh, Dr. Allen.

He says, Paul did not write Romans primarily as a doctrinal treatise on individual salvation via predestination and election due to the notions of original sin and inherited guilt, and no Reformed person has ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever suggested another one, ever.

The Reformed understanding is that Romans is Paul's thought out, uh, polemically organized presentation of his gospel that he wants to be communicated to all the churches that he intends to see founded from people going out from the Roman church.

And so what Romans is about is the glory of God in the gospel, in the incarnation, in the outpouring of the Spirit, and the resultant creation of this one body of Jews and Gentiles that, um, is to carry on the work of Christ into future years.

Uh, so all the issues that come, that were mentioned here, so individual salvation via predestination and election mentioned, it's part of it, but it's not the focus. Do the notions of original sin and inherited guilt, well, that's what Romans 5 is about, but that's not, again, what Romans as a whole is about.

And then he says, and I mentioned this in answer to Rich's question in the last program, a failure to identify Paul's meaning of works in Romans as a reference to the Mosaic law and not a generalized reference to a works righteousness leads to a misinterpretation of Romans.

Now, those of us who have been warning about talking about the quote-unquote new perspective on Paul, Sanders, N .T. Wright, et cetera, you've heard this language before. What do works mean in Romans?

And just try to follow what he's saying here. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and the many who follow their lead, in other words, the Reformation, failed to understand that when Paul refers to works in Romans 9 -12, he's referring to the law of Moses and not a generalized reference to works righteousness to please God that might play some role in salvation, earning one's way to heaven.