Reformed Baptists: Thomism or Biblicism? (A Conversation with James White)

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00:19

All right, well, guys, this is the moment I've been waiting for, for ever since I started this podcast, and that is my interview with Dr.

00:27

James White, and I'm a little nervous, so I'm going to try to do as best as I can.

00:31

I just got done preaching.

00:32

Why are you nervous? Well, um.

00:36

We've known, how long have we known each other? Well, that was the first thing I want to ask.

00:38

Do you remember the first time we met? No earthly idea.

00:41

Oh, come on.

00:42

No, no, no, no, no.

00:44

Once you get to this age, um.

00:46

Well, I want to remind you and see if you remember, because you mentioned John Shelby Spong in your sermon.

00:51

Right.

00:53

We, my wife and I met you at the Spong debate, and I sidled up next to your table, trying to get your attention, and you said, I'm hungry, I don't have a car, can somebody get something to eat? Oh.

01:09

So I went to McDonald's, because you asked me to go to McDonald's.

01:12

I don't know if you still eat McDonald's, but you asked me, yeah, yeah.

01:14

I went to McDonald's and got you a cheeseburger, and you gave me your room number, I brought it up to the room.

01:20

Are you remembering this now? No.

01:23

Sorry.

01:24

How long ago was that? That was.

01:26

2006, wasn't it? 2005, 2006.

01:29

I honestly don't remember what year it was.

01:30

Well, whatever the Spong debate.

01:32

That was.

01:32

You know who would remember? Mike O'Fallon.

01:34

What's scary is.

01:34

Well, he was the one who scheduled it.

01:35

Right.

01:36

Because whenever I ask Mike, when did we do this cruise? He remembers exactly what year it was, and I have no earthly idea.

01:42

And what's funny is Mike and I have become friends since then.

01:44

I love him, I love Saul, I love all those guys at Sovereign.

01:48

But no, I brought it to your room, and I remember you opened the door, and you knew I wanted to sit with you, and I had just bought you food, so I think you felt obligated.

01:57

Probably.

01:58

So you were like, intro, or something.

02:01

You did some weird like.

02:03

Entree vu.

02:03

Entree vu, yeah.

02:04

Entree vu.

02:05

So I came in and I sat, I watched you eat the cheeseburger, it silenced.

02:10

Oh, that's pretty weird.

02:11

It was very weird.

02:12

That's very strange.

02:14

And then you were just, you were like.

02:16

And I actually went to see you, to visit with you after, again, that's pretty strange.

02:21

I thought I'd put you on the, watch this guy list, right there.

02:25

Well, anyway, so what happened was, the next time we met, which was at the Barterman, and then we went on the cruise together.

02:34

Okay.

02:34

So I got to meet Summer and all that, your wife was there and all, we went on the cruise.

02:37

And then you came and preached at the church.

02:41

Which one of the things I wanted to ask you, my fellow elders have asked me to ask you, when can we have you back? I know Jacksonville's the furthest east in Florida you can go.

02:50

That is, you know, it's interesting, nothing's worked out in Florida, but there was somebody else just recently talking about Florida.

02:58

So it's possible that there'll be a Florida swing, but yeah, that's a long ways over there.

03:04

Yeah.

03:05

And you're not flying anymore.

03:06

I'm not flying.

03:07

So G3 is in Atlanta, but everybody wants to do something around G3 this time around.

03:14

And I'm trying to limit it to about a month at a shot, you know, that's a long time away from home.

03:22

But my wife no longer works the airlines, but that also means she can still fly for free.

03:29

So I'm trying to work stuff out to where she can like fly and meet me at certain places.

03:34

So she'll fly.

03:34

You don't want to fly, but she'll fly.

03:36

She'll fly.

03:37

She loves to fly, but well, not so much these days, but I'm still in rebellion against the airlines that wanted to kill me during COVID.

03:46

So right now she's taking care of her mom.

03:50

So it's all dependent on her health and stuff like that and things like that.

03:54

So yeah, we might be able to make it out there.

03:56

Our goal would be, I mean, I'd love to even sponsor a debate, sort of like they did this weekend.

04:02

I mean, if we can do something like that, that'd be great.

04:04

That'll give you more of an incentive.

04:05

Yes, that's true.

04:07

So it does take some work to do all that.

04:09

So the two things I wanted to talk to you about, and I've wanted to have you on the program for this reason.

04:14

One is within the Reformed Baptist circles, there seems to be, oh, you just got real tense.

04:24

No, I'm just sitting here going, that's a different definition than it was only a few years ago.

04:29

Yes, and I'm on the outside.

04:32

You and I would probably have some differences.

04:34

I tend to fall more in the Well and Gentry, Kingdom through Covenant side than I do on the more classic Baptist covenant theology.

04:43

So I feel like I'm not a Federalist, so I'm outside of that camp, but I'm also probably not where you are on some things.

04:52

We probably differ maybe on Sabbath issues and stuff, and maybe we could do a debate sometime.

04:55

Hey, one of my only two- I don't know what your position is.

04:59

Well, one of my only two public debates has been on the Sabbath.

05:02

I debated a Presbyterian.

05:05

He took the position that- You know what? I seem to recall that.

05:07

Yeah, yeah.

05:08

So it is something that I know I'm sort of on the black sheep of the Reformed community, and we're okay with that.

05:18

But it seems to me like the divide is, and tell me where I'm wrong, over this whole Thomas Aquinas situation.

05:27

It seems to me where the divide has come in is over the subject of the impassibility argument, which goes back to the simplicity argument, and how we define God's nature.

05:40

Well, that's where it entered in, was the controversy that led to the split in ARBCA right at about 10 years ago now, 2010 to 2014, that time frame in there.

05:54

And I'll be honest with you, I wasn't a part of it.

05:57

I've actually apologized to certain people who were the objects of that particular jihad, that I didn't get involved with it.

06:11

Because now that I look back on it, what happened was, you had a narrowing of the perspective as to what it means to be confessional.

06:20

And that was so much so that you'd allow a quarter to a third of a denomination to just walk away.

06:29

When I listened to the perspectives being expressed, I couldn't slide a business envelope between them, they were so close.

06:38

So I didn't figure anything would come of it, and then you ended up with this split.

06:42

Well, that led to people going, okay, let's keep going this direction.

06:48

We've now discovered that we're doing this resourcement, and we're discovering that this particular person was involved with writing the confession.

06:58

Look what he says over here, look what he says over there.

07:00

And then other books started being published, coming out that had not been read before from some of these individuals.

07:07

We don't have nearly as much information about the people who wrote the London Baptist Confession as we have about the Westminster.

07:14

Sure.

07:16

They just weren't as widely published.

07:18

So what that has led to, the impassibility moved into simplicity, and what has then happened in that context is in the 2015 Southern California Pastors Conference, which is fairly, I've spoken at it in years past.

07:43

That is when James Dolezal presented his simplicity argumentation, and Dolezal's thoroughly Thomistic in his metaphysics.

07:55

And it seems to have caught on like wildfire, and now it's divided, I mean, even my friends, I've got guys on both sides, and if you're not on one side or the other, it seems to be...

08:05

Yeah.

08:05

Well, and I did not get involved with this until about 15 months ago.

08:13

I remember.

08:14

When I started seeing certain statements being made, and I'm like, it's one thing to have a discussion about Aquinas' doctrine of simplicity, and just how far Baptists would go with his metaphysics and stuff like that.

08:33

My concern is not actually that.

08:37

I have said more than once, if you want to hold to what I call the extreme doctrine of simplicity or the extended definition of simplicity, where you are specifically making the statement that God's attributes are not to be distinguished ad intro, I'm like, more power to you.

08:59

I honestly don't think you could get past about two sermons on that subject before your people start wondering, what are you babbling about, and move on to someplace else.

09:09

But if that's where you want to go, okay, fine.

09:13

My concern is, if you've been watching this, is now the same people who are talking about Thomas and the great tradition, they're starting to promote people like Craig Carter, and language about the great tradition that I know fundamentally leads to a change in how we view Sola Scriptura.

09:40

So they're now talking about Biblicism as a bad thing, when it used to be a really good thing.

09:48

And that's where I come in, because when I read Craig Carter's definition, I'm just going to have to memorize it.

09:55

I'm going to read it to you.

09:58

It's funny that you mentioned, because I was going to ask, hey, do you know this guy? Because it was on Twitter, and I didn't respond, because Owen Strand, he responded, and I was like, well, I don't need to say anything.

10:15

I agree with what he said.

10:17

And even just saying that, I've got guys that are going to write me off, because I just said I agree with Owen, and not this guy.

10:23

But this is what he said.

10:25

He said, for me, the term Biblicism does not just mean holding a high view of Scripture.

10:31

Biblicism is the view that no non-biblical words can be required for orthodoxy, no creed but Christ.

10:37

It was taught by Arians in the 4th century, Sassanians in the 16th century, and a fair number of modern evangelicals.

10:42

When I read that, I said, well, for anyone to say that about Dr.

10:47

White, and again, I like to think that ...

10:52

I had been called a James White fanboy.

10:56

I was actually called that by a King James Only-ist on my podcast, because I quoted you.

11:02

Well, that's just because you're a James White fanboy.

11:03

Okay, whatever.

11:04

I'd like to think I have enough sense to know why I agree with you on things.

11:10

It's not just because I like you as a person.

11:13

But on this, when I see this, it's a ...

11:20

To say that James White, as a Biblicist, won't use non-biblical language, the man who wrote The Forgotten Trinity, which is a non-biblical word, the man who I remember taught me how to define and teach the trinity, in lectures you probably don't remember, with the box with the light bulb.

11:39

Oh, I remember.

11:39

Well, I say you don't remember.

11:42

This has been so many years ago, and to say that you won't use non-biblical terms ...

11:48

Well, right.

11:48

Okay.

11:49

We know ...

11:50

I actually addressed that on The Dividing Line a day or two ago.

11:54

I read that same tweet.

11:55

But this is what I'm ...

11:58

Sorry, it looked like I was tweeting somebody.

12:01

I was looking for this, and somehow it came up.

12:04

This is from his published book, Interpreting Scripture with a Great Tradition, by Craig Carter.

12:10

This is what I'm talking about.

12:12

The Great Tradition was a three-legged stool made up of spiritual exegesis, Nicene dogma, and Christian Platonist metaphysics.

12:21

By pressing deep into the meaning of the text contemplatively, spiritual exegesis yielded the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas, which in turn generated certain metaphysical doctrines such as creation ex nihilo and the reality of the spiritual realm.

12:36

The metaphysics then created a hospitable context for further spiritual exegesis in which the interpreter, listen to this, penetrated through the literal sense to that to which the text referred, the spiritual or heavenly realities that led upward eventually to participation in the divine radiance.

12:55

It was all based on a sacramental ontology in which creaturely things, words, were made up into the divine and made into signs which conveyed the reality to which they pointed.

13:07

Great tradition exegesis was and is a profoundly spiritual and moral act in which the interpreter who succeeds in grasping the true res, or subject matter of the text, is irrevocably transformed in the process, sanctified, and turned into one who possesses eternal life.

13:24

Now, this is in a quote from a book that is now being recommended at Master's Seminary at Midwestern, Matthew Barrett, Peter Sammons, Riccardi at Master's, IRBS, etc, etc.

13:41

Reformed Baptists are, and not just Reformed Baptists, but Craig Carter spoke at Reformed Theological Seminary recently as well.

13:50

So there are Presbyterians who are doing the Thomas thing as well.

13:55

And when I read that, I know enough about Roman Catholicism to know what's behind this, the language.

14:05

Craig Carter did his PhD at a conservative-believing Roman Catholic institution.

14:10

And the very next paragraph in his book says, now that may sound very Roman Catholic, well that's because it is, alright? This is my concern, is that I am now having to explain what Reformed Biblicism is.

14:24

I have done programs where I've gone through Calvin's response to Sadaletto and demonstrated that he did not use great tradition exegesis, he's in fact responding to that kind of perspective coming from Archbishop Sadaletto.

14:42

So this is the issue for me.

14:46

If anyone's read Evangelical Exodus, I'm not sure if you've ever heard of the book, it came out in 2016, it was, Southern Evangelical Seminary was founded by Norm Geisler.

15:00

And Geisler was a huge Thomas.

15:02

Really? Oh, big, big, big, big, big.

15:04

And Thomas is the central aspect of SES teaching.

15:09

About a dozen former students and staff members wrote the book Evangelical Exodus.

15:15

They were all from SES, and they had all become Roman Catholics.

15:19

And their constant theme throughout the entire book was, we were introduced to Thomas, we were told that he was the greatest theologian in history, but we were told that you could just leave the Catholic Thomas off to the side and just focus on his metaphysics, and once we started reading him we realized, no you really can't.

15:39

And so what I've been trying to tell people is that it may not happen today, it may not happen next week, but you're going to see, before I'm 70, the number of people who are going to follow the logic of all this.

15:55

If you're saying Thomas was the greatest theologian that ever lived, then eventually you're going to go, well, if I've decided that he was all right about God, and he uses the same argumentation in metaphysics for the Eucharist, why am I rejecting one and not the other? And I have heard highly placed Protestant scholars saying, I have come to understand that the men from whom I learned the most about justification were wrong on their doctrine of God.

16:32

Wow.

16:33

So, if you follow that out, what's the inevitable conclusion you're going to come to? Yeah.

16:37

Absolutely.

16:38

Absolutely.

16:39

So, if I were to ask you, in a simplest term, to define Reformed Biblicist, because we know that that doesn't mean no Creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, that's not what we're saying, but if you said Reformed Biblicist is...

16:59

Well, I posted an article on my Theology Matters blog about four months ago called Reformed Biblicism, so that's going to lay it out for you.

17:10

But fundamentally, a Reformed Biblicist is a person who takes seriously church history, takes seriously where we stand in church history.

17:21

We are thankful for those that came before us, but recognizes that if it's going to be a dogma, if it's going to be something that we believe and stand on, its origin and source must be Scripture, not Scripture interpreted by a peculiar metaphysical system that gives the meaning to the words themselves and limits the meaning of those words.

17:46

That's what you've got with Thomas.

17:48

And you used the phrase in that quote earlier, a spiritual, what's it, spiritual interpretation? Spiritual exegesis? Spiritual exegesis.

17:55

Right.

17:55

Which sounds not like proper hermeneutics to me.

17:59

No, and in fact, what we're seeing amongst Reformed Baptists are people going, well, the original intent of the author should not be what you're looking for.

18:07

You can't find out what the original intent of the author was.

18:09

The great tradition has to determine that for you.

18:12

Oh, this is what we are hearing.

18:14

This is what's already out there.

18:16

And I say to you, someone who has gotten to that point in a relatively short period of time is not going to be a Baptist any longer.

18:24

Wow.

18:24

That's just, that's just the reality.

18:27

Well, I want to, I want to, I, first of all, thank you, because I know that's not what you probably plan to talk about, but this is honestly, this is on my plate.

18:35

I thought you were going to ask me about my new Bible.

18:38

Well, this, this is the type of stuff that me and my elders are, you know, we talk about these things and because we see these things coming down, people are coming in talking about these things.

18:47

But the other one that, that, and, and, and forgive me if this is a left, left, left field question, but, um, I, because again, I feel like you taught me in many ways, the doctrine of the Trinity in a way that I didn't understand it before, you know, before, uh, uh, Lutheran satire told me, you know, that's modalism, Patrick, I knew what modalism was because of you.

19:16

And I'm not, and I'm not ashamed to say that for anybody who's listening to this.

19:19

I mean, I've been a pastor for 16 years in the same church.

19:23

And before I became the pastor, reading, debating Calvinism with you and Dave Hunt was one of the first introductions to reform theology for me.

19:31

And then after that, I read everything, listened to Dividing Line.

19:34

I used to be in the chat channel.

19:35

Yeah, sure.

19:36

So, I mean, been around, right? So here's my question on the doctrine of, which I know goes by different names.

19:45

So if I say this wrong, forgive me, but the doctrine of subordinationism, which I know is sometimes referred to as eternal relations of authority and submission or eternal subordination of the son.

19:56

I have trouble with that and, and, and where I'm having trouble is, you know, the way I define the Trinity, even in the little book I wrote for our church, God in Three Persons, is that God is, the three persons are co-equal and co-eternal and distinct.

20:16

And I think that that's still true, but what are your, what are your thoughts on that issue? Well, when that issue exploded in 2016, in the summer of 2016, I'd say May, April or May of 2016, we're gathering a large crowd here that I think all want me to sign books or something.

20:39

That's okay.

20:39

We'll finish up after this.

20:40

Yeah.

20:43

And I addressed it on the Dividing Line at that time.

20:47

I explained why I don't accept EFS or ERAS or however else you want to express it, because decades before that, I had taken a stand in agreement with Calvin's view, which is a minority view amongst the Reformed, that the son is autotheos, that the son is God in and of himself.

21:12

You can't hold to EFS or ERAS if you believe that the son is autotheos, they just don't fit.

21:21

And so I felt that the argumentation being put forward was inappropriate because it was basically complementarians trying to say, we're supposed to have these relationships between men and women because this is the relationship that exists in the Trinity.

21:41

And you have this eternal functional subordination and I'm going, we're going the wrong direction and that's not where we need to go at all.

21:49

And so I have opposed it, but I have never said that the people promoting it like a Bruce Ware is somehow a heretic that needs to be put out of the church or anything like that at all.

22:06

And so unfortunately in that situation, on the one side, people have become so dogmatic against it that they are willing to say these people are outside the kingdom and so on and so forth.

22:22

That has now become a part of the current conversation because of the extended application of simplicity and something called inseparable operations.

22:39

Which no one had ever heard of until just recently.

22:44

Yes, it's been around for a long, long time, but the reality is even Vidu, who wrote the book on it recently, which was his doctoral dissertation, even he admits in the beginning he couldn't find anything on it when he started his studies.

22:59

So I'm concerned about that subject because of where it's coming from and because of the fact that I can't see how anyone who holds that position could ever talk to a modalist and get anywhere.

23:13

I was going to say, it seems like it almost falls into the category of something like patripassionism or something, and it's not the same, but it seems like it doesn't.

23:21

But what it does do is, I think, removes the ability to go to scripture to define who persons are, what their relationship is.

23:41

Just this past Tuesday, I was in a small church in Louisiana talking with Oneness people because this was my subject, and I was able to present to them the biblical doctrine of the Trinity without ever mentioning inseparable operations, divine simplicity, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotelian metaphysics or anything of the kind.

23:59

And that benefited them greatly.

24:01

And so my concern is, a lot of these people that are pushing this stuff, these young scholastic kids, they never get out of their ivory towers.

24:10

They're not out there in a small Baptist church in rural Louisiana talking to Oneness people, helping them understand what the doctrine of the Trinity is.

24:18

And they actually look down upon those of us that would do that kind of thing.

24:22

Well, from my perspective, they're not going to be finishing well.

24:27

So there you go.

24:29

Well, I've been looking forward to this conversation, and a lot of what I asked you were real concerns of mine.

24:34

Oh, yeah.

24:34

Well, they're really, really concerns of mine, too, and it's sad, it's very sad that what I've seen happen.

24:42

Do you think the Reformed Baptist community is going to divide over this? Well, it's already divided.

24:47

The division's already taken place.

24:50

The question is, will there be any healing in the sense of—the scary way that the healing will take place is that there'll just be—it'll go like this, and this will cease being Baptist.

25:03

It'll become Anglican or Roman or Orthodox or some type of liturgical thing, something off in the great tradition, and the rest of us move on diminished in our numbers, but still committed to biblical sufficiency.

25:15

So if people want to look at that article at aomin.org on Reformed Biblicism, and then I wrote two articles for ProPastor, the journal for Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

25:31

One was on the London Baptist Confession and what it says about Sola Scriptura, and then the second was, did Thomas Aquinas hold the Sola Scriptura? And my answer was, that's a stupid question because it wasn't the issue of his day, but in reality, no, he did not by any stretch of the imagination.

25:50

But those are available in our journal in the first edition that came out just a few months ago.

25:56

Well, thank you for sitting down with me.

25:58

I know you've got people waiting on you, and as always, I appreciate you as a scholar.

26:03

But Keith, I'm just so thankful that everyone now has evidence.

26:06

I knew Keith before he became the viral hit, the man making videos that just explode.

26:17

And before Keith Foskey became the face and spokesperson for the United Methodist Church.

26:28

Somebody in Twitter called me the king of the denomination.

26:35

But when you dress up and can soften your voice and become pansified so you can be the voice of the United Methodists, I'm like, wow, okay, yeah, all right.

26:49

Yeah.

26:50

Well, I'll tell you a story off air.

26:52

Thank you, James, for sitting down with me, Dr.

26:54

O.

26:54

I appreciate it.