Christian Nationalism, Warren McGrew, Warning Against Slander & Gossip, Leftist Twisting of Language

Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line on a cool and windy day here in Phoenix. It's the high today, it's only gonna be in the low 60s. I'll be honest with you, I remember many a Christmas of the mid 70s.

So, you know, I'm sitting here looking at this camera and I'm realizing it's not flat. It's tilted over this direction. I don't know why, but that's new. No, no, it's new. It's been bumped, probably the legs or something.

I am, yeah, I'm looking right at it. He's over there someplace. And see, this is what I deal with regularly, okay? All the time. Anyway, remember, you smashed your head on the, again, on the front of the RV.

Twice. First time, you went down. I mean, the first time you were on the ground, okay? You, and I've pulled this thing 20 ,000 miles. I've hooked it up, unhooked it. I've never done that. And he just gets around it and smashes his head against the front of the RV, so.

I'm not sure that he's really in a position to judge what's level and what's not right now. There you go. Anyway, so it's a cool, breezy day here. We might have some more rain coming in. And that's great.

I think that's wonderful. I'm looking forward to, I told a friend in St. Charles that I would really appreciate, because he said they've got beautiful weather right there. And I said, I'd appreciate if you'd get rid of that before I get there, because my weekend in St. Charles each year is my getting into the Christmas spirit time.

And so if it's like here, that's not gonna help much. A warm breeze in the palm trees does not do much to get you in the Christmas spirit. Though, look at this sweater I've got on. I mean, there you go.

Yes, sir?

So will you be doing Christmas lights in the RV?

Yes.

Okay.

I already have one string and I ordered the little tree for it today.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I would have been surprised if you didn't.

Yeah, oh yeah, no, I'm thinking ahead.

Last year, everything got scuttled. So this is your chance to really do it.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, I got some little LED lights last month. I haven't pulled them out yet because I didn't get them till I get back. And then I got the little LED thing and I'll just tape it down. Just tape it to the top and that way it doesn't fly all over the place when...

Yeah, super glue for everything. Hey, Gorilla Tape, man. Gorilla Glue, Gorilla Tape, it's all good. It keeps things where they're supposed to be when you're bouncing around in an RV. So yeah, so that will be the first weekend in December.

The Doctrine of the Trinity and Current Controversies

We're gonna be doing the Doctrine of Trinity and this year we're gonna be talking about the current controversies. You know, I was going to do this, sorry. I'm still signing these. There are people who still have the 1998 edition of these things.

And I want to, you know, someday I'm gonna pull some of the quotes out of here just to go, yeah, see, you know, it's interesting. So many people thought this was so great for so long and now, huh, I guess you didn't notice these things.

So we're gonna be talking a little bit about how do we know the Doctrine of the Trinity? Is it something that developed over time? That is the majority view in I guess what we would call broadly Christendom.

But that's certainly never been my position and I can't see how it could ever be the position of anyone who would hold to Sola Scriptura. Those are some of the questions we'll be looking at. We will be looking at the Doctrine itself, obviously, as it is revealed to us in scripture.

And I have found over, coming up on four decades of ministry now, next year will be our 40th anniversary for Alpha and Omega Ministries, looking forward to that, if we remember it. When you got Rich and I in charge of remembering these things that, you know, we may realize it the week after and go, oh man.

But I've realized over 40 years of ministry that the people who are the most deeply blessed and rooted in truth are those who are rooted in scripture. Not in some dedication to a particular tradition, denomination, anything like that, but are rooted in scripture itself.

And then can see, you know, if in their confessional tradition, they see biblical truth, great, fine. But there's only one direction to go here. It's not, it doesn't go both ways. Can't go both ways. Not and leave scripture in position of ultimate authority.

While making those last comments, I just realized that I did not queue up and I apologize and did not in fact get a chance to even work through. Again, Rich and I have been busy the past couple of days.

Not really doing anything on social media, but getting our fingers and hands dirty and, you know, using a half inch, you know, just working on stuff, nuts and bolts. And I was putting the tonneau cover on the truck and that kind of stuff.

And so when doing that, I generally don't have a phone nearby to be monitoring social media or anything like that. It's actually been sort of nice, to be honest with you. Anyway, so I almost hesitate to respond to it, but at the end of the last program, everybody was saying, you need to look at this.

And I wanted to, AD Robles, I guess, posted something because I had responded to a Twitter thread, I think Tuesday morning, as I recall, about Christian nationalism and mere Christendom and these issues.

Okay.

And obviously I've listened a lot to what Doug Wilson has said about mere Christendom, which is a little bit different than mere Christianity. I have criticized the mere Christianity concept for a long time.

But again, it's all a matter of definitions. What is mere Christianity? We're not talking about C .S. Lewis specifically, though he's not irrelevant. I have been a strong critic of the kind of, taking a position where you minimize the Christian faith, you get as small as you possibly can.

How do you do that? You limit the definitional aspects of the faith down to the Trinity and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to create as large a group that can agree mainly, I mean, even when you think about that, think about when you talk about the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, in the mere Christendom model, those are totally historical statements.

You can't ask the question, why? Why did Jesus have to be truly man and truly God? Could Eutychianism have worked? Couldn't Historianism have worked? Apollinarianism, so on and so forth. No, you can't.

All that stuff is out there some place. The idea is that you want to create the biggest, for most people, political block that you can. And hence, the gospel is right out because you're not gonna get a whole lot of agreement on the whys and wherefores of the gospel.

And so the whole idea being, we can create this fictional big blob of people but there's really nothing to hold them together. They're not pulling in the same direction. They're not going toward the same goals, all because you leave the gospel out.

And so I have criticized that for a long, long time. And I remember back in the late 90s when the ECT stuff happened. I wasn't the only one criticizing that stuff back then. There were a bunch of folks that joined together to say, yeah, this isn't good.

And so Doug uses the term mere Christendom. Now, what is he talking about? He's talking about seeking to, when you talk about, well, right now, a phrase I hadn't heard repeated over and over and over again, Christian nationalism.

Well, we talked about that. A couple of days ago and a couple of programs ago. And I said at the time, I said, again, what's that? How do you define it? Okay, there's books that's come out. Great, haven't had a chance to look at yet, but book comes out.

And when I hear Christian nationalism, I just go, you mean blesses a nation whose God is Yahweh? You mean sin is a rebuke to any people? Is that, are we talking about the command to disciple the nations and to proclaim Christ's Lordship far and wide and to say that the standard of judgment, Act 1731, is gonna come from Christ in obedience to his ways and his purposes?

Is that what Christian nationalism is? Is that saying to a nation that if you want the fullness of God's blessing, if you want your citizens to experience the fullness of happiness and joy, then they need to live the way their creator intended them to live.

And who is their creator? Christ, right? So Jesus is the maker of all things. Obey Jesus's commands and your people will be happy and your nation will be blessed. Is that Christian nationalism? Well, I would assume in a secular world that's Christian nationalism because you're literally saying to the nations that Christ is Lord and he's the maker of all things and therefore you cannot ignore him and you cannot just simply put him in the category of one religious leader amongst all religious leaders because there's an empty tomb.

There's an empty tomb. Everybody else is, there's still bones in their tombs. And so this is sort of a basic idea that, okay, most of my adult life I had never really been challenged to think about. Again, myth of neutrality, church, state, wall.

They're gonna be neutral toward us. We're gonna be neutral toward them. And of course it was silly. Of course it was silly, but we didn't even think about it because there was, in essence, a functional neutrality going on.

At least we didn't figure that the state was gonna be coming after us. We know now that was pretty naive and dumb, but that's where we were. So is that Christian nationalism? Is that just simply taking seriously the call to call individual men, women, boys, and girls, and those are the only options out there, to faith in Christ, to repent and believe, and to bow the knee to his lordship?

See, that's where the certain elements of evangelicalism immediately jump ship because they don't believe that's part of what repentance and saving faith is. But that's what it is anyways. Is it that and a recognition that, especially today, where we have so many amazing issues facing us, that the answers to all those questions will be found only in Christ and in his truth?

Or is there something more to it than that? Because I'm well aware of the fact that there are very complicated questions. When you say we want to actuate Christ's law in a society, my understanding, when I, for example, a couple of years ago, read The Mission of God by Dr. Joe Boot, preached at Paula G last Sunday, in fact, when I read his discussion of what he called Christian libertarianism and what it would look like to see a post-millennial concept taking shape, what was central to all of that was, this can't be forced outside of the changing of hearts and minds.

In other words, until there's a majority of people who have truly been regenerated, the idea of making application of law just isn't gonna function. You say to the, you present to the people the benefits of obedience to God, but if the majority of people are still in rebellion against God, what's that gonna do?

You have to have, there has to be a major work of the spirit of God in bringing about true regeneration in a very large portion of the population before you can even start talking about these things. And I guess what it was, what happened was there was that graphic where you have all these big muscular arms coming together.

And I forget what they all were, but it included Roman Catholicism. I think it said crazy charismatics or something. Wacko Pentecostals, I forget what it was, but anyway. And I made a comment that basically was like, oh, I remember, it was the comment that I've made on the program over and over again.

And that is, as we are pressed into a smaller and smaller cultural neighborhood, we will be brought together, and this will certainly be the case like if we all end up starting, start getting put into gulags together, where there's gonna be a very strong reason to start minimizing the specifics of the gospel, to try to create as broad a consensus as you possibly can.

And that's always the first casualty. That's always the first casualty. Because the gospel, if you really understand it biblically, is so utterly destructive of human pride. And yet so many versions of that gospel are, how do I put it, designed to maintain man's free will and pride and so on and so forth.

And so the gospel gets shoved off to the side. We're never gonna agree on this, so we've gotta put it out so that we can get all these big muscular arms together. And unless the gospel is in there to define, it's not going to be Christian nationalism.

You can call it religious nationalism, you can call it what you want, but it's not Christian. Because it doesn't have the gospel that changes hearts and minds. And hence, we'll crash and burn spectacularly.

And church history shows this. We've tried it in the past, but we, again, lost the gospel. And you ended up with a massive nominal claim to being Christian. And yeah, there were great benefits to be obtained from obedience to at least parts of God's law, but without a changed heart, it can't be heartfelt obedience, right?

And it'll rot from the inside. And it did rot from the inside. And so my positive hope for the future is completely based upon a massive outpouring of the spirit of God. Because the nations will be desirous of the law of God.

They will desire true and proper things. What's the only way that can happen? Is if there has been a tremendous outpouring.

Of the spirit of God.

In bringing about true conversion regeneration, not mere baptism, where historically, where you got infant baptism to the max, you had gospel to the minimum. And what did that produce? If we can't, if that's mere Christendom, that's not gonna cut it.

Unless there is true dedication to the things of God, to the gospel itself, you're not gonna have anything called Christendom. So I apologize to A .D. Reblis that I didn't, I downloaded it. But as I said, sitting in the back of my truck, sometimes getting on my knees, attempting to get those clips to the right spot, to hold the rails in place so you can put the tonneau cover.

That's not the best place to be listening to videos. I mean, I have done things similar to that. I just didn't bring stuff along to listen to and stuff like that. So I apologize if I have completely missed the context of everything there.

But, oh, okay, I pulled that down. No, that's not what I wanted. I'm also looking for, huh, I don't see it in my Dropbox. Yeah, I wanted to play something else here in a second, but I'll try to multitask here.

It's probably gonna fail spectacularly. No, it didn't. Scrolled up to it immediately. Maybe I'm not even addressing the issues. Maybe that wasn't what was being discussed. Maybe why I made the comment wasn't understood.

But that's what I was talking about, is that apart from, see, I would see as a sign of the outpouring of the Spirit of God. Well, they couldn't hear that, but none of these, have you noticed these microphones just do not pick up that kind of, it's thundering outside.

So I'm watching the video and I see a sign going back and forth out there. And I see it on the radar too. We've got some, there's some orange in that one. So we may get some good rain here in a second.

Anyway, it would be a sign to me of that outpouring of the Spirit in bringing the true gospel to bear, that we didn't have all those strong arms, but that there was a abandonment of so much of the errors that are represented by those quote-unquote strong arms.

And so again, Christendom without Christ is dumb.

Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Broom, ch, Christendom, you know. It just, it doesn't work. And as I said, I'm watching a guy trying to get in. The wind's blowing his umbrella all to pieces and it's coming down real, real good. Like I said, there's orange in them, their storms.

So that means it's coming down good. So if we all of a sudden just appear, this used to be more of the case here in Arizona. You know, that as soon as the big thunderstorm hit, you could expect the lights to go out at any moment.

It's not quite as bad as it used to be, but if we all of a sudden disappear, that's what it was, I can assure you, because she's coming down pretty good out there right now. Anyway, so that's, I will try to see if I've missed the point or if I've guessed correctly as to what the point was, but that's what I wanted to say about that.

Okay. What? What, is somebody commenting?

Twitch has determined that we need to get Doctrine of Life to develop a new t-shirt based on what you just said.

Christendom without Christ is just dumb.

It's dumb, yep, there you go, new t-shirt.

I'll stand by that. I don't know who would argue against that, at least I hope so. I at least hope most people would not argue against that, but there you go. Sort of watching, it's one thing for it to be raining, raining really hard.

If I start seeing hail, that's when I start getting a little concerned, but so far, you probably can't see any of this, can you? Oh yeah, well, I've got the whole thing up here and it do be raining pretty well.

Anyway, thankfully I did find this and over the past couple of days, I saw a description and I'm not sure if this is the nice short one. Wow, again, I know you can't hear this, but okay, here it is. And I need to send you the sound here, sorry about that.

All right, I'm hooked up to that now. I guess about a year ago, I haven't paid attention to Warren McGrew in a long time. Warren McGrew, young guy, well, younger guy, the idol killer, all the stuff that he was really going after total depravity and original sin and stuff like that.

And then he started playing around with open theism, but he didn't want to say it was open theism. He called it dynamic omniscience and then he interviewed an open theist who said, no, that's open theism, stuff like that.

And we went back and forth for a while and then I do that stuff if it's educational and then once it starts getting really repetitive, then we move on. And so I saw a video that was put up and it's a one minute and 43 seconds long.

So the guy that Warren McGrew has on his program is called Paul Vendretti, never heard him, never heard him, tried to look him up. All I found were his own websites. I didn't find any books, teaching, nothing.

So I have no idea where he's coming from or why he's on the program for that matter. But the subject is penal substitutionary atonement. And it is not at all surprising to me that the direction in which Warren McGrew has been going has continued on the path that I said it would be continuing with this denial of penal substitutionary atonement.

And again, if you're not aware, most evangelicals just accept as a given that Christ died so as to provide penal substitutionary atonement, the wrath of God for his broken law, the wrath of God the Father is fulfilled in the death of the Son.

And this is what provides the foundation of peace, the ability to have an imputed righteousness, the need for an imputed righteousness is all associated with this doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.

And again, most people just simply, this is the default. This is simply what they've heard. And so sometimes they're surprised to discover that there are other quote unquote models. Now, I don't like the idea of models.

Using terminology of models makes it sound like we have this mass of biblical data and we have no idea what it means, but we're gonna model it this way and model it that way. Well, given how horribly poor meteorological modeling has proven to be or voting modeling has proven to be, I'm not sure how useful the term is.

But what happens is we send folks off to Bible college and seminary and they get taught by all these bright folks and they get introduced to stuff that they never heard of back home in church when they were teaching Sunday school or in sermons or whatever else.

And they find out there are other models. So the Christus Victor model, Christ as victorious over the powers of darkness. There's the ransom to Satan model where Christ pays a ransom to the enemy of our soul to free us from his control so that we can have peace with God.

And as we've taught on this program over and over again, no one can, well, I was about to say, no one can blame us for not having talked about that. And then I realized how many lies are being told about me today.

It's like, oh, nevermind that, somebody could. But no honest person could accuse us of not having informed people for a long, long time of the fact that those of us who hold to something like penal substitution and atonement, we do so because of our view of scripture and that puts us in a small minority.

And we have said over and over again that it took till the fourth century before a full length tome treatment of the doctrine of the atonement appeared from Athanasius. And that means it was not the central focus of dispute and hence definition that there were men who were important in church history such as Irenaeus of Lyon, vitally important in fighting Gnosticism in the late second century.

Our primary source of information on Gnosticism until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library and other findings last century that gave us many of the original documents of the Gnostics. And yet he held to what's called the recapitulation theory.

And again, most evangelicals have never even heard these terms before. The idea that Christ had to live through each age of man to redeem each age of man, which is why Irenaeus amazingly said that it was an apostolic tradition passed down from the apostles outside of scripture.

The Jesus was more than 50 years old. Had to be so as to redeem old people. Now, nobody believes the apostles actually taught that today but Irenaeus did. And so you've had all these different models and then those models continue on and you end up getting mixtures between those models and you end up with the Anselm and Abelard and their discussions in the medieval period in regards to what the real nature of the atonement is.

And the very fact that there's still this conversation going on shows how late in development what we have in reformed circles really is. And that bothers a lot of people. People who want church history to be a mirror, not mirror in the good sense of being able to show us what Christians are like down through the ages, but you want everybody in church history to look like you.

So that affirms that you're right and everybody else is wrong. Well, that's a fundamentalist idea and it's a false idea. It's not, there's nobody that can honestly look back in history and find that everybody looks like them.

It's just simply not the case and it wasn't God's intention anyways, to be perfectly honest with you. So the reality is all of these different models have elements of truth in them. So there is clearly an element of truth.

There are biblical texts and themes that refer to Christ as victor, as defeater of death. Yep. And there's even an element to the recapitulation concept where Christ has to truly be man and he has to truly suffer and he has to truly experience temptation and stuff like that.

So there's an element of truth to that, but it's when people say, well, it's only this. And when it comes to penal substitution atonement, there was a scholar last century, C .H. Dodd, I think, I'm pretty sure it was C .H. Dodd.

Haven't read Dodd in a long time, but I think it was C .H. Dodd, who was so averse to the concept of God having wrath just did not believe that it was helpful or useful at all to speak of God having wrath, that that's why he preferred the term expiation to the term propitiation, because expiation does not make reference to the wrath of God, propitiation does.

To propitiate is obviously to turn away wrath. Expiation doesn't involve that, and so he preferred that terminology, and a lot of people followed him in that. There is in PSA, penal substitution atonement, an inevitably offensive element of a recognition of God's wrath and holiness.

You can't factor that out, you can't soften it, you can't get rid of it. And so, especially looking at modern Christianity trying to fit in and get along with a more and more secular, naturalistic, anti-biblical society, you can see where that would be pushing, where that would be going.

And so, you can see why people would reject PSA for those reasons. So there is a history behind all this, and I think it is important for people to know where all this came from and what those conversations were, and I mean, I'm not gonna sit there and say, you're gonna become an atheist if you don't know as much about church history as if you had read Origin of Christian Doctrines by Berkhoff or something like that.

But it's helpful if you want to know where your terminology came from and why there is such a strong emphasis upon these things in your understanding of scripture. Takes us back, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, to what we all remember took place with dear, blessed Brother Hunt all those years ago now when on KPXQ Radio here in Phoenix, when he gave me a completely traditionalistic interpretation of John 6 that had nothing to do with the text, I said, Dave, that's just your tradition speaking.

And he said to me, James, I have no traditions. And we all have traditions. All of us have traditions. And the only way to be able to honestly say that you are saying that when you present God's truth, that you are able to say, thus saith the Lord, is if you do the proper exegesis and hermeneutics so as to detect your traditions.

And of course, if you embrace the idea that you can't, in other words, that those traditions actually have to function above scripture, there's no reason for you to believe in Sola Scriptura any longer because you don't believe it.

Your traditions are your ultimate authority. And you're stuck with that, whether you recognize it or not. So anyway, all of that, to get us back here to this clip, I'm only gonna do the audio, so don't worry about switching to the video.

But I listened to this brief clip. Matt Estes posted it, so thank you, Matt, for putting that up there. I downloaded the whole thing, but there was no way I was gonna have time to fast forward to it. I didn't get it queued up before him.

But again, I can't even start to explain who Paul Vendretti is. I followed the links, I did do the Google, and it was like, there was something where he was going after Hank Hanegraaff. Okay, whatever.

But this was an amazing snippet. So let's take a listen to it, hope it works here. And here we go.

If you believe in PSA, the fine details of the hypostatic union matter not at all. All that matters is that Jesus have a physical body with blood in it so that God the Father in his wrath can spill the blood.

Now this is a provocative thing I'm about to say, but in penal substitutionary atonement, Jesus of Nazareth is really nothing more than a bag of blood that's stapled to the second person of the Trinity.

The uh-uh is the deep discussion from Warren McGrew in response to that. I would think, now that's only 28 seconds, so I would think that almost any orthodox attender of church, let alone theologian, would hear that statement.

Now maybe there was just a whole bunch that came before this. I can't imagine what it would be. But that's just some of the most inane, absurd, filled with animus blather I think I've ever heard. A bag of blood stapled to the second person of the Trinity.

That's what penal substitutionary atonement means. Well that is just, when you use that kind of argumentation, and maybe that's what happened to Warren. He was just so stunned that he couldn't enunciate any meaningful conversation.

But it is interesting, maybe, and this is possible, Mr. Vendretti, Venedretti, sorry, it's a very small print over there. Maybe the problem here is that he's only responding to some of the, what shall we call them?

Well there have been, remember, most of you don't remember, back in the 80s there was a intra-fundamentalist controversy where John MacArthur got into a bunch of trouble, got into a bunch of trouble.

And for years, well even to today, I saw somebody going, I still see people going after MacArthur to today in fundamentalist circles about this, saying MacArthur denied the blood. And what John said was that the blood of Jesus is not some magical thing that's sitting in a vial someplace and God takes a little dropout for each person to get saved or some strangeness like that.

The shedding of blood was the giving of life. It was substitution of a perfect life and hence all of the importance of Christ being the Anthropos, the God man, of being truly man, of truly suffering, of not being a Gnostic, you know, the Christ spirit leaves as the body dies on the tree, dualism and all the other stuff that people have come up with.

It is vitally important that Christ is truly the God man.

Why?

Because the people of God are united to Christ in the sovereign election of the father so that his death becomes their death. It's not magic blood time. It's the giving of the perfect life in behalf of those who are united to him.

And so it's still penal. God's law is being fulfilled and it is necessary that it be fulfilled. And when you don't have that as a part of your theology, you end up with what you've got in Islam where a law can just simply, you know, that sin's gone.

No atonement's been made. The law remains broken, sin's gone. And if you want to see how that plays out in debate, in a mosque, in front of the Qibla, in a majority Muslim audience, then go watch the debate I did with Shabir Ali at the Al-Babak Rasidic Mosque and wow, it's coming up on a decade ago.

That just hit me.

It's 2013. That's 2013.

I want to cry.

I, wow. That was, that was an amazing night. I have a picture from, no, no, that was in Erasmia, suburb of Pretoria. I remember my dear friend and I afterwards, we started, I think that's the night we started the tradition of going to McDonald's after debates there in South Africa.

Because by the way, McDonald's tastes the same wherever you go in the world, except for Italy. Except for Italy. You buy a quarter pound of cheese in Kiev. Well, maybe for after the war, I don't know.

But when I was in Kiev, you buy a quarter pound of cheese. It tastes exactly the same, but not in Italy. And in South Africa does too. And that night we just sat there talking about what an amazing thing it was to be able to stand there that close to these individuals and talk about my need of an alien righteousness, a righteousness outside of myself.

And where does that come from? It comes from that penal substitutionary atonement. And without that, you end up with the Muslim view. And I'm not going to take time to narrate the Hadith on that right now about the 99, the man who killed 99 people.

We've done that many times in the past. But maybe it's just, you know, when you hear someone, you know, he said, I'm going to be provocative. No, it was just, that was just being dumb. That was just, that was just, I'm going to ignore the very substance of the vast majority of everything that has been written on this subject from a believing perspective since the time of the Reformation and create, I'm just going to, I'm going to soak this baby in kerosene and light it up and let you see her burn.

That's what that just was. And the response from Warren McGrew was, no.

Yeah, it's fascinating that Craig would deny these things, but it's not at all shocking knowing his presuppositional commitments there. But if you study what the early church had taught about these things, I mean, Gregory said, that which Christ did not assume, he did not heal.

And so if we're to take these words from a faithful member of the body of Christ to have any merit, if all he is is flesh and blood, then he didn't heal our soul. He didn't heal our mind. He didn't heal these other attributes.

And so in PSA, it really seems to me that the incarnation is, it has almost hardly any meaning or merit to it other than just to make a bloody piñata.

How do you respond to something that absurd? Union with Christ, the fact that Christ needs to be the God-man, that makes a bloody piñata? What piñata has ever voluntarily given himself in obedience to the Father?

You're just left going, why do these people waste their time and hours? It's stunning.

It's something that can be beaten and spilled, and that's all it is. There's no human healing. There's no actual redemptive merit there anywhere to the degree that you would have with the restored icon model.

The restored icon model. The restored icon model. Well, icon, image, definitely used. Maybe this is in reference to something related to restoring the Imago Dei. Well, there is, that's part of Reform soteriology, but it's also a part of Reform soteriology that that Imago Dei was greatly marred by sin.

And with federal headship was marred in the fall of Adam. And we know these are things that don't fit well with those who struggle with original sin, federal headship, whatever else it might be. I don't know.

And it seems to be really troubling that we would say that Christ assumed these things, and it seems to me in scripture at least, but then have to deny those in order to get to an atonement theory that comports with our presuppositions.