The Trinity | w/ Dr. Brant Bosserman

Jeremiah, you just, you gotta drive home with this guy. If there is an absolute personal creator

God at the end of it, and your whole religion doesn't even acknowledge him whatsoever, how are you not in the position of Romans 1, where it says, since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen.

We're talking about the big God here, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse.

For even though they knew God, you just betrayed it despite your own theology, Mormon. For even though they knew

God, they did not honor him as God or give him thanks. My goodness, friends, have you ever given thanks to this

God for sustaining your entire being? Why do you have some God before him who you call

Elohim from planet Kolob and his son? Why do you put another God in front of him and deprive the one who's really responsible for everything?

Well, hello, and welcome back to the apologetic dog, where it's our heart's desire to do apologetics, to talk about knowledge that God has revealed himself to be and who we are in his world and to talk about the truth.

And so if you're acquainted with the apologetic dog ministry, then you've seen the logo, the dog, the bearded dog.

I hope y 'all get a kick out of that, but there's also a verse embedded in the logos ministry, and that is 1

Timothy 6, 20. I just wanna remind you of how important this verse is to me. Or Paul tells

Timothy, oh, Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. And so the apologetic dog is a guard dog, guarding the gospel of grace.

And then Paul tells Timothy, do this in a very particular way, avoid irreverent babble, avoid pagan philosophies that try to rival the knowledge of God and twist truth.

And he says, also avoid those traditions that have contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.

And so the apologetic dog, we wanna stand on God's truth, the way that he has revealed himself to be.

And so thank you again for joining. I just wanna give one quick announcement, where in about a month or two coming up,

I will be engaging in a public debate with AK Richardson, and we are going to be debating free will.

And so this is a hotly debated topic that will probably not be solved with our debate, but that's okay.

AK and I have really enjoyed interacting with one another and talking about what does free will look like in light of God's word.

So mark down your calendars, that'll be on June 24th at 12 .5 church, where I serve as pastor and elder here.

We're gonna have a great time. And if you would love to come in person, we can hold up to 130 seats.

So message me, message pastor Nathan, you can reach out to him on Facebook Messenger and things through the church website, if you would like a seat.

But if you can't make it in person, then we will also live stream the debate on the apologetic dog

YouTube channel. So mark that down on your calendars, you don't wanna miss the free will debate between me and AK Richardson.

So with my ministry being in apologetics, it's no surprise,

I'm reformed. And so everything that I approach doctrine and scripture and everything is through that worldview.

And so another part of my ministry that I'm looking forward to embarking more and more on is the fact that I'm Trinitarian.

I believe that God is a triune, God the Father, Son and Spirit are the one true

God. And so the doctrine of Trinity for me is foundational for everything else. God has revealed himself in his word to be a very particular way.

And I believe when we look in creation, it gives us so many details pointing back to God's triunity.

But at the end of the day, God has to reveal himself to us in truth.

And so as I've studied the Trinity, I came across a book called

The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox, an Interpretation and Refinement of the

Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til, written by Dr.

B .A. Bosserman. And so without further ado, Dr. Bosserman's in the building.

Can you hear me okay, Dr. Bosserman? I can hear you well, Jeremiah. And I just wanna say, I really appreciate you explaining the meaning of the apologetic dog because I was worried it might be a reference to Psalm 2220 that seizes upon the power of the dog.

And I just, I was gonna have to confront you that that's not a positive biblical reference. And so I just,

I'm glad to hear that there's a better reference. Yes, well, I've also, people have said that, don't cast what is holy before the dogs.

And I'm like, oh, people are already coming at me pretty hard. So I have to constantly remind people kind of the vision behind the logo and the ministry name.

Yes, but in all seriousness, yeah, go right ahead. I appreciate you coming on the show.

Like, I have waited a long time for this. I read your book a while back.

I actually learned about you from a mutual friend of ours, Eli Ayala from Revealed Apologetics.

That was the first time I found out about you. And it was also during a similar time where I was starting to really grasp concepts of the

Trinity. God is one being, and he's three in his personhood. And those are different distinct categories that are necessary when we're evangelizing.

I remember I was sharing the gospel with a Jehovah's Witness and they said,

Jeremiah, can you show me anywhere in the Bible where we see Trinity? And you talk about just not being equipped to be able to go to the scripture and show that.

And then they're saying, how are you not serving three gods? I just felt it all in a moment. And this was years back early on in the faith.

I really wanted to just be obedient to share the gospel. So by God's grace, I've been equipped over the years.

My heart has really rejoiced with presuppositional apologetics. That's why

Eli Ayala has been so invaluable in my life and then learning from guys like Cornelius Van Til and just the rest.

And so when you came on the scene, I was like, what is this book about? And the way that I approached it was thinking is he really gonna take

Cornelius Van Til's apologetic one step further? I just wanna tell you, your book was fantastic.

By far the hardest book that I've ever read. Wow, wow.

Well, I mean, don't pick up the critique of pure reason, my friend, or the phenomenology of spirit because they will crush you.

Yes. No, I appreciate that. I mean, there's some honesty there, I think, about the nature of the work.

But I think, I say we just jump into it. I think one of the goals today is to try to draw out some of the argument that I make in that book and to maybe put it in terms that are more accessible, of course, as you know, difficult to read.

And I'll tell you what, before we dive right in, do you mind to tell people where they can maybe see some more of your work?

If you have a website, if they can listen to some of your preaching, where you serve at and things like that? Yeah, all my sermons are on Sermonatium.

So anybody wants to listen into a sermon, it'd be there. I just barely have a hand in academic things these days.

I'd say in the last probably couple of years, I've been able to be a bit more involved. But man,

I've had kids under the age of six for a long, long time. And survival should be everyone's chief goal at that point.

But my kids are getting older. And so that's opening me up a bit. I've got an article that is slated to get published in the

Westminster Journal this coming fall. It's actually more of an exegetical article, but it has an apologetic flavor to it, directed specifically to Seventh -day

Sabbatarians and it's an argument for First -day observance. But yeah, other than that, really, it's stuff like this.

There are various interviews and things like that floating around on the internet, a debate from about a decade ago.

Someday, maybe I'll do some more of that stuff. But I've got a church and a family, and that's quite a lot.

Oh, your hands are full. And because I would love it for the day for you to get back into the debate arena.

I know some Unitarians that would love to have a crack at B .A. Bosterman. Oh my goodness.

I want people to see your book here, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox.

And so I love it because you talk about things that are paradoxical but necessarily require, like if you're starting at one point, then you have to carry that all the way to the other pole.

And a lot of things are necessary for one another when we're talking about God and who man is.

And something that you talk about in your book a lot is the absolute moral bankruptcy of any worldview that opposes the

Trinity, doesn't start with the sovereign triune God. So I just wanna tee you up.

We can start wherever you want to in that. Well, let's do it. I think a great place to start is with the concept of context, how important context is for understanding anything.

Now you can think about this on a very practical level. If you heard someone scream,

I'm going to kill you. If that is in the context of people playing Fortnite online, the meaning of that phrase is radically different than if two people are in a street fight.

In the context in which that phrase is uttered is going to color its meaning utterly. Those two contexts are gonna change that same phrase into a playful assertion to something very dangerous.

And so we start with the concept of context, but we're gonna take that into the realm of metaphysics.

What is the ultimate context that surrounds everything? You could say that this is kind of the heart of any apologetic debate with an atheist, someone of another faith.

And to be really honest, this isn't a difficult part of what we call presuppositional apologetics, really driving home the problem of context.

And here's what I mean. When you talk with an unbeliever, it doesn't take any grand skill or ingenuity to explain, listen, how do you know that the ground that you're standing on is going to be stable?

At first, they could appeal to the integrity of the structure that they're standing in, the house or the building.

Beyond that though, you'd have to say, yeah, but how do you know the ground underneath that is stable? Then they might have some conception of planetary motion, gravity, things like that.

But obviously, as you keep pressing this question further, the unbeliever must arrive at a point where they frankly say,

I don't know what's beyond that. You take it to the Big Bang, for example, where it's hypothesized that space and time themselves came into being through some sort of initial explosion.

The physical laws we know, the rational laws by which our minds are governed came into being at this point.

And it's actually a big problem to come to terms with the fact that you don't know where the

Big Bang itself came from and what's beyond that. And fundamentally, if you don't know, for lack of a better phrase, the ocean on which our universe is floating, everything you think you know about this universe is undermined.

That's to say some other dimension that birthed our dimension. How do you know that that other dimension will not intervene or is not intervening right now, such that what you think is a valid conception of the external world is an illusion?

And most unbelievers have to admit they don't know. Yeah, so I just wanna chime in, because you gotta think,

I'm coming at this from the lay perspective, but I've loved the stepping into the world of apologetics, thinking presuppositionally, standing on God's truth at every point and turn.

And so what helped me beginning this endeavor was understanding what a worldview is, right?

So we got kind of the category of ontology slash metaphysics, you know, what is actually real, you know, past the physical realm that we can see what goes after that or beyond.

But you have ontology, you have epistemology, how do we know what we know? And that's the kind of the question that you're pressing, you know, the skeptic, essentially.

And then the value theory of ethics and morality, how ought we live in this particular universe?

And what I've loved about presuppositional apologetics, it says all three of those pillars are necessary to kind of explain one another.

You can't just have an epistemology devoid of an ontology, it's begging the question.

It's gonna be arbitrary, and the Christian apologists were saying, you're standing on our ground. We're not saying that we don't know, and we're going to press the epistemological question on your worldview to the point where you have to say, well, it just seems to be the case.

And at that point, you've given up a rational foundation for meaning and intelligibility and so forth.

Am I on point or am I close to where you're laying the foundation for? Absolutely, absolutely.

If you do not know the fundamental nature of ultimate reality, you could say the context of everything, it undermines your capacity to know anything.

And this is really a fairly elementary insight. And in fact, it will be propounded as epistemic humility to admit these sorts of things that we really can't totally know, we can't be absolutely certain.

And of course, that's the opposite of the virtue of humility taken in the ethical realm.

To be humble in the ethical realm, you have to actually know that you lack certain capacities, that you've done certain things wrong.

And therefore, in light of that objective standard, you're humbled by your inadequacy.

But in the realm of epistemology or knowledge, people will have to admit fundamentally,

I don't ultimately know anything. And they'll try to go with, it's probable.

We'd probably push forward that your knowledge isn't even probable, you have to have an objective standard to even begin to calculate probability.

And this is the beginning of our claim to just demonstrate the importance of context.

And of course, the unbeliever is gonna come right back at us and say, one of two things, you're in just as bad of a position as I am.

That's the first thing they're gonna say, or other people or other religious worldviews can do just as well as you.

And that's what we'll kind of, we'll be responding to. Could we say what we're dealing with is the problem of induction, right?

Absolutely. Humanity, we exist in a context, we're gonna keep using this word, in a world that's impersonal.

And so in many ways, this impersonal context subjects us to the problem of induction to where we don't have an absolute knowledge and all sufficient omniscient mind to know things with absolute certainty.

And it kind of goes back to the context in which we live, this impersonal universe, right?

And then the way I've processed it in your book is, and that's kind of why we have the problem of induction.

And if induction is the foundational worldview, well, that's seeking sand, right? That's probability.

And like you're bringing out the hypotheticals of, well, if you don't know with absolute certainty, then everything's kind of up for chance, but it's also self -defeating because you have to make knowledge claims that you're certain about something not being certain at the end of the day.

So it's just a broken epistemology when you get down to it. That's right. It is deeply broken.

And the problem of induction is it's even worse than just that people only have probabilistic knowledge.

It's worse than that because as Hume showed, before you can even rely on the concept that I've watched something occur, say five times, and I'm anticipating it's gonna happen a sixth, you have to already know that reality is such a place that uniformity pervades it.

How do you know that in the first place? Why do five occurrences imply a sixth at all?

What authority could tell you that? And when you're dealing with a universe that seemingly came into being out of nothing, that right there is so anomalous and so foundationally problematic when you start talking about what you should or should not expect to occur.

How do you know that the universe as we know it will not be zapped out of reality out of nowhere?

You don't know the concept, excuse me, that the properties of this other dimension from which our dimension came and that undermines knowledge.

And so, of course, the Christian claim is gonna go something like this. And so we're gonna power into the

Christian view of reality and we're really answering the question, where are we? The unbeliever's answer is, we do not know where we are.

I can talk about certain local answers to that question, but even those are subject to some vast void of unknown in the darkest sense.

And we're gonna say to the unbeliever, if that were true, you would have no knowledge at all. You wouldn't be justified in any of your beliefs.

You wouldn't even know that any belief were true. We're gonna say, you don't really live in that context. You live in this context and we're gonna expound this for a moment.

Where we all are in the Christian worldview is we are in God's providence.

And when we speak of God, we're not talking about a being who is gradationally greater than we are, has significantly more power than we do, occupy some space in the universe.

We're talking about an absolutely personal God who spoke reality into existence such that all of it, without exception, is subject to his design and decrees and that he has absolute comprehension of himself and the universe.

And in fact, we were made to live out our existence with this understanding at all times that this is our ultimate context.

And in fact, the natural, when we speak of natural, we mean before man fell into sin, the natural way to look at the world when we encounter any object, any animal form, any plant life, a mountain, the sky, all of it, is to immediately see that as a created creature, created animal form, a created tree, a created mountain that was made for us to access it, to study it, to search out the mysteries in it.

And in that context where our biggest authority, our biggest principle is a personal

God who fit us and fashioned us for the world and the world for us, we know everything in light of his revelation and his testimony that we can know in a manner that images his absolute perfect and comprehensive knowledge.

And I just wanna point out some biblical scriptures that people will get,

I think agnostics and believers will get frustrated with Genesis 1 .1. It simply begins, in the beginning,

God created the heavens and the earth. It doesn't provide a proof, a theistic proof that this

God exists. And there's a reason for that. God is saying, I am the absolute context of everything.

Heaven, earth, time itself with its beginning, I am the one who precedes that.

My voice, my song pervades all of it. And in fact, one has to begin with me, not arrive at me from an apologetic argument, climbing up a ladder, if you will, to God to discover him and then reason in light of what he tells you.

Rather, you were designed to begin with me as your ultimate presupposition and starting point.

And what that involves is acknowledging him as the ultimate context of everything.

Go ahead, Jeremiah. So another verse that presuppositional apologists really try to memorize is

Proverbs 1, verse 7, that talks about the fear of Yahweh giving reverence and honor to him as the supreme being.

That's the beginning of knowledge. Proverbs goes on to say, that's the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. And it's fools that despise him and ultimately want nothing to do with him.

So is that a good scripture? Because I've actually had some people say, well, beginning could just mean the best of many options.

And my response is, that's true because it's the only foundation that secures everything else.

And so I've had some people kind of scoff a little bit about Proverbs being just kind of wisdom literature. I'm like, where else would you wanna go for wisdom?

Lover of knowledge, right? From the book of Proverbs itself. And then

I believe it's later in Proverbs chapter nine, where it tethers it, this concept to the

Holy One. And so that sounds a lot like Colossians chapter two, that in Jesus Christ is the treasures of knowledge.

And that's how we ultimately have full assurance. And so the presuppositional argument is, you must start with the

Christian worldview and the triune God for everything else to even make a lick of sense.

To remove that foundation, everything is going to be absurd. It's gonna be rendered into kind of nonsense.

And so this actually reminds me, one of my favorite chapters in your book, you talk about the transcendental argument from the

Trinity and for the Trinity. And when I first read through that, it didn't hit me, but it's like, oh, because I've even talked with skeptics and atheists about this and they're just like, well, did you know about God when you were little?

And I'm like, no, but that's approximate starting point. I was borrowing from the triune

God who I made in his image and I didn't realize it. And so I'm standing on that metaphysical grounding all along and I didn't know it, right?

I discovered that that's where I've always been. Van Til talked about a little child slapping the father in the face, but it was the father that was holding him up the whole time.

I believe that's Paul in Areopagus, right? We live and move and have our being, quoting these Greek prophets that knew better, right?

For our being, that's contingent on a greater eternal being. So that's kind of the thrust of the propositional framework.

That's right, sir. And I would put it this way, to the friend who said Proverbs 1, 7 is just setting

God out as the best of multiple options to be your starting point. Think about what a contradiction it is to even say that.

If you consider yourself as a person at the ice cream shop looking for a starting point, in fact, your appetites are the starting point.

None of the ice cream flavors, none of the 31 flavors are the starting point. You, your autonomous self are the beginning of things with, as we'll discuss in the course of time, an active suppression of the knowledge of God.

And when you know the difference, to the friend who said, well, did you know God when you were a baby or something like that?

You distinguish the proximate starting point from kind of the foundational logical starting point.

And I would just say to the unbeliever, as a logic professor, I always talk to people about the wonder of that.

What we're studying in this class is something you've been using all of your life. From the moment you began reasoning, we're just putting names to these argument forms, which are the way that the mind thinks and operates.

I will note, there's no logical proof that logic itself applies to reality.

It's actually kind of a big problem philosophically. I mean - It's just assumed, right?

Well, for Kant, the transcendental subject is imposing various categories onto creation.

That's why you can be sure they're going to show up every time you evaluate something is you're literally projecting them.

Obviously, other philosophers will say that reality is embedded. These laws are embedded in reality.

But then again, that's just a hypothesis. And so I would actually say, in fact, not only are we, from the moment we are conscious, relying on reason and logic, but we're actually relying on the

God who is above all rational forms, all rational inferences and material reality, whose voice is assuring us at all times to apply the one to the other and count them as fit for one another.

And I would just note, reality can't tell you that before you evaluate it, nor can reason tell you that before you're using it.

In fact, no, that's the voice of God at all times speaking. That is your big context. And they'll hate that.

But I should also note, the verse that you just mentioned, Proverbs 1 .7, it's just, it's multiplied all over the wisdom literature.

It's the exact same thing in Job 28 .28. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom.

It's Ecclesiastes 12 .13. It is in the wisdom Psalms, Psalm 111 verse 10.

This is a mantra of scripture. I have another one I want your thought on. So John 17 .17,

Father sanctify them in truth. Your word is truth. And I was talking to some advocates of Greek orthodoxy.

And they're just like, Jeremiah, that's not the word graphe. Logos there.

How do you know it's not referring to Jesus? I'm like, the word of God is necessarily both, right?

How God has revealed himself as the second person of the triune God and his revealed word.

And so I read a book called The Canon of Scripture, a Presubstitutional Study by Philip Kaiser.

And he made such an astute point. I think you will like this. He said, Jesus did not say your word is true as though you're judging

God's word from a different standard altogether, but your word is truth.

It's the precipium that everything else is judged in light of. And so when

I get asked about Sola Scriptura, because Jonathan Frame said that presubstitutional apologetics is

Sola Scriptura applied. I love that. But I just said, John 17 .17, that's my go -to.

To say, look, God's word is truth. Jesus is the revealed word. He is the way, the truth, and the life.

And so I just love it. You gotta start with Christ. Christ is the justification. Yes, and to that Eastern Orthodox fellow,

I would just note, contextually, John 14 through 17, there are numerous statements to the effect that the spirit of God will recall to you all that I have spoken to you.

He who remains in my word. The good news is not just that God has a word, it's that the word speaks to us with our words, and it would be deeply problematic and no salvation at all if that contact were not made.

But to jump back onto the Christian view of reality, before the fall, we exist in the context of an absolute, all -knowing, sovereign creator

God. And this is just pounded home all over the word. Solomon, after he completes the temple and he leads the people in prayer, he says this, he says, but will

God indeed dwell on earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house which

I have built. It is the concept that God births the categories that we might make from, not in the sense that they are totally rendered entirely useless, but in the sense that we can know

God truly, but never exhaustively. And the temple is a really excellent portrait of this.

It's the concept that we can access our living God. He is present here with us.

So this building isn't useless, but it's also there to remind us where we need to be reminded at all times that that building, and especially as it's holy of holies, actually represents the context and the transcendent thing that surrounds us,

God himself. And, you know, John Frame, you just mentioned a moment ago, he does well expounding, you know,

Van Til's concept of a Christian concept of transcendence and eminence. The non -Christian concepts of both are deeply problematic.

That which is transcendent is totally unknowable and unknown. It's their void, their empty, the realm that surrounds this realm that just calls everything into question.

Their concept of eminence is the idea that we can know

God or divine things exhaustively, or maybe even anything about God exhaustively or exactly or perfectly.

And it kind of bounced back and forth between those two things. Whereas for us as Trinitarians, who we know our context is this absolutely personal

God, we know that in everything, in all points, we know God truly, but we never know him exhaustively.

The transcendence piece is what keeps us from knowing him exhaustively and his eminence.

The fact that the word of God can speak with human words and well represent himself means we can know him truly.

And those two things together are of utter significance. Go ahead. And maybe a key word that you mentioned a lot in your book, it comes out in Van Til, but we know

God analogically. And that's awesome, right? God is able to speak to us in ways that we can understand.

I remember you giving an example of, you have a child seeing that their dad uses a credit card and all he knows is every time he swipes the magic card, you get food, you get groceries.

And that is a adequate understanding from that child's perspective, but doesn't understand the greater context that their dad goes to work and puts money in the bank and all this transaction.

Well, in a similar way, analogically, God comes down to us and speak to us in ways that we can actually understand.

And that's only possible if we are made in his image and reflect many attributes of who he is.

Yes, that's absolutely right. And so with that understanding in mind, we're gonna confront the unbeliever with this concept that as a creature, their context is the creator.

We're actually gonna confront the unbeliever and we're gonna say the reason you carry about with such a self -assured sense that you can trust your senses, the world around you, expect normalcy, honestly, even expect a whole lot more than that in a world full of expectations.

The reason for that is because you live and move and have your being in the context of this

God with this sort of character that the scriptures revealed. And the non -Christian response is actually gonna be interesting at this point.

If all I told the unbeliever were that much as a presuppositionalist, that you're a creature and your context is the creator, some unbelievers will actually think that we have some sort of common ground here in that we kind of believe the same thing.

I'm thinking of a recent interview between Russell Brand and I think Tucker Carlson, where he gave testimony to how much he needs

God to feel sane in the world. And we can appreciate that on some level, but Russell Brand's coming at this from what

I can tell, sort of mysticism and pantheism, where you're not actually saying the same thing we are at all.

You don't fundamentally, if you're a pantheist, believe in a creator -creature distinction.

In fact, what you're saying is that we are one metaphysically with this context in which we live.

In fact, the context is the wrong way to even think about it. Perhaps the biggest problem from which we all suffer is believing in our distinct individuality when we're really drips from an ocean.

And that actually might be the great error from which we suffer. We'll just note, even right here, you're actually in the same terrible position as the out -and -out atheist.

Ultimate reality itself is afflicted with error, illusion, falsehood in you because you are, as Van Til will frequently say, a charter member of ultimate reality, which means that error is inherent in that thing that you're calling

God itself. The moment you do that, you say that God himself is in some degree in error, or even the illusion of error.

You're in the same place where you'd have to admit every proposition of knowledge that you claim to know is questionable.

There's no ultimate authority or standard to which you can go that is flawless, whose knowledge is perfect, never hampered down with error and confusion, because those things enter into the divine himself.

So this is how a presuppositionalist is going to go at someone who tries to mimic a theistic sort of position and go, yes,

I believe in a divine context as well. We're gonna say, in fact, what you're describing is totally different from what we're describing, because you lack a creator -creature distinction where that creator context is absolutely holy, never fraught with error, sin, confusion, or the like.

That's the thing I said. Yeah, because you're bringing out, once again, the problem of induction.

And one objection I've heard against presuppositionalists from the same gentleman that doesn't want us to interpret

Proverbs 1 -7 in the way that we do is, well, Jeremiah, you don't know everything, do you?

Well, then how can you? And my immediate thought is, I'm not claiming to be the one that has all knowledge, but I'm putting forth a worldview.

The worldview that I have has the one who has all knowledge. So we're kind of going back and forth between the creator -creation distinction.

I do have a fallible knowledge, but it's within a worldview that rests on the one who is infallible.

So it's making that distinction between what I possess and the metaphysical context in which

I exist. I can know that with certainty, even though I've not crossed over into the creator realm itself.

So we're talking about metaphysics. We're talking about the whole worldview in which we're even having the conversation.

Well, that's right. And I think even just laying forth the simple proposition that I think we can agree that if there is a

God who knows absolutely everything, then believing what he says would be the absolutely most certain sort of belief that you could ever have.

Whereas what you're saying, Unbeliever, is that maybe such a God exists. If he does,

I'm gonna have to find him and he's gonna have to prove himself to me. And what you're really saying is that there's some self -assurance that you have, which we're gonna press forward is baseless.

It's entirely baseless. It doesn't matter how much money that's made you, how well that's gotten you around the world and helped you reach your goals.

It's baseless in terms of epistemic justification or even a claim to truth.

And Jeremiah, I'll just say one thing. It's more than just the problem of induction because that's a problem of how we can make probabilistic conclusions about the world, the external world.

It's the problem of intuition. How can you trust your intuition when you say you're a member of ultimate reality, which itself just emits error from time to time, emanates error and illusion from time to time?

It calls into question all of your thought as potentially being error and illusion.

And so we could go down the line. It calls into question your sense of mathematical truths.

I understand it's really compelling and it's painful to imagine trying to disbelieve those things.

But again, once you put yourself into the context of the unknown, what the unknown is compelling you to think or to believe is itself unknown.

And that's what renders all of your knowledge uncertain. And so here's what really an unbeliever will do, not that this happened two weeks ago with my big brother who's an unbeliever.

What they'll really do is they'll really drive home that the biggest problem the presuppositionalist has is that there are other theisms out there, not pantheisms, apparent monotheisms that can mimic your claims at every single point.

And I would say there are really only two really effective ways to combat presuppositionalism.

One is to just keep claiming to not understand what they're talking about and it's just subterfuge.

The other is to attempt that what the presuppositionalist is saying can be mimicked by the adherence of any other sort of theism.

The most frequent ones would be ones that have holy books that puts you in the realm of Judaism, Mormonism, Islam.

I would say Islam is in a special favorite. My big brother has on more than one occasion been a quasi

Muslim in the course of a presuppositional discussion. And the point will be, how do we know, if we have to begin with God as our foundation and as our starting point to make sense of the world, how do you know which

God to start with will be the finger wagging to have at us? You were gonna say something.

Yeah, because I've had the blessing of teaching at the college with some Christians that were wanting to engage with apologetics.

And so this was the big question. And they were asking in a nice way with this similar encounter they've had with an atheist, how do, why should we believe

Christianity over Islam? And so my first reaction was the atheist could not arbitrate which one is true from their position because atheism has a worldview.

And it claims, most of them would say, we don't know the ontology and we don't need the ontology.

We just need to have hypothesis of different types of knowledge. And my point is they could never know which one is true from the foundation that they're standing on, but they can know this, they are standing on nothing, right?

The foundation that they're standing on will not provide them knowledge. So what we would do, or at least what

I would do is invite them over to Islam, right? Let's do this. Let's kind of do some searching around with this whole worldview and try to do what we would call an internal critique to show the logical problems of what this

Unitarian God offers, which is a bunch of hot garbage. And then we would do that through a process, demonstrate the inconsistencies, the absurdities within the worldview of Islam to show that if it were true on its own terms, it would be false.

It'd be self -conspiratory. That's right. And that's what we're gonna do right now. We're gonna take the next step.

And I'm gonna go at this at a different angle than jumping straight into the Trinity. The absolute

God is unmistakably different from Allah. And you can at least sympathize with the unbeliever that can't anyone just smack a name on ultimate authority and call it

Allah, call it Yahweh, call it Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And any person who wants to take your money, and frankly, just chew you up, it can assert very loudly that they're the spokesperson for the absolute

God. And you must essentially abandon every single belief you ever had and just stand on him as your foundation.

And here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna, we're gonna talk more about Islam, but we're gonna do it through talking about this next piece.

It's very problematic as a presuppositionalist if you simply drive home the creator -creature distinction, we have an absolute authority in the creator and we're the creature.

That's not the whole story. And we have to be faithful telling the whole story. The whole story is that our context is not only the triune

God as our absolute context, but after the fall, we have to be keenly aware that our context, all of created humanity's context is in our covenantal head,

Adam, as a rebel and a sinner before God. We are in Adam, says the scriptures.

This is vitally important because I'm gonna emphasize this point and try to draw it out.

The moral gravity of our plight is directly related to whether we really believe we live in a personal context or not.

And if a worldview dumbs down, diminishes the moral gravity of our plight to the degree that they do, and frankly, to any degree at all, we can be absolutely certain that the worldview being propounded is not one where you have an absolute

God. So let me explain what I mean. According to the biblical portrait, humanity being made in the image of the triune

God, we are linked and united in a very unique way and frankly, in an offensive way to the individualist world in which we currently live.

Just as God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and they contain one another and they represent one another, humanity was made in such a fashion that we represent in insignificant ways and dwell one another as well.

And so the story of the fall is a story about how Adam and Eve began with total moral innocence, an inclination to the right, an understanding of God, clear personal interaction with their creator before the fall, where he lays before them his expectations for them, his laws, his requirements for them to be obedient sons and daughters.

And what mankind did is willfully and culpably rebel against a person in every single plight that we have springs from that fall.

And the fruit of that fall is something called original sin. We were in Adam represented by him and we fell in in with him so that we entered the world ourselves in a state of moral rebellion against our creator.

And here's the thing, as foreign as this is, we can impress upon whoever we're speaking with, in fact, how this is in fact implicit in so many relationships that we have.

You know that you're represented by your family. You have a certain shame and guilt for certain things that they do and they'll be more ashamed of what you do than what the neighbors did.

This is true of tribes and nations. You will go to war at the behest of a figurehead who represents the whole.

It's true of social groups. We're made this way. And frankly, even your view of right and wrong is going to be colored by the groups in which you live.

This is virtually a truism today. That sort of relativism exists.

And you can even observe it on this level that most of us will probably experience greater pain and suffering at the loss of a loved one than if we lost an arm or a leg.

Losing a physical appendage of our own body. We're knit together. But the fruit of what

Adam did was this. Man started to think about himself in three ways.

He started to think, first of all, maybe I can be my own guide, shirking the guidance of God, or frankly, even judging between his guidance and that of Satan.

That makes me autonomous, self -guided, at least in my own conception.

I am going to choose and be the ultimate arbiter of true and false between God and Satan.

That is our concept of human autonomy. By the same right, man started to think maybe reality is just here.

It just is. This is a staple belief to secular man.

It just is. And what that means is that perhaps there's no intentionality behind the very existence of reality as we know it.

So we call that a concept of brute factness or pure chance, things just are.

And you'd say the third member of this holy trinity, unholy trinity of human autonomy and pure chance is the idea of abstract reason.

And this is a little bit more challenging, I think, for people, but it's just the idea that maybe mathematical laws are true and self -evident in themselves, and they don't need anyone to testify to their truth beyond the obviousness of themselves.

They're abstract truths. The principles of logic are that way.

Maybe even certain categories are that way. Humanity or love or things like that, they just have kind of a impersonal, timeless definition.

And man and philosophers, particularly in the Western tradition, that's what they're working with.

Those things in different measures and degrees. Go ahead, Jeremiah. So we've talked about that word context a lot.

And so what we see in Genesis 1 and 2 is we see a context in which man has a perfect relationship with God.

And he sees the world as it truly is, and there's no reason to question anything.

And then when Satan comes into the picture, this other mind changes the context with his doubt, doubting

God's revelation. And I think we see recapitulations of the fall in these autonomous thoughts of just changing the original context.

And that has consequences, right? Because the chief end of man is ultimately to glorify

God and enjoy him forever. And so when you take God out of the equation, well,

I mean, it kind of devolves back into this world of unknown.

Now, I talk with those people that wanna say, well, mathematics, laws of logic are just so self -evident.

Well, they don't tell you anything, right? You're having to make a bunch of bald assertions.

And was it a Vantel that said brute facts or mute facts? What is the context that gives the truth bearing value of anything?

Yes, things are very intuitive and they're screaming at you, but it's because you're made in God's image and created a certain way to be able to observe

God's created world. So anyway, you just, you get me going a little bit there.

No, no, I appreciate that very much. And when people say these things, I mean, the laws of mathematics or geometric truths just are, it's like, no, there are other geometries than Euclidean geometry, which you might say is the more intuitive and hence classical objects as we think of them would work that way.

When you start talking about quantum mechanics and the subatomic world and how things work, all those intuitions are challenged in various ways.

And so again, this is the self -assuredness though of autonomous reasoning that what strikes me as reasonable,

I'm equipped to myself to make a good judgment about these things without prior direction and guidance from God.

And here's the thing, the unbeliever actually is miserably unsuccessful at their attempts at being autonomous, only relying on what they can know based on pure human judgment, because the fact is they can't even know that their mind makes contact with reality.

And this is why the Bible asserts again and again, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. And this is really the condition of the unbeliever.

And this is deeply subversive. An unbeliever won't appreciate hearing this, even believers actually won't appreciate hearing this if they haven't had the gospel preached to them rather boldly.

But we are in a constant ferocious rebellion against the

God who made us. And we can't stop knowing him. And the instant of knowing him, suppressing the knowledge of God and unrighteousness, that's the picture of what we're doing.

We talk about a fool who says in his heart, there is no God, betraying an awareness of him and then declaring there is not him.

And the way I would, for analogy, for an analogy, I would describe it like this. It's like a person constantly grabbing new objects to snuff out the sunlight, which is obviously a hopeless endeavor with a hand held above the eyes.

Every time they pick up a new object, they need the sunlight to grab it. And they're picking up bigger ones, different shapes of ones, and they're always suppressing the truth and unrighteousness.

But even when they do that, the methods that they're using and the most basic tool that they're using to go and find more objects to place in front of him is actually the

God in whose light he see light. That's what Psalm 33, nine says. He is a light that cannot be extinguished.

It's actually one of the beautiful things in John 1, one to four, when describing the son of God and his work and creation.

It says in the beginning was the word, word was with God, the word was God, that's Christ. All things came into being through him.

And it says this, in him was life and life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overpower it.

Hmm. Human sin and rebellion is not sufficiently power. It's literally, it's just a contradiction to attempt to use

God's light to suppress it. And that is the insanity in which we are engaged when we reason autonomously, we treat things as if they just were, and we treat, you know, knowledge as if it could be just abstract, timeless, impersonal truths.

And I wanna emphasize one thing. It's really important to understand that we are in a condition as sinners that we cannot even begin by our own efforts and our own labors to be in moral reconciliation to God.

That is to say, and this is fairly obvious when you have a presuppositional standpoint. For presuppositionalists, the only foundation on which you can stand to begin to have right and holy and loving fellowship and hence with God and hence knowledge that flows from that is on the foundation of God as our ultimate standard.

An unbeliever who's starting with himself, his self -interest, his judgment of things can never arrive on that foundation of God from himself.

He's standing in midair falling constantly. And if I could admit, yes. I think therefore

I am. Why can I not start there? Isn't that all of secular philosophy kind of hangs on the cogito?

Well, I mean, it didn't take, what, four decades for people to call into question the cogito.

Again, you're presupposing an I that is a consistent self -sustained

I -ness as opposed to, as Hume said, how do you know you're not just blips of consciousness that you've strung together, you've deceived yourself into believing is, or I hate to say it, but all the wild theories that we're in the matrix and your past and the past of your

I is itself an illusion and all sorts of things presently with thoughts about artificial intelligence.

I mean, all of these things call into question the sufficiency of your self -awareness as a place from which to begin.

And so it's interesting that the commandment in Exodus 20, verse one, it says, you shall have no other gods before me.

And I would submit that what it's tacitly claiming is you don't have the option to not have me as a

God at all. But what you shouldn't do and what will be terribly destructive is if you pick up any objects and try to place them between me and my light.

That's what you're not to do, Israel. And you should see the futility of it because I am your context and because I am the one sustaining you and because I am the one in whose light all reasoning takes place.

This is, it's not only evil, but it's futile to try to snuff out my light.

You're never, it doesn't say to not have a God besides me. You will have me as your God, your judge, your sustainer, your creator.

That just is. And there's a futility in attempting not to. At this point though,

I wanna just mention something. Given our conditions, we A, we're moral rebels against God.

We cannot stop being moral rebels against God. The only thing we can do is multiply it, increase in it.

The only thing we can do is be eternal sinners. That's it. In light of the object against whom we've sinned, the very nature of the self -multiplying sin that we are, we deserve eternal death.

That's the situation we're in. And we have to be unashamed to say that to the unbeliever, that the gravity of the situation, if we are literally in a divine context with the

God who meets us everywhere, the gravity of the situation is an infinite punishment met out by that person.

This, of course, is where, yeah. Go ahead. Well, I mean, scripture's clear about that, right? That if we sin, because that's one of the,

I've had conversations with a Jewish person and they are trying to say life for life.

So temporal sin on earth here and now does not justify eternal death.

And simply pointing out, who's the one against whom you've sinned against? Well, that being is eternal.

Therefore, the consequences are also eternal. So it's devastating. And God's word is very clear on that.

And he's also foundational. And the consequences of going to war with your own foundation is that there is no place to stand.

This man is thinking of like you've taken one life and it's done, now pay the penalty.

You're involved in a crime that can't stop happening. That's part of the problem here.

And so this is where the unbeliever and the unbelieving worldview, it's gonna part ways with us a turn.

First off, the pantheist, our moral rebellion isn't against a distinct self -contained personal, absolutely holy

God. He is involved. The only sort of divine being that there is is involved in our moral rebellion, whatever that is, untrueness to ourselves,

I guess. But there isn't a contrast who is himself holy, never tainted even with our illusion.

And so we don't have this problem. You could say our problem for the pantheist is metaphysical. The one divine reality is himself.

He's plagued by the problem of multiple split personalities. And maybe he needs a therapist.

He both is the problem and is the therapist. And there's this sort of unraveling of yourself metaphysically so that you're not in a knot anymore.

That's the picture that you're dealing with. And what that is though is, it's hard to say what the standard of straightness is if ultimate reality is itself tied in a knot.

And that's where I'm gonna say to the pantheist, you don't know anything if your ultimate reality is not a perfect self -comprehending holy

God. Now with pantheism, now rebuke me if I'm wrong here, but all is one, pantheism.

So there's no meaningful, all is God, including ourself, right?

That's right. And this thing over here. And so maybe you can speak just a moment because I think this will kind of help give a good context of, there's this pervading problem in philosophy has been for forever with the pre -Socratics.

I'd love for you to speak to this a little bit here. But every worldview has to give an account to the problem of the one and the many.

In pantheism, they have a radical one, but they're not giving an account for the diversity that we clearly see in this world.

And it's pretty easy to show the pantheist that not all is God. Not all is the same, right?

Yeah, yeah. Or if all were God, if you tried to reason like that, then you would have no ultimate standard distinct from error, distinct from unholiness, sin, evil, wickedness.

All of that is part of himself, if it is at all. And even if they try to say it's illusory, which is kind of the direction that the pantheist...

Then the illusion is being emanated from the one, it's being entertained by those who have the illusion of individual selfhood.

And once you make God himself the source of error and illusion, where do you look for certainty?

Yeah, so go ahead. The laws of logic are all is one, right? There's really no law of contradiction, right?

Error is really truth in this model, because all is one. You see, this is actually where they're gonna apply an abstract sort of logic and try to take it to its limit.

It's in fact, because there can be no real contradictions that all must be one and all must be metaphysically and utterly one.

Of course, hence multiplicity is an illusion. We're actually, we're not far from Christian science here.

And of course, they're gonna stop short of certain of these, but surely your pain and suffering and evil are not real.

And you've got to wrap your head around that. And then you're like, yeah, but the illusion strikes as really problematically real.

And however you're using that word real, I'm in a problematic place if ultimate reality can be subject to or be emanating an illusion.

That calls into question is just as bad as sitting in the void in the utter unknown.

Who knows what illusion will emanate from the divine being next? How do I know even my talk about the divine being is not itself?

Some of that illusory dream business and talk. And we're gonna say that fundamentally places you in a place where you cannot justify anything you claim to know.

You're in a different position than the Christian, but I wanna get to the Muslim in particular.

Islam has no doctrine of original sin, none at all. You and I are not in the condition we are in because we in our covenantal head

Adam were first made perfect, made innocent, made without any inclination to evil or error.

And then ourselves as an act of human free will chose to rebel against God.

We're not in that position for that reason. It's actually more true to say a Pelagian picture.

We come into the world and we all sin our own sins. Now, here's the problem when you think about this.

You and I enter the world with a myriad of evils occurring against us. Some of us are aborted in the womb.

Some of us are abused by our parents. We're all abused by a world who draws us into sin, encourages our suppression of the knowledge of God in unrighteousness.

This is a real problem for Islam. Why are we in this position that we're in?

Why do we enter the world subject to pain, suffering, and death?

And there is no Islamic answer. The answer is because other individuals made terrible decisions, sinful and wicked decisions, leaving whatever original position of innocence they may have been in and then go about sinning against others.

Or they might even admit that we entered the world with a proclivity to sin and where that came from is just part of our finitude and creatureliness.

This utterly alters the situation. It makes it so that the creator himself,

Allah, is part of the problem. He is really more like pure indiscernible chance and why he made us in this original condition apart from a human act of moral rebellion, it takes our plight outside of the realm of ethics and it places it in the realm of metaphysics.

And if God makes people in a condition with a proclivity to sin or being sinned against constantly from infancy to adulthood, then we actually have

God himself being part of the problem. And when we are in that place where God himself is involved in producing the condition of chaos that we're in, we're already at a point of chipping away from any sense of himself as an absolute holy standard who himself is perfectly righteous.

Because once you go into the realm of saying that God's sovereignty and his greatness and his wonder is such that he can just do whatever he wants, you're actually turning

God into the void, a context that is unknowable, uncertain, unsure and undermining of every knowledge claim that we might seek to have.

Because how do we know that in any act of knowing or understanding of things, this isn't another instance where God says, look,

I'm Allah and I don't have any problem with you having certain illusions.

And the fact that I made you in such a way that you are inherently naturally prone to illusion and error, guess what

I've got? I can do that. Here in a little bit, I want you to give me the cue when you wanna do this, but Allah is a

Unitarian version of God and fails to account for many things in this world.

And in your book, you had a lot of awesome illustrations. So I just wanna kind of wet our audience appetite a little bit because I wanna go back when you're ready to, to some of those logical problems of a

Unitarian God like Allah, which you've already been speaking to a little bit. And ultimately, it's going to be morally bankrupt.

Right, well, and see, here's the thing. One of the problems that we're driving home here right now is that the moral problem that we have with the

Unitarian God is utterly different than the moral problem that we have with the

Trinitarian God. Because the Unitarian God, if he makes man in his image, will never make man in covenantal relations such that man could have culpably fallen into sin and incurred the terrible situation that he's in.

You're in a position where every individual has got to do that for themselves because insofar as God himself is the model of personhood, individual persons are each in their own saga.

And there's no explanation, no coherent explanation for why an individual person enters reality in infancy, utterly suffering, utterly being inculcated with false beliefs and pain and suffering and harm, you name it, this is step one toward that end.

And so we'll get straight to the Trinity after one more intervening consideration. So our context, our ultimate context is the

Trinitarian God. Our subordinate context is that we're in Adam, we're in moral rebellion as a people, as a people made in God's image, we fell together in our covenantal head as one body would fall if the head of the body made self -harming decisions and rebellious decisions against an infinite creator.

But this is where we talk about the Christian solution. Everybody, every worldview has a problem.

Even the worldviews that claim not to have a problem, they're gonna talk about the illusion of a problem, which is always just as bad.

So when we talked about the problem, we're in moral rebellion against God. I said that only Christianity has that personalistic problem at the heart of things.

Every other worldview, there isn't an interpersonal problem that fundamentally afflicts us.

There's a metaphysical problem that reality itself is fraught with a bit of evil and a bit of error, whether you call that reality

Allah or by any pantheistic name. Well, what is the solution? It should be obvious our solution has to be radically different than the unbelievers.

For us, we are fallen in Adam and the moral gravity of our plight is directly related to this personal context we're in.

And so is the solution. The Christian gospel begins with the concept that God required of man, perfect obedience.

In fact, he required of man, a certain type of man. He required of man, a certain type of person who would obey his father flawlessly.

And after the fall, necessarily our punishment is a condition of a type of person, a fallen man under God's wrath, bearing that wrath, an infinite wrath, you could say, eternally.

Therefore, our solution is a person. It can only be a person. Hebrews 10 says this so beautifully, commenting on and quoting

Psalm 40. Hebrews 10, five to nine says this.

Therefore, when he comes into the world, he says, sacrifice an offering you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.

In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin, you have taken no pleasure.

Then I said, behold, I have come. In the scroll of the book, it is written to do your will,

O God. God requires a person as our solution who perfectly obeys

God where Adam did not. And even more, bears the just plight of Adam's sin, himself being a sacrifice obedient unto death, bearing the wrath of God in our place.

And of course, the gospel is that Christ is our righteousness. We began with a covenantal view of man where the many could fall in the one.

And we continue with a covenantal view of man made in God's image where a person can put us right with God matching the person that God requires of us, which is a person of absolute obedience and a person bearing our just punishment.

And so now we'd say redemption is that believers are in Christ. Our context is always

God as creator. It's secondarily Adam as a sinner. But the wonderful thing is that redemption means being placed into the body of Christ.

And we have a community as part of our solution. We're one body together.

But at the head of that is Christ himself who redeems us. And I would note this as well.

And I think this is very important. It's actually important that how we got in Christ is itself the work of a person.

If we were in Christ by our own autonomous will, maybe just doing the math or a

Pascalian wager or something and just simply thinking, hey, good bet would be to jump into this place.

I mean, that isn't saving faith. Just betting on getting baptized. Do I have to give up my libertarian free will?

Is that what you're telling me? Well, that's right. You'll have to embrace a

Trinitarian concept of free will where three persons are all genuine persons and bound together by one divine will.

And they're not diminished in their personhood in the least for that. So I would actually emphasize that it's a Trinitarian vision not just the

Calvinistic one. To say that two persons, even where one is prior to the other, willing the same thing does not diminish the reality of the second person's will and personhood.

So that said, I mean, the fact is, is that the Holy Spirit is the one willing in us and willing with us, willing to work and to act to God's good pleasure and to embrace

Christ as our savior. And so for us, we have this totally personalistic picture of, first of all, our context as creators, our context as creatures.

Then we have a personalist picture of our plight and our problem. A moral rebellion is the beginning of all suffering, error, and illusion.

And we have a totally personal solution that matches the personal creator.

He wants man to be an obedient son after his image.

And so this is the Christian picture for how we end up back in a place with true beliefs, justified knowledge, because we're justified in Christ.

And again, this is where there's a radical departure for every single unbelieving worldview without exception.

For the unbelieving mystic and pantheist, we've always been in God. We've always been in God and there is no antithesis between being in Adam and in Christ.

At most, they're kind of an evolution that is happening to God himself in his individual expressions and people.

But I would just emphasize, especially with Islam, because this is touted as a competitor.

You know, Islam really makes God a bully. He was the problem and the solution.

He's like the mafia. You know, he made us in this situation in plight where we can just be sinned against by other autonomous individuals prior to any incurrence of guilt of our own.

And that's kind of a, it's a deeply scary God when we're just made in that condition.

And we didn't incur it for ourselves ethically. The solution - I got a question real quick before you get into the solution.

So I don't know if you wanna speak to this any, but Allah can deceive at will. And I feel like if God can deceive in that way, then that erodes any meaningful foundation for knowledge itself.

Why would we not just think, well, maybe Allah is deceiving me? Right, that's a great point.

And I would just emphasize because dilettantes in theology and comparative religion will point out any number of cases.

I mean, obviously, particularly the one where there's the court of spirits before the Lord and God sends one to deceive, one to be a deceiving spirit.

And, you know, that's radically different. That's God dealing with people who already are sinners, who deserve nothing but the company of other sinners and more powerful sinners than themselves in the cauldron of confusion and sin that they're in.

It's entirely different. To say someone enters the world not covenantally represented by another, such that they fell in and with that other by a culpable decision of the human will.

And there they found themselves deceived and they found themselves harmed and sinned against and all of these things.

It's radically different. And that's what I mean when I say Allah is the problem and he's the solution.

And the way it goes like is this, you came into being by my arbitrary will subject to suffering and maybe even sin inclined.

Don't ask questions. Transcend your plight by doing whatever I ask and relying on my mercy to overlook failures because I can just do that sometimes.

I can just occasionally overlook sin. No justice. This is no justice.

It is the epitome of the rationalist, irrationalist dialectic that the unbeliever finds himself in.

There's a little bit of reason in reality. Certain things are self evident that like you should probably do

Allah's will. By the way, there's a big asterisk of uncertainty in reality that who knows?

Who knows what tomorrow might bring? And this is exactly the mindset of fallen man. Allah is overtly and utterly and obviously the projection of fallen man.

And he's just bigger and stronger than the rest of us in the theology that they have. And it's one of the reasons why the religion spreads in large part by violence, just being bigger and stronger as an expression of the arbitrary will of the

God whom they claim to serve. And let me put it this way. If the formula for human salvation is a significant degree of human obedience to Allah, do your prayers, things like that, and a significant amount of human disobedience is just forgiven by fiat and by haphazard, that says something about the

God himself. He must himself be somewhat rational, somewhat moral, and somewhat irrational, somewhat totally arbitrary.

If that is your starting point, you are not talking about an absolute personalist context of reality.

First of all, that being isn't even simple such that he is all of his attributes and all of his attributes are one and coterminous.

Contrary to that, this God is sometimes rational, sometimes a little bit irrational.

He is nothing at all but the psychological problems that belong to mankind down here.

And then what is rationale? It's not him. It's some abstract form of what would be a moral or reasonable way to act.

And then what are his decisions? Well, they're expressions of chance. And God himself simply becomes a sort of a two -faced being who is exactly kind of the two faces that man finds in impersonal reality.

And he's not absolute. He's not a perfect standard at that point. And it would call into question all of our knowledge and understanding.

If he himself can be occasionally arbitrary and be occasionally self -consistent.

And so this is where we really wanna emphasize, we're talking about two radically different religions.

It does make a huge difference. It's not just a matter of like, there are two claims to absolute authority by different names.

And that's the only thing that differentiates them. No, what they're allegedly saying totally undermines their claim to being anything like an absolute authority.

And if Allah were God, you couldn't know anything. And it is emphasized utterly in their doctrine of assurance of salvation.

No one can be sure that they're saying. This is foundational to Islam. It would undermine the arbitrariness of the will of God and the fact that he is nothing like the self -sufficient divine being that we are actually related to as creatures and who is the foundation for all human knowledge.

And I remember working in restaurants and talking to Ayhan, the cook.

And I said, Ayhan, how do you know that you're going to heaven? He's just like, I would never claim to know that.

No Muslim would ever claim to know that. And that is a telling admission. If you don't actually know that you're saved or that you're heaven bound, it really does affect and taint your knowledge of everything else.

You don't know that the most important fact about every fact, which is whether God's pleased with your interpretation of that fact, your use of that fact, your existence in reality.

That's because Allah is the void. He is that, and you've slapped a name on it, but in every way it betrays itself as empty.

The unknown God. The unknown God, that's absolutely right. Act 17, I just keep thinking of that over and over again.

That's right. So, at the end of the day, you could say, Islam is always struggling between two things.

Is the moral part of God an expression of his pure and arbitrary will? He's more a pure and arbitrary will, so he chose to erect certain standards for a time.

Then you'd be like, well, is he gonna change them? Is he going to say, nah, I don't care about that anymore.

Is he, that's the suspense that you're in. Is that, are the things being demanded of you by that God expressive of who he really is or just kind of a fiat decision?

And obviously if you lean more to the one way that it's kind of more an expression of the arbitrary, obviously that has its problems and they're radical.

The other way that people will sometimes try to think of Allah is that what seems arbitrary to us really isn't arbitrary to him.

So in that case, this seeming arbitrariness at different points, there's a deep rationality to it.

But then again, there's a deep problem there. What you're saying is these things like God just overlooking sin without a matching, atoning savior to it, maybe it's rational for God to just be a little bit arbitrarily forgetful from time to time.

It's rational to be forgetful. It's rational to, these are the sorts of contradictions and conundrums you end up with in Islam because you don't really have the personalist solution to the human plight.

And so now we can really talk about the mature Christian doctrine of God, which is the fruit of this. And I actually like what we did today,

Jeremiah. A lot of guys who wanna talk to me, you wanna jump straight into talk about the Trinity.

Maybe I'll just start with the doctrine of the Trinity, lay it out to the unbeliever as like, you need this as like the key to your world view or something.

I actually like what we did today. What the unbeliever really needs to know is they're a creature in the context of the living

God. They are a sinner in Adam and in their multiplication of his sin so willingly and gleefully and gladly.

And they are only redeemed in Jesus Christ. And it is the fruit.

It is the fruit of redemption in Christ that we have a doctrine of God that is not mimicable.

We have a doctrine of God that is such clear and simple ID right on the front of it. We can spot any false religion, any cult, any aberrant belief system, because this doctrine of God, it's the knowledge of the holy, to use

A .W. Tozer's book title. It is the knowledge of the holy. It is the most defined piece of knowledge we have.

It is the most robust idea the mind is able to ever think.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I think, said that the Trinity is the idea of ideas. And it's incredible and it's beautiful because everything that we just said really can be encapsulated in this.

The fruit of redemption in Christ is knowing God by a new and unmistakable name.

And it's not just a name like Pete or Todd or Brad that we're slapping on a divine being whom we're claiming is the ultimate authority instead of Allah or whomever else.

Biblical names, as anyone knows who reads the Bible, all have inherent meaning. And this new name gives us the deepest insight into God.

Of course, Matthew ends in chapter 28, verse 19 with this baptismal formula that we're to be baptized in the name of the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That name is the fullest exposition of the divine name in the

Old Testament, Yahweh Elohim, the I am, the self -existent one.

We have the deepest imaginable insight into God's self -existence.

So Calvin rightly said this, that when we don't know God as a Trinity, the name of God just flutters about in our brain.

That is Islam. That's Islam to the core. It is an arbitrary assignment of a name to pure arbitrariness.

But for the Trinitarian, we have a very different conception of things because the natural question when we say that God is the ultimate context, any child can ask this question.

If we say God is the ultimate context that contains everything, the natural question is, well, what contains

God? It's the same as if we say God is the beginning or the foundation of knowledge. It's like, well, what's underneath him?

It's a fairly standard question. And our answer as Trinitarians, and it's beautiful, is that first of all, the

Trinity is not nowhere. We'd wanna be very clear about that. In fact, you can't think of anything that is nowhere.

You can't. If it's not in physical time space or something like that, it's in conceptual space.

It's somewhere. If it's a word, it's in a series of relations to other words and definitions, a language.

Every word is in a language. No word would have meaning if it weren't in a language. Everything you can think is somewhere.

And my claim is you can't think of God who is nowhere. That's what Allah is. There is nowhere that he is.

It's pure darkness on the edges of his being and pervading his being. We would say nowhere has no qualities, attributes, actions, nor can it contain anything that does.

This is all at the heart of what it means to just know or to conceptualize anything.

The answer for us is that God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he is in himself.

And I just wanna lay this out with a few scriptures first as we advance toward this mature doctrine of the

Trinity. But I mean, Jesus said as much, he said this, do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?

The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own initiative, but the Father abiding in me does his works.

Believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Here's the thing, if all that we were saying is that Jesus, the

Son of God is in the Father and the Father is in the Son, we would really kind of be left with the concept that they are just one self -identical person, kind of like George Washington is in the presidency and the presidency is in George Washington and president and George Washington are the same guy at least for his term.

That's what we would think. But the key is this, the Father and the Son are also related to one another.

And it's very clear all throughout scripture, even here, the fact that Jesus can say, I'm not doing this on my own initiative.

There's another person to whom I am related. I share one will with him.

And so you'd have to say, where are the Father and the Son? And the answer for us is they are absolutely in the

Holy Spirit. The third person of the Trinity. And this does lie on the surface of various passages of the

Bible. You take Hebrews 9, 14, we're talking about this awesome transaction where Jesus is satisfying the justice of the

Father. And it says, how much more will the blood of Christ who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living

God. And this is so grand and beautiful. The only context that can contain the

Father in his infinitude and eternality as the one exacting an infinite righteousness of obedience and sacrifice from his

Son is the only context that can contain the wrath of God that he justly has for sinners, which the

Bible elsewhere tell you is, well, if it's gonna appear in time, it's gonna have to be an eternal duration of time.

The only context where these two can really meet to have this grand transaction, it transcends

Golgotha and the hill. It's in the ultimate context of God, the Holy Spirit. And the

Spirit is being represented as the true temple here in Hebrews. He's the real pillar of cloud, outside the temple, a pillar cloud ascends and covers the whole.

And the Spirit of God is that real context, that context in which two persons of the

Godhead meet. Mere space -time cannot contain the being of the

Father born by the Son's judgment or the infinite righteousness of Christ received by the

Father's satisfaction, only the Spirit can. And the answer therefore is that for the

Trinity, we have the self -contained God. And He's not contained by something impersonal.

It means that all of reality, this context that surrounds us is bright, in Him is light, and there is no darkness at all, as 1

John 1 says. And it is on the foundation of this pure, personal comprehension, understanding, willing, being, and power, that we take our stand as Christians and we can't get there by any means, but by God, the

Holy Spirit, regenerating us and uniting us to Christ as our Savior. And we can do this with all three persons, of course, the

Son and the Spirit, but they're obviously related. Where are they? Well, they're related in the

Father. And it's appropriately said therefore in Psalm 33, 6, by the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth, all their hosts.

God is appropriately represented by the

Trinitarian analogy of an individual with intellect and will, and word, of course, being the rational self -expression and a comprehensive self -expression, and of course, breath, and actually articulating expressive of this infinite divine will.

Both are sent from the Father, but of course we'd say the same thing about the Father -Spirit relation. So that is the grand piece of knowledge that we have.

And we should stop right here before we jump into the three and only three, and just note, there is no competitor to this

God. There is no portrait of God anywhere to be found that expresses

God's self -containment in such a grand, personal way, giving us an utterly personal worldview.

There's no competitor for this God who is light and in whom there is no darkness at all.

And we see Him as clearly as can be in redemption, and having this knowledge and this faith and trust in Him is the fruit of redemption.

So any questions or thoughts about that before we jump into the three minutes, yeah. So I've done a number of debates at this point, and so a couple of years ago,

I debated a Mormon. And so obviously the huge, how everything comes down to is the distinction of how we understand who

God is, or in their case, an infinite pantheon of gods. And so I would keep pressing him on, well, how far does that go back?

Does it go back infinitum? Is that actually a rational stance to take? And his answer is no.

And so he took a minority position saying there is a fundamental ultimate creator that kickstarts the whole thing to rationally ground where we're at now.

And so it's just interesting. Yeah, so I thought. He made something up, well done. That is not

Mormon, sorry. Yeah, no, no, I'm with you. So you found our God at the end of this long, why don't we worship

Him? Yeah, I told him, I'm curious about that God. Yeah. Because that's what we're getting at, is we want the absolute self -contained ground of all being.

Now, something that I loved in your book, and rebuke me if I'm wrong. Jeremiah, can I just interject really, really quick?

We'll go to the book in a second. Jeremiah, you gotta drive home with this guy.

If there is an absolute personal creator God at the end of it, and your whole religion doesn't even acknowledge

Him whatsoever, how are you not in the position of Romans 1, where it says, since the creation of the world,

His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen. We're talking about the big God here, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse.

For even though they knew God, you just betrayed it despite your own theology, Mormon. For even though they knew

God, they did not honor Him as God or give Him thanks. My goodness, friend, have you ever given thanks to this

God for sustaining your entire being? Why do you have some God before Him who you call

Elohim from planet Kolob and His son? Why do you put another God in front of Him and deprive the one who's really responsible for everything?

In Him, you live and move and have your being. Why do you deprive Him of worship and praise? Is there not a being in all of reality who is more worthy of worship and praise?

Isn't any good thing that the subordinate deity that you're talking about in your theology who's done for you actually ultimately an expression of the prior goodness and wisdom and providence of that deity?

And then of course, we'd hit Him with all the same questions about this one God who started everything. Where is He? Is He nowhere?

Because then He's nothing. So I'm gonna tell you something else that's gonna get you going again is ask

Him about the logical problem of how do you have two distinct deities, right?

How do you have two omnipotence, right? If you have God who is perfect, holy, righteous, and good, how do you have a departure of another being that's somehow distinct?

And He quickly told me, He goes, we don't believe in maximal deities. And so they're not omnipotent.

And so it's just going back to the point that you're making that they have a little trail going back to who we should be trying to ask questions about to begin with.

But yeah, they back off pretty quick about lowercase d deities. That's right, that's right.

Well, yeah, so let's, I mean, yeah, you were gonna - I appreciate that fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So as you were, I don't wanna derail you in any way. No, no, no, that's all I wanted to say. I just wanted to touch on that point.

I liked the encouragement of we need to drive that point home, especially asking about where is that God, right?

Tell us, because I think what you're getting at is give us the revelation, because you gotta think Mormons, they're trying to hijack our scriptures, right?

That's right. Well, and you know, I didn't even talk about Islam in that light as well, because that also is fundamentally problematic.

And even the contemplation of scriptures that got corrupted, it just adds again to the arbitrary God. Why did you let your word get corrupted?

What else did you let get corrupted? You know, where is your way? This is the insanity of Islam, and it is insane.

It is nothing but superficial comparisons that you can make between Christianity as a worldview in Islam.

It is the game of the dilettante in religion and theology. It is the person who really doesn't want to contemplate these big ideas, when they simply bring up Islam with an inch deep knowledge of it as an apparent competitor, because they can think of another name of an alleged deity.

We're talking about something radically different. And God has given us in our baptismal formula and in the name that we bear, this basic sort of fingerprint that has, it's not just assertions, it's an insight into why we would credit this

God for being an absolute authority. There's no insight in Islam for why you would credit this being with being an absolute authority.

Quite to the contrary, there are numerous features of the belief system that undermine such a claim.

But go ahead and continue, we'll go on. Something I love about your book is you got a lot of fancy illustrations.

And that was one of the first things that I found. I was like, you know what? I gotta figure these bad boys out. And so I read your book twice, and I read chapter nine a dozen times, because that's where to me it all came down to, rebuke me if I'm saying this wrong.

But when you talk about an interpretation and refinement of the theological apologetic of Cornelius Van Til, it seems like you were taking

Van Til's thought one step further in this way. Because when

I debated the Mormon, I had Van Til in the back of my mind. And when I'm asked the question, why is

God one in three? Van Til rightly pointed out, Christians rightly point out, well, that's the God who has revealed

Himself to be. And so we live in the scriptures. We go back to the scriptures, say, it's right here.

This is the new name, right, of Yahweh, but He is Father, Son, and Spirit. And so I said that, but your book, tell me if you can say it differently, almost says the

God who revealed Himself is necessarily one in three. And so chapter nine really gets into the philosophical categories of why we can confidently say

God is who He is necessarily, and He has revealed Himself in a very particular way.

And you gave us some really awesome illustrations that I would like to talk about while I have you on here, is that okay?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm gonna cheat though, because this one is not your illustration.

I looked at all your book today, because I wanna talk about the problems of a Unitarian God, a bininity, a two -person single

God. And then I want us to talk, obviously we're gonna talk about the Trinity and the beautiful harmony and the perfection that we see there, loving eternal relationship.

And then the problems of a quadrinity plus, because in my debate, that was leveled at me as Jeremiah, you're making a big stink out of the problem of the one and the many and the

Trinity is the only thing that can settle it. Well, I can just come up with other conceptions of God with multiple persons, not just three, either two, four plus, and he said 100.

And so this is why chapter nine in your book was my favorite, because this is what you deal with. And so I wanna talk a little, we've already been talking about the problems of a

Unitarian God with Islam and Allah, right? But this is how I've explained it to people.

Because I think I'm a little bit behind you in understanding these things. And so that's why you're on, to help me out.

So I have a few categories listed here that I think Unitarianism fails to account for, now it tries to.

But when we look in our context in this universe, right? We experience so many things like person to person relationships, right?

We have a temporal relationship. And so it goes on and on.

We have a temporal knowledge, a finite knowledge of things that we truly know. But we live in a context of this impersonal universe.

And so that's when we get into the, of how do we know what we know, epistemology, and what's the justification for human intelligibility?

Well, we know, biblically, starting with the biblical worldview, that this world tells us many features about the creator, right?

We got Psalm 19, one. Well, God's creation is his handiwork, and it glorifies him and points us back to him.

Romans one, like you quoted earlier, points us back to God. And so we see many things in this world that tell us very specific things about the creator who made everything, right?

And so in order to ground knowledge, you have to solve the problem of induction.

And so how I've kind of said it is, we can only have probabilistic knowledge. We can never be truly certain because we do not have an omniscient mind.

And so what I'm getting at is God must be eternal. How do we know that? Well, this temporal world presupposes that.

We have a finite knowledge, but that presupposes an eternal, absolute, omniscient mind.

And we have person -to -person relationships in this impersonal void. Therefore, God, in some way, has to rise above all the problems that we have and be an absolute person in order to ground knowledge.

Okay? And so with Unitarianism, I love the question that you've been posing. Where is he?

Right? So I couldn't do it. I couldn't put this Unitarian deity above creative reality because it just can't work in any way.

Like you rightly said, this is the imagination of man, conceiving of man just on a bigger plane, right?

Because this deity is a radical, concrete one. And so immediately fails for the multiplicity and diversity in this created world, right?

And so I just put Xs on all the big categories as far as I'm concerned, because look at the context in which this

Unitarian deity exists. Who knows? It's a void of nothingness, and he couldn't even know, right?

You like my little question marks going on there? What do you think so far? That's great. Yeah, no, I think that's right.

I mean, the problem is really, perhaps if I were to represent this,

I would actually, I'd have the Unitarian deity inside of creative reality with the creature.

There you go. Because here's why. He's in the realm of the unknown. When we have a conception of God who is nowhere, who has no relations, who has no others, we can't conceptualize any qualities about that God except as he is the something that made this universe.

He's the question mark beyond this universe. The concept of Unitarian deity, does he have self -knowledge?

What is the content and nature of that knowledge? Does he have, you might say, a word?

Does God know himself using impersonal categories like we do when we call something mammal and we call something animal?

Is there this universe of ideas that Plato went into discussing in great depths that they just are, and any conscious being kind of has to rely on them and appeal to them?

You see, the Trinitarian answer is that God has an eternal word who is so sufficient to define and comprehend him, it can't be an abstract, impersonal thing.

His word is his son. His word is the second person of the Trinity. He has a language that comprehends himself.

That's what we're talking about. This isn't just mumbo -jumbo in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. This is the deepest insight that one can have into God.

And it gives us the ability to say that we know anything about him, albeit, we know it analogically, there's nothing in this world that is exactly like God.

And so we say we know him truly, but not exhaustively. The unbeliever and the Unitarian, they know something exhaustive about their

God, that he's Unitarian in one strict sense and could never be three. Human reason is that powerful to tell us what

God can and cannot be. And on the other hand, they know at the same time, nothing about what that unit actually has inside of it and hence it reduces to just pure chance.

Now tell me, okay, so I've also explained it this way. To be personal presupposes another person.

It doesn't make sense to say I'm a radical one person and it's in a context where there's no other persons to have a meaningful interaction.

So to be personal presupposes at least, so this is where I wanna kind of dispel

Unitarianism, is it doesn't make any meaningful sense to say that a

Unitarian God is personal at all. Well, what context? Because it's not in a personal context.

To be personal presupposes another person, right? And that corresponds with our experience, right?

You and I are two persons in a particular context having a meaningful back and forth relationship.

And so God has to be able to account for that, rise above, not be within or descend beneath.

So I'm saying Unitarianism fails to even be personal. And my inner

Johnny Max a long time ago talked about how love presupposes multiple persons.

We're gonna see the beautiful harmony of that is three, but one fails. That's right, and to be clear, when we say that it corresponds with our experience, we wanna be clear that it corresponds with our experience as Christians interpreting the reality of the world as Christians.

Because we know this because we are covenantally represented by a person who was created in relationship to a divine person.

We have zero conception in our worldview of a unitary person. And the unbeliever is gonna go, no,

I actually do conceive of myself as potentially unipersonal, which is still a bit ridiculous because you're born by other persons, all of those things.

And I actually kind of do think of myself as ultimately just my own individual.

And what we will hit him back with, of course, again and again and again, is that that sort of autonomy, that autonomous unit you're describing can't know anything.

And we're gonna keep driving that home with you. And when you just describe to ultimate reality a bigger uniperson like yourself, it doesn't solve the problem.

In fact, it just, it raises the question, where is he conceptually? Where is he materially, spatially, all of those things?

What context is sustaining his self -conception? And until you arrive at the point that he is self -contained as the

Trinity, you're nowhere, but it's more than that. Until you can get to the point where he's not only self -contained, but he solves the problem of your rebellion against him.

He solves the problem of the fact that we've constantly been denying him. And he does so with a solution that is equal to his person with a personal savior.

See, we have to be really clear. We're not working with the Trinity as a sort of unit of knowledge, as a base premise.

We're talking about the trying God who's revealed himself in scripture and interpreted us so thoroughly in this story.

All of those things stand and fall together. And of course, then it becomes really ridiculous. Is the unbeliever gonna tell me about another worldview that he has where he doesn't call the being the

Trinity, his multi -personal God is called Dan. And he sent his son into the world to die for our sins.

His name is Billy, not Jesus. And his Holy Spirit is the one who puts us into Christ.

And it's not called the Holy Spirit. It's called by Raven. What we'd say to that person is the real problem here is not that you're proposing an alternative to Christianity.

The problem here is that you're speaking in tongues without interpretation because all of those things are just my worldview.

And the fact that you've smacked another names on it is, first of all, it just goes to show that just the folly of evil and sin, the links will go to.

But you're actually affirming that only the Christian worldview places you on this firm foundation.

I'm really redemption in Christ. I wanna be clear. We're not saved by a worldview. The worldview is the fruit of redemption.

Well, so we're just trying to dispel the Unitarian version of God, and it tries to be eternal, but we realize at the end of it, it can't even reveal to us that that's the case.

It fails to account for multiplicity, the diversity in our world, and cannot be personal, not in a true, meaningful sense.

I liked how you reemphasized in our Christian experience, we see that this

Unitarian God has just blown up. And I try to really press the point, to be personal presupposes more than one person.

And so this, and then so someone has come along and say, well, okay, fine, you can have a bind entity.

That way you can have more than one person, Jeremiah, to solve the personal problem that you're putting forth.

Like, fine. And so this is where, this is yours. This is original with you, this diagram. And this took me a long time to understand what you were getting at.

But give me first cracks, if you don't care, okay? Sure. So earlier in the conversation, we were talking about the word context.

Every person to person relationships has a context or a map that's facilitating that personal relationship, right?

And so you're also bringing out the question, where is God? What's the context in which he exists and has revealed himself?

And so when I bring up the problem of a uni person is no person at all, because you need another person to have that relationship, they say, fine, take father and son.

Well, they're personal. Why can't a bind entity ground human intelligibility? Well, you talked about asking the question, well, what context would facilitate the bind entity?

So like in the diagram here, you got that circle, right? So we're asking the question, what is that context?

And so I wanna say timeout, because when we go back to the human plan, then rebuke me if I need it here.

I brought up the problem of induction earlier. I think that's something that pervades our human experience.

We have person to person interaction, but in an impersonal context of this created world, right?

The universe just on its own. It's an impersonal context. And so here with a bind entity, you have person one and person two in an undefinable void that's impersonal.

And in some way, this is how I've explained it, they would be problem, that they would be subjection to the problem of induction, and you cannot ground intelligibility in this model, but I'm sure it's way deeper than that.

Well, I mean, that's right. I mean, the situation in this model, you might put it this way.

So father and son are related. You know, what language are they speaking? Where did that language come from?

Did they come together and make that language together and say, hey, let's have this word mean that, to even begin that conversation, they're speaking a language.

So where is, there has got to be a unity between them that is not impersonal space, not impersonal time, not even an abstract language for which you could simply ask, my goodness, where did these words come from?

Any of these sorts of contexts that you can imagine or that we tend to impersonalize as creatures, not recognizing the ultimate creator person behind them all, they're gonna fail when understood as such.

In fact, the father and the son have got to be in the context of the spirit with whom they are one being, so that they are comprehensive of their own context.

They are one with their context, and that that context is not what you would call an artificial production that they make coming together.

That's not a personal context. In fact, a production produced by the coming together of two immense deities presupposes already some context in which productions can be produced.

It actually renders God mutable. All of these things become a problem when we don't say that, in fact, the context within which the father and the son are is the spirit whom they share and with whom they are one being.

That's gonna be haptic, yeah. And so when I understood this to some degree, so I'm thinking, okay, father -son bininity does not work because that relationship is existing in some indefinable, impersonal, abstract void, okay?

And this is where we see the harmony of the Trinity because you take that impersonal, undefinable, impersonal void, and in my language, we flip it into a third person in which facilitates perfectly the relationship between father and son.

In what context the father and son relate to one another? In the spirit. In what context does the son and the spirit relate to one another?

In the father. And I think the word you used in your book was perichoresis, which is a term that the early church fathers used as well.

Is that right? That's right. You know, I mean, it's a word that means the dance, you know, and really you're describing the dance of our mind when we try to think it, because it's thoughts.

You know, you try to think the father and the son, you think the spirit, and you're like, where's the spirit? He's related to the father, he's in the son.

But in reality, you know, obviously in reality, the Trinity is just absolutely infinitely self -contained as one simple

God. And by simple, I'm using that term in the theological sense that the divine being is not divisible.

They're not parts. The divine being has no parts. Each person of the Trinity is the whole

God functioning as relator, relationship, and related persons.

And of course, you know, we have the, you know, Trinitarian relations that the scriptures just impress upon us. You know, the son, we use the word generation not to imply that, you know, his being is made, but that he relates to the father and son.

Yes, yes, yes, internally. But of course, yeah, this is what we're talking about. And in fact, you know, if you flip back to the other slide, you know, the one you had before, you know, others might think of, you know, the father and the son as kind of having a relationship where the son is, you know, inside of the father.

And I mean, and that's kind of the only relationship. It's like, you know, when you ask the question, where'd the language come from?

You know, it came from the father and the son is, you know, speaking it back or something like that. But in that case, there isn't, if the son is just in the father, you just ask the question again, where is the father?

And you're kind of back in that impersonal void place. Right. You know, that's huge.

So I just, I wanted to mention that again. I mean, that is the subordinationism, really what we're looking at there is

Arianism. It really does go to the place where the father is unknowable virtually, and the son is this, you know, this word spoken by the father who's otherwise pretty well, you know, just the void, indefinable void.

And the son is just barely more, you know, definable. And it lends itself to the emanation sorts of theories of early narcissism.

And how I've tried to emphasize this best I can is to say relationships always exist in a context, person to person relationships always exist in a type of context.

And remember the kind of context that we have here on earth is in an impersonal context immediately what we experience.

And so that renders us to a lot of problems where we can't justify knowledge by just appealing to ourselves.

And so I asked the question, what context facilitates this person one, person two by an entity?

We don't know, and they don't know. And that's the problem, right? It's in an undefinable void.

And that renders, you know, absurdities and not being able to have an absolute self -contained knowledge.

And that's where the Trinity has this perichoresis, this perfect harmony, this inner penetrating dance, one always within one another, pervading one another.

So it's beautiful because discipleship at 12 .5, you know, I try to really hit point, you know, 1

John tells us God is love. Well, love is transcendent and image bearers of God know that like even the secular world, they want to say, yes, love feels, you know, something we experience, but is outside of us also.

Like, how do we explain it? It's like, well, God is eternally love in a wonderful relationship with Father, Son, and Spirit.

Perfect love shares that love, right? So we see that in this triune form.

So I think this brings us to another illustration as we kind of want to.

One interjection, we'll get to that last one. One interjection, but when you describe the unbeliever situation, it's also important to note though, that their self -conception as being in an impersonal context is itself an illusion.

It's the illusion of unbelief. You know, we would say that because we live and move and have our being in God, the

Trinity, that's why the unbeliever's actually getting along pretty well. He's always hearing virtually a song that is inviting him to dance, even against his intention and will, in a way that betrays expectation of where things will be, where things will end up, how they can trust their senses, you name it.

And they're just always denying the music's playing, which is so utterly clear and all that there's, even when they're trying to wreck the dance, there are certain ways to do it, where you kind of have to kind of respect the dance to even kind of muck it up.

And so the unbeliever's lying self -conception is, we're doing this in the context of a void.

We both don't know how we're talking, Jeremiah. It's like, you know, we'd say that's a lie.

And if that were true, you wouldn't know anything at all. And Elon Musk would be right that maybe we are just, maybe our consciousness right now, 50 -50 chance, we're just emulated consciousness from a computer, you know, or some type of experience.

But what we're saying is that, it's just important to put it this way. Our premise that all personal relationships are mediated ultimately by self -conscious person is a

Christian premise. We have it in Acts 17, in Him we live and move and have our being. And then, you know, when we ask, that's what's exciting us to ask the question, okay, well, where is

God? Where, what context is He in? We're starting with a premise given to us from scripture to, and Van Til calls this, you know, reasoning by implication.

We're starting with our presuppositions and reasoning more deeply into them. Hence reasoning from the

Trinity and to the Trinity in ever deeper ways. But go ahead and let's hit that last slide.

Why can't God be more than three persons is where we're going. And to me, this was the hardest one to wrap my mind around.

Give me first cracks though. In it. So in my other studies,

I've listened to other theologians saying, you know, the Trinity is this perfect harmony. So God's not going to unnecessarily add more persons.

God is the author, you know, of everything that is good, not the author of confusion. So to add unnecessarily persons just wouldn't make sense.

And you know what? I want to give some credit there. Like, you know, the principle of like Occam's razor, things like that.

Like I can see kind of some merit in that. But your book goes so much deeper. You're saying no, to add a person

X totally throws everything out of harmony. Because I kind of thought, okay,

I can see the problems with a Unitarian model. To be personal presupposes more persons, not just one.

You move to a binary entity, what's the context there between person one, person two? Well, it's undefinable, impersonal context.

Oh, we need a third person to have perfect harmony there. So I've always, I kind of got that down first.

And I was like, okay, we're flowing, we're flowing. Oh no, what do we do with four persons? Well, in your two models here,

I love this because we got to continue to ask the question, in what context would four persons exist?

Okay, well, when we have over here, you got the

Holy Spirit, person X over here, that's in relation to this other part and it's in this bigger context going on.

And so what's happened is now you have an impersonal group.

Am I getting this right? I want you to go more into that because once you've started to have maybe two over here and two over here, well, now you have two groups, right?

This abstract impersonal thing. And once you've brought in an impersonal aspect, well, then you've eroded any grounds for intelligibility.

And so you have either two over here and two over here, or you have three over here and one over here.

And if you have, in this model, three would kind of be a group, this impersonal abstract thing facilitating the one.

So I need you to say it better. Yeah, okay. What you're gonna end up doing when you try to add persons is you're gonna actually diminish the persons and you're going to inject impersonalism as a context.

You can think about a quadrinity or efforts at a quadrinity in a couple of ways.

You think of it this way, you could think of it, and we'll start as maybe the simplest one.

Maybe you say that the relationship between the Father and the Son is perfectly mediated by the third person of the

Trinity of the Holy Spirit. He is that context who contains Father and Son perfectly and exhaustively.

And let me express kind of what I mean by containment. It's the idea that the relationship itself between the

Father and the Son isn't arbitrary. It didn't happen because two minds came together and thought of a relationship to be in.

It's that that relationship itself is expressive of the almighty power, wisdom, and will of a person, the self -existent person who is the one and only

God. So the first way that you could think about a quadrinity is that, so you have that beautiful thing with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and there's just a fourth person off to the side as an appendage.

There's an obvious and radical problem that arises there. That person, if he's not involved in the facilitation of that relationship, is passive then.

He's not pure act as the divine being must be. Now God is made of parts, active and passive.

Now we're not talking about a God who is immutable because to be brought from passivity to activity is to undergo change.

And now you're having to ask all of these questions. Where is change taking place? Where is passivity being brought into activity?

And now you've got a God who is somewhere other than holy and completely in himself. That appendage throws everything off if he's inactive in facilitating a relationship.

That other person of the Godhead is less divine. Now we're introducing gradations into the divine nature.

And now we've got a metaphysical problem where we're going, where does more and less come from within the divine being?

Is there a bit of non -being intermingled with God? And now we don't have an absolute anymore.

We have a being who is surrounded by non -being kind of functioning positively and adding something to the divine nature.

He's not self -sufficient, self -contained. That's what happens if we have the appendage view of a fourth somewhere out there.

The other way to think about it is this, that the father -son relationship appears in the context of the, we'll call it the

Holy Spirit and mother relationship. Mother will be the fourth person in the Trinity there, which is obviously very confused.

Again, we have the same problem. You could think of it this way. Either person's three and four, we'll call it spirit and mother, are both equally necessary to produce the single context in which one and two are related.

That is as much as to say that neither one is sufficient. This would mean that neither person is the absolute self -trinitarian context of the divine persons.

He's not sufficient to do that on his own. He's in need of another part to facilitate that context if they're both necessary.

And again, once we have a divine being who lacks sufficiency in himself to be the whole

God as the all -containing context, we have something very different than a self -contained

Trinity. We have a sort of makeshift relation where you have two pieces of the puzzle coming together to be the context for the picture that's contained in it.

Neither one of them contain the whole that God is in themselves. And of course, then we're right back in the same place.

A God who is mutable, that's a God who's in time. Then you have a God who has gradations of being because they're not all of the deity in themselves.

Now you have the injection of non -being as the metaphysical principle, and we're right back to a

God who is in nowhere. And some measure of nowhere interjects itself into the divine being, and he is marked by gradations.

And so when we think about it in those terms, it really does radically undermine

God's status as self -sufficient. If persons three and four, and I'm looking at the right -hand side of your image, the father -son group are facilitating the person

X and the Holy Spirit relation, a group is not a person.

A group is something artificial that comes together and it is not expressive of the self -existence of God.

And it's a real problem if God is not in his own self -existent personal context. That's the whole problem of unbelieving thought.

So - Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Yeah. So when you were studying these things, when was the eureka moment when you were kind of like, oh, a group is an abstract, impersonal thing?

Like to me, that's just so remarkable. Do you remember when that was first kind of, you know, the pieces were coming together with that?

Yeah, yeah, I remember I was really excited about it. I was in my pajamas in my stairway, walking down the stairs where it really, like,

I was deep in, deep in thesis thought and things like that.

And yeah, that, I mean, and I was like, yeah, I think, you know, I think I really got something here. And, you know, obviously you go through all the motions of, you know, writing something and trying to be your own worst critic.

And sometimes you can see it, sometimes you can't. Even when I go into these conversations, to be honest with you, I really have to make sure that I'm well -rested and like, if I'm gonna hit it super hard,

Because that is a reality that it's dangerous for presuppositionalists not to be aware of, that, you know, as we are a mind -body unit, you know, our physical exhaustion does affect all of these things.

And this is where having Trinity as our presupposition, it is just the place where, it's a place where we go to bed, man.

It's a place where we rest, even when we don't feel like we can expound these sorts of depths.

But another way to put all this, that is, I think, maybe much more practical, Jeremiah, is this. We discussed the personal problem of sin and how it requires an utterly personal solution.

It requires a tri -personal solution. You know, another practical way to put this is I'd like to know from the quadrinitarian how we're reconciled to the fourth person of the

Trinity. I know why we're reconciled to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in this theological situation that we're in.

And again, I would just say the not, they're gonna find themselves in trying to develop a quadripersonal version of salvation.

And why is this fourth appendage even necessary at any point in this portrait?

Much less, where are you gonna find an inspired book that has facilitated worship in a community, reconciled to this

God anywhere? I mean, all of these details are some of the more simple ways to get at this point.

But to boil down the point here, if you add a fourth person, then either persons three and four are necessary to produce one context within which one and two are related.

If that's the case, if both are necessary, then neither one is sufficient. Neither one is the whole self -contained

Trinity functioning as context to the other two persons. They're both lesser than the full

Godhead. And that right there, when you interject gradations of being into God, you mingle being and non -being as your starting point.

And you don't have a God who's self -contained and complete. The other option is this, that both persons three and four are sufficient to serve as the single context of the relationship between one and two.

In which case, one of them has to be inactive if the other is sufficiently the one divine will, knowledge and power within which the other two reside.

That other person who is the whole Godhead is off doing something else.

And so in that case, you could say that they are together.

They're both sufficient, but one is not actively being sufficient.

And then you have a problem of passivity and change. So either way, you're stuck with a

God who is not self -contained. And you have all of these problems of change, mutability, metaphysical non -being, gradations, all of these things that make something not an ultimately personal context, but someone who is himself fraught with impersonality.

And so if we add more persons, five, six, 100, it's just all the same problems over and over and over.

Well, that's right. Of course it is, yeah. Then it just even becomes more ridiculous to speak of ourselves reconciled to the 100 person

God who we only know three of the person. I mean, it just is Mormonism. And you're at the point of that Mormon guy where it's like, well,

I'm gonna know the real God who is beyond the Trinity that I know of.

But it's even worse than that because what you have is you don't have person as the context of every personal relationship.

You have something else, time change, non -being, gradations of being, the absolute personal

God. You know, I wanna say one last thing, Jeremiah. One of the challenges that people will constantly bring up and I have to answer every time

I do one of these interviews is, well, what about the people in the Old Testament who didn't know God is trying? Yeah. Things like that.

And, you know, I'm gonna just say a couple of things about that. You know, take the people in the

Old Testament who knew that God was a transcendent person. They knew he was self -existent, but didn't know the divine name,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You know, here's what I would liken the condition of the Old Testament saint to.

You could have a bunch of kids on a playground who know that, you know, you'd say that the recess duty officer, you know, that you have in elementary school, they all know that they're the authority and because he's just bigger than everybody else.

It's obvious, his physical strength, you know, sets him apart. You can imagine in that era of human history while we're children, and it's fairly obvious why the one ground duty person is the true

God. He's the only person who's even claiming, you know, self -sufficiency.

And you can imagine, you know, other kids presenting themselves as competing ultimate authorities or officers on the playground.

Maybe because they're really big too. So they kind of like that ground duty officer, but, you know, obviously distinct in certain ways.

They're not nearly as strong as he is. That's kind of all of the sorts of religions that you would encounter in what you could call the pre -Trinitarian

New Covenant world. The competitors to God that you would encounter aren't even claiming the sort of self -existence that Yahweh is.

They're just claiming to be really powerful and someone you could place before God or in front of that big

God. And, you know, it could be that in God's providence, he's absolutely sovereign.

He purposefully ordained that the worst competitors to his own self -revelation in the

Old Testament were painfully and obviously not even good competitors because they are polytheistic deities who don't even claim the sort of absolute creator situation.

But you would liken things to this in the New Covenant. Imagine the kids on the playground did grow up and they got bigger than the ground duty officer.

And they're like, all right, we can take you now, man. We're gonna take you out. We can mimic every one of your claims.

In fact, you know, maybe we're even stronger than you. But what the New Covenant doctrine of the

Trinity is like is the ground duty officer pulling out a machine gun and saying, hmm, actually the strength that I have is more profound than you ever imagined.

You were right the whole time that I was stronger than all of you. You know, and even in the

Old Testament, I used my gun not infrequently and certain things that I did were only explicable on the ground that I actually had vastly superior mechanisms of strength than you.

And in this analogy, the reality in which you exist is one in such that there is only one machine gun.

There is no other one to be found. That is what the doctrine of the Trinity is like.

It is the revelation of the machine gun on the playground. It is the magnification of a strength that you always knew that you had a sense that, you know,

God was incomprehensibly stronger, you know, right in the back of your mind the whole time.

But the revelation of the Trinity is this sort of thing that, yes, now in a world of machine guns, it's laughable and ridiculous to set against the

Trinity of a very Unitarian deity like Islam. It's retrogressive. It has no meaningful or deep insight into this awesome

God. And it is so obviously a human creation to mimic and to compete and to do so hopelessly.

And that's the situation as I would describe it. And, you know,

I find this bothers people because what they want is, they wanna know what are the like the timeless premises for a worldview that is coherent.

And, you know, and what they're saying is, I really want abstract deductive premises to start with that work everywhere all the time.

And the whole point of the Trinity and the problem of the one in the many, which

I didn't get to discuss quite in the depths that I might have, is that abstract reason alone, it's an illusion and it's never how we were supposed to reason.

We were supposed to release in an unfolding relationship with God. And it's appropriate that at each distinct period in human history, the amount of revelation that he has given is sufficient utterly to differentiate the living

God from all false gods and competitors. So I hope that that's helpful in some measure.

But I spent a little time trying to think about how to explain that sort of concept. Yeah, and we see principles of the

Trinity all throughout the Old Testament. And like you said, God was progressively revealing himself.

I had a Jew one time tell me, well, you believe Jesus is Yahweh, right? And I'm like, of course. And he's like, well, come join us because we're the first Jesus followers.

I'm like, well, why didn't you believe him when he revealed himself? I mean, those are the type of apologetic encounters that I have, but we know better.

We see God's revelation unfolding. How God initially revealed himself to Adam pre -fall was not one as Redeemer, right?

There's a grand master plan that's going to unfold. How Moses knew God was in a fuller sense than we would say with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

I mean, God is revealing himself, his character as Redeemer, like what you were quoting

Job earlier. He knows that his Redeemer lives. And so when we see the

New Testament, we see the apostles being experiential Trinitarians, right?

Getting to be with the son. They had the spirit poured out on them. All these things that God's word said would happen.

And so it all comes back to the Trinity. And I just want you to know, wherever you found this title or your book cover,

I've had my phone background for a while now. So you've been, oh, and you see that it's 1135 my time too.

Well, you know what? I both get compliments and I suffer for that book title. Obviously, I didn't cover.

I didn't make the cover. So some who are really anxious about making images of God, I would note none of those are images of God, just for the record.

That is a lamb and that's a dove. None of those are persons of the

Trinity or anything like, nor am I even trying to represent the humanity of Christ. And as long as we caveat that those two fingers are not

God's fingers pointing up right there, we're good on that front. I just want to put that out there. But yes, it's a beautiful cover and I'm indebted to whoever made it for me.

We're not worse than this image, is what I tell people, far be it. That's right, that's right.

But I had to get that out there. I'm not super comfortable with the halos around them, but all that said, yeah, yeah, yes.

Dr. Bosterman, you've been a champion and I'm gonna have to go back and listen to a lot of things that you said.

But I love how you just explained the problem of humanity, something that all image bearers know, whether they're gonna be honest or not, but there's a solution.

God has personally provided a way to be reconciled to himself and that's found in Jesus.

And I tell people, you gotta believe in the right Jesus and you have to receive him on the terms that he prescribed.

He is the second person of the Trinity and we receive him by faith apart from any works that you could possibly imagine because his works alone are perfect, holy, righteous.

Look to him, don't add your works to the already finished work that he accomplished. So our gospel is

Trinitarian. You're nailing it. And we quoted a passage from Hebrews and it talks about Christ as the one who actually cleanses the conscience.

Let's end with a prayer that people wouldn't just know about Trinitarian theology today, that any listener to this would know the peace of mind, the satisfaction, the wholeness of being reconciled to God in Jesus Christ.

And of course, yes, a robust, rich theology that flows from that, but is itself the fruit of a personal relationship with our creator being reconciled to him in Christ.

And so I'll pray and I'll ask the Lord to bless this whole program. Lord God, I thank you so much that I had the privilege to talk with my friend,

Jeremiah. What a wonder it is, is we talk about context that I can be here in Seattle and he can be on, well, he can be on the other side of the country, two thirds of the way across it.

And Lord, we can be discussing who you are. We have no doubt that the technology we're using right now,

God, that it exists to magnify and glorify you. First of all, to show you what wonderful connections we can have in this creation as we search out the potentialities of it that you've put there, like jewels to be mined out of it.

But Lord, just to point us to the great, awesome providence in which we live and exist and move and have our being.

God, we pray for the masses out there to, by your Holy Spirit, be regenerated so that they would have faith in Jesus Christ, that they would be united to him as members of his body,

God, that they would know the satisfaction in the depths of their soul, that it is finished. The one and only absolute personal payment for sin has been made, that they wear

Christ's righteousness as if it were their own, so that God, they're justified. And Lord, I pray.

I pray for those who are doubting, for your spirit to dispel their doubts.

Pray for unbelievers who have been just vehemently against the teaching of your word, given to false teaching and to lies.

I pray, God, that you would just put that fight to rest, just like you exercise demons, Lord Jesus Christ.

I pray for brothers and sisters who have maybe never felt the slightest doubt of the

Trinity or the gospel. I pray that they would just be excited at the wonders of the depths of who you are and how powerfully you've revealed it in your word.

And bless my friend here. Bless his program into the future. I pray that numerous people of all sorts of aberrant belief systems would come to saving faith through his work.

In Jesus' name we pray by your spirit, amen. Amen, Dr. Bosterman, thank you so much for coming on.

And I love telling people about your book. And I tell them, they're like, oh, let me write that down. I'm gonna say, be prepared for the biggest challenge of reading a book that's out there.

But it's so rewarding when you can piece the pieces together little by little, realizing how

God has revealed himself perfectly. You and I are trying to articulate that the best that we can.

And so I just praise the Lord for your ministry. Now I'm gonna continue to recommend your book. I tell people it's good to have a already established understanding of the

Trinity already, along with presuppositionalism. And then when you put them together, you get

Bosterman's book here. But I say that a little tongue in cheek because I know you're just like the rest of us, trying to better glorify our sovereign triune

God. Amen. All right. Well, hey, we'll have to do this again sometime.

I've really enjoyed this. This is a marathon episode. I pray that it just blesses people. But I thank you so much for giving up a little bit of your evening to come on here with me.

Absolutely, my friend. Grace and peace, blessing to you. All right, take care. Thank you so much, Dr. Bosterman.

Yes, bye. Well, I just wanna thank you all for tuning in to The Apologetic Dog.

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