John 10, Thomas, Hagiography

I can hear that. And greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line.

My name's James White. We are in Salt Lake City, Utah, where last evening, that looks really weird because now

I see myself twice. That's very strange. I'll have to change that.

There we go. Last evening, I spoke out at Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna on the subject of God made the male and female.

I've, of course, addressed that a few times before. I started off talking about how my grandmother could have never understood why anybody would ever have to have a discussion about the fact that there are men and women, but here we are.

And we had a pretty small little group. You'd expect that because there was a big storm coming in and we had been hearing about it for days and two feet of snow up in the mountains and they weren't sure how much lower that would come.

And it was raining kitties and doggies when we got to the church. I had had dinner beforehand with Wade Orsini and Andrew Sunkrans and their families who are our church planters up here in Salt Lake City and for apology,

Utah. And we had Cafe Rio. We were treated to it by a local

Christian who's been very kind to us. And, but then by the time we got done eating, it was just coming down like anything.

And then that transitioned into snow. And so I was there quite a while talking with folks afterwards and stuff.

And by the time I got out, my truck was covered in snow and it was big, big fluffy stuff.

You gotta understand for people who live in Arizona, I've lived in Arizona since 1974, snow is sort of a big thing because it doesn't snow in Phoenix, obviously.

And well, okay. I've seen like twice,

I've seen snowflakes in my headlights. Okay. But it doesn't stick, the ground's too warm.

That's as far as it took. So it was a big thing. Well, once I started trying to get out of there,

I mean, trying to get my windshield cleared off and just be able to see where you're going.

And then it's just getting heavier and heavier and it's blowing and going all over the place. It turned into a blizzard.

And even Wade and Andrew said they've struggled getting home.

And Andrew saw somebody run into a pole right in front of him. It got, the visibility was challenging.

And so I posted a picture to, we have an

AO road trip group, various people. So I don't have to send things to 10 different people each time.

Of the front end of my truck, by the time I got here, just plastered with snow.

And it was, I have to admit, I was glad to be in a nice big GMC. I still couldn't see necessarily where I was going, but I was in a big

GMC and she sort of just rolls right through stuff. She's big and heavy. So anyway,

I'm watching a squall come in right now over the mountains. The mountains that I can see over here were clear yesterday.

Just dirt, rocks, and they are completely covered in snow right now. And they're disappearing right now, which

I'm hoping what that means, because I am seeing a few little flakes right now. I'm hoping we're gonna get another one of those, and here it comes down.

And I'll see if there's some way to do something with the camera. So y 'all can see.

I realize most of you don't care, but I've said more than once, someday

I'm gonna be sitting here in the mobile command unit. And instead of having the

AC running and whatever, we're gonna have snow coming down outside.

And I'm watching that one there. I'm figuring we're in for it here in a few minutes.

So we'll hopefully be able to have some. All of a sudden I started thinking about White Christmas, the movie.

It's a great movie. Though I've got to admit, I'm from the 50s, and I'm like, man, a lot of the ladies in that movie weren't wearing a lot of clothes in the 1950s.

It's interesting. But I love when the general comes in at the end.

Anyway, I'm wandering all over the place here. But that silly, silly song they sang, ♪

Snows, snows, snows, it's really stupid. ♪ There was a lot of good music in it, but that one wasn't one of the good songs in my opinion.

So we'll keep an eye on it here. I'm going to jump over to a text of scripture.

And I'm going to try to fire up our

Presentify program and look through a few things with you here to start off as an introduction to where I figure

I'm going to be going today on the program. And so if you would like to go over to John chapter 10, that's where we will be.

And I'll share the screen here. And then I'll try to bring up, well,

I'll hold off on that until I need to write on something.

But here we have John chapter 10, beginning of verse 22. At that time, the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem.

It was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple in the portico of Solomon. The Jews then gathered around him, were saying to him, how long will you keep us in suspense?

If you are the Christ, tell us openly. It's literally, you'll notice, how long shall you raise up our soul, is literally what the

Greek over there is saying. If you are the Christ, say it to us openly, tell us openly.

And Jesus answered them and said to them, I've told you,

I've spoken to you, and you are not believing. Same phrase, by the way, that Jesus used in John chapter six, when he, the men that had rode across the lake found him in the synagogue there at Capernaum.

You are not believers. The works which I do in my father's name, the name of my father, these testify concerning me.

But you do not believe, scroll up here, but you are not believing because you are not of my sheep.

You are not of my sheep. Now, I just point out that the standard synergistic

Arminian understanding of a text like this would be, you are not believing, therefore you can't be one of my sheep, or something along those lines.

But notice, belief is predicated upon having a certain ability that is related to one's nature.

Why are they not believing? Is it because Jesus hasn't been a good enough preacher? Is it because the disciples were a bad example?

There wasn't the appropriate music in the service? I mean, there's all sorts of things that people will say, but a simple reading of John 10, 26 says, but you are not believing because you are not of my sheep.

And so which condition comes first? Well, it's being one of his sheep, but in any standard evangelical synergistic system, you become one of the sheep by believing, right?

Yesterday's program, we were listening to Dr. Turek, and that's what he was saying, is that you believe, and that makes you one of the sheep.

But Jesus, in speaking to the Jews, said, you do not believe because you are not of my sheep.

So you have to be of Christ's sheep to be able to believe. Now, there's a lot that needs to be thought of there about the nature of saving faith and everything else, but you can't get rid of it, it's right there.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.

My sheep hear my voice, that's why they believe. And he knows them, and they follow him, and I give to them eternal life, and they shall never perish forever.

So notice, I'm gonna go ahead and since we've, yeah, I'm just gonna leave it right where it is and see if I can bring up my, there we go.

Let's see if I can, okay, there it is, okay.

Ding, ding, ding, we're gonna go with green today. How does that sound? Okay, so my sheep hear my voice, and they are following, oh, okay.

Why isn't that doing, hmm, all right.

Let's go back up here and stop annotating screen, all right, and annotate screen.

Well, that's fun, we've all seen it work before, haven't we? Yes, we have, for some reason it's not allowing me to annotate the screen.

So I wonder if it's because I had already, I wonder if it's because I'm sharing it.

Let's stop sharing it for a second, hi, and let's annotate screen, and no, it's not doing nothing.

So I'm gonna restart something there. Sorry about this, it's always worked in the past.

Huh, well, I don't understand.

Am I missing something obvious here? Well, I'll give it one more shot, and then we'll just have to do it the old fashioned way.

And we'll see what goes on with that. Yep, nada, not well, press that button.

No, it is not gonna allow me to do that. I apologize, it's worked just fine in the past, but for some reason it's not gonna do it here.

And I don't remember, honestly, how to do the little thing in, well, highlight.

Let's see if I can do that. Well, sorta, but honestly, it doesn't,

I don't think it's gonna come across, and the only reason to do it is for you all to see it. So let's not worry about that.

So, sorry, I'm gonna skip that whole part of the discussion, and cut that out or whatever when we get a chance.

So I will just undo the, try to undo, and now it's not gonna allow me to do that.

I tried to use the highlighter thingy, and it's like, it doesn't wanna do that.

So I'll just go back to displaying it, and we'll just have to use the cursor, and not draw on stuff for some reason this time around.

Maybe next time I can figure out what went wrong.

Anyway, my sheep hear my voice, they're following me, and I know them, and they follow me.

I know them. That's what's right here. I know them.

There is a personal relationship. It's vital to emphasize the fact that synergism results inevitably in an impersonal, one -sided relationship between those who choose to be saved and the

Lord himself. But here, we know the shepherd chooses the sheep.

The shepherd analogy is what has preceded all of this, of course, in John chapter 10.

The shepherd is the one who chooses the sheep. He knows them, and they follow him, which is why following him is the parallel to believing, up here.

You do not believe. So you have to allow the scriptures to define these categories, no matter how accustomed you are to certain ways of expressing these things.

Verse 28, and I give to them eternal life, and they shall never perish.

Ume, heiress of junk to the strong denial, Aiston Iona, they shall never perish forever.

I mean, this is a very, very strong statement. And no one shall snatch them out of my hand.

So this is a promise. The very one who can give eternal life promises to give to them eternal life, and they shall never perish forever, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.

I remember years and years and years ago, when

I was a senior in high school at a large Southern Baptist church, one

Sunday, my small group teacher and his wife, who was also a small group teacher, decided that they were going to help us students come to understand that salvation could be lost.

And they knew that's not what the church taught, so they decided to do it on the same

Sunday with their students. And I knew what the church believed, so as soon as he started saying this stuff,

I'm like, wait a minute, are you saying this? And we ended up having a little mini debate.

I was only 18 years old, but I knew what I believed. And when it became very clear that that's exactly what he was saying,

I said, you know this is not what we believe here. And I got up and left the class.

And that was a pretty radical thing for me to do. I was the guy that never got into trouble in school, so to just walk out of a class was pretty big.

And I don't know, about two years there, because they ended up leaving the church.

I think they expected that. About two years later, I walk around a corner at Berean Christian Bookstore that was right next to the campus of Grand Canyon, and there he is, same guy.

And he sees me and I see him, we start talking, and got right back into it after two years or so.

And this is one of the texts we came to. And you really, you have to stand on your head, and you really have to have a belief that yeah,

Jesus may promise this, and he may say, I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand, but it's still up to you.

And it's just so sad, for me anyways, to think of how many believers just don't understand, and they've been robbed of the glory of being able to trust that the shepherd will be able to save his sheep, that the shepherd will be able to give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.

And no one can snatch them out of his hand, except for you, ah, the almighty autonomous man.

No one else can. And Jesus can't keep you, but, and I think basically what he said was, no, no one can ever snatch you out of his hand, but you can jump out.

And if he didn't, there were others who have, said those exact words.

I mean, John 10, 28 should be a, like right along with Romans 8 and many others, one of those verses that, especially for those people that pastorally, you recognize struggle with assurance and constantly looking to self and not looking to Christ.

Here's beautiful words of assurance. So my father,

I'll go back to the text here. My father, who has given them to me.

Now you can't understand what's going on here. You can't understand, you know, who has given right here, who has given them to me.

If you haven't read John six, this is going to be a new idea.

But if you've read John six, you're going, okay, we're back there. Because this is the father giving a certain people to son.

He raised them up on the last day. This is a repetition. My father who has given them to me is greater than all.

And no one is able to, so har podzo, sorry, har podzan in the infinitival form here, is right back to here.

No one shall snatch them in regards to Jesus' words. So no one is able to snatch them from my father's hand.

Now don't read ahead. Sort of silly to say that. I well know that when you tell a class or anything else, don't read ahead.

They're going to read ahead anyways. But 10, 28 and 29 together require us to have an understanding that's already been given to us in the gospel of John of who

Jesus is. He is the Logos made flesh. He's eternally existed. He is the I am of John chapter eight.

He is the one who is the source of eternal life and spiritual food in John chapter six.

He is the one who gives sight in John chapter nine. He's the good shepherd in John chapter 10. So we've already been given the information that we need to have to be able to see why verses 28 and 29 are there and why they're right next to each other.

We've also read John chapter five, where you are to honor the son even as you honor the father and the father and the son are distinguished from one another.

And yet they are seen to share that one nature that is

God. Romans, I'm sorry, John chapter five. Jesus says, my father's working until now.

And now I am working. What he's doing there is he is drawing from the fact that Jews recognize the father works on the

Sabbath day and he upholds the world and the son's doing the same thing.

And so all that's in the background. And so if you only had 1028, then the focus would be solely on Christ.

And yet Jesus is doing this as the one sent by the father. And so there's this, always this perfect harmony that is struck in the gospel of John.

I'm giving them eternal lives. They shall never perish. I'll smash them out of my hand.

The father who has given to me is greater than all. And no one is able to snatch them out of my father's hand.

Now that doesn't change the fact that the son is the one giving eternal life to them.

And even though it's not in the gospel of John, it sure sounds like it could be in Matthew chapter 11.

Who is it that knows the father? Those, it's only by the son and those to whom the son wills to reveal him.

There is the freedom and the sovereignty of the son to will to reveal the father.

So much for a natural ability in of yourself to know

God. No, the son has to will to reveal him to you. That's exclusivity, folks.

The idea of an inclusive concept of a pluralism just simply doesn't fit anywhere in scripture.

But the point is, this is giving of eternal life. This is how you receive from God the greatest that he has to give to you.

And it's the father and it's the son together accomplishing these things. And no one is able to frustrate the work of the father and the son.

All these things are very important, but now listen, hear me. That is the context of verse 30.

That is the context of verse 30. And so when we get there, what happens, and this is very, very common in the faith.

I've seen this happen over and over and over. It's partly because we do a lot of proof texting and everyone has to proof text.

The question is, is your proof texting, are you establishing a system and then looking for texts to plug in?

Or are you reading, for example, a text like this, allowing it to speak for itself and then creating and drawing from that, the system of divine truth that the sheep feed upon.

Because that's, I'm convinced that's what, that's what the sheep need.

Is they don't need our systems. They don't need our performances. I've met many hungry sheep in my life and they appreciated the most the provision of pure food, letting the words speak for itself.

Not the fancy words, you know,

Spurgeon at his best, a wordsmith unparalleled could only give the sheep what the shepherd provided in his word.

Everything else is empty filler and it will not provide nourishment to the sheep.

We need to derive our faith from what God has breathed out.

That's what provides us with true nourishment and true food. So why am

I emphasizing this? We'll look at it again. When Jesus says,

Ego kai hapater, hen esmen. And please notice esmen is plural, first person plural.

I and the father, we are one. We are one. Not I and the father are one.

There's no confusion of the father and the son. They're not one person.

There is a distinction in the very use of the language. I and the father, we are one.

One in what way? Well, look what you just had. In the preceding two verses, you have the last phrase, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.

Verse 28, verse 29. And no one is able to snatch them out of my father's hand. So what is this oneness?

And the problem is, and by the way, it's snowing. I'm gonna see if the flake's getting larger and then

I'll think about moving the camera. The problem is that we automatically jump to big questions like,

I mean, you will find over and over and over again, you will find study

Bibles, short summaries of Christian doctrine, things like that, that will just give you these quick references.

And I understand that that can be useful in some ways, but I've seen

John 10, 30 cited over and over and over again as the proof text for the ontological, oneness of the father and the son.

And I am not saying that the verse is not relevant to that, but what

I am saying is that's not the initial exegetical meaning of this text.

That's not what would have been understood by the statement that was being made.

Because there wasn't a discussion about the ontological relationship with the father and the son going on.

There was a discussion about the son giving eternal life to his sheep and that the people he's talking to are unbelievers.

And that's an amazing claim was being made. And that is that the father and the son together are literally holding the people of God that are in right relationship to God and giving eternal life to them.

And Jesus is saying, no one can undo what the father and the son together are doing in the salvation of these sheep.

Now, that is a claim to deity. There's no question about that. When Jesus says,

I give eternal life to them, that's what God does. Okay, that's what

God does. That is a divine act. The, yeah,

I don't even know if this is gonna work. Hold on. You know,

I can just barely see it over on the black of the unit across the way. I can sort of, the camera's just struggled to pick that kind of stuff up and it's sort of windy.

But yeah, it is snowing. It's not snowing heavily, but it is snowing.

So I wanted to make sure to grab that. And now of course it's all miscentered and all the rest of that stuff.

But I said I'd try. And I'm certainly, it's almost like I'm hearing rain too.

I guess it can do both things at once, huh? It's so strange in these parts of the world. The things that will fall out of the sky instead of massive solar radiation that can fry you in five minutes, it's cold, wet stuff.

It's very interesting, very strange. I've gotten enough winter this year, okay?

Between the ice storm in Conway and this, that's enough, we're good.

I'm ready for summer now. That's how it works.

Okay, so this is a claim to deity and therefore it is relevant to the assertion of the oneness of the

Father and the Son, monotheism, all those things, but you have to let the text speak.

You have to let it speak properly. And that is the reason it's a reference to deity is because Jesus is saying, if I hold my sheep in my hand, that's the same thing as the

Father holding the sheep in His hand. And no one can snatch them out of my hand because I and the

Father, we are one in providing eternal life and salvation to God's people, which is a divine act.

One of the reasons this is important, aside from just not proof texting things that don't actually say what they're saying, one of the reasons this is important is because there's plenty of people who reject the doctrine of the

Trinity that know what this text is about. They don't follow it all the way through to realize what it's really saying, but they will point out, hey, that Jesus is talking about salvation here and stuff like that, and He is.

So we have to be the ones that are accurately handling the text and say, yes, that is what Jesus is saying, but what does that mean?

Could Isaiah have ever said, I and Yahweh are one in providing salvation to the people of Israel?

Of course not. Moses, Abraham, David, it doesn't matter who you pick in the past, none of them could have said these words.

But Jesus says them, and as you can imagine, the

Jews understand exactly what He's saying. They understand this is a claim to deity.

They're not getting into ontological discussions of the relationship with the

Father and Son or any of the rest of that type of stuff. They recognize if you're making that claim, you're making a claim to deity, and that's why in verse 31, they pick up stones again to stone

Him. And that leads to Jesus' quotation of Psalm 82, application to the

Jews as unrighteous judges. That's what Psalm 82 is about. And hence the identification of them as being condemned just as those false judges, human judges in Psalm 82 were being condemned as well.

So why start off with this? Well, I was looking, a lot of us are reading more of Thomas Aquinas these days than we ever really wanted to.

And if you're going to deal with certain issues, you need to do so not by reading secondary sources, but by going to primary sources.

And so for me, the most relevant material is to look at Thomas' biblical commentary.

Now, no matter what you say, Thomas is a brilliant man.

I can't imagine he slept much. To produce the amount of material that he did in a relatively short life, obviously a very, very brilliant individual.

There were a lot of brilliant individuals in the history of the church, but he is certainly at the top of that list as far as intellectual capacity and accomplishment in literary output, things like that.

And so I was looking at his commentary in John and it's very, very interesting.

He, in commenting in John chapter 10, says the

Jews are not of his sheep because they're not predestined to be. And it's only the sheep that believe.

On that level, the influence of Augustine on him is very clear.

And it's interesting, I would think that many of his biggest fans today are not of his sheep.

Are completely synergistic. And so maybe they just overlook that part. I don't know.

But it does make you wonder, how do you hold this together with other things that he says?

Well, that's, you know, how can you be an Augustinian Roman Catholic, for example?

Well, that's what we've got to think about. Because, but hold that thought a second, we'll get to it in a moment.

What I was interested in is that as soon as you get into John chapter 10 and you get to I and the

Father 1, his entire discussion does not even touch on anything that I just said.

He doesn't touch on, well, notice the last clause of verse 28 and the last clause of 29. You know, it's talking about the hand, it's the son, it's the father, no one can snatch them out of my hand, no one can snatch them out of the father's hand.

That kind of contextual flow, that kind of staying close to the text and letting the text define its own parameters and context and things like that, it's just not there.

Instead, there is a discussion of basically a systematic theology type idea of the relationship between the father and the son and receiving from the father one's essence and a whole discussion of that type of material that you can get to, but you can only, you should only get to it after you've actually handled the text itself as it would have been understood by its author and its intended audience.

And then once you get that, then you relate that to everything else that you have in scripture.

That's how you do sound exegesis, but some of them might say, well, who are you to say that?

Well, because that's the only way that you can say, thus sayeth the Lord. That's the only way that you can honor the original author's intention, what he intended to communicate in his context.

Once that's not the first thing you do, any text can say anything. Any text can be made to say anything.

If you don't start there. So you're not honoring the text when even when you say, well, we need to get back to a medieval exegesis.

No, no, we don't need to get back to medieval exegesis. We need to stick very closely to the intended meaning of the text, find out what the text is saying in its immediate context and then and only then under the

Lordship of Christ and in complete obedience to his commands and the highest belief in the consistency of the text of scripture.

By the way, that is a belief that many people don't have. That's a belief that really sets you apart these days and puts you in a minority.

The consistency of the teachings of scripture, that's a big issue.

Once you have all of that, then having done your exegetical work, you can put together the testimony of first John chapter 10, and then the gospel of John, and then the gospels, and then the

New Testament, and then the Bible as a whole. There's all these different levels that sometimes we'd wanna skip a few levels because it's a lot of work and it's a lot of time.

What was that sermon preparation thing? Funny, I've already forgotten the name of the place.

Something Dent, I don't know. And pay somebody else to do it.

I don't wanna spend that amount of time and effort. No, that's just simply on a real practical level.

If you want to go into the pulpit, confident that you can stand there and say, thus sayeth the

Lord, that's what you've gotta do. You've gotta do that work. That's, there's no getting around it.

So again, reading

Thomas's commentary, the guy's brilliant, but at the same time you realize, and this is true reading pretty much all of the early church fathers with very few exceptions.

And then even more so once you get into scholastics. And Thomas was definitely the best of those.

You go, there's something, it's not there's something missing.

It's that there's something extra here and it's hard for me to identify. The reason it's hard for you to identify is because it's a filter.

And filters are supposed to be somewhat inconspicuous, but there is a set of assumptions that flow from the medieval time period that create that filter that you can sense when you read the commentary and you go,

I'm missing something. I'm not sure why something's being said the way that it is.

It's because of this filter, these assumptions that are a part of the medieval mindset.

That some people today say we need to go back to somehow because we lost something in the so -called enlightenment.

Well, no one's, I'm certainly never gonna argue that the enlightenment was some wonderful, positive thing in every aspect of its expression, obviously.

But that doesn't mean that I don't then still see the extra layers that are in the way in medieval interpretations of scripture.

And I rejoice that the Reformation identified those things and sought to help us to rid ourselves of those things, which is why it's strange today to see people within the

Reformed context seeking to want to say this is good stuff to do.

Now, I have a bunch of reading to do for you here, which is why

I just wet the whistle a little bit so that I can do so.

I want to read you from an article. I will tell you who wrote it later, but I want to read you from an article about Thomas Aquinas.

And I will probably make some comments along the way. But I'll try to keep them fairly brief.

It is the mystical life of St. Thomas, however, that has sparked the interest of biographers.

Immediately after Thomas's death, his disciple Reginald returned to Naples and declared, quote, as long as he was living, my master prevented me from revealing the marvels that I witnessed.

He owed his knowledge less to the effort of his mind than to the power of his prayer. Every time he wanted to study, discuss, teach, write, or dictate, he first had recourse to the privacy of prayer, weeping before God in order to discover in the truth the divine secrets.

He would go to the altar and would stay there weeping many tears and uttering great sobs, then return to his room and continue his writings.

End quote from Reginald. Now, please, please let me mention just a couple things real quick.

Hagiography, hagiography. Hagios, saints, Godfrey writing, the writings concerning the lives of the saints goes all the way back to the first century.

It goes back to the earliest martyrs. Papias, Ignatius, Polycarp.

We have hagiographa, writings about early saints.

And there are certain aspects, characteristics of hagiographic writings.

What you just read, what I just read to you is hagiography. By the time

Thomas is sainted, which was not long after he died, there was already a process in place whereby, and it's similar to the process that exists today, whereby you would have to find miracles that were performed by this individual or in the name of this individual even after they had died.

There's an entire office in the

Curia, in the Vatican, that collects this kind of information in regards to the possibilities of sainthood and lesser honors to people who have died.

And there's a lot of hagiography out there for a lot of different people who believed a lot of different things.

But the other thing I want you to notice is he would go to the altar.

Do not interpret that as a Baptist. Thomas did not have a wooden table down front that said, do this in remembrance of me.

When it says he would go to the altar, we're talking the altar in the Roman Catholic Church where the miracle of transubstantiation takes place in the mass, which is a perpetuatory sacrifice, but one that does not save anyone.

It does not perfect anyone, okay? Just some data there.

I continue reading. A similar testimony comes from Tocco. He said of Aquinas, his gift of prayer exceeded every measure.

He elevated himself to God as freely as though no burden of flesh held him down. Hardly a day passed that he was not rapt,

R -A -P -T as in rapture, as in the experience of an ecstatic state out of his senses.

Being daily rapt out of one's senses is hardly routine we expect from abstract scholars and philosophers, particularly from someone like Aquinas who was given to the pursuit of logic.

The habit of passionate prayer is crowned by the extraordinary claims of miraculous visitations granted to St.

Thomas. Such incidents raise the eyebrows of Reformed theologians.

And we mentioned these accounts with the due reservations of our trade. Maritain recites the following episode as part of the

Catholic record of Thomas's sainthood. So like I said, to be made a saint, to be proclaimed a saint by the church, there is this inquiry and there's this gathering of witnesses and testimony of miraculous things related to this individual.

So this is part of what was gathered for Thomas's sainthood. Quote, another time it was the saints who came to help him with his commentary of Isaiah.

An obscure passage stopped him. For a long time he fasted and prayed to obtain understanding of it.

And behold, one night Reginald heard him speaking with someone in his room. When the sound of conversation had ceased,

Friar Thomas called him, telling him to light the candle and take the manuscript on Isaiah. Then he dictated for an hour after which he sent

Reginald back to bed. But Reginald fell upon his knees. I will not rise from here until you tell me the name of him or of them with whom you have spoken for such a long time tonight.

Finally, Friar Thomas began to weep and forbidding him in the name of God to reveal the thing during Thomas's life, confessed that the apostles

Peter and Paul had come to instruct him. Another event occurred in Paris when

Thomas was lecturing on the Eucharist. As he went to the altar, the brethren suddenly saw Christ standing before him and heard him speak aloud.

Now listen to this. This is what Jesus says to Thomas. You have written well of the sacrament of my body and you have well and truthfully resolved the question which was proposed to you to the extent that it is possible to have an understanding of it on earth and to ascertain it humanly.

Now, please don't miss what that means. That means that these multiple people had a vision or said they had a vision of Jesus telling

Thomas that Thomas has explained the sacrament of his body.

Yeah, the sacrament of my body as well and truthfully as it can be by human being.

Please understand what this means. Thomas believed in transubstantiation. He taught transubstantiation.

The Council of Trent codifies his understanding of transubstantiation which is based upon the application of Aristotelian categories, metaphysical categories to the elements of the supper.

This is how you can create an unbloody sacrifice and still say that there is only one sacrifice of the cross.

So here are people saying, we saw Jesus appear to Thomas and Jesus told

Thomas, you got it. You, best understanding can be had.

That sober philosophers like Jacques Maritain report such incidences as simple historical fact is itself testimony to the extraordinary impact

Aquinas' spiritual power had on his contemporaries as well as his future disciples. One anecdote about St.

Thomas is virtually beyond dispute. Toward the end of his life, he had a powerful mystical experience that dramatically affected his work.

Again, we turn to Maritain for his account of it. Quote, having returned to Italy after Easter of 1272,

Friar Thomas took part in the general chapter of the order at Florence. And then he went to Naples again to continue his teaching there.

One day, December 6th, 1273, while he was celebrating mass in the chapel of St.

Nicholas, a great change came over him. From that moment, he ceased writing and dictating.

Was the Summa then, with its 38 treatises, its 3 ,000 articles and 10 ,000 objections to remain unfinished?

As Reginald was complaining about it, his master said to him, I can do no more. But the other was insistent,

Reginald, I can do no more. Such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as much straw.

Now I await the end of my life after that of my works. End quote.

After this experience, Thomas Aquinas wrote no more. On his final journey, he asked to be taken to the monastery of Santa Maria.

As he was dying, he asked for the atticum. When he saw the consecrated host, he threw himself on the floor and cried out, quote,

I receive thee, price of my redemption, viaticum of my pilgrimage, for love of whom

I have studied and watched, toiled, preached, and taught. Never have I said anything against thee, but if I have done so, it is through ignorance, and I do not persist in my opinions.

If I have done anything wrong, I leave all to the correction of the Roman church. It is in this obedience to her that I depart from this life.

Then this writer goes on to say the following. There is a strange progression in the achievement of titles of honor and status in the theological world.

A freshman student begins his pursuit of knowledge simply with his given name. Then he graduates from college. Some may now call him mister.

When he graduates from seminary and passes his trials for our nation, he is granted the title reverend or father.

If he continues his education, achieves a doctorate, he is called doctor. If he is fortunate enough to secure a teaching degree, a teaching position on a faculty, he must wait to progress to a full professorship.

Then he can preface his name with the coveted title of professor. The irony is this. If he makes it really big and achieves a widespread reputation for his learning, he will achieve the highest honor, that of being known simply by his name.

We do not usually speak of Professor Bart or of Dr. Calvin or Professor Kung. The leaders in the field of theology are known by their names.

We speak of Bart, Bultmann, Brunner, Kung, Calvin, Luther, Edwards, and Rahner. I struggled to even put all those in the same sentence for other reasons, but anyway.

A man doesn't seem to make it until his title returns to where he started with his own name. There is a special sense in which this strange progression reaches its acme with the titular honor paid to Aquinas.

He is known not only by his famous last name, but in the world of theology and philosophy is recognized by his first name.

No one speaks of Aquinasism. We talk about Calvinism, Lutheranism, Augustinianism, but with Aquinas, it is

Thomism. One need merely mention the name Thomas and every scholar of theology knows of whom we speak.

Okay, there's more that we could look at. We have here, again, hagiography.

There are volumes, and you see, most of us never read these volumes, and so we don't know how many there are, but if you, for example, will pick up the volume on Purgatory, I think it's

FX Shoop, if I recall correctly, published by Tan Books, a very conservative

Roman Catholic publisher, and read the book and the testimonies found therein, you will find that very kind of language, illustrations, fantastic levels of spiritual attainment.

Reported over and over and over and over again. If you pick up the

Glories of Mary, again, saint after saint after saint doing these amazing things and all of that, excuse me, being tied together to promote, in that instance, the elevation of the worship of Mary.

So there's nothing new to these things, and those who read church history are familiar with this language and learn to begin to analyze it historically because so much of what it says just simply can't be true.

I mean, it's the same kind of literature that told stories in this same time period of the beekeeper that stole the host from the mass and put the host into his hive to increase the production of honey.

But instead, the bees stopped making honey. And when the beekeeper looked inside the hive, he found that they had placed the host in the center of the hive, and the reason the bees are making honey is that they were all worshiping the host, okay?

So there are thousands of volumes of that kind of apocryphal story, okay?

So who wrote this article? Who wrote this article? R .C. Sproul did.

It appeared in Table of Doctrines. Let me see if, here's the source.

So let me click on it real quick and see if I can. It's called, Was Thomas Aquinas the

Most Brilliant Theologian Ever? June of 2019 by R .C. Sproul. And we know

R .C.'s deep connection to his high veneration of Thomas Aquinas.

But we also need to recognize that if you're going to give any level of credence whatsoever to that kind of story, there's 10 ,000 more stories you're gonna have to give credence to.

And that's gonna lead you to conclusions that thankfully

R .C. didn't go to, but it's gonna lead you that direction.

And I think it's important that we recognize that. We are experiencing this sudden discussion of Thomas Aquinas.

Again, it's interesting, and I'll wrap up with this. This morning I was listening to a lecture by Van Til on the conflict of Christianity and philosophy.

And sort of in passing, and I wasn't sure the exact date, but I'd put it in the late 60s, early 70s, almost in passing,

Van Til said, and we have of late, and the way he expressed it, sort of the idea was it's no longer happening, but we have had of late an intrusion of Thomistic philosophy into reformed churches.

But like I said, I got the feeling that what he was saying is it had happened, but wasn't happening anymore, had been corrected, or without knowing exactly what year it was,

I'm not exactly sure what he was referring to, but it just struck me, here we are in 2022, and this has now been going on for a couple of years, and now it's becoming more and more recognized.

And what it requires of anyone who wants to seriously engage it is the recognition that this ain't the first time, this isn't the first time we've gone around here, and unfortunately, a lot of people are wanting to reinvent the wheel, and just do it all over again.

And sometimes you wonder if there's no way we can't get around doing it that way, anyway.

But there's a lot to be thought about. And I think people are surprised when you hear some of the material that I read to you there from Sproul's article, but the majority of people that are surprised by that are people that are not regularly reading church history anyways, and that's most of us.

What'd they say today? New record, 8 .5 % inflation, and we all know that it's probably 30%.

So we're all working harder than ever just trying to make ends meet. Inflation is a massive tax, and I am absolutely convinced that the people in charge want it, that's why they're driving it, that's why they did it, and blaming

Vladimir Putin for it's the stupidest thing on the planet, but hey, totalitarians, tyrants lie to themselves, let alone lying to everybody else.

So we don't have time necessarily to be reading all these sources in the past, but social media tells us that these things are happening.

And so a lot of folks are going, well, what should I believe about these things, and what's the truth about these things?

There's gonna be a lot more said, I think. And so there's some stuff to chew on, some stuff to think about today on the program as we come here.

Clearing, got some sun going on right now, but a lot more clouds out there, and a lot of snow out there.

Not down here, there's little patches that are, it's melting, actually, it's 38 degrees outside.

So, but we're up here in, I will be speaking tomorrow night at Apologia, Utah, and Thursday night down in Payson, Utah, and then heading north toward Idaho.

So prayers for that travel, very much appreciated. Seems to be looking pretty good, looking at the weather, but everybody around here tells me that, hey, weather can change pretty quickly.

So who knows, we will see. I'm all, as long as I can see the road, that's the important part.

Last night, that was very questionable. Anyways, I hope that some of that was of use to you, usefulness, these are not the kind of things that most webcasts talk about, but we get to do pretty much what we wanna do, because we've been doing it for almost 40 years now.

So there you go, that's cool, that's neat. Thank you,

Mr. Pierce, for making this possible. I'm thinking we'll still be pretty good for, yeah, we'll be good for Thursday, probably might be able to do it earlier, because Payson's a good, it's an hour south of here.

So I'm gonna have some driving to do, but probably looking at Thursday for the next program, if that works out.