August 14, 2018 Show with Phil Johnson on “Social Justice Warriors Doing Injustice to the Gospel of Jesus Christ” AND Dr. Tony Costa on “The Centrality of the Trinity in Christian Theology”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister

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George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host Chris Arnton. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 14th day of August 2018.

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I'm so delighted to have back on as a returning guest, probably my most frequently interviewed guest of all time,

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Phil Johnson. He's going to be on with us for the first hour only and today we are going to be discussing social justice warriors doing injustice to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Coming up in the second hour, another dear friend of mine returns to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and that is author, conference speaker, and professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

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I'm speaking of Dr. Tony Costa. He is going to be addressing during the second hour the centrality of the trinity in Christian theology and will be also talking about an upcoming online course on the trinity that he is conducting with Toronto Baptist Seminary.

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But first of all, let me introduce to you my friend, author, conference speaker, and executive director of John MacArthur's media ministry, grace to you,

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Phil Johnson. Hey, thanks Chris, good to be with you. It's always great to have you on and let me give our listeners our email address right away.

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It is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com if you have a question of your own about our theme today, which is a very controversial theme, social justice warriors doing injustice to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Well, first of all, Phil, I think it might be wise for us to start out with what is this social justice that people are clamoring about constantly in the media today?

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Well, social justice is one of those code words that is frequently used to mean various things to various people, which makes it unfortunate because it's an ambiguous term that is often thrown around, but usually points back to some issue having to do with civil rights or income equality or something of that sort, suggesting that there are, and there are, uh, social, uh, injustices that are sort of ubiquitous in this world.

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And, uh, and yet the term implies usually from the people who use it, that they see some, they, they want some sort of political or governmentally sponsored, uh, uh, remedy to the, whatever the injustices that they're pointing to.

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So that we should pass a law that, you know, makes it impossible to do this thing or that, which in and of itself would be fine, but it's really not the mission of the gospel or the mission of Christians to, uh, use legal means to change our society.

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Our calling is to proclaim the gospel, which has built in it, uh, a divine justice that is different and broader and higher and more profound than what most people have in mind when they speak of social justice.

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And, uh, one of the concerns I have lately is it seems to me that, uh, uh, many evangelicals in their rhetoric have conflated the notion of biblical justice and social justice, and they're willing actually to settle for a lesser kind of justice than biblical justice and gospel -based justice.

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Well, when we approach God, isn't it mercy that we want and not justice?

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Well, that's the interesting thing, though. The gospel, uh, says we, that the mercy of God comes to us not by overthrowing justice, but by fulfilling it.

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God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. And scripture is very emphatic about that, that, uh, forgiveness is obtained not by the overthrow of justice, but by the fulfillment of it.

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And, um, uh, that's a point I think a lot of people miss in the gospel. They think that God forgives simply by ignoring the demands of his law or overlooking the breaches of his law.

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And in fact, the gospel is, it makes a totally different point that God is both just and the justifier of the one who believes in Jesus, so that he justifies the ungodly.

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That's a, that's an amazing statement, isn't it? Chapter four, that God justifies the ungodly.

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There's something about that that sounds unsavory, except that in the context of the gospel, you see that justice is completely fulfilled, so that forgiveness for repentant sinners is free.

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And one of the ramifications of that is that therefore we are obliged to forgive one another as we've been forgiven.

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And that means we can't be, uh, we can't be constantly sort of drumming up resentment over past sins of past generations and trying to set people groups against each other.

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That's so contrary to the message of the gospel that I'm amazed it ever got a footing in the evangelical movement.

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But it is all the rage right now, and a couple of the largest evangelical conferences so far this year have devoted whole sections of their conferences, and one conference in particular was devoted entirely to the subject of social justice, dealing with primarily with racial injustice and racial division, and doing more,

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I think, to promote resentment and division than forgiveness and unity.

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Well, judging from some of the things that you said, I'm assuming what you mean by as far as dredging up past sins of the ancestors of many, but ironically not even the ancestors of all white people, because let's face it, we're talking about white people in general as a whole, as a group.

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Because of the lack of melanin content in our skin, we are told that we need to repent because we are automatically deemed as being guilty of being racist, and yet those that are hurling the accusation make no such claim about themselves in any way, shape, or form.

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And many of us who live in this country, many of us pale -skinned folks, my ancestors never owned slaves, and if my viking ancestors ever owned them, they were white.

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My mother's parents came here from Poland in the early 20th century, escaping the

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Nazi occupation of Poland, and my father's ancestors came here in the 1860s, fleeing the heavy -handed church state, or state church, the

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Lutheran state church in Scandinavia. My ancestors in Norway were

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Baptists, and non -Lutherans were being arrested and fined for performing or participating in the two ordinances of the church without a

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Lutheran minister's license, and so there was a massive exodus. But anyway, so neither of my sides of the family were ever slave owners of black

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Africans, and so therefore, why is it that I and multitudes of other white people—you might even have some first -generation

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Americans that are being accused of this sin of racism, and it is...

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Well, yeah, when you make that accusation, and in fact, I think it was

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Thabiti Anyobule that wrote an article on this. You and I had a conversation about this on a broadcast a couple of months ago, where he said he believes all white people need to confess their parents' and grandparents' complicity in the murder of Martin Luther King.

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Yeah, I was offended by that, because neither my parents nor my grandparents were in any way complicit in that.

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But, I mean, let's look at this from a biblical point of view, the bigger picture. I could talk about, well, none of my ancestors owned slaves, either, and all that, but let's face it, all of my ancestors were sinners, and some of them were deplorable sinners, guilty of possibly atrocities that I don't even know about.

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But that's true of all of us. I don't know that anyone didn't descend from stock that was sinful.

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In fact, that would be impossible if you take a biblical worldview and understand that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

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All of our ancestors were sinners. We're not guilty because of what they did, and Ezekiel 18 is an entire chapter of Scripture devoted to that, that the son is not guilty of the sins of the father, unless he becomes a participant in those same sins.

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And so this whole thing about generational sin and generational guilt is actually a departure and a deflection from gospel truth.

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The gospel's about forgiveness. And it does call for repentance, but it calls for repentance for the things

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I'm guilty of, not the things that my great -great -great -grandparents might have been guilty of.

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Right. I don't see anything in the New Testament where the Gentiles who have become

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Christians are demanded some kind of repentance against their views of Jews before their salvation.

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Of course, everything that they had as a sin in their lives needed to be repented of. But I'm talking about where that uniquely was something that they needed to declare as a people group.

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And the Jews on the other side were kept free from the responsibility of that, when in reality we see the

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Jews being the ones, the very ones in the New Testament, being rebuked for racism against the

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Gentiles. And in fact, we have, you know, the Apostle Paul, obviously, rebuking the

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Judaizers and the Galatians for really trying to turn Christianity into a

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Jewish club, exclusively Jewish club. But see, even that, even that, though, was in a context where Paul's concern was about the theology, not the sociology.

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And if you just step back and look at the New Testament world, the Roman Empire at that point, there were all kinds of atrocities and injustices going on in the culture.

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And you just don't see any call in the New Testament for the Church to rally together and avail themselves of legal means to try to, you know, get new rulers or legislation that's going to eliminate social injustices.

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That's just not the thrust of the Gospel. And in fact, I think the Church actually got off track.

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People often say, well, but what about abortion? You oppose abortion, you favor laws to outlaw abortion.

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I do favor laws that would outlaw abortion. I also favor laws that outlaw racism.

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But it's not the mission of the Church to devote her energies and resources to activism, to try to change the laws.

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That's not what we're called to do. We're called to proclaim the Gospel. And, you know, as individuals, you can be involved in whatever political thing you want, but when people begin to try to rally the

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Church as a political bloc for any purpose, I think we've gone off message.

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That's not the Gospel. The Gospel is not about the law. The Gospel and the law are really two separate things, and Scripture says if righteousness could have come by the law, then

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Christ died in vain. And those are truths that I think are being lost and obscured and even denied in a lot of this emphasis on social justice today.

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It's a great concern. In fact, John MacArthur has said all of the issues that he's ever been involved in, polemics in defense of the

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Gospel, there was the lordship debate, there was the debate over pragmatism and, you know,

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Church leadership style and psychology and the sufficiency of Scripture and the authority of Scripture and all of those things, there's been numerous controversies that he's engaged in over the years.

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He has said recently he thinks this thrust to divert the

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Church's energy and resources to the issue of social justice and sort of leftist view of social justice, this could be the greatest threat to the

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Gospel of all of them. And in fact, in a way, it's a culmination of the influences of all those previous attacks on the

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Gospel. Wow. Yeah, one of the reasons I even brought up the Judaizers and the

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Jews that were indeed showing favoritism towards their own kind and excluding Gentiles from even the dinner table, is that Jews were a persecuted minority then, and they did not have any prestigious right to harbor those feelings of victimhood and anger and hatred and bitterness towards the

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Gentiles, even though they were victims. So therefore, unlike what we hear today, just because you may be of a darker skin and just because you're, especially your ancestors, perhaps your parents and those preceding your parents, may have been persecuted, and perhaps even quite harshly, that does not give you a carte blanche liberty to think that you cannot be guilty of the sin of bigotry.

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Yeah, I think that's an important point, because one of the grosser errors floating around there today is,

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I think, the idea that persecuted minorities cannot be guilty of racism, because in order to be a racist, you have to be in a position of power.

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And so what's actually, I know numerous evangelicals, loud evangelical voices on blogs and Twitter and so on, parroting that, which is an idea that came, of course, from the secular left wing, in order to justify a lot of hateful rhetoric that comes from the left side of the spectrum that would be racist if you said the exact same thing in the opposite direction.

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But the idea is, well, if you're African American or if you're a member of a minority, a persecuted minority, you can't be racist, because you're not in a position of power.

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That's a total fallacy. Racism is simply hatred for someone based on the color of their skin or their nationality or ethnic background or whatever, and it doesn't matter which direction it's going.

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That sort of contempt is manifestly wrong, and it's a violation of the second great commandment to love your neighbor as you love yourself.

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And I don't see how any Christian can possibly defend that kind of thing and say it's not racism because it's coming from a persecuted minority.

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It still is. And that sort of imbalance, moral imbalance, in some of the rhetoric and discussion that's going on out there today is one of the things that concerns me the greatest.

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It's a skewed moral perspective, and to hear that coming from evangelicals and sometimes even from leading evangelicals really is a deep travesty,

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I think, and it's an insult to the gospel and to Christ.

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Yeah, it seems as if we are seeing this relived in our modern day from what we were warned about in Matthew 7 verse 5, where you are supposed to pull the plank out of your own eye before removing a speck from your brother's eye.

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It seems that the people very often hurling the accusation of racism against white people in general and even white

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Christians, they are not even recognizing that very often, if not most often, their rhetoric includes racist and bigoted attitudes from their own lips.

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Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a fair statement, actually. It's a shame, but I think what has brought it about is a tendency for the

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Church to imitate the attitudes, the values, the rhetoric of the world.

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This came from the world into the Church. This is not a biblical perspective that somebody has suddenly discovered fresh insight from the pages of Scripture, and now we really ought to make this the center of our message.

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That's, I think, what a lot of the champions of social justice are either saying or implying, and it's a total fallacy.

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Now, Tucker Carlson is one of my favorite talk show hosts. I don't know where he is theologically.

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I know that he claims to be an Episcopalian. I don't know if he is really a brother in Christ or not. It's hard to say sometimes, but he said something on the program recently, on his program, that I thought had relevance and had a ring of truth to it.

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He was talking about the fact that white supremacy is being treated as if this is a national plague that dominates the culture in America, whereas he said in America you could live your entire life and never really meet a person who is truly a white supremacist, and do you think that he's accurate on that?

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Yeah, I think it may be a bit of an exaggeration. I've met a few white supremacists, and you can see them online, and there used to be, in fact, a nest of reformed racists at a website called

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Little Geneva. Do you remember that one? Is that the Kinsmen Redeemer folks? Well, they call themselves

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Kinnists. Right, right, right. Yeah, and so I know they exist out there.

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I deplore that. I think they are also a significant problem.

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It's just that I don't see them having widespread influence, but let me say this. I think any time the

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Church imitates the... I don't watch Fox News either, just so you know.

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I'm not advocating a corresponding right -wing answer to what

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I see as a sort of leftist intrusion into the Church's rhetoric. I think either way would be bad.

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I don't think the Church's message should be colored by secular politics on either side of the spectrum.

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Our role is to preach the Gospel, and I deplore the racists as much as I deplore the race baiters on the left.

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It's just that there aren't that many of them. I don't know of anyone in my circle of personal relationships who would ever defend racism or suggest that those attitudes that you see on websites like the old

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Little Geneva, the Kinnists, the overtly white supremacists, or any of that.

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I don't know of anybody who defends that. It is a very small minority, and in that sense, what Tucker Carlson is saying,

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I agree with. I think he may exaggerate the case. I think what he meant was a full -blown supremacist, not somebody who, since we all have sinned, we may all at times, in fact we all do at times, think more highly of ourselves than we ought.

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We look down on others for no real legitimate reason at all, so we all may have some kind of remnants of racism in us to one degree or another.

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But he's talking about somebody of the level of a Klansman or Neo -Nazi, I believe, and that is being viewed and portrayed as being some kind of dominant plague in our country.

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Yeah, I don't think it is at this point, but one of my concerns about this whole social justice movement is that it's going to unleash a backlash that actually empowers the white racists and these

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Neo -Nazis and people. I see them actually gaining influence because so many people react against the obvious militancy and radicalism of people who are touting social justice notions such as the redistribution of wealth and government -enforced language, forcing you to use certain pronouns.

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It's not all about racism, by the way. It also has to do with gender roles and sexual preferences and all of that.

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It's all together. When you say it's all together, are you speaking about that element within even the more biblically, theologically, and doctrinally conservative circles that this stuff, the sex aspect?

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I think it's coming together. I wouldn't say that everyone on the—it's obvious that not everyone in the evangelical world who is clamoring for social justice also would be on the bandwagon of saying, we need to soften our stance against gay rights activists and all of that.

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But it's coming, and I see a drift in that direction. It wouldn't surprise me if a decade from now, those things are so inextricably linked that—in fact, there are people making the argument, evangelicals making the argument, that to marginalize anyone because of their race or their sexual identity or their sexual preferences, it's all the same.

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In fact, there was recently a conference on—I forget how they sold it, but the idea was sexual minorities in the church.

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That was the kind of language they used. You're talking about the MLK conference? No, no, the—I forget the name of it.

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It was just a few weeks ago. It was a conference on how the church should accommodate what they called sexual minorities.

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Oh, you're talking about the Revoice conference. Revoice, that's right. Right. Well, we did discuss the issue of social justice gone wild not long ago.

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What, perhaps, have you learned since then, or what additional things, perhaps, that Dr.

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MacArthur has raised that you would like to address today to further expand our awareness?

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Yeah, it's a timely question because just yesterday on the Grace to You blog, we released the first of a series of articles that's coming from John MacArthur dealing with this issue.

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And I think the thing that strikes me about it, most of the response we've gotten has been positive.

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Lots of people saying, you know, it's about time someone like John MacArthur would speak out in a sensible way on this issue and try to re -center the compass of the evangelical movement on something that seems to be quickly going astray.

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But we've also gotten, I would say maybe 15 % of our response has been negative pushback.

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And what surprises me about it, Chris, is how vitriolic and angry some of this is.

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I mean, MacArthur hasn't really even said anything very controversial so far. And yet, the outpouring of vitriol from people who hold, who know they're going to hold a different perspective than what they think he's going to say, it's just been astonishing.

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Because he's attacking their narrative, you know. And the narrative is everything in this.

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You have to buy into the narrative. And if you're white and you reject the narrative, it's because you're a racist.

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If you're black and you reject the narrative, it's because you're a sellout or an Uncle Tom or whatever. And so, the answers you get aren't typically rationally based arguments.

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They are insults and ad hominem and accusations of racism.

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And once you're labeled a racist, you know this, in current culture, once you're labeled a racist,

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I mean, you're done. You're sunk. Lots of people have lost their jobs because of an indiscreet tweet or something like that that was taken wrong or that was implying something or use a word that somebody doesn't like.

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And you get the stigma of being a racist and a bigot that will stick with you for life.

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So, it's risky to speak out against this. And therefore, the narrative is just driving forward like a juggernaut through the evangelical movement.

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And tons of people are jumping on the bandwagon because there really aren't very many influential voices speaking words of warning about it.

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Now, the thing that puzzles me is that I got saved by God's mercy in the 1980s.

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And during those decades leading up till now, I have seen, especially amongst the theologically reformed or Calvinist or sovereign grace believers,

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I've seen a steady rise of people of color becoming reformed and becoming not only reformed individuals, but becoming reformed advocates in the publishing realm and ministry and pastoral authority, growing and growing.

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And all of a sudden, this issue seems to have come out of nowhere, where you once had men like Thabiti Anyabwile only nine years ago on my program, talking about his book,

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The Decline of African American Theology, and actually blaming the very mindset that he seems to be echoing today, he was blaming that mindset for the decline and the actual doctrine and beliefs and soteriology and on and on, when it comes to the black church at large.

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What do you think it is that after all of this time where there was more of a harmonious voice amongst black and white believers, especially in the reformed community, why all of a sudden this tension and this war that seems to have erupted?

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Well, partly I think it reflects what's going on in the secular culture. I don't think the recent presidential election in America did anything to bring

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Americans together towards the center. It has radicalized people on both sides.

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And I think there's no question that Thabiti's mind or at least his rhetoric has changed over the past decade.

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I've pointed that out online. He wasn't happy when I pointed that out, and he insists that he hasn't really changed his mind.

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But I have to say, I have his book, The Decline of African American Theology, and it's an excellent book.

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I've recommended it, and yet now he seems to have softened...

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James Cone, the founder of black liberation theology, which is a radical, communistic, left -wing secular theology, really, if you can have such a thing.

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He died recently, and there were all these accolades heaped on him by evangelicals who really ought to deplore that doctrine.

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But it seems to me that if you're a black evangelical, it's so politically incorrect nowadays to critique liberation theology and those radical tendencies that grew out of, really, a communist approach to civil rights issues.

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These men have at least softened their public stance on it. Whether they've actually changed their mind about it or not,

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I don't know what's going on in their minds, and I don't want to try to speculate on that.

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But I will say that the shift in rhetoric is dangerous, and it points a wrong direction.

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It's taking a soft message. And it was really Thabiti himself who made this point.

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I think it was in 2008 at the Together for the Gospel conference, where he was saying things then like, if you're talking about social justice and all these racial issues, you're off message.

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I agreed with that. I agree emphatically with that, and I wish he still did.

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I'm going to try and pray that I'm successful in getting Thabiti on the show eventually to have a dialogue with someone who is concerned about the direction he has taken.

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I mean, Thabiti in his book and on my program—in fact, I will email anyone who asks for it, the free

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MP3 of my two interviews with him on the decline of African American theology—but he was blaming the downfall of African American theology not only to the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s that secularized the movement of civil rights, but he also went back to the abolitionist movement, where when he said that they became secularized, that was like a root of this decline.

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And I can't even imagine him saying that today. And the thing that does...

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He might, he might. You know, it would be interesting. I hope you can get him on. I have to say, I love Thabiti. Yeah, me too.

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He's a delightful person in person to have a relationship with and all that.

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I've had good fellowship with him at times in the past. We've spoken at conferences together, and when he preaches the

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Word, when he's preaching the Gospel, there's nobody better. But I have this fear that he's gone off -message just based on what he has published publicly over the last two or three years.

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It's not just one or two things. It's been a two - or three -year -long campaign by him, and it just seems to me to be pointing away from the

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Gospel. Yeah, we have to go to our first break right now, and if you have a question that you'd like to ask

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Phil Johnson, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the

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USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private manner. Don't go away.

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We'll be right back with Phil Johnson right after these messages. My name is Steve Lawson, founder and president of One Passion Ministries, as well as teaching fellow for Ligonier Ministries.

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I serve as professor of preaching and oversee the Doctor of Ministry program at the Master's Seminary in Los Angeles.

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I would like to recommend the church where one of my preaching students, Andy Woodard, serves as the pastor.

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It's called New Covenant Church, NYC. They are a Reformed Baptist church that meets in Midtown Manhattan.

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You can find their service times and location on their website, which is www .ncc .nyc.

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They believe in a sovereign God who commands all men everywhere to repent and believe the

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Gospel. If you're looking for a church that believes in expository preaching, which is simply biblical preaching, in New York City, I'd like to recommend that you visit

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New Covenant Church, NYC. Again, their information can be found at www .ncc

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.nyc. Have a great day. James White here, co -founder of Alvin Omega Ministries and occasional guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

34:46

I'm so delighted that my friend Chris Arnzen will be heading down to Atlanta for the next G3 Conference from January 17th to the 19th, 2019, where I'll be joining a very impressive lineup of speakers on the theme,

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A Biblical Understanding of Missions. Speakers include John Piper, Steve Lawson, Bodhi Balcombe, Mark Dever, Conrad Mbewe, Phil Johnson, Josh Bice, yours truly, and many more.

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I hope you all join Chris and me for this phenomenal event. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

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That's g3conference .com. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune into A Visit to the

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Next Thursday, the 23rd of August, he's going in for surgery prep, and he is actually having the surgery,

37:22

God willing, on the morning of Friday, the 24th of August. So please pray that this very complicated, very delicate, very dangerous, very serious open -heart surgery that he is undergoing will be successfully performed, and that our great physician

37:37

Jesus Christ will raise him from his hospital bed a stronger and healthier man physically than he has been in years, and even a stronger and healthier man spiritually as a result of the trial our loving and merciful

37:48

Lord has placed him in. And so keep praying for Mike Gaydosh. We are now back with our interview with Phil Johnson.

37:55

He's on for the first hour, and we are discussing social justice warriors doing injustice to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

38:02

Coming up in our second hour, we will be joined by Dr. Tony Costa, and we'll be discussing the centrality of the

38:08

Trinity in Christian theology. Phil, before we go on with the social justice theme,

38:14

I know that you are one of the speakers again at the G3 conference, where I will,

38:20

God willing, be manning an exhibitor's booth for the third year in a row. And I know that the theme is the mission of God.

38:28

Do you have yet a specific theme under that umbrella that you are going to be speaking on?

38:34

No, I don't. I'm thinking about the subject, and it's so big. I'm looking forward to it, though.

38:40

I love that conference. Yes, I do. Yeah, looking forward to it. And in fact, I know I owe you something about that.

38:46

Yes, you do. I'm going to do that this afternoon, and as soon as we hang up,

38:52

I have to go down for a recording session, and I'll do that. Great. And Phil is talking about a commercial that he's going to do for the

38:58

Iron Trip and Zion Radio program. Let's see. We have B .B.

39:06

in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who asks, Phil, what do you think the primary things that you need to warn the church at large about in regard to social justice and regards to what it is deflecting us from actually concentrating our focus of attention on?

39:26

Well, let me say this. I think any time evangelicals find themselves parroting the conversation that's going on on the cable news networks, they are off topic, right?

39:41

That's not the substance of our message that we're given to proclaim.

39:47

In fact, I made a tweet today that I thought was linked to a statement by Steve Lawson that I thought was just brilliant and insightful, but very simple.

39:59

Someone asked him, if you were going to preach on the subject of Obamacare, how would you do it?

40:07

And Steve Lawson, in his inimitable way, said, all right, get a pencil and take this down. He said, first,

40:13

I would preach through the book of Romans, verse by verse. He said, and when you're finished with that, preach through the gospel of John, verse by verse.

40:21

He says, are you writing this down? And then he says, when you get through the entire

40:26

New Testament, as you go through those books, any time you find a reference to Obamacare, preach on it.

40:39

Just keep in the text. And that's where I'm at on this.

40:45

And it doesn't mean twist the text so that you can work in your political positions and secular views and all of that, but just teach what the

40:55

Word of God says. Well, I could go back to Exodus, thou shalt not steal.

41:02

Sorry about that. Yeah. Well, I mean, all of the principles of justice are there, but you see, biblical justice is wider.

41:11

When people talk about social justice, they're talking about income equality and equal opportunity and all of those things, some of which do have a bearing on principles that are in Scripture, but the biblical idea of justice is much broader than that, and the biblical idea of justice includes swift and decisive punishment for evildoers.

41:33

And sometimes the social justice rhetoric utterly omits the balance of that.

41:41

The biblical idea of justice is just far more balanced and full -orbed than you find people are talking about when they use the term social justice.

41:53

And so I think if you stay in the text, the balance is there automatically. Once you depart from the text, once you begin to preach topical messages rather than just doing biblical exposition, you're going to get off message.

42:07

You're going to be imbalanced. You're in some way or another twisting the truth to suit your own preferences, and it's just not a good way to go.

42:16

Yeah, that is one of the definitely solid reasons why expository preaching is very valuable, because it's not perfect in preventing hobby -horsing, because if somebody's determined to be a hobby -horser, they're going to do something to accomplish their goals.

42:38

Yeah, I know a guy who's into preterism. It's a particular view of eschatology, who can find a preterist message in any text you give him.

42:50

That's not what I'm talking about. Yes, and then, of course, we have the gift of John MacArthur, who is an extraordinary example of expository preaching.

43:01

It's amazing how many people love John MacArthur, even outside of his theological orbit.

43:07

Can you think of anyone else in our generation who has pastored the same church for 50 years?

43:15

He's coming up on his 50th anniversary, who has stayed in the text the entire time, who has said the difficult things.

43:25

It's not like he tries to kowtow to people's preferences and has, at many times, said things that were deeply unpopular, and yet he's earned the respect,

43:35

I think, and the right to be listened to by evangelicals as a whole. He's more conservative than most, and I see that, of course, as a good thing.

43:44

Not everyone would, but regardless of your perspective, you have to look at his life and say, look, here's a man who's been unstintingly faithful for 50 years.

43:58

His experience counts for something. His steadfastness counts for something.

44:04

This is a voice that needs to be listened to. One of the disturbing things was that when we posted that blog post, by him as the first in a series on this subject, where he barely touches on it, a well -known

44:18

Christian leader wrote a tweet saying something very hateful, really snide, like,

44:23

John MacArthur faceplants in a pile of conservative rubbish. It's just disrespectful, but it shows the attitude that underlies so much of this rhetoric that has taken place of the gospel, which doesn't speak in a tone like that.

44:43

Right. We have Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, who says, I have heard you on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio before, and I've also heard and read other things that you have said in this regard, so I think that a clarification would be helpful for you.

45:00

I know that although you disagree with the Church as an institution being politically involved, you are not opposed to Christians as individuals being politically involved.

45:10

Am I right on that? Right. We all have a calling. Some people's vocation is dentistry, and some people's vocation is government leadership.

45:23

Thankfully, I'm thankful for them being called to be witnesses in the realm of politics, but it's not the

45:31

Church's calling to do dentistry. It's not the Church's calling to do dentistry.

45:38

I don't see why it's so difficult for people to separate those things, but any time you get into a political issue, there are people who think, okay, we need to give some pulpit time to this political issue and rally our

45:50

Church as a voting bloc to try to do this thing, and I think that's always a mistake.

45:55

At the end of the day, politics is the wisdom of this world, which is foolishness with God, and at the very best, a political remedy to any social evil or moral problem is going to be a temporary and unsuccessful solution.

46:13

The only solution to human sin is the Gospel, and we have that message. Why give it up for a lesser temporary solution?

46:22

And you see this in the history of the Church. Every time the Church has become politically active, for example, in the beginning of the 20th century, the thing among evangelicals was to clamor for rules to outlaw the sale of liquor, because we could end drunkenness if we just didn't have booze.

46:41

And they were successful in getting prohibition passed as legislation, but that was perhaps the most unsuccessful moral political experiment ever in the history of American politics.

46:57

It was counterproductive. And the end was worse than the beginning.

47:05

And it's that way with everything. Like I said earlier, I am all in favor of laws to outlaw abortion, but I'm not going to devote my energies only to the clamoring for legislation against those things.

47:20

While I'll vote for that, and I'll argue for it and all of that, I don't see that as a sufficient solution to the abortion issue.

47:30

The only sufficient solution ultimately is the gospel, and people's hearts and minds need to be transformed by Jesus Christ.

47:38

And until that happens, they're going to be sinners with sinful desires and sinful actions that result in complications like unwanted pregnancies.

47:47

And a law against abortion isn't going to solve the root problem, the root issue, but the gospel does.

47:53

So why would we give up that message for a different one? Now, don't you think though that there is a danger, because I have experienced this,

48:01

I have heard people who will take what you're saying but run way too far to the left with it.

48:09

They will take things that really transcend politics, such as abortion.

48:16

The murder of an unborn child transcends a political issue or political discussion. And they will say, since politicians talk about this, we're just not going to ever talk about it or address it or condemn it.

48:29

That's politics talk, and they'll say the same thing about homosexual marriage and on and on.

48:35

Right. You know, again, if you're living your life in the scriptures and drawing your message from the scriptures, you're not going to fall into those imbalances.

48:46

You can't do that. You can't bleed scripture and yet be silent on the issue of abortion or homosexuality or any of the other great moral issues of our time.

48:57

What I'm arguing though is that we should never think that getting a law passed against these evils is a sufficient answer to the evil itself.

49:07

It isn't. It won't be, and it won't put a stop to it either until people's hearts are changed by the gospel.

49:15

Now, it wasn't that long ago. I don't know if it was during the first presidential race with Barack Obama or not, but I remember

49:24

Dr. MacArthur, though, he gave a message about the evils of the Democratic Party. Do you remember this message?

49:32

Yeah, I do. He was pointing out that so much on the, I think it was shortly after the

49:38

Democratic National Convention, he was just pointing out that so many of the issues on that platform were direct attacks on biblical morality, which is, you know, it's a simple matter of fact.

49:53

There are governments and politicians who are evil, and it's right to point that out.

49:59

John the Baptist lost his life because of that. And, you know,

50:04

Elijah wasn't afraid to walk right into the king's palace and pronounce judgment on him.

50:12

And that's the prophetic message we're called to proclaim, but it's one thing to do that, to declare those things and take a stand, a public stand, and teach people and all that.

50:25

It's another thing to give up gospel preaching for political rallying, and that often happens.

50:34

I mean, in the abortion issue, for example, there was a great push even as long as 20 years ago,

50:41

I remember this being a concern of mine, that a lot of the evangelicals who were clamoring for anti -abortion laws were also arguing that we needed to soften our stance against the

50:55

Roman Catholic errors, because Rome was our ally in the war against abortion, and we didn't want to offend our

51:03

Roman Catholic partners in this political endeavor by preaching a gospel that would offend them.

51:10

And that's the kind of thing that concerns me when Christians sell out for a political issue or become so obsessed with one issue that they forget the breadth of biblical morality in the gospel, they tend to get skewed.

51:23

I mean, this is the exact same thing that happened, you know, not to pick on Thabiti again, but during the election, the last election, he was campaigning for votes for Hillary Clinton, who's a great advocate of abortion.

51:39

Even late -term abortion, she even defended it with a smile on her face. But it's because he saw racism as such a greater evil than abortion, that I don't know, it skewed his moral perspective.

51:53

He was okay to accept this, and other Christians, same thing.

51:58

They were actively stumping for an immoral candidate because they liked his policies better than hers.

52:08

I have a problem either way, and, you know, I have to vote ultimately, and so I'll vote for whatever candidate

52:17

I think is best. But if, in my rhetoric as a Christian, I convey to the public the idea that this man's immorality is a non -issue, or that this woman's advocacy of abortion is really a non -issue, it's not something we should worry about, then you've given a bad message.

52:37

You've damaged your own testimony. Well, I heard a rumor, and this is one of the few rumors that I would love to spread further, because it's a wonderful rumor.

52:50

I heard that Pyromaniacs has returned. Yes, in a limited way.

52:58

I honestly haven't posted that much, but I did reopen the doors of the blog, mainly because I'm concerned about this very issue, the pressure to switch our message so that we're concerned with social justice rather than divine justice, or social justice more than we're concerned with divine justice, or we talk about it more than we do.

53:22

People are going to pick apart whatever I say about that, but it's undeniable that the language of the movement and our leadership has shifted in the past five years so that people are talking more about social justice and racial issues than they are about divine justice and redemption, and I'm concerned about that.

53:46

And so I originally started my blog because I was concerned about the emerging church movement and its influence, and no one seemed to be critiquing it.

53:56

And so I started the blog to just give a critique to something I thought needed to be critiqued.

54:02

And when the emerging church movement died as a movement, their ideas are still floating around out there, but the movement died,

54:11

I felt like I kind of ran out of opinions. I had nothing else to say, and so I stopped blogging in 2012 or thereabout, and the blog sort of wound down to virtually nothing.

54:25

But I'm intending to crank it back up and get more back into posting opinions on this social justice issue, because I think it is the important issue of our time as far as evangelical faithfulness is concerned.

54:41

Well, how can our listeners access the all -new Pyromaniacs?

54:46

It's the same as the old one. Same address. If you have a link to the old one, it's a little long, so I won't give it, but I did buy a shortened domain for it, so I think it's just pyromaniacs .net.

55:01

Great, pyromaniacs .net. And I know that the Grace to You website is gty .org, gty .org.

55:08

And I know that the G3 conference, where you are on the very long and very impressive roster, is g3conference .com,

55:17

g3conference .com. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing you again and sharing fellowship with you January 17th through the 19th of 2019, which will be here before you know it.

55:27

Me, too. That's going to be a good time, I think. Amen. Well, Phil, I know that you could only be on with us for the first hour.

55:33

I look forward to having you back again, especially when you could be on for two hours. And I just thank you from the depths of my heart for being able to fill in today at late notice, because, as you know, my previously scheduled guest had to back out due to a church emergency.

55:49

So we look forward to having you. Thanks for having me. Hey, thank you, brother. And please put a bug in Dr.

55:55

MacArthur's ear that I want to have him back on the show. All right, thanks. All right, well, God bless you, brother.

56:01

Yep. Take care. Bye -bye. And coming up during our second hour, my dear friend

56:07

Dr. Tony Costa will be joining us, God willing. We are going to be discussing the

56:12

Trinity, so if you have a question on the centrality of the Trinity in Christian theology, give us an email at chrisarnson at gmail .com.

56:22

chrisarnson at gmail .com. This is our elongated break, so please take this advantage of this opportunity to not only write down questions for Dr.

56:31

Tony Costa on the Trinity, but also to write down the information provided by our advertisers so that you can successfully patronize them and do so more frequently so that Iron Sharpens Iron Radio can remain on the air longer because we depend upon their advertising dollars.

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01:11:32

Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary on the centrality of the Trinity in Christian theology.

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But before we do that, we just have a few announcements to make. This coming September the 7th,

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Friday, September the 7th, my dear friend, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries will be joined by Dr.

01:11:52

Michael L. Brown of the Line of Fire program and the Fire School of Ministry, and they are going to be lecturing at the

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Theological Seminary, Friday, September 7th at 6 .30 p .m. Also in Jacksonville, Florida, the very next night,

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James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries and Dr. Michael L. Brown of the Line of Fire and the

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Christians who believe that homosexuality is acceptable in the eyes of God.

01:13:10

The debate theme is, is homosexuality consistent with New Testament obedience?

01:13:17

I intend to be there. I helped orchestrate this event. I hope you join me there. That will be

01:13:22

Saturday, September 8th at 6 .30 p .m. at the Switzerland Community Church in St. John's, Florida, which is a suburb of Jacksonville.

01:13:30

The website is Switzerlandcc .org. Switzerlandcc, for communitychurch .org.

01:13:36

And then, coming up in November, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is having their annual

01:13:42

Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology. On the theme, the glory of the cross. It will be held at the

01:13:48

Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and the speakers include David Garner, Ray Ortlund, Richard Phillips, Timothy Gibson, and Carlton Nguyen.

01:13:57

That is November 9th and the 10th, and if you'd like to join me there, I plan to be there as well with an

01:14:02

Iron Sharpens Iron Exhibitors booth. Go to AllianceNet .org, AllianceNet .org, click on events, and then scroll down to Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology.

01:14:12

That's AllianceNet .org. Then, coming up in January, you heard us talking about it earlier with Phil Johnson.

01:14:20

The G3 Conference is returning to Atlanta, Georgia, College Park, Georgia, to be more precise, a suburb of Atlanta, and I am so pumped up about going to this for the third year in a row.

01:14:33

The G3 Conference, which stands for Gospel, Grace, and Glory, and the dates, exact dates, are

01:14:43

Thursday, January 17th through Saturday, January 19th.

01:14:49

Tell your Spanish -speaking and bilingual friends that there is also an exclusively Spanish -speaking edition of the conference on Wednesday, January 16th.

01:14:58

But the English -speaking conference, they have an enormous lineup, as always, featuring

01:15:05

Dr. James R. White, John Piper, Stephen Lawson, Vody Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad M.

01:15:11

Bayway, Tim Challies, Phil Johnson, who is our first guest today, Josh Bice, the founder of the

01:15:17

G3 Conference, Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, Stephen J.

01:15:22

Nichols, who is the president of the Reformation Bible College, founded by R .C. Sproul and Ligonier Ministries, and many, many more.

01:15:28

If you'd like to attend that event, and even if you'd like to register for your own exhibitors booth, like I will be manning there,

01:15:35

God willing, and they're expecting between 4 ,000 and 5 ,000 people there, so it's a great place to have an exhibitors booth, go to g3conference .com,

01:15:44

g3conference .com. Please make sure you tell all of these organizations, if you register for these events, that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:15:52

Last but not least, if you love this radio show, you don't want it to disappear from the airwaves, please go to ironsharpensironradio .com,

01:15:59

click support, then click, click to donate now, and you can donate instantly with a credit or debit card.

01:16:04

You can also donate via snail mail at the address that you will see appear on the screen, and if you want to advertise with us, send us an email to chrisarnzen at gmail .com

01:16:15

and put advertising in the subject line, because we truly do need your advertising dollars to remain on the air.

01:16:22

That's chrisarnzen at gmail .com and put advertising in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question to our guest, our second guest today,

01:16:31

Dr. Tony Costa, who is the professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, and we are talking about the centrality of the trinity in Christian theology, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my dear friend,

01:16:46

Dr. Tony Costa. Dr. Costa, I'm sorry,

01:16:51

I had you on mute accidentally. Well, I'm used to that. I'm just saying it's always a pleasure to be with you, brother

01:16:58

Chris. It's always the pleasure is all mine and my audience, brother, and before we go into the subject at hand, just briefly give our listeners a summary of what

01:17:10

Toronto Baptist Seminary is all about. Yeah, Toronto Baptist Seminary is a reformed

01:17:15

Baptist seminary in Toronto in Canada, and it traces its origins to the 1930s.

01:17:25

It was started by the late Dr. T .T. Shields, who was the pastor of the

01:17:30

Jarvis Street Baptist Church, one of the oldest Baptist churches in the city of Toronto, and we are committed to reformed theology, sound theology.

01:17:41

We train men and women for missions, and we also train men for the ministry, as well as training young men and women to progress in their academic skills into going into doctoral programs in other colleges and universities.

01:18:01

So we're both missional, we're also theological, but we're also rigorously academic.

01:18:08

Now, also before we get into the heart of the discussion on the

01:18:13

Trinity, I want you to tell our listeners about this exciting upcoming online course they can take that focuses on the one of the pillars of the

01:18:26

Christian faith, the Trinity, that is an eight -week course, I understand. Yes, the course will take place in Toronto, Canada, but we have become somewhat of an online school as well.

01:18:40

We have folks joining us via the internet to the course in Toronto, from around the

01:18:47

United States as well as other parts of Canada. We have people as far away as Australia joining in.

01:18:54

So it's going to be an eight -week course. It's going to run Sunday afternoons, starting September the 9th, from 2 p .m.

01:19:02

till 4 30 p .m., and so it's a course that is geared to grounding Christians in the doctrine of the

01:19:09

Trinity, what it is, what it is not, the Trinity through the Old Testament, the

01:19:14

Trinity in the New Testament, how the Trinity relates to God's identity and person and character, and also how the

01:19:22

Trinity also relates to the redemptive work of God in the salvation of His people. And so it's a very exciting course.

01:19:29

We really need this course, Chris, because, as you know, the Trinity is the subject of frequent attacks from Islam, the cults all deny the

01:19:41

Trinity, and also Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism has also attacked the

01:19:47

Trinity. And so this is a topic that really needs to be addressed. It is lamentable that many

01:19:54

Christians are very poor in their understanding of the Trinity. I usually, when

01:20:00

I teach on this course on seminary level, Chris, I usually ask my students just to define the

01:20:05

Trinity. Most of them sound like Arians, and others sound like modalists. So I think there's a great need to educate the

01:20:13

Church at large on this very, very fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith. And of course, when you say

01:20:19

Arians, you're not talking about neo -Nazis, you're talking about the stepchildren of Arius, one of the early deniers of the deity of Christ, and therefore obviously the

01:20:31

Trinity. That's right, that's right. So it's Arians, A -R -I -A -N, not

01:20:37

A -R -Y -A -N. So yes, they always seem to think that, yes, they always seem to think whenever I mention the

01:20:43

Arians, they didn't know that the, they think that the skinheads were around back in the fourth century.

01:20:50

So there were some skinheads too, I'm sure there were people back then who probably had lots of hair, but yeah, the

01:20:56

Arians are named after Arius of Alexandria, the heretic who denied the deity of Christ, and which prompted, of course, the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in A .D.

01:21:06

325. Great. Well, how can our listeners take advantage of this eight -week course?

01:21:13

Well, if our viewers, or our listeners rather, if they go to the website, it's oakwoodwesleyan .org

01:21:35

forward slash event one. So again, that's oakwoodwesleyan, that's all one word, dot org forward slash event one.

01:21:47

So let me just say that it's held at Oakwood Wesleyan Church, but the pastor and I are, we're both

01:21:55

Reformed. Really? Yes. So this is a bit of, we're like ducks sitting on chicken eggs.

01:22:02

Well, I would love to interview this Wesleyan pastor who's a Calvinist. Well, I will.

01:22:09

I can hear George Whitfield chuckling from heaven. And I can hear

01:22:15

John Wesley spinning in his grave. Actually, he is a Calvinist now, didn't he here?

01:22:23

Well, yeah, so it is the Wesleyan Church, but the pastor and I serve as an assistant there.

01:22:30

We are, we're both actually. Oh, so you're actually an assistant at this church? Yes, I am.

01:22:35

Is that a new development? Well, I mean, I came on about a year or so ago.

01:22:41

So he's a graduate student of mine who pastors there and he doesn't have any assistants, any associates.

01:22:50

And so rather than see him work himself to the ground and burn out, I came on to help out as an assistant.

01:22:57

Well, I would love to interview him, so try to set that up for me. I'll definitely do that. And we will repeat that website before we go off the air in regard to those, for the benefit of those who want to take advantage of that online course.

01:23:10

And before we go to our final break, which is a very brief break, we have a fellow

01:23:17

Canadian writing in from Panoca, Alberta, Canada. Did I pronounce that right?

01:23:23

Do you know if that's? I think that's correct. Yes. Okay, we have Sika Lee, who has a very unusual name.

01:23:29

He's already told us that this is a Dutch name. Sika Lee writes, do you think someone, he has very poor grammar in this

01:23:40

Sika Lee, what's, I guess you were probably doing this while you were driving or something. Do you think someone be saved without believing in the

01:23:48

Trinity? Do you think someone can be saved is obviously what he meant to say. Without believing in the Trinity, I hold to the

01:23:54

Trinity, but at times wonder if it is detrimental. I think, oh, determinal.

01:24:00

I think that's what he meant. Determine. Thanks. And God bless you both.

01:24:05

Yeah. One of the reasons that I have myself a little bit of a hard time thinking that is absolutely required for someone to believe in the

01:24:17

Trinity to be saved. Because even Dr. James R. White says, if you interview the average

01:24:24

Christian, they're going to give you a modalist answer when they are asked to define the Trinity. I think there is a difference between the average

01:24:32

Christian who is confused and a leader in the Unitarian or Oneness Pentecostal movement or anti -Trinitarian movement, or one of the cults, who's one of their life's goals is to tear from people a belief in the

01:24:46

Trinity. I think that those are two different categories. What do you think? I think you're correct, Chris. The Trinity is definitely fundamental because if the

01:24:54

Trinity is false, then the deity of Christ is false. And if the deity of Christ is false, then God did not come to truly save us.

01:25:02

What you have is just a mere creature, a mere man who came to set a moral example.

01:25:09

So to put it another way, if a person is a young believer, so think of the thief on the cross.

01:25:15

I'm sure the thief on the cross did not know the full details of Trinitarian theology, but he put his faith on Christ as the

01:25:22

Lord, as the promised Messiah, and so forth, and the Lord Jesus promised salvation to him that very day.

01:25:28

So as you rightly said, if a Christian is young and is a child, a babe in Christ, so to speak, and comes to faith in Christ, we're not expecting that young Christian who's a babe in Christ to have a full -blown theological understanding of the

01:25:42

Trinity. But if he is called by God, he's called by the triune God, it is the triune

01:25:47

God himself who calls his people to himself. And so we would not expect young people in the faith to have a full understanding, a full -orbed understanding of the

01:25:57

Trinity. However, if someone is aware of the Trinity, of biblical theology, is mature in the faith, and rejects the

01:26:05

Trinity, and teaches others to do likewise, then yes, you're absolutely right, he is a false teacher, and is leading others astray.

01:26:14

Well, thank you, Sikhali. Continue to listen to Iron, Sharp, and Zion radio, and continue to contribute to the program with your excellent questions, and keep spreading the word in Panoka, Alberta, Canada, and beyond.

01:26:26

We're going to our final break right now, and if anybody wants to ask a question of your own, now is the time to do it before we run out of time.

01:26:34

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

01:26:42

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01:31:02

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That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. James White here, co -founder of Alpha Omega Ministries and occasional guest on Iron Sharpens Radio.

01:32:59

I'm so delighted that my friend Chris Arnson will be heading down to Atlanta for the next G3 Conference from January 17th to the 19th, 2019, where I'll be joining a very impressive lineup of speakers on the theme,

01:33:11

A Biblical Understanding of Missions. Speakers include John Piper, Steve Lawson, Bodhi Balcombe, Mark Dever, Conrad Mbewe, Phil Johnson, Josh Weiss, yours truly, and many more.

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I hope you all join Chris and me for this phenomenal event. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

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01:38:24

We are now back with our final segment of our interview today with Dr. Tony Costa on the centrality of the trinity in Christian theology.

01:38:33

If you'd like to join us on the air our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:38:41

Joe in Newville, Pennsylvania asks, is the Pope Catholic?

01:38:48

That actually used to be a funny punchline or a rhetorical question, but it's not such a rhetorical question anymore, is it?

01:38:57

No, no it's not. It's funny, I was just recently debating a Roman Catholic apologist just about two weeks ago.

01:39:05

We were debating on radio on the Immaculate Conception and it's quite funny that this comes in light of the

01:39:14

Pope telling, I think you remember, told a young child who lost his father who was an atheist that the child's father was in heaven because he had his kids baptized even though he was an atheist.

01:39:25

The Pope also made a claim about two years ago actually around Christmas time where he was actually talking about Mary, the about the word that was promised to her by the angel

01:39:41

Gabriel when she saw Christ crucified. The Pope actually said that Mary was probably saying in her mind,

01:39:48

I've been lied to, these were all lies that I was told about Jesus being the

01:39:53

Messiah and being the one who sit on David's throne. And so there are a lot of Roman Catholics online just basically saying that Pope Francis had deemed the

01:40:02

Immaculate Conception that Mary actually did commit sin. So no,

01:40:08

I would say that this Pope is more of a left -leaning liberation Marxist theologian than he is

01:40:15

Roman Catholic. Yes, and of course that was a bit off of our subject today, but we thank

01:40:21

Joe anyway for his question. Let me go to another listener here that has a more serious question.

01:40:33

We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. And Harrison asks, do you think that those on both sides of the current debate amongst

01:40:46

Reformed Christians regarding eternal subordination are going too far in their rhetoric against one another, claiming that those on each side are heretics?

01:41:00

I guess what he means is that those on one side are calling the folks on the other side heretics when it comes to an acceptance or denial of eternal subordination.

01:41:11

If you could define that for us and let us know your answer to his question. Yeah, I think that the main word here is subordinationism.

01:41:19

And subordinationism is usually attributed to Origen, the 3rd century church father, who was later anathematized in the 6th century,

01:41:29

I believe, at the 5th Council of Constantinople, because, among other things, of subordinationism.

01:41:35

Now, there are some scholars today who will actually say that Origen was misunderstood, because there are some things that Origen says in his

01:41:42

First Principles, that's his major work, where he does in fact argue that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are equal in nature and being, and so forth.

01:41:52

And so the word subordinationism, many have taken to mean that Origen was saying that the

01:41:58

Son is subordinate, and the Holy Spirit are subordinate to the Father in their nature and in their being.

01:42:06

That subordination of being, or that the Father is the fountain of the Godhead, and that the

01:42:12

Son and the Holy Spirit are lesser in deity or divinity by degree.

01:42:18

Now, that's what has traditionally been attributed to Origen. Now, where I think some of the

01:42:23

Reformed folks are going with this today is, I think they're going with what they call economic subordination.

01:42:30

That is to say that within the economical trinity, when we talk about the economical trinity, we're talking about the roles or the functions of the persons of the

01:42:38

Godhead. So that the Father, for instance, the Father is never sent. The Father always sends the

01:42:44

Son and the Holy Spirit, but the Father is not sent by the Son or the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit did not become incarnate.

01:42:50

The Father did not become incarnate. It was the Son who took the role of the incarnation, and it was the Son who shed his blood for the people of God, and so forth.

01:42:58

And so where these Reformed theologians today are going with this, a lot of them are arguing for,

01:43:05

I think, most of it economic subordination. And this is something that has been argued by great church fathers like Athanasius and Basil the

01:43:15

Great and others, that the subordination within the trinity is not one of nature, but one of roles, so that the

01:43:22

Son lovingly serves the Father out of his love for the Father. And so that's where I think the subordination language may be a little sticky, because I think we need to define what do they mean by this.

01:43:37

When they say eternal subordination, what they're saying is that the Son has eternally been subject to the

01:43:43

Father as the one who does the will of the Father, and the one who explains the Father, interprets the

01:43:49

Father. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and the work of the

01:43:55

Spirit is to regenerate the people of God, and to fill them, and guide them, and empower them, and so forth.

01:44:01

So I think that's where the debate is, is in the question of, are we talking ontological subordination, or are we talking economical subordination?

01:44:11

And I'm assuming those that are defenders of the economic subordination of the

01:44:20

Son to the Father are basing that on the fact that historically

01:44:26

Orthodox Christianity has taught that Jesus Christ was always the

01:44:32

Son of God, even in all eternity past. And there are some who have been viewed as heretics, or at least aberrant, who although believing in the eternality of the

01:44:50

Son, and believe that the Trinity always existed, or that the

01:44:55

Son became the Son, that Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, was not the

01:45:01

Son until the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary. And then of course you have the whole issue of egalitarianism being brought up, because those that defend the economic subordination view will say that if we as complementarians can say that man and woman are equal in the sight of God, even though they have different roles, should not give anybody a problem with viewing the

01:45:35

Son and the Holy Spirit having a subordinate function in the Trinity. Right.

01:45:41

Yes, I think you're right, Chris. And the big question is the question of what it means to say in the

01:45:47

Creed, the Nicene Creed, that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, that He is begotten, not made.

01:45:55

And so we talk here usually about what's called the eternal generation of the Son, and this has led to some confusion.

01:46:01

But again, the Fathers of the Church in origin, Himself included, were very clear that the beginning of the

01:46:07

Son, or the generation of the Son, is eternal. It's not a finite beginning in time, it is an eternal generation from the

01:46:14

Father, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father as well. And so the idea here is that the

01:46:21

Orthodox view is that the Son eternally existed as the Son, as the eternal

01:46:26

Son, and then there were those, like even Walter Martin, the author of the Kingdom of the

01:46:31

Cults, argued for the view that Jesus Christ became the Son of God in the Incarnation, and prior to that He was just the eternal

01:46:38

Word. Really? Yes. That is not, in fact, when the Pentecostals threw that at Him, when they were debating

01:46:45

Him in the John Ankenberg show, they actually threw that at Him, that He actually agreed with them, that Jesus Christ became the

01:46:53

Son of God in the Incarnation. But I think Scripture is very clear that the

01:46:58

Son Himself is an eternal person, and He has eternally been the

01:47:04

Son of God. Even Calvin was accused of denying the Nicaean Creed, because Calvin would argue that Jesus was, the way he put it was that Jesus was, in Latin he said,

01:47:19

Jesus was Deus ase, He was God of Himself. And Calvin didn't really use the language of the oral ages, and he was a little uncomfortable with that, and so he was falsely accused, in my opinion, for denying

01:47:37

Nicaean Christology. He did not, he just didn't like the language that was being used in Nicaea.

01:47:44

And so it's this type of begettal language, Chris, this idea of eternal generation, that even

01:47:49

Arius quoted Origen, and tried to argue that Origen taught that Jesus Christ was the first -generated

01:47:57

Son of God by creation, but that's not what Origen taught. Origen definitely was not an

01:48:02

Arian. And interestingly enough, Athanasius at the Nicaean Creed, Athanasius actually quoted

01:48:08

Origen as well, against Arius. And so I think a lot of this comes to do with the language of the eternal generation of the

01:48:18

Son. Was the second person of the Trinity the eternal Son, or was He the eternal

01:48:23

Word who became the Son in the Incarnation? Yes, well, that has to be the huge difference that, obviously, we need to make clear to our listeners when you were discussing

01:48:34

Walter Martin. He did not agree with the Oneness Pentecostals that Jesus came into existence in the

01:48:42

Incarnation. Correct. Which is what they believe. They do not believe. Yes, the

01:48:48

Oneness Pentecostals believe that the Father, and Jesus, Jesus is the

01:48:53

Father, there's only one person in the Godhead, and that the Father is the deity of Christ, and the

01:48:59

Son is the humanity of Christ. So that you don't have a distinction of persons in the Oneness Pentecostal movement, you have three manifestations where the one

01:49:08

God manifests Himself as Father, and then as Son, and then as Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

01:49:13

That's why it's called modalism. Right. And let's see here, we have

01:49:22

Susan Margaret in Newville, Pennsylvania, who asks, what do you think is the best book outside of Holy Scripture that can help us understand this very difficult and mysterious subject known as the

01:49:38

Trinity? Well, I would highly recommend our common friend

01:49:43

James White's book, The Forgotten Trinity, which I think was also dedicated to you,

01:49:50

Chris. Yes, it was. That's one of the reasons it is the most important book for you to own.

01:49:57

It's not because of James White, it's because of whom he devoted it to. But The Forgotten Trinity, in my mind, is probably the best book for the layman to adequately understand this very important doctrine.

01:50:13

If you want something more intermediate and more advanced, then I would probably look at Wayne Grudem's systematic theology, he's got a good section there on the

01:50:22

Trinity. Yes, interesting. And Wayne Grudem, to let our listeners know, he is not only theologically

01:50:31

Reformed, but he is also charismatic. Right. Not that that should impinge upon his understanding of the

01:50:38

Trinity. Right, exactly. Let's see, we have here

01:50:45

Christopher in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. And Christopher says, how should we respond to our

01:50:54

Roman Catholic friends when they insist that we rely upon the

01:51:00

Church of Rome, whether we realize it or not? Because issues like the Trinity were not hammered out until the councils like the one at Nicaea and others, where we learned the

01:51:14

Trinity through the understanding of those assembled at these councils who came to the conclusion through exegesis that this is what was true about God.

01:51:25

If it were not for these councils, we would never believe in the Trinity. This is what I constantly hear from Catholics.

01:51:31

How do you respond to them? Yeah, the Roman Catholics commit what we call an anachronistic fallacy here.

01:51:38

They're assuming there was a Roman Catholic Church back in Nicaea, which there most definitely was not.

01:51:43

There was not what we know today as Roman Catholicism. There was the Church of Rome, there was a Bishop of Rome.

01:51:48

He wasn't even at the council. There were 318 bishops present at Nicaea, and the

01:51:54

Bishop of Rome was not even there, so much for the papacy. And so we have to realize that the

01:52:00

Trinity was always believed by the Church. Tertullian wrote a defense of the Trinity in the early 3rd century, long before Nicaea, over 100 years before Nicaea.

01:52:10

And the Council of Nicaea was brought together for one purpose. It's not to invent the

01:52:16

Trinity, it was to respond to Arianism, to the heresy of Arias, and to define, to formally declare what the

01:52:25

Church believed about the Son. Nicaea really wasn't about the Trinity, per se, because it was about the

01:52:32

Son. Was he homoousios, of the same nature with the Father, or was he homoousios, was he of like nature with the

01:52:39

Father? The Holy Spirit wasn't even discussed until 381 at the Council of Constantinople.

01:52:45

So it's erroneous to say that Nicaea was about the Trinity, because he was primarily about the relationship of the

01:52:52

Son to the Father. So there was no Bishop of Rome there. At the

01:52:58

Council of Nicaea, none of the bishops at Nicaea, in fact, I asked my Roman Catholic interlocutor about two weeks ago, can you name one father from Nicaea who believed in the

01:53:07

Immaculate Conception, or the Assumption of Mary, or any of the Roman Catholic doctrines today, like Purgatory? He couldn't name one of them.

01:53:14

And so there was no Roman Catholic Church. The Church was ecumenical, that is to say, it was a council that brought together both eastern and western parts of the known

01:53:24

Church. And they, again, did not invent the doctrine of the

01:53:29

Trinity, they simply formulated in creedal form, this is where we stand, this is what we believe about Christ, and in so doing, they condemned the heretic

01:53:39

Arius. Now I'll throw in a question of my own in that regard. A follow -up answer to that question that you asked, the

01:53:50

Catholic apologist, about naming someone at Nicaea who believed in the

01:53:57

Immaculate Conception, or the Assumption, or anything else that the Church of Rome claims as their dogma.

01:54:03

I have heard, yes, they did believe it, but they didn't bring it up, because it wasn't being attacked at that time.

01:54:09

How do you respond to that? Yeah, well, I would say, well, they also believe that Santa Claus slapped out

01:54:14

Arius as well. I mean, you get these arguments from silence a lot of the time, and the issue is this.

01:54:26

The Assumption of Mary, or even the Immaculate Conception of Mary, there were fathers who were talking about Mary. And it's not really until you get to the 5th century, the

01:54:35

Council of Ephesus in 431, where you begin to see there's a rise in Marian devotion, and also with the rise of monasticism, that's when

01:54:43

Mary becomes prominent, because virginity is emphasized in the monastic movement, and of course virginity was considered a high virtue, to be close to God.

01:54:52

And so if Mary gave birth to Christ, the God -man, then her virginity must have been always intact and perpetual.

01:55:01

But none of those fathers that we know of at the Council, we know what they said about Mary, but they never said anything about her being immaculately conceived, nor did they ever say anything about her being bodily assumed.

01:55:14

And so it really is an argument from silence to say, well, they really believed it, but it was an attack.

01:55:19

The reason why it was an attack is no one actually believed it, and no one talked about it. No one actually talked about it, the immaculate conception at least, until you get to 1100 years after Christ, with a

01:55:31

British monk by the name of Edamer. He's the one who actually begins to talk about it, and then Don Scotus is the one who begins to push to have this idea taught in the

01:55:42

Church. But then it was refuted and discarded by people like Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and also

01:55:51

Thomas Aquinas, and others. So it really is an anachronistic fallacy to say that the bishops of Nicaea were in fellowship with Rome, and that they believed in these married dogmas.

01:56:06

Even Roman Catholic scholars have come out and openly admitted that these doctrines were not even around at that time.

01:56:13

Arnie in Perry County says, I know this is not on the subject of the Trinity, but forgive me, but because of the last question asked,

01:56:22

I want to know if it is true that the Catholic Church really teaches in regard to their understanding of the perpetual virginity of Mary, and forgive me for sounding crude, but that Mary never lost physically her hymen in the process of giving birth to Jesus.

01:56:41

Yeah, I have heard that. In fact, I heard that from Jerry Matitix. Do you know, this is an idea that actually is found in a second -century apocryphal text called the

01:56:55

Post -Evangelium of James. And in that story there, when Mary gives birth to Jesus, she doesn't experience any pain, which is very strange, because women experience pain in childbirth.

01:57:08

She doesn't experience any pain, and in the story, this baby just appears out of nowhere.

01:57:16

And in the story, there's a woman, there's a midwife there who's surprised at this whole thing, and one lady there denies that Mary was actually a virgin when she gave birth to the child, and she inspects, she actually inspects

01:57:28

Mary's hymen, and she finds that her hymen is intact, and then her hand catches on fire as a sign of judgment from God, and then they pray for her and she's healed.

01:57:39

Well, apparently what they believe in the Post -Evangelium of James, what it says there is basically that Jesus did not exit the birth canal of Mary, therefore not rupturing her hymen.

01:57:49

What he did was, I mean, I call it the beaming up Scotty. It's as if he beamed out of her womb, and there's this infant just lying there without exiting.

01:58:02

So there is no postnatal birth here, in the sense of there's no child, there's no baby that exits

01:58:07

Mary's birth canal. And so it's quite interesting that Roman Catholics would hold to this, and their source for this is an apocryphal text that was rejected by the

01:58:18

Church, and even by the Church of Rome. The Church of Rome does not accept the Post -Evangelium of James as canonical.

01:58:24

Well, we are out of time, and I want to make sure that our listeners once again have this website for the eight -week course on the

01:58:30

Trinity, oakwoodwesleyan .org forward slash event one, and that's the number one, forward slash oakwoodwesleyan .org

01:58:40

forward slash event one forward slash. And I know that the Toronto Baptist Seminary website is tbs .edu,

01:58:47

tbs .edu. Any other contact information you'd care to share, Dr. Tony Costa? Well, if folks are interested, my pastor friend and I, we put together a series of YouTube videos called

01:58:59

The Third Degree. So if you punch my name, Tony Costa, Third Degree, on YouTube or Google, it'll come right up.

01:59:06

There's a series of videos there that will help Christians be equipped with their defensive faith.

01:59:12

Well, I look forward to getting you back in Pennsylvania for another pastor's luncheon, and everybody listening, if you want to keep in touch with me about that, we are going to try to get him out here,

01:59:22

Dr. Costa, out here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for our next pastor's luncheon this October, God willing.

01:59:29

My email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com if you'd like to be put on an email list. I want to thank you so much,

01:59:34

Dr. Costa, for being our guest today. I want to thank Dr., or should I say my brother, Phil Johnson, for being our first guest.

01:59:41

I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who wrote in questions, and I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater