WHO Treaty then Church History Is a Bit Messy

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. Welcome back to the big studio today. We're gonna try to sneak this one in, even though there's something going on elsewhere in the building that might create some background noise.

We'll see, we'll see. Gotta roll with the punches, as they say. Before we get into the main subject today, which will involve the use of the big board and some church history discussions and hermeneutics and all sorts of fun stuff like that, there is something that has certainly caught my attention.

I have been hearing about it for a while, but really I'm focused upon it now because it is happening right now. But the World Health Organization is pushing for a pandemic treaty. And I heard about this.

Well, I've heard about the movement toward this kind of thing, a global authority to handle pandemics in the future. But you need to understand that a treaty overrides constitutional authority in the United States.

And so if the crazed leftist communist morons in charge in Washington, that's the only way to describe them. I mean, every time I listen to the leadership of our government today speaking, I just go, how are we even still functioning?

I don't understand. Listen to our new spokesperson who is an advertisement for sexual depravity. And again, the vice president, the president, they are all experts at word salads. What they say makes no sense.

And yet everyone sits back politely and goes, oh, isn't that beautiful? Isn't that wonderful? It doesn't mean anything. But anyway, these people would sign away our sovereignty in a second. And so I just want you to think about what it would be like if we lived in a world where some elitist in Belgium someplace who is living high on the hog has control over whether your three-year-old has to have experimental drugs inserted into their body with the force of law.

And if you want to see what that looks like, just go online and start watching everything happening in China because that's what these people want for us. They want people in hazmat suits running around through our neighborhoods, locking us in jails, and beating us, obviously not enough.

I mean, there are people literally jumping out of high-rise buildings in China committing suicide just to get out of these places. This is what these people want, that China is there. Oh, isn't that beautiful?

Isn't that wonderful? That's what they think is just so awesome. And obviously, here in the United States, there would be blood in the streets if that were to happen. There's no question about it, but we don't want that.

And so we have to be very awake. Unfortunately, that's a issue for the Senate. Both of the senators from my state last week demonstrated themselves to be people without moral fiber in voting for the establishment of unlimited abortion rights up to the point of birth.

And so I get the feeling they would be just fine with some of that stuff too, though one of the two of them is very strange on every way that you can be strange. She's something else. But anyway, be aware of this, be praying about it, be looking for it, be talking about it.

There are a few things that we've needed to be more clear about. I mean, this is one of the things in the United States that has been a blessing is that we still have some shred of constitutional and federal authority left.

This would do away with all of it and would hand our sovereignty over to unelected, unaccountable, basically it would make Bill Gates the king of the world because he has all the influence of WHO. So this is literally Bill Gates' attempt to take over the world.

And you go, no, and I go, yes, yes. All the rest of this stuff has been preparatory and here's old Bill who's buying up all of our farmland and doing all the rest of this kind of stuff, literally making a play to be, he doesn't need a Titanic.

He can be king of the world from wherever it is he is right now. And so it is very concerning and we need to be very active in denouncing those who would seek to become techno-tyrants over us because that's what these people are seeking to do.

So be watching for information on the World Health Organization, WHO, and the pandemic treaty because that is the play. That's where they're going. That may be one of the reasons for a lot of the other stuff going on just to distract everybody so you're not even paying attention to it.

You got, let's talk about Ukraine. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about that. One other thing, though, like I said, our primary topic today is far removed from all of these things. Whenever the Lord lifts his hand of restraint and we see the depth of the evil in the heart of man, as we saw in the mass shooting over the weekend, as we saw a year earlier when a man drove his vehicle through a Christmas parade, neither, those two were not treated the same way, but they are, they're the exact same thing.

They're not treated the same way in our world today because there are certain people who can't be evil on a certain level. When we see these things, we are truly reminded of how regular the extension of God's grace toward all of us is because that kind of thing could happen all the time if God were not restraining people from doing it.

And what's really interesting is I think, and it's a challenging area and it's easy to jump off the cliff into weird stuff, but the relationship between pharmaceuticals, drugs, and the occult and demons is biblically fascinating.

They're frequently associated. They're close, associated with one another. And most Christians today just won't even use terminology like demons. And yet when you see a young man, in this case, 18 years of age, recent high school graduate, who at that early age is turned over to that kind of hatred.

And again, this has nothing to do with race. I know right now in our country, it only has to do with whites, only whites do this. Far more blacks will be killed by blacks in Chicago this summer by multitude of factors than were killed in that shooting, but no one will care.

And no one is even allowed to say that. Again, it all goes back to the spiritual realm. It's demonic. I mean, what's the primary push? What's the primary thing that causes murders in Chicago? Drugs, gangs, drugs.

And how do gangs get money? Drugs. And of course, the current regime is allowing drugs to just flow over the southern border along with people, millions of them, because they want to change the voting demographic in the United States, and it's evil and it's traitorous, it's treasonous.

And they don't care how many people die as a result. The regime has no concern about human life whatsoever and knows that their policy is a result of this, but they do it anyway. But the point is, these are spiritual things.

And a lot of us are afraid to even point out that when you withdraw a hand of restraint, you're opening up a vacuum for other things to come in, and those things will always destroy human life. And we see this happening around us.

We see it happening in our major cities. It's astonishing. When I just think of how much my own city has changed in the past 10 years, and the acceleration recently, because we have a mayor that is part of the World Economic Forum stuff, and hence is a part of a traitorous movement to destroy the Constitution of the United States, and our lives, and I can see it practically.

I can absolutely see it practically. How? I used to be able to get up. I remember back when I was first studying Islam, I would, this is back when I could get up real early in the morning, too. So I've seen the decline of Phoenix, and it seems to be going along with the decline of shame, as age just hits you every which way.

Anyway, I used to be able to get up in the morning. I remember one morning, I wanted to get a particular, I wanted to get a particular portion, I think it was, I wanted to get Surah 112 memorized in Arabic.

Okay? And so I had it all set up to be able to hear it, listen to it while I was writing. And so before sunrise, I could go out, and I could go out onto the Arizona Canal, and I could ride on the Arizona Canal, and we could, you could, they're really neat, you could, I could do an almost 70-mile loop and only cross one street because they had put underpasses in.

Every place else. And it's really, really wonderful. That was 12, 14 years ago. I can't do that now. The underpasses are not passable any longer. They are fundamentally, I would not call them homeless shelters, they are drug houses.

They reek to high heaven because they use the storm drains as sewers. They're dangerous. I remember a number of years ago, one of the guys was going through cleaning for the city. They don't bother with that anymore.

The cops don't bother with it anymore. They don't clean it anymore. And he said he had found, I think, in that one underpass, when I stopped to talk to him on a bike ride, he had found eight needles in that one underpass that one day.

So they're just not safe. Even though they have lights on, they just take them over. And there's dogs and everything down there. And now they're moving out of those to where you're getting tent cities.

And so I can't, the very places that I was riding, and I didn't even have to give it a thought back then. Just riding along, and I've got a real good light and stuff like that. You can't go to those places anymore.

If I want to ride from my house out of the city, I get to play with the cars now. And at my age, I don't like playing with cars as much as I used to. I think back in my 30s, some of the stuff that I would do, some of the times I would ride, and I look at that now and go, yeah, no, I don't think so.

I'd like to see my grandkids get married. And so I've got different priorities now. So things have changed. And it's been purposeful. It's absolutely purposeful all the way along. And we pray for repentance and reformation in our land.

Now, so keep that in mind, World Health Organization Treaty, pandemic treaty, bad, tyranny, end of, well, it's end of sovereign nation. I mean, you won't have sovereign nations anymore. You will have one global government run by unelected people.

And frequently, you won't even know who they are, where they live, what their background is, and how they got that power, other than Bill Gates. You will know exactly how he did that. And you will remember like I do, how many blue screens of death you had to suffer through for that man to become king of the world.

Church History, the Reformation, and the Problem of the Great Tradition

Okay, let's switch over to something of vital, well, that was a vital importance. This is a vital importance in a very, very different area. We struggle, honestly, in the church, often, to place ourselves within the proper context of church history.

Where are we? And we have joked more than once that church history, for most people, starts with Billy Graham. And honestly, as I get older, I'm starting to wonder how many people hear me say, Billy Graham, and they go, who?

And I'm sure. And so we tend to see ourselves within a very, very short context. And so when people start talking about church history, it's very easy to be misled and misdirected as to exactly what's going on and exactly what's being said.

And so unless Rich tells me that we're just not gonna be able to do the program today, because we are hearing large amounts of sound coming into the room right now, as long as, I can't even, how would you even know?

You don't have, you know, if you

You realize how loud you three was when you did that joke? Well, that's true. We just talked over it.

Yeah, we just talked over it. We'll just, if you hear stuff in the background, don't worry about it.

There's nothing Pay no attention. There is nothing we can do about it. Pay no attention to that noise behind the church.

Yeah, that's exactly how we're gonna have to handle this. Pay no attention to the noise behind the curtain. When we think about church history, the problem, normally when we look at church history, let's put the cross right here, okay?

And so here's church history, and let's go over here, and here's where we are today. And if you've ever, that was a really bad line, wasn't it? Yeah, anyway, if you've ever looked at books that try to provide a kind of, it gets really complicated really quickly because you have so many things, so many areas of development and change.

And if this is church history, well, world history is going on. And so the history of the church in a particular nation or in a particular area is going to look very different than history in, history, the church in England, or what we would call England today, very, very, very different line than what we would see in regards to China or regards to North Africa.

And yet there would also be links between them. And so you've got the Roman Empire in there, and then you've got the fall of the Western half of the Roman Empire. And then, well, what happens with Byzantium?

And then you've got the rise of Islam, and you've got technological changes going on here. It's just incredibly complicated, so much so that a lot of folks just don't even want to necessarily put out the effort to look at it.

But from a theological perspective, we have to look at this because we have the promise. The one there on the cross said, I will build my church. And so whatever we do with this here, Christ has been active in building his church.

Now, you're raised in a fundamentalist context. It's sort of, fundamentalism sort of does this, and then it picks up there. And there's this, there wasn't really. Oh, come on. There's at least an extra key.

Well, and, well, but actually what the fund, what the fundamentalists, they've got it, and then, and you got the Waldensians, then, and these are the real Baptists, but they're all hidden. You know, it's the trail of blood stuff, which we've talked about before, and it's just all, so we can't, we can't go there.

That's, that's just simply wrong. And so we have to deal with the reality that there has been a work of God, the work of, well, the triune work of God, in building the church. And hence, we have to ask ourselves the question, what does the church look like in these ages?

And if you take the time to read the writings of those who've lived before us, remember, 99 of the people that have been a part of this, we don't know their names. We don't have anything they ever wrote.

We have buildings they built, and a lot of those buildings, man, some of them would take 200 years to build. And so generations would build. But we don't know the vast majority of these people. And we don't have anything written by them that we would be able to look at and to understand.

And so we have the writings of leaders. And then once in a while, I remember one of them, it was obviously one of Mr. Professor's favorite stories back in 1987 or whatever it was, yeah, it was about 87.

And that was, oops, there was a story about, it somehow ended up in a, I think it was in a biblical manuscript. I forget how it was preserved, but it was from the medieval period, and it was from a monastery.

And it was someone complaining that someone up in the choir, so the choir would frequently not be up front. It would be behind you, which is really good for acoustics, by the way. And it also helps you not to be distracted by them.

You're still looking toward the front, and in that context would be the altar. But it was a complaint that there was someone in the choir that kept, because I think this was during night vigils, during the night prayers, and so you had to have candles.

There's no electricity. And someone in the choir was dripping wax from their candles on the people down below them, and no one could figure out who it was. So there's someone who sort of snuck into church history a little bit.

We don't know who it was. Maybe we'll find out someday, I don't know. But anyway, the point is that we do have the ability to sort of look at little snippets of time, and when we do so, we recognize that it doesn't matter whether you are Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, any of the various forms of the Protestant churches.

We are all different today than they were back then. Now, some of them, if you're Eastern Orthodox, you pride yourself on looking and believing just like they did in the 7th and 8th century. That's part of your thing.

That's part of what makes you who you are, and you literally do pride yourself on that. But at the same time, you, even amongst the Orthodox, are arguing about things today that they were not arguing about back then, and you're using methodologies, and you get to church in a different way, and things have changed.

But then, that's the one side, and on the other side, amongst Protestants, you don't even care what somebody in the 3rd century was doing, or why they worshipped the way that they worshipped, or anything like that.

And so, you have differences in our perspectives at that point as well. And so, today, let's say that this here is, here's the Reformation, okay? Here's the Reformation. Now, again, from the Eastern perspective, they don't care.

I mean, it's just, that's something you all were doing, and we didn't need to worry about that. But in most English-speaking places today, that's still a rather important aspect of it. And so, if we are heirs of the Reformation, there are certain beliefs that are central to us, frequently put in the form of the solas, even though that's not historically how they themselves did.

We look back, and we go, okay, the material principle of the Reformation, sola fide, justification by faith alone. The formal principle that gave form, sola scriptura. Scripture is the sole and fallible rule of faith of the Church.

Over against the Roman Catholic theory of sacred tradition, and oral tradition, and written tradition, and the papacy, and the things that go along with that. And so, we look at this, and we believe that there is a great increase in light, post-Tenebrous looks, after the darkness, light, right?

A great increase in light after the Reformation. But why would there need to be a need for an increase in light? Well, because the idea would be that along in here, there is a diminishment from the apostolic period, a diminishment of light that led to darkness.

And this has been a standard understanding of Reformed historians, and scholars, and things like that. But what that frequently results in is that we don't really care much about what's in here. Who cares?

I mean, it's a period of darkness, you've got indulgences being sold, Rome has fallen back about here or so, and so in the West, you've got the Carolingian dynasty, and you've got some periods where there's important alchemy and preservation of manuscripts, and things that helped maintain culture in what we call Europe today.

So you do have stuff going on in here that's important. And of course, about right here or so, you'd have Thomas Aquinas, so let's put good old T .A. in there because he seems to be so vitally important today.

And so, but we're not really sure what all this looks like, and the tendency is to say, yeah, you have, and so there is obviously a tremendous amount of nominalism today in many nations. There's nominal Islam, there's nominal Buddhism, there's nominal Christianity, obviously.

And you look at a lot of Roman Catholic nations today, and you have a tremendous amount, not only of nominalism, but you also have a tremendous amount of just superstition in your Central American countries.

It's just so obvious that Roman Catholicism came in and just co-opted all the local gods, in essence, and turned the saints into gods, and you have mixtures of, in the Caribbean, you have all sorts of weird mixtures of pagan magic and Catholicism and stuff like that.

And so, we sort of look at that, and we sort of figure that's going on back here. But what we frequently don't recognize is that you can have, when we look at this, let's say the Council of Nicaea is about here, so there's Nicaea, and so Rome, Rome falls about here.

And so, this is your Medieval Period. MD for now. That wouldn't do it either. It's MP, Medieval Period. And this is where this ends, because you can break this up. You've got the Renaissance Period right here, where you start having universities.

You've actually got universities all the way back here, but enough that it really starts impacting things. And the Reformation can't happen without this. It's obvious. And so, we see all these things, and we struggle with, where were the key, the key beliefs of the Reformation, who in here is still holding these things?

And if, and how much mixture of error can you have and still have sufficient truth for the church to exist? Because the Reformers were not saying we're founding a new church. The whole point of the Reformation was, no, the church is founded back here.

We still believe that, but there has been a fundamental departing of the church. And so, there needs to be Reformation, needs to be Reformation, and the Reformation needs to take us back to certain principles.

And there certainly was a claim that basically, in essence, if you looked at sort of like this area, they're saying, we're going back to there. And we're gonna put Augustine about right there. We're gonna, there's somebody that believe what we believe in certain areas, but there's a recognition that, but not in all areas.

And so, you have a great respect for Augustine, and yet, we're not following Augustine slavishly, and we're saying he was wrong about certain things. Is he the last light? No, no. You've got Gottschalk in here.

You have, in fact, I wanted to read you a portion here of something. You have a man by the name of Fulgentius. And if you're not familiar with Fulgentius, and most, I would guess 99 .5 of our audience is not familiar with Fulgentius, and that is perfectly acceptable.

We don't have to get too upset about that. But Fulgentius was Bishop of Rusp, and let me pull this up here. Where did he go? I hate when stuff just disappears. Oh, there you are. There it is. You may have actually heard of Fulgentius.

I quoted him in a debate that I did in London a number of years ago on the Merian dogmas. His years are 467 to 532. So into the early sixth century. So the end of the fifth, early sixth century. Listen to what Fulgentius says about the issue of Mary.

This is a grace whereby it came to pass that God, who came to take away sins because sin was not in him, was conceived and born a man in the similitude of sinful flesh. The flesh of Mary, forsooth, which had been conceived in iniquities after the manner of men.

Repeat that again. The flesh of Mary, which had been conceived in iniquities after the manner of men, was indeed sinful flesh, which bore the Son of God in the similitude of sinful flesh. We must believe that the only begotten God did not derive the defilement of sin from the mortal flesh of the virgin.

Truly, therefore, Mary conceived God the word which she bore in sinful flesh, which God received. Now, you can see the immediate relevance of this. You have a bishop literally half a millennium after the events of the crucifixion.

So he dies in 532. And you have very clearly, he has no concept of later Marian dogmas in regards to Mary, immaculate conception, certainly nothing about the bodily assumption, anything like that at all.

I also, just in passing, being the weirdo that I am, notice he uses the phrase only begotten God. I would love to see what the Latin on that is and see if that's a reflection of John 118 because that's monogamous theos.

It's a sexual variant there, very interesting. But he also, elsewhere, listen to this. For this reason regarding all those whom God wishes to save, we must understand that we do not think anyone can be saved apart from God who wills it.

Further, let us not imagine the will of the omnipotent God either is not fulfilled or is in any way impeded in certain people. For all whom God wishes to save are unquestionably saved and they cannot be saved unless God wishes them to be saved.

And each person whom God does not will to be saved is not saved since our God, quote, has done all things that he willed, end quote. Therefore, all are saved whom he wishes to be saved for the salvation is not born of the human will, but is supplied by God's goodwill.

Nevertheless, these all men whom God wishes to save include not the entire human race altogether, but rather the totality of those who are to be saved. So the word all is mentioned because the divine kindness saves all kinds from among all men, that is from every race, status and age, from every language and every region.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's how reformed people address those key passages as well. And this is a bishop of what would be called the Catholic Church halfway into the first millennium. And I could give you all sorts of quotations from Fulgentius promoting what we would call solo scriptura.

Now, does that mean that Fulgentius was a reformed Baptist? No, it does not. And that is an abuse of church history to even try to anachronistically read categories that we have today back into the early church.

This is one of the reasons that when I listen to, when I bother to waste the time in listening to Roman Catholic apologists trying to deal with church history, it becomes more and more, maybe I'm just not patient anymore, but it becomes more and more difficult for me to listen to these things because it's just such an abuse.

We do not have to turn Fulgentius into a reformed Baptist. They do, obviously. He was a bishop of the church, crying out loud. And they are told that their beliefs have been what's been believed every age of the church, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so they've got to attack him, and he's not the tradition of the church, and yin, yin, yin, yin, yin. I just tire of the sophistry that marks the vast majority of that kind of stuff. But Fulgentius allows us to stop and to think about the fact that the church in every age gives to us this challenge.

We don't know the true and the false. We ask for professions of faith. We do the best that we can. We have to, out of grace, accept the claims and the assertions of people. And sometimes we get taken for a ride.

Sometimes we end up with people in our midst who are not truly believers, and we leave that to God. But that's the case in every age with the church. That's been her reality from the beginning. What you have is a mixture.

And there are times when there is more light, and there are times when there is less light. And it's not our job to try to climb into the hearts of these individuals and determine their salvific status, though for some reason we cannot resist the temptation to do so.

We try to do it no matter what. Our goal, really, I think our mindset should be to hope for the best for as many as we possibly can. That's, again, not my background. That's not a fundamentalist background at all.

But it should be, I think, from a New Testament perspective, we should hope for the best in those situations. But you get a mixture of beliefs and consistencies and level of consistencies. And to be honest with you, I would say there were times, just remember, almost every person in this audience right now has a digital device like this now.

And on this digital device, you have access to. Thank you, Summer, I will try to ask. Look, when your daughter's carrying, hopefully, your fifth grandchild, a little boy, and she asks you to check out the homeschooling place next door because she doesn't want to drive halfway across the valley.

And I'm going out to the East Valley tomorrow anyways. You do what your daughter asks you to do. And you help take care of the grandkids. That's how it works. So I'll do my best. Well, actually, when do they close?

I don't know. You don't know? I think before 35. Oh, so we now have a limitation to how long the program can go, thanks to Summer. So if any of you want me to go farther, I've just got to have my priorities.

So Moses was in the bulrushes and, oh, yes, Fulgentius. Okay, so when you think about it, we have on this unit access to more translations of the Bible and information about the Bible than any generation before us has ever had.

Do you realize how unusual it is in all of that church history to own, as a Christian, to actually have direct access to the scriptures for yourself at all? I mean, I would say that starts, I mean, that obviously is a big thing, the Reformation, but it's really from about here onward, you can have at least a copy of the scriptures.

As a believing Christian, they become affordable enough to have about at that point. Before then, just not possible, just not possible. I mean, when you think about that, it's astonishing. And so is it not understandable that there would be a real mixture of light and darkness, truth and error?

And so with that, what I want to ask, touch on briefly, is the concept of the great tradition. This is the new buzzword, all popular, the great tradition. And we had a, here's, here's, let's see if I can find this here.

There was a, see, I opened way too many of these things. There it is, there it is. Okay, Dr. Craig Carter, again, Dr. Carter, a brilliant man, I'm sure he's a wonderfully nice fellow. And when I was looking through his timeline, it seems he and I agree on a lot of things in regards to the wackiness of what's going on in the world today.

So we would probably get along like gangbusters along there. But he's one of the major proponents of the great tradition. And he tweeted something last week on the 14th. And it says, to assume that the current Roman Catholic Church is the same as the historic church that existed prior to the Reformation is a big mistake.

As Hagen says, the Roman Catholic Church is not the Catholic Church of the first five or six centuries of the patristic era. The Reformed Church is the era of pre-Reformation Catholic orthodoxy. Okay, what was confusing about this was, okay, the current Roman Catholic Church is not the same as the historic church that existed prior to the Reformation.

Okay, prior to Reformation when? Because there's a lot of time prior to the Reformation. And there's a lot of development during that time period. And there are big, big, big monuments of development, Nicaeas, big chain, big chain.

Obviously, the peace of the church was 313. And then at the end of that century, you have Christianity becoming not just a religio licita, a legal religion, but now the religion of the state. That happens at the end of, you know, around 380.

And so, that's a completely different time period than the schoolmen, scholasticism, Aquinas. There's been a lot of development in between those churches. And so, Michael Hagen's statement, which I'll read to you in a moment, first five or six centuries of the patristic era.

Okay, up through Fulgentius. All right, let's use Fulgentius. He's right at that shift, right? The beginning of the sixth century. Is that different than the Roman church that Luther reacted against? Of course it is, massively so.

But in what way? Specifically, in what way? Now, that's a fascinating question in and of itself. That's a fascinating question in and of itself. Because the argument today is, on the doctrine of God, nothing changed.

Well, okay, let me take that back. Nothing fundamentally changed, but there was a continuing development. In fact, Dr. Carter has been one of the people that has said that the doctrine of the Trinity finishes its development in Aquinas in the medieval period.

And so there is this concept of a continuing development that evidently he considers to be a good, proper, and necessary development from the patristic church all the way through the 12th century. That's a long time, a very long time.

And I would argue that the specific developments within Aquinas require input from sources that we just simply need to be extremely concerned about. And that would include, obviously, Aristotle. Now, what's the statement from Michael Hagen?

I just realized I'm never gonna get through all this. And I have forgotten to mention that we have a special program on Thursday. It will be in here, and we will have numerous guests. I guess I should have mentioned this to you.

CrossPolitik is in town. And speaking Thursday, I will be speaking, I will be part of the panel Thursday evening at their event here locally. And they would very much like to bust in and say hi. In fact, that was Gabe Wrench that was texting me right there.

And asking about details about that. And so, yeah, we'll, hey, you got two days. You got plenty of time. It's just a matter of finding some place for some of the stuff stored over there. Anyway, so yes, we will have a special program on Thursday.

And that means I won't be able to continue this subject on Thursday because I don't really think the guys are gonna wanna be discussing these things. But we will have to continue this because there's all sorts of stuff on hermeneutics that we need to get into as well.

And I'm gonna have to look at my calendar and see if we can't sneak another one in here because this is important stuff, and I just, too much stuff going on. Here's what Michael Haken had said, so at least let's get the context.

He says, I have spent a lifetime of study engaging in resourcement, that is, in the retrieval of the riches of church history for the present day. In my early academic career, that retrieval was centered upon the patristic era.

Today, it's mostly the particular Baptists of the long 18th century. One thing that was etched deep into my mental light from that study of the patristic world had to do with the question that I asked from time to time, how could I study the Fathers so deeply and not swim the Tiber and become a Roman Catholic?

Well, first of all, I had grown up in the pre-Vatican II Roman Church and had seen some of its worst problems then and since. And there is a lot to be said about that. Much more significant was this, the Roman Catholic Church is not the Catholic Church of the first five or six centuries of the patristic era.

That's what was being referred to earlier. In fact, I am more and more convinced as a historian that the Roman Church of the present day is mainly a product of the high Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, but be that as it may.

I can't let that be a be as it may. Listen to what's that said. The Roman Church of the present day is mainly a product of the high Middle Ages. What's the high Middle Ages? The schoolmen and Thomas Aquinas.

The high Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation. And yes, Rome was deeply influenced by the Reformation and hence the Counter-Reformation. In other words, if I want to join a church with claims to antiquity, it would not be present day Rome.

And see, I would say all this stuff, I would have said this before Francis came along, but now with Francis, oh good grief, everything has changed completely. What is critical is this, is my faith and that of my church built squarely on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone.

That is the crucial matter. That is what the Spirit of Christ has anointed. So what if I can trace an organic succession of material churches if half of them were theologically askew? What I want is that new mythological line of succession that is true catholicity, John 8, 39.

Okay, so nothing shocking or unusual about that, but it is fascinating to think about the modern Roman church as the product of the high Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation because that throws Aquinas right in the middle of it.

And so what we've got going on today is we have people who want to get back to Thomas and get back to using Thomas. What they want to do is they want to edit Thomas and they want to edit the great tradition.

And so for them, the great tradition is primarily doctrine of God. Okay, that's what this great tradition, that's the good part of the great tradition that we can borrow, that we can use. In fact, we need this.