August 5, 2025 Show with Jason Wallace on “The Not-So-Great Tradition”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, 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. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this fifth day of August 2025, and I am thrilled to announce that our tribute that we conducted last Friday with Phil Johnson, executive director for the late John MacArthur's media ministry, Grace to You, and Dr. Doug McMasters, pastor of New Hyde Park Baptist Church on Long Island, who is the former director of pastoral communications with pastoral correspondents with Grace to You.

And my co-host on Friday was my very, very dear friend, Pastor Jim Capo, the former pastor of Massapequa Church of God on Long Island, who was at one time a frequent co-host with me on the old Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, broadcasting at WNYG, 1440 AM in Babylon, Long Island.

I just wanted to tell you the wonderful news that the recording of that tribute to the late John MacArthur, in loving memory of a champion for truth in the 20th and 21st centuries, that is now uploaded to the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio website, ironsharpensironradio .com.

And many thanks to my webmaster, Eric Nielsen, who did a miraculous job fixing the recording because Phil Johnson was having an audio problem where he kept dropping off the air every 30 seconds. And amazingly, Eric was able to repair the audio, and it just sounds wonderful.

You'd never know there was a problem. After this live program, of course, you can listen to that wonderful tribute to the late John MacArthur on ironsharpensironradio .com. But today, I'm so excited to have a returning guest, Jason Wallace, who, if you've listened to Iron Sharpens Iron regularly, that name should not be unfamiliar to you.

He is pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church and Orthodox Presbyterian Congregation in Magna, Utah, and he is a documentarian. We are going to be addressing the controversial theme, the not-so-great tradition, the inconsistency of those claiming to affirm the Reformation who are paving a path to Rome.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio to warn our listeners about a very theologically dangerous trend amongst Reformed Christians. Pastor Jason Wallace.

Chris, always a privilege to be with you.

Before we go into the topic at hand, let our listeners know more about Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah.

We started from scratch back in May of 1998. The Lord's blessed. We actually, our building is an old Mormon ward. Wow, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's actually one of the oldest church buildings in the valley.

The story goes that Brigham Young actually came out for the dedication of the original building on the site the year he died.

Oh, the irony.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They sold it to the steelworkers in 61, and they sold it and it went through a number of hands. And it was a United Church of Christ building before we got it. They bought it for their Samoan congregation.

And so, we have a sister congregation in Clearfield, Utah, Berean Presbyterian, and we have a mission work in Provo, Utah.

Well, if anybody wants more details on Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah, you can go to gospelutah .org, gospelutah .org. The name Utah is fully spelled out, U-T-A-H, gospelutah .org. Well, this subject matter has become a disturbing trend for some of us who are Reformed theologically, both from Reformed Baptist backgrounds, like myself, and from Presbyterian backgrounds,.

Like you.

There are, it seems as if only a minority of Reformed folks are speaking up against this trend that we are discussing. But if you could, please open up by telling us what the great tradition is, and why you believe with all your heart that it is a not-so-great tradition.

I mean, the great tradition has been championed in various corners for a very long time. I started hearing about it a few years ago within particularly Reformed Baptist circles. There were some Presbyterians as well.

But it was being championed as something to trump, especially advocates of presuppositional apologetics. Thomas Aquinas was being championed as one of the greatest theologians ever. And I had questions about why people would be going after Aquinas.

Aquinas was a brilliant man, but he had a very different understanding of the gospel than Protestants would have. And people became fixated on things such as it was not enough to say that God is without body parts or passions.

They had to articulate the simplicity of God in the language of Aquinas, not just the confessions. So I was hearing rumblings about all this. About a year ago, I heard Matthew Barrett do a podcast.

And can you tell us who Matthew Barrett is first?

Yeah. Matthew Barrett was the head of the doctoral program at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, SPC institution. And he was doing a podcast July of last year where he identified John of Damascus as one of his top two favorite theologians.

And I had to pause. John of Damascus has come up a lot. In our documentaries, we've been dealing a lot with Eastern Orthodoxy over the last couple of years. And John of Damascus was denounced as a heretic by the Council of Hyria in the 8th century.

33 years later, the Second Council of Nicaea declared him a saint and used his argumentation for the history of icon veneration to anathematize anyone who refused to venerate an icon. And for someone who is Protestant, especially Baptist, to be championing John of Damascus as this wonderful, wonderful theologian is concerning, John of Damascus is arguably the first person in the East that you can point to who explicitly says the Spirit did not proceed from the Son.

There's all kinds of arguments the East makes in terms of Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Natsanza, Basil, the Cappadocian Fathers, in terms of some of their articulation of the procession. But it's with John of Damascus that you have an explicit denial.

And that becomes the basis of the East anathematizing anyone who says that the Spirit proceeds from the Son. Well, that anathematizes the whole Western Church, but it also anathematizes Augustine and Athanasius and a host of Jerome, a host of others.

One of the things that has concerned me is that the great tradition comes off as a fantasy. Who defines this great tradition? The historic church is messy. You know, John of Damascus is condemned by one council that declares itself the Seventh Ecumenical Council, and then is declared a saint by a later council.

That council is overturned by another council that's then overturned by another council. And I'm afraid that many people who don't seem to have a solid knowledge of just how messy church history can be have gotten swept up in this idea that there's this monolithic great tradition that trumps good exegesis.

And it's become the trump card for denouncing not just presuppositional apologetics, but a host of more traditional Reformed Baptists. But Dr. Barrett announced, I think it was last week, announced that he is now no longer Southern Baptist, but has converted to Anglicanism.

And that basically means he's not a Baptist of any kind anymore.

Well, he's right. He's clearly abandoned Credo Baptism, you know, Baptism of those who've made a professional faith, for Paedo-Baptism.

Now, even though you're a Paedo-Baptist, you're not pumping your fist in the air over this.

Y 'all can have him back. Brother, I have labored side by side with a mutual friend of ours, Dr. James White, for going on 27 years, and we have picked at each other every opportunity we've ever had about our differences on baptism.

But both of us are coming at it from—we read our history differently. We read the Scriptures differently on that subject. But our ultimate standard is God's Word. I've seen a lot of young men become Paedo-Baptists for reasons that scare me to death, because it's not because they are seeing the Paedo-Baptist arguments in Scripture so much as they're just becoming—they've become frustrated with their Baptist church, and so they're following what they believe is a great tradition.

And James and I would disagree on the historic evidence, clearly, but we would pretty much both agree that after the 4th century, until you get to the 15th—until you get to the 16th century, you don't have a lot of Paedo-Baptists, or what we just call Baptists.

Yeah, people make arguments for various groups and this and that and the other. But when somebody embraces Paedo-Baptism because they like it, it resonates with them. That scares me. I want them to see it from Scripture.

The fact that James and I are both arguing from the basis of Scripture, even though we disagree, we have confidence in one another that we've been able to maintain that relationship. But I've just seen too many guys that they get frustrated with some of the problems within the Baptist church, which some of them are legitimate frustrations.

They find that they have those same frustrations elsewhere if they stick around long enough. But they're looking for greener pastures, and so this has an appeal of antiquity. But at the same time that they're embracing Paedo-Baptism, they also all of a sudden decide that they really like the smells and bells of Rome in the East.

And they're like, this is the ancient faith. And it's like, no, no, it's not. It's the medieval faith. This isn't the early church. And I'm not just talking about a fantasy of some very simplistic understanding of the early church, but we're putting out a video at Ward-William in the next couple of weeks called The Patristic Roots of the Reformed Faith.

When we stand against the veneration of icons, you need to understand, Rome in the East called down God's curse on us. If you refuse to venerate an icon, this isn't simply them saying, you really ought to allow us to do it.

They're saying, if you don't join us with this, you are under the curse of God. And that is what anathema means for all the games they play about. And I can back it up. The Council of Iasi, or Iasi, as the Romanians prefer that we say it, called for Protestants to be unforgiven in this life and in the next.

And so, you know, they can't simply say, well, that just means separation. No, they're calling down the curse of God. They want us to be under his curse in this life and in the next.

And the Eastern Orthodox seem to be more upfront about that than the Roman Catholics. Am I correct?

Yes. And they vary as well. I mean, there's a whole Eastern Orthodoxy at whatever you want to make it. You can become an Orthobro and think that Putin is the savior of Western civilization. You can become a David Bentley Hart and sit around and sneer at everybody and champion universalism.

You can go Greek Orthodox and have Archbishop Elpidiphoros say that judging people for whom they love, which he's talking about homosexuals, is not Orthodox, that it's Western Puritanism. He said this in the context of baptizing the child of a homosexual couple.

Rome tends to sugarcoat everything a lot more these days. Their apologists don't. Anybody that can create a YouTube channel can become an apologist for Rome. But Rome as an institution has very clearly moved towards universalistic understanding.

Karl Rahner's Anonymous Christianity won out at Vatican II. And so you had Pope Francis telling this child that their father was going to heaven because the father didn't stop the son from being baptized, even though he was an atheist.

Yes, he was an atheist, but you've got the Pope kissing the Qur 'an. It's very much a universalistic, we are the world kind of thing these days, which historically it wasn't, but that's what it has morphed into.

And to put the seal on that, just now last week, Pope Leo has declared John Henry Newman a doctor of the church, you know, right up there with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John of Damascus, and these others.

And we're going to be dealing a lot with John Henry Newman in the upcoming video.

John Henry Newman, former Anglican.

Yes. And, you know, like John of Damascus, he trumps everything with mysticism. In his book on some of the stories of the saints, I'm trying to look here.

While you're looking, I'm going to announce our email address. If anybody would like to join us with a question for Pastor Jason Wallace about why the great tradition is not so great, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and country of residence. And Pastor Jason was in the middle of talking about John Henry Newman, who was an Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism in the 19th century.

And if you want to pick up where you left off there.

Yeah. Basically, Newman is proof that there is no great tradition, because he said that, this is from his book, an essay on the development of doctrine, he said, St. Dionysius is accused by St. Basil of having sown the first seeds of Arianism.

St. Hippolytus speaks as if he were ignorant of our Lord's eternal sonship. St. Methodius speaks incorrectly, at least upon the Incarnation. St. Cyprian does not treat of theology at all. Such is the incompleteness of the extant teaching of these true saints, and in their day, faithful witnesses of the eternal Son.

Essentially, the old arguments of Rome, that they stood on sacred scripture, sacred tradition, and the magisterium. When you strip away all the fluff, and get down to the heart of what Newman's saying is, you trump all that with whatever the Pope says.

That's how you have certainty. You ignore the scriptures, you ignore tradition. I mean, you make some appeals here and there to dress them up, but it doesn't matter. If scripture contradicts the Pope, the Pope's right.

If tradition contradicts the Pope, the Pope's right. If previous Pope contradicts the Pope, it's just like Mormonism. A living prophet is more vital to the church than a dead prophet. And so, this idea of a great tradition, yes, there are things that were clear in the history of the church, but you can find just about any modern heresy in the early church.

You can find just about any error in terms of claims of ongoing revelation, things like this. You can find that in the early church. Depends on how you define the church. Are there things about which the church did speak clearly, like the deity of Christ?

Yes. But the problem is, people pretend that Nicaea had this special aura, that it spoke infallibly. The problem with that is that 10 years later, Constantine called another council that denounced Athanasius, the defender of Nicene Orthodoxy, and declared Arius orthodox.

Now, Arius was dead by this point. Then his son, Constantius II, calls the council of Sirmium a number of years after that, and Sirmium explicitly denounces the Nicene Creed and declares that the Father is greater than the Son, not just in His incarnation, not just economic trinity, but in His being.

Now, I think a proper understanding of this is that the Westminster Confession says councils can and do err. They're made up of fallible, sinful men. Some are more faithful than others. Some are completely apostate.

But there's a reason that Jerome in the 4th century said the whole world groaned to discover itself Arian. Arianism was the great tradition for decades in the 4th century. Athanasius had to defy councils, creeds, and the Pope in standing for the historic faith.

Now— Nicene Orthodoxy—.

Go ahead. No, no, you continue.

Anyway, what I was going to tell you—I apologize. I'm jumping around here a bit, but John Henry Newman's been declared a doctor of the church. This is what he says about the crazy stories that were made up in the Middle Ages about saints.

He said—.

And by the way, I want to let our listeners know that if you have seen debates with Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, you have likely heard Catholic apologists quoting John Henry Newman with the most false statement that has been most repeated in the history of apologetics by Catholics, to be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant.

If anything that has taught me that that is a lie is the more deep I grow in the knowledge of church history from folks like Dr. James R. White and men like you, I just keep becoming more and more convinced as an ex-Catholic that I made the right decision back in the mid -1980s when I formally left the Roman Catholic Church.

But anyway, I'm sorry, I just wanted to let all this—.

No problem. Actually, that statement, to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant, is actually the opening line of our new video. I mean, we start with that. But then we show that he also said that the Council of Trent's doctrine of justification was in some sense new also, because the refutation of errors can't proceed near arising.

But he also, Newman admitted, we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special devotion to the Blessed Virgin, but he laid the foundations on which that devotion was to rest. So here you've got a fourth-century doctor of the church, the father of orthodoxy, and he has no special devotion to the Virgin Mary.

But for him, that's not a problem, because he's abandoned this idea that you can demonstrate that what Rome is doing is actually historic. What he's done is he's introduced the doctrine of development.

And so the only tradition that really matters for Newman is that Christ established a church, and it defines itself. That's what it boils down to. But in terms of his, you know, this guy not being deep in history, in terms of these crazy stories, I remember when we did the Eastern Orthodox one, the failure of Eastern Orthodoxy, you had a story of a monk who supposedly lived for an entire year on a single date.

Well, then later you had another monk who was claimed to have lived a whole year on a half of a date, and then another monk on a third of a date, and then yet another monk on one-sixth of a date. Not a day, total.

But in terms of some of the crazy stuff, you know, like Saint Dionysius being beheaded, then picking up his head and walking down the road preaching a sermon, he said, there is no room for the exercise of reason.

We are in the region of faith. We must believe and act where we cannot discriminate. We must be content to take the history as sacred on the whole and leave the verification of particulars as unnecessary for devotion and for criticism impossible.

This is a guy that basically, his whole argumentation boils down to the only way you will ever have certainty is to shut up and do what you're told by the Pope. Because he saw the scriptures as confusing, he saw the fathers as confusing, and therefore, if you're going to have certainty, you got to have one person tell you, and that's the Pope.

And if that's contrary to what previous Popes said, it's a small price for certainty. He wrote in 1848 about the house of the Virgin Mary was supposedly magically transported by angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and then to Loretto in Italy.

And it's a shrine there. Pope Francis visited there a few years ago and was championing, you know, that this is the house of the Virgin Mary.

Now, who is the one that started that fable?

You first hear about it, I want to say, about 200 years later, so 14th century is when you start hearing these stories. But I want to say, I'm pulling this off the top of my head, so I may be a little bit off, but I want to say that it was in the 12th century.

It was when the Saracen troops were in the Muslims, were taking back some of that area. Angels magically transported this house, supposedly first to Dalmatia, but then to Loretto. And, you know, you start hearing about a couple of years later, like, this is a house that angels brought here 200 years ago.

And you think about how divorced people are today from what happened 200 years ago. People believed it. John Henry Newman said, if you ask me why I believe, it is because everyone believes it in Rome.

Wow. Cautious as they are and skeptical about some other things. I believe it then as I believe that there is a new planet called Neptune, or the core form destroys the sense of pain. Newman is a loon, and I'm not even getting into his personal life and his relationship with others.

There's all kinds of things that are said about such things, but just as a theologian, what he does is he sets up straw men. He describes scripture, let's see.

In fact, why don't you pick up where you left off there on what Newman says of scripture when we come back from our first commercial break. And if anybody would like to join us, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages.

James White here of Alpha and Omega Ministries announcing that this September, I'm heading out to Pennsylvania to speak at two events that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen has lined up for me. On Thursday, September 18th at 11 a .m., I'm speaking to men in ministry leadership at Chris's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastors Luncheon at Church of the Living Christ in Lloydsville.

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We are now back with Pastor Jason Wallace of Christ Presbyterian Church, an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation in Magna, Utah, and we are discussing the not-so-great tradition. This conversation was basically spawned by the recent conversion of Southern Baptist theologian Matthew Barrett to Anglicanism, and he is one of the growing number of professedly Reformed Christians who boast of upholding what has become known as the great tradition.

And if you have a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. And right before the break, you were looking up a quote by the Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism in the 19th century, Cardinal John Henry Newman, about Scripture.

Yeah, he said it has a structure so.

Unsystematic and various and a style so figurative and indirect that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not. Wow. So basically, yeah. By the way, go ahead, go ahead. I'm sorry.

No, no, continue. Essentially, his take was that Scripture is confusing. He said the 39 articles are so loosely worded, so incomplete in statement, so ambiguous in their meaning, as to need an authoritative interpretation.

The 39 articles being the Reformed.

Standard of historic Anglicanism, which Reformed Baptists and Presbyterians.

Agree with in their majority. Right. And I'm afraid I may have gotten off on a tangent and lost some people, but the gist of it is that the great tradition has become this byword, a shibboleth among a lot of Reformed folk.

Even Roman myths, there's no great tradition. Whenever they call John Henry Newman a doctor of the church, this is what they're endorsing, that they can't back up. You'll have people make claims. There are people who will go back and try to argue that when Irenaeus calls Mary the new Eve, that this is pointing towards her being a co-mediator with Jesus.

Clearly, that's not what Irenaeus believed. John Henry Newman admitted that. Anyone who carefully goes through finds that there are some things the church was clear about, that the Holy Spirit did lead people into truth.

The Nicene Creed is faithful, but we don't hold everything that the Council of Nicaea held. I say that for Protestants. We especially don't agree with the Second Council of Nicaea four and a half centuries later.

That council anathematized anyone who will not bow down and offer veneration to an idol, to a representation of Christ or the saints. And when Matthew Barrett was gushing about how wonderful John of Damascus was, he's the theologian who's behind Second Nicaea.

And he makes all kinds of mystical arguments, but he also appeals to this supposed history that shows that the veneration of icons goes back to the apostles themselves. One of the claims was that Luke made the first icon of Mary.

Well, the simple reality is that those claims do not hold up to scrutiny, and Newman recognized that. And I'm assuming Matthew Barrett does not publicly.

Agree on those issues. I'm assuming that. Well, yeah, I've heard nothing.

The discussion of John of Damascus seemed to equivocate a lot. I don't know what his specific position is. I know that when he posted his announcement, that he posted numerous pictures showing representations of Christ, which one of the points I try to make is this is not the great tradition.

It's not even the Anglican tradition. Yes, many Anglican churches have embraced having images of Christ and venerating them. But that's contrary to the 39 articles. Yes. And people have had some Anglicans get upset with me because I pointed that out.

And they're like, we have other standards as well. I was like, I never said you did. Yeah. But the 39 articles were clear that this was something looking for the exact quote.

And the 39 articles were drafted by Thomas Cranmer, who was a thoroughly Reformed Christian who didn't even believe, from the interviews I've done with Cranmer historians and scholars, he didn't even believe his friend King Henry VIII was saved until on King Henry VIII's deathbed, he asked Henry, if you believe in justification by faith alone, please squeeze my hand.

And Henry squeezed his hand, giving him Cranmer more comfort that he had become saved before entering eternity. And so he was a very strong Calvinist. And of course, he also denounced fear of the threat of death.

He denounced his Protestant faith, but then he later renounced his renunciation of Protestantism and was burned at the stake and plunged his hand into the flame that signed his initial recantation of Protestantism.

He wanted that.

First. Yeah. The 39 articles say about the adoration of images calls it a fond thing, vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God. The great theme of what I'm trying to communicate to folks now is that this whole idea of a great tradition is a farce.

It's a wax nose that basically gives historic camouflage to mysticism. The Second Council of Nicaea in the 8th century anathematized the faith of the First Council of Nicaea in the 4th century. There's no evidence that anyone at that First Council of Nicaea venerated images.

You wouldn't know that to listen to the discussion on John of Damascus that Barrett did. It would seem much more, you know, well, you know, Luther felt this way, and Calvin felt this way, and these people felt this way.

And, you know, we recognize that we can we can make these images without worshiping them. And that, you know, John of Damascus made this great differentiation between Latria and Julia. And, you know, we're only giving Latria the highest worship to God, but we're giving Julia.

Those distinctions do not hold up to scrutiny.

And by the way, I wanted to make it clear also to our listeners that you and I are not in any way trying to broad brush and condemn all of Anglicanism, because there not only have been heroes of the faith that you and I love to read from centuries past who were Anglicans, one of the most recent from history, the 19th century Bishop J .C. Ryle, but even today, there are thoroughly Protestant and Reformed Anglicans who would join us in our warning, well, sounding the alarm to warn people against the growing Anglo-Catholic movement that is barely distinguishable from Rome.

Big time. I mean, Calvin Robinson got a big following during COVID. I mean, this is a guy who devotion to Mary is at the center of his Anglicanism.

Yes. And he's not even an Anglican anymore. He's an old Catholic.

Yeah. He's bounced around so many different ways. You know, one of the concerns, I mean, you know, I'm a Presbyterian. Presbyterianism has morphed a bit over time to include more old Anglican elements.

You know, the early Presbyterians would make a point to preach on anything other than the Incarnation around Christmastime. No, we don't observe a the Book of Common Prayer in our bulletin each week as a silent prayer in preparation for worship.

We recite the Nicene Creed every week. We sing the Goria Patria. We read the law. We have a very traditional service, and we're thrilled that ours is the historic faith, that we are the true Catholics.

We're the ones that can recite the Nicene Creed without anathematizing what those men believe. This isn't just my opinion. You know, they try to, in a lot of these areas, they'll try to muddy the waters.

There is a clear consensus on some things, like the deity of Christ. Yes, that was confused and required fights during the time of Arianism, as I said. But Arianism has more claim to historicity and Catholicity than the veneration of images.

And this isn't just my opinion. Arguably, Rome's top scholar of councils, if not just the Fathers overall, said—this is Fr. Richard Price in his book on the Second Council of Nicaea—he said, the iconoclasts claim that reverence towards images did not go back to the olden age of the Fathers, which he identifies as 325 to 451, so from First Nicaea to Chalcedon.

Still less to the apostles would be judged by impartial historians today, to be simply correct. Chris, the idea that the early church venerated images—now, there were Gnostics who did that, but they were clearly outside the pale.

This wasn't something about which there was debate within the church to speak of. Yes, there were people who would dabble in these things. You have Eusebius, I believe it was, who finds a tapestry, a drape or something, that had an image, he said.

He couldn't remember if it was Christ or one of the saints on it. And he saw it, he ripped it out, tore it into pieces, and said, use it for bandages for the poor.

Wow. We have to go to our midway break right now. But if anybody would like to join us, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least, city and state and country of residence.