Aquinas as a Commentator, Doing "Theological Exegesis" on Matthew 24:36

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It's Thursday, Thursday of ReformCon 2022. I'll be heading over there right after we do this. And I'm really not sure what's going on this evening. It's sort of a meet and greet type thing, but okay, we'll meet and greet.

And then tomorrow, I know Summer's doing something and I know I'm speaking at 11 something in the morning, and then 1 .30 is when we will be doing The Dividing Line. And I hope to have Joe Boot and a number of other people that will be speaking on the program.

I can't guarantee all that because, you know, people end up other places and things happen. But we're going to try to have some interesting guests on live program be very different than what we normally do in looking at particular topics and stuff like that.

And the tricky part is, you know, background noise, getting people mic'd properly so you can hear things and stuff like that. So that's what we'll be doing tomorrow. So another program tomorrow, different than today.

I noticed that, I guess, Aaron up in Salt Lake City put out a video on is Leighton Flowers heterodox or the, no, the heterodoxy of Leighton Flowers. And Leighton's first, and I guarantee you, first response.

Leighton doesn't just do one response. The first response is 90 minutes long. And to be honest with you, the seventh response in 2027 will be 90 minutes long. Oh, yeah. I sent Aaron a Facebook note and said, welcome to my world.

It's just the way things are out there. Just in passing, the way that it's being described, and to be really quick with this, the way it's being described to me by faithful Roman Catholics is the scandal of Francis's appointment of a pro-choice individual to what's supposed to be a Vatican group on promoting life.

And there isn't a question he knew where she was coming from. He was well aware of that. And we've been saying for a long, long time, if you just look at his background, if you look at the subject of liberation theology in South America, where it was put that way, and all the associated woke stuff that goes with that.

Well, further developments, it seems that a second person has been appointed to the same commission, whatever it is, that likewise, real questions as to whether this person even believes in a pro-life stance.

And it's at the exact same time that you have Joe Biden, who calls himself a practicing Roman Catholic. I know he's not a practicing Roman Catholic. I get that. I get that it is painfully obvious that the commands of Christ have nothing to do with what Joe Biden believes does on a daily basis.

And that's true for, unfortunately, a large number of people that claim to be Roman Catholic or claim to be Protestant or whatever. Nominalism is everywhere. But you have Joe Biden sitting down with this absurd guy who pretends to be a girl, not a woman, a girl.

And this guy was a, I guess, some type of internet comic or something. And so I would not be at all surprised if a year from now, he just stops and says, okay, what did you think of my acting? Pretty good, huh?

Had y 'all going, didn't I? I wouldn't be surprised by that. I really wouldn't. I got to go to the White House. Can you believe that? I mean, the stuff that he's done already is just so circus level stupid that you just.

But to have Joe Biden, and I know Joe Biden doesn't write his own tweets. That's why we don't have any more mean tweets. Well, I'll tell you something. I have seen the POTUS account on Twitter post over and over and over again about making Roe v. Wade the law of the land, legislating it, codifying it is the term they use.

I consider that a very mean tweet. And to all of the airheaded evangelicals, and I'm just being honest with you, airheaded evangelicals, that were, I think, I haven't been able to check, but I think pretty much everybody from the evangelicals for Biden group have not only left Twitter, I think they've left the United States.

They're in hiding in Portugal, I think, somewhere around there. But everybody who did that, you know, I'll retweet the fact that we are live. You know, I've got almost 100 ,000 followers now on Twitter.

I'm not sure how many of them are bots, but honestly, why would a bot follow me? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Because I'm Russian or I'm from Russia, they're watching. Oh, I've been to Russia, by the way.

I need to admit that in 2019. Yes, I could see it from my house. Yes. Anyway, all those folks, all you airheads that got rid of mean tweets, I consider those mean tweets. Here's the point. If there was anybody who went on national television promoting the murder of unborn children and the transgender insanity that pretend to be a member of our church, we would respond instantly, instantly.

But remember, when Nancy Pelosi's bishop told Nancy Pelosi not to present herself to receive the Eucharist, she went to Rome and got it from the Pope. That's as much of a slap in your face as could ever be.

And just to tell my Roman Catholic friends, sorry to keep pointing this out, but it's really hard to take your authority claims seriously when there isn't any question about this man's formal heresy, Joe Biden's formal heresy.

I mean, you might say, well, he's really not there. That's true. That's true. I suppose that would be the excuse now is that you're not going to excommunicate a senile old man. But this senile old man is doing everything he can to force your schools and your churches to abandon your moral teaching.

And you all won't touch him with a 10 foot pole. And I just keep going, got to change, got to change. But it's not going to change as long as you have Francis as a Pope, because there you go. Anyway, so yesterday I was, I don't know how I saw this.

Actually, this is October 23rd. So it was a couple of days ago. Some guy on Twitter named, going by the title Classical Theist, wrote the following tweet. The Protestant perspicuity of scripture doctrine has always struck me as among the most inane and self-evidently false doctrines ever professed in the history of Christendom.

Now, just because someone names themself Classical Theist doesn't make them a representative, a meaningful representative of Classical Theism. And the reality is Classical Theism was a, as far as I understand, a phrase that became widely used that was initially come up with, designed, created by open theists as a means of differentiating their perspective from historical orthodoxy.

Obviously, what's happened now is you have a, in essence, a hijacking of that term and a extreme narrowing of that focus. That was, when I first read James Dolezal's book, that was the first problem I had was, there was a, same thing with Carter, there is a way, way, way too simplistic bifurcation of where everybody's been in history and everything else.

You've got what they call the mutualists, the theistic mutualists, and everybody's in that. You just throw everything in there. It's just a, when you throw so much into a category, so as to say, these are the bad guys and these are the good guys, and there's so much difference between all these people, it doesn't accomplish, it doesn't have any meaning to it, especially if someone understands that.

So if you're throwing Scott Oliphant and John Frame and Charles Hodge into the same bucket with open theists, it's like using the term racist anymore. Racist means nothing. You could, I just saw, I just saw a tweet go by from Fetterman's wife saying that swimming has historically been racist.

Snow is racist, Christmas is racist. Since everything is racist, then nothing is racist. The term has no meaning. And if you throw all these people with all these different perspectives into one category, you destroy the meaningfulness of your attempt.

So any open theist would consider myself a classical theist. Obviously, that's what I've defended, and now the disputes we're having are over how narrowly do you define that? How far do you take certain things?

What's the origin and source of what we affirm about the nature of God? And so you look at something like this and the Protestant perspicuity of scripture doctrine, that scripture speaks with sufficient clarity to function the way God has designed it to function.

Now, this guy is Roman Catholic, so he doesn't believe in any of this stuff. I get that. Has all this struck me as among the most inane and self-evidently false doctrines ever professed in the history of Christendom.

And I love turning this back on people that try to use it as an argument against the soul of scripture and say, so how's that unity amongst all you Roman Catholic theologians doing? How about old Frankie there?

You all on the same page there? Do we have the perspicuity, the Roman Catholic magisterium? I don't know. Go to Boston College and find out, right? It's just, it's laughable because the range of expression and understanding is very, very wide.

And anybody in the system knows that. But it's easy to take shots at scripture that way. But I just found that fascinating from a guy named Classical Theist. I also noticed there's an article, Making the Rounds, where someone fairly well known has collected a number of the negative reviews of Craig Carter's work.

And there are negative reviews of Dolezal's work. There are negative reviews of Craig Carter's work. And I've been aware of these things for a long, long time. And the easy way, and I think the less, and I'm not criticizing this article at all, I'm simply saying that the easy way would be to set the philosophers at each other's throats and go see, oh, this philosopher says this.

And that way you can keep your philosophical credentials because you are quoting one philosopher against another philosopher and so on and so forth. And I've been aware of, I've had a whole list of them.

I've just never used them in my responses. Why? Because that's not why I'm engaging in the issue. I'm not engaging in the issue so as to protect my publishing status or my book contracts or teaching contracts or get invited to some conference or scholarly confab.

I don't care about any of that stuff. The whole reason to be engaged in this subject is for the ministry of the church and the service of the church. That's why we've always done what we do. We've never viewed ourselves as a church, taken the roles of the church, anything like that.

And so it's Christ's sheep that are the foremost in my thinking. And when I see a movement that is fundamentally of necessity, undercutting the unique authority of scripture in defining what we are to believe as Christians, we have a long history of engaging that particular subject.

And so we're just being consistent, even though right now that means having to respond to a lot of Baptists, Reformed Baptists and people like that. So I've been well aware of the fact that if all I was trying to do was to say, well, there's other perspectives out there.

All I'd be saying is there's other perspectives within the philosophical community. Fine. That's not my concern, because that's not the concern of the vast majority of people in the church. I want to address the issue biblically, because it's nice that a lot of you still have the older purple version.

Ah, blue. Yeah, it's got purple in it. Anyway, the older printing of the Forgotten Trinity, because there's documentation from a quarter century ago, I think it came out in 98, so we're getting close to, yeah, next year will be a quarter century, that I have said from the beginning I'm a biblical Trinitarian.

And back then no one objected because biblical was a compliment, not an insult. And the very fact that everybody once accepted it as a compliment and as something you should be, and now one side uses it as an insult, and the other side is still going, nope, that's not an insult.

That's a good thing. Should tell you something. It certainly tells me something. But you can go back and you can find it almost 25 years ago, 24, I guess, 98 to now. That's where we've been coming from all along.

Anyway, an article was referred to from, it's an older article from Norm Geisler about Aquinas. And there was just one little thing I wanted to comment on it. What will people find when they read Aquinas besides philosophy?

Here's the answer. People are rediscovering Aquinas as a biblical exegete. He wrote some of the greatest commentaries in the Gospels to this day. Now think about, just stop just a second. Think what that means.

The entirety of the Reformation, post-Tenebrous Lux, recovery of the centrality of biblical exegesis. Nobody has ever been able to surpass Thomas's commentary on the Gospels. That's what Norm Geisler believed.

He has 10 pages on John 1, ooh, and 78 pages on chapter 1. He calls from the fathers from the second century up to the 13th century and weaves them together in a continuous commentary. Well, he's definitely verbose.

And he definitely brings in all sorts of early writings from Origen and Augustine and John Chrysostom and all sorts of stuff that he does, that he does, no question about it. And that would be really tough to do in 1250.

Why? Well, how easy is it for us today? Pop up Lagos, do some searches. Couldn't do that back then. You didn't even have, goodness, you didn't even have a card catalog back then. You didn't have interlibrary loan.

You didn't have critical editions and anything else. So hats off. And look, we've looked at a couple of texts and this is the thing that bugs me. I looked at ailmen .org. I searched on it. Couldn't find it.

But John 1319, I know that I wanted to address Thomas's comments on John 1319. But see, here's the problem. When you're traveling and teaching and doing, I just did something on Cauldron Pool down in Australia, which was really fun.

And I'm going to be on a bunch of other programs this next month before I go out of town again. And it's actually impossible since I don't have someone who follows me around to check this stuff out. Rich has got other things to be doing.

So it's me, myself and I. And so I don't remember if I got around to doing it. I remember looking it up, but I don't remember if we did it in the program or not. And so just briefly, in light of Geisler's commentary, I wanted to point out, just in passing, looking at the commentary on the Gospel of John, since that's what Geisler specifically mentioned.

Is this the worst commentary ever written? No, not by a long shot. Is it better than most commentaries prior to the Reformation? Well, as far as the breadth of information brought in, yes. The thing that is constantly distracting are the number of Old Testament texts that are cited that have absolutely nothing to do with what's actually being said in the New Testament text.

It's that as long as there's a word similar, we can make the connection thing that was very common in the medieval period, but I'll be perfectly honest with you, is incredibly distracting and not helpful at all.

Was it really, really, really popular in his day? It was, so there you go. But have we produced more in-depth, consistent, recognizing historical connections, readable commentaries of the Gospel of John since Thomas Aquinas?

Well, let me put it this way. If we haven't, the Reformation was a we most certainly have. I cannot think of almost any text where I would find Aquinas' commentary superior to Calvin's. Calvin is so connected to the text, so rarely distracted and drawn off into who knows what.

I would put Calvin against Aquinas any day as far as usefulness to the people of God in the church in regard to biblical commentary. So to say no one has surpassed his commentary on the Gospels to this day, it just tells you a lot about what Norm Geisler thought about the and in people like that.

I discovered that when I, the stuff he said about Reformed theology in Chosen but Free was just astonishingly, simplistically bad. And in my conversations with him, as soon as you would raise any objection to his long-held positions, it was just like this shield comes down and he just repeats a few things and he's off someplace else.

There was no willingness to hear, learn, continue to grow. It was, anyway. So just quickly, in his commentary on the Gospel of John, if I'm recalling correctly, I said toward the end of a program that I wanted to do this, didn't get around to doing it.

That's my recollection. If I did, I apologize. But I had the thought, let's look and see what Aquinas did with some of the I Am sayings of Jesus and especially the I Am saying of Jesus that is the one that most people don't see.

People see John 8, 58 all the time. They see Jesus using that in the garden, the soldiers fall back when he says, I Am. A lot of people do miss the earlier one in John 8, unless you believe that I Am, you'll die in your sins.

So they often miss that one. But the one they really, really, miss is John 13, 19. And this one's really interesting because what it demonstrates is Aquinas completely misses it. Now, there might be other decent commentaries, I haven't taken the time to look at them, that likewise miss it.

It's understandable, I suppose. But John 13, 19, Jesus is purposely quoting from, drawing from Isaiah 43, 10, which is a text about Yahweh and applying it to himself in the context of prophecy of future fulfillment.

And that's what it was in the original context, that's what it is in John 13. It's vitally important, especially in the whole context of the Gospel of John. Aquinas never even mentions it, doesn't see it, clearly did not catch the Old Testament connection, which is what's weird.

Because as I said, there are, even within two paragraphs, you will find Aquinas pulling citations from Old Testament texts that have nothing to do with what's going on in John at all, because of a similar phrase or something like that.

So, you would think that this would have been, you know, right there. And in fact, what's interesting is he quotes from Isaiah 41, 23. That's within two chapters of what's actually being quoted from, but not in the proper context.

So, I'll just, as if to say I've been silent about his malice for a long time, but because the time is near when it will appear publicly, therefore, I'm telling you this now, before it takes place, that when it does take place, you may believe that I am he who predicts the future and reveals the secrets of the heart, things which are characteristic of God.

The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the mind and try the heart, Jeremiah 17, 9. Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are God's, Isaiah 41, 23, or I am who I am, Exodus 3, 14.

Pretty close, but misses the elephant standing in the room. So, there isn't a strong, and there wasn't yet in that time period, a strong, meaningful intertextuality, understanding of the intertextuality of the Old and New Testaments.

And Aquinas just missed it. So, is this, is this just not another example of the fact that we have people, and have had people for a long time. John Gerstner was another one. God bless John Gerstner, but John Gerstner's material on Aquinas is simply horrific.

I mean, it's just, it's imbalanced. And, you know, there you go. You learn to appreciate people and then go, they really had a problem on that one all the time. It's just, that's how it works. We all have to be able to do that.

Certainly the case with Norm, he did a lot of good stuff, but boy, when it came to Aquinas, he was way, way off. Oh, yes, sir.

So, apparently you did do, on a road trip, when you were up in Colorado, August 25th, you did the I Am Sayings of Jesus. Now, whether or not you covered what you just covered, I don't know, but there is that.

Chris just found that. So, there is that, but, you know,.

Little repetition can't hurt. Well, yeah, I don't know if that was what I was discussing on that or not. I've slept since then. So, got no idea, no idea whatsoever. All right, well, I need to start providing a response.

And this, I don't want people to tune out here. I apologize if you think that this isn't, oh, wait a minute, one other statement. Sorry, I have to, there's, wait, there's more. Yeah, I, anyway, I do need to, I'm just checking the temperature in here real quickly.

Once the door got closed, it's, no, it's still where it needs to be. That's fine. Good. Anyway, there was one other statement, and it popped up here when I opened this other program. I think this is Geisler.

And then there's the concern that Aquinas was a Roman Catholic. And we Protestants disagree with Catholicism at key points. Now, here's the sentence. I had never seen this one before. In truth, most Protestants today could have accepted what the Roman Catholic Church taught up to the time of the Reformation.

Let me read that one more time. In truth, most Protestants today could have accepted what the Roman Catholic Church taught up to the time of the Reformation. Now, I remember very, very clearly when Geisler and McKenzie put out, I think Baker published their book on Roman Catholic, Roman Catholicism, Agreements and Differences, I forget what it was.

It was a pretty thick thing. I remember having read it that I sat down with McKenzie at the Christian Booksellers Association meeting in 1995, I think. And he called me hard-nosed. He said, you know your stuff, but you're pretty hard-nosed about Roman Catholicism.

He says, but you might be right. There were a bunch of things that I asked him about that he didn't really seem to have thought about. And obviously, I felt that the book missed some of the most important issues.

Here's a good example of it. In truth, most Protestants today could have accepted what the Roman Catholic Church taught up to the time of the Reformation, which means there was no reason for the Reformation.

So what he goes on to talk about are Roman Catholic dogmas that have been dogmatized and defined since the days of Thomas Aquinas. Well, yeah, and there are Vatican I, papal infallibility, you've got the definition of the Immaculate Conception, which he did specifically reject, and the fact that he did not believe in the bodily assumption.

That was, again, still future as far as full development in his day. And so that's fine, but those are well-known to be modern innovations, at least modern dogmatizations. But how about the papacy as a whole?

How about the entire soteriological and sacramental system? There were seven sacraments by that time. Thomas's dedication to the Eucharistic sacrifice, transubstantiation, he provided the entire metaphysical framework for transubstantiation in the math, right?

Wrote in defense of it. And so purgatory, all of the sacramental concepts, baptism, destruction of heretics, priests, bishops, all of ecclesiology, all of soteriology, almost all of ecclesiology in regards to the papacy, and a large portion of Mariology without the last definitions.

Are you saying that Protestants would have agreed with all that? It's just astonishing. It truly leaves you sitting there going, so from your perspective, Luther was just hyperactive. He just had too much caffeine in his coffee.

Coffee had just started arriving in Europe at that point. There is no foundation for post-Tenebrous Lux, an understanding of post-Tenebrous Lux in any of these folks that are pushing Thomas today. It just, there just isn't.

There was no darkness. You just weren't looking for the light in the right places. It's amazing. Okay. Let me scroll back down here past all these interesting things. Last week, I believe, I responded to the first of a series of articles.

Three have now been published at baptistogmatics .com. The second, which I'm getting to now, Trinity Christology and James White exegetical concerns. I provided numerous corrections in the first one. It said, hey guys, you're missing, you've missed the boat here on some really foundational stuff.

As is so often the case, I think these were all written a long time ago. They're just going to keep appearing. What I say won't matter. Maybe there'll be a follow-up later on, but there you go. This one was published on the 21st.

I have the third one as well. Not sure that I'll be getting to it today, but we'll see. What's interesting here, and this is why it'll be helpful, I think, for everyone to stay tuned in, is here is an attempt to do theological exegesis.

Now, who could ever object against theological exegesis? You don't do non-theological exegesis. Well, you do when you're exegeting a non-theological text. If you're reading a letter written from a battlefield by a famous Civil War general, okay, you're still going to do exegesis, but it's just not theological.

Well, unless it's a theological subject, I guess, which could have happened. But this is their own, in this post, we endeavor to engage in theological exegesis of Matthew 24 -36. Now, again, I just point out, sadly, that the entire foundation they're using for this was a Twitter threat.

Now, I said it, and in fact, the title was just too long for a Twitter threat, but it was a quick, brief correction of more straw men that popped up one morning on Twitter. So I opened a file, and I was going to do the Twitter thread thing, and then once you scroll down to the next page in what you're writing, you can still do that on Twitter, but it just ends up being long.

And so I decided we'll just post on the blog, link to it, go from there. But again, it's not, it was never meant to be some kind of position paper or anything of the kind, but that's what they chose to use.

I suppose it's easier than, no, it wouldn't be easier. They could have gone to some of the much lengthier discussions that I've provided on the dividing line, just go to the transcript thing and pull it off of there.

Could have done that, but they didn't. So they're going with the, they get to write long stuff, and mine was a, do with that as you will, be that as it may. It says, first we will examine theological exegesis, then we will evaluate White's comments on the Holy Spirit while offering an alternative way of reading the text.

Time out. There is one stinking sentence. There is one parenthetical sentence, actually, I should say. One, I put in a parentheses because someone had pointed out that somebody had said something about the Holy Spirit.

And so I put in a parenthetical comment into something on a different topic, and that's what they're focusing on. Again, you're just left going, okay. All right. See, I would never do that to somebody else.

I would not focus upon a parenthetical comment and write an entire article when I know that they've written and published and all the rest of the stuff on other subjects. I just don't know what's going on.

We used to treat each other differently back in the olden days, back when we were all on the same page, but anyway. So then we have some quotations. Interesting enough, leaning on John Webster, now if I'm correct, my recollection is that Craig Carter specifically speaks much of his dependence, his owing much to John Webster, if I'm recalling correctly.

Exegetical reasoning attends to the order and flow of the text following its twists and turns. Dogmatic reasoning attends the theological claims of the text, looking along and with the text to discern the ultimate reality to which it bears witness.

Neither is complete without the other. Both move from and toward one another in a continual, mutually informative exchange. Biblical reasoning. Okay. What I have always said, and what I thought sound hermeneutical guides and things like that said, is we have to start somewhere and we have to start with ascertaining the meaning of the text itself and then the application, taking that meaning of the text and then making application within the immediate context, the broader context of the author, maybe the book, epistle, something like that.

Then the corpus of similar forms and types of literature. So for example, you would look at Paul's epistles as a whole, and then you compare them with other epistles. Peter's got a couple of epistles in there too.

That's going to be a different application than looking at Revelation, which is apocalyptic. Looking at the Gospels, which are historical, biographical, and then eventually you do get to the entire corpus of the New Testament, entire corpus of the Bible.

And at this point, you have removed certain possible readings that were possible in the text itself that become impossible, for example, in looking at all of Paul's writings, or if we're looking at Matthew 24 -36, looking at the Gospels.

Some of those readings, possible interpretations have been filtered out at that point. Finally, you can then make application theologically to a systematic theology, to an understanding of the whole of Christian truth because you started with a recognition that we are dealing with that which is Theanustos.

But that doesn't change the reality that God used men who spoke from him as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit in history. And so you can't ignore the reality that it was God's intention to put the Apostle Paul in a context where he could make reference to the Roman games or the Greek games, I really borrowed them from the Greeks, in writing to Timothy and talking about the wreath and the prize and the contest and the games and no one gets the prize unless they compete according to the rules.

Well, it used to be that way. It doesn't really work that way anymore here in the West. But anyhow, that was all a part of God's sovereign ordering of things, that that background would exist and would then come into the very wording of Scripture itself.

So no one in the believing community is approaching Scripture as if it is just simply some type of naturalistic, no difference between this and reading Pliny or Suetonius or any of the Greek historians this time period.

No one's doing that, not in the believing community. I know that the liberals, the leftists, the modern academy does not start there. I've always started there. Like I said before, the dividing line was initially in reference to people who, the dividing line was whether you believe Scripture is or is not inspired, inerrant, insufficient.

That was what the dividing line was and it still is. So no one's saying, well, okay, the leftist academy is saying you treat it like anything else. It's not what I've ever said. That's not how I've ever done anything.

I've wrote a few books. This book's got a whole lot of exegesis in it. Did I? God it justifies. Did I engage in that kind of? No, of course not. Of course not. So, but you have to start someplace. And the question, the real question, I've brought this up over and over the decades, what is the origin and source of your theological conclusions?

Where are they derived from? What is forced upon us by the actual meaning of the text? And when I say the actual meaning of the text, that is the discernible intention that the author intends to communicate to his audience.

There's no place else to go. If you abandon that, there is nothing to pass on to the next generation and generation after that. If you say that is not discernible, if you say that's not an objective, consistent reality that goes from generation to generation, we've got nothing left.

We are playing games. That's a real, can you see why it's a serious concern? Yeah, it's a serious concern. So this dogmatic reasoning attends the theological claims of the text. Well, that can only be ascertained after you've determined the order and flow of the text.

So one has to flow from the other. If you try to put them together, you're going to have a problem. This mutually informative relationship between exegetical and dogmatic reasoning is not asymmetrical, wherein exegesis informs dogmatics, but dogmatics cannot inform exegesis.

They write dogmatic reasoning is every bit as much a mode of reading scripture as exegetical reasoning. Well, it's a mode, but it's a secondary mode informed by the first. That's where our first division is.

Because real simply, I need to put a stop to this right here so you can see why, because it's just going to, the divergence just gets wider and wider over time unless you explain why it is. The dogma, and see again, I think part of this is the people they're quoting are not people who spend a whole lot of time presenting the Christian faith as true over against other perspectives.

And so I have seen dogmatic exegesis in almost every debate I've ever done. And especially in dealing with some of my Roman Catholic friends, it becomes blatantly obvious. Go watch the cross-examination of Father Dr. Peter Stravinskis on Purgatory from 2001.

If you want to see what happens when straightforward, old-fashioned exegesis runs up against dogmatic reasoning, one side gets run over really badly. Just go look for yourself. But I can't think of a single one of my critics and a single one of the people quoting this that's ever done anything like that, that's ever put themselves on the line, ever sat there in front of a live audience with a guy with two PhDs from Ivy League schools and sat there with a Greek New Testament open to 1 Corinthians chapter 3 and said, let's dig into it.

I don't know of one of them that's ever done that. And I think that's relevant because if you listen to Stravinskis, Stravinskis is giving you, he's looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 3 through the lens of the dogma that's been given to him by the church, by the Roman church.

And so I can walk him straight through. Everybody in the audience sees exactly what's there, but he can't because of the lens that he's wearing. And I say that what I communicated is what Paul communicated to the Corinthians.

There's the issue. There's the issue. In this scheme, I'm not going to get this done today. In this scheme, theology or dogmatics is not a superstructure placed over or improving upon the text. Now, those are two different things.

There's some really, really inaccurate language in these articles. Placed over is different than improving. I don't even know who would ever suggest that. We're going to improve the text. But how can it not be a superstructure placed over the text?

Because my dogmatic conclusions, if they are going to be binding upon anyone else, have to flow from the text of scripture itself. And there is the bugaboo. Everybody wants to say that, but a lot of people just don't really believe it anymore.

It is instead a substructure. Theology is not added to or outside the text, but in the text. Dogmatic reasoning is a means by which we see the substructure revealed in the text. Okay. I'm going to want to know, how are you going to avoid origin here?

Or are you going to go ahead and go with them? Are you saying that the substructure is the deeper spiritual meaning that is more important than the surface level exegetical meaning? You've got three different views, and some people would identify more.

Anybody who wants to find anything in origin will be able to find anything they want in origin, just in passing. But the surface level, that which the regular mind can understand, that's not really important.

The moral and ethical, okay, it's important. But it's the spiritual that really, really matters in origin. And that is almost always allegorical in its nature. So is the dogmatic, is this substructure the deeper spiritual meaning?

In other words, they write, dogmatic reasoning discerns what must be the case if everything scripture says is true. Well, that's harmonization. That's allowing all of scripture to speak. That's based upon the nature of scripture.

And that's what we do once we, when I remember, and he'll remember this clearly, one night after church, years and years and years ago at PRBC, he was standing out in the back lot, as we always would and talk.