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 like 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 I 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 his

Leighton Flowers heterodox or the, no, the heterodoxy of Leighton Flowers.

And Leighton's first response, 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, 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 a, 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 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, I guess, some type of internet comic or something.

And so I would not be at all surprised if, you know, a year from now, he just stops and says,

OK, 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 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, you know,

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.

And but everybody who did that, you know,

I'll retweet the fact that we are live that will, you know,

I've got almost a hundred thousand 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. So 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 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 you, 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 represent, 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, 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. 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 you know, 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 always struck me as among the most inane and self -evidently false doctrines ever professed in the history of Christendom.

And I I love turning this back on people that try to use it as an argument against Sola Scriptura and say, so how's that unity amongst all you

Roman Catholic theologians doing? How about old

Frankie there? Y '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 or 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. It 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 Bible. No one has surpassed his commentary on the

Gospels to this day. Now think about, just stop just a second, think what that means. The entirety of the

Reformation, post -Tenebris 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 2nd 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 and Chris system 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 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 13, 19, I know that I wanted to address

Thomas's comments on John 13, 19. But see, here's the problem.

When you're traveling and teaching and doing, you know,

I just did something on Cauldron Pool down in Australia, which is 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, it's actually impossible since I don't have someone who follows me around to check this stuff out.

Okay. 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, just in passing, looking at the commentary on the

Gospel of John, since that's what Geisler specifically mentioned, um, is this the worst commentary ever written?

No, not by a long shot. Is it, uh, 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, uh, 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.

Um, was it really, really, popular in his day? It was. So there you go.

Um, but have we produced more, uh, in -depth, consistent, um, recognizing historical connections, um, 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 waste. If we haven't, the

Reformation was a waste. We most certainly have. I, I, I cannot think of almost any text where I would find

Aquinas's commentary superior to Calvin's. Calvin is so connected to the text, so rarely distracted and drawn off into who knows what, um,

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 is just, tells you a lot about what

Norm Geisler thought about the Reformation and how little reading he had done in Calvin and in people like that.

I, I discovered that when I, uh, you know, the stuff he said about Reformed theology in Chosen but Free was just astonishingly, simplistically bad.

Um, and in my conversations with him, as soon as you would raise any objection to his long -held positions, it was just like this, this shield comes down and he just repeats a few things and he's off someplace else.

There was, there was no willingness to, to hear, learn, continue to grow.

It was, um, anyway. Um, so just quickly, in his commentary on the

Gospel of John, I had, and I, if I, if I'm recalling correctly,

I said toward the end of a program that I wanted to do this. We didn't get around to doing it. That's my recollection.

If I did, I apologize. But I had the thought, you know, let's look and see what

Aquinas did with some of the, I am sayings of Jesus. And especially the, uh,

I am saying of Jesus that is the one that most people don't see. People see

John 8, 58 all the time. But I'm going to say, I go, I mean, before Abraham was, I am okay.

We got that one. Um, they see Jesus using that in the garden and the soldiers fall back when he says,

I am. I go, I mean, uh, a lot of people do miss the, 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, really miss is

John 13, 19. And this one's really interesting because what it demonstrates is, um,

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, 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, um, 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, um, 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, yeah, 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.

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. 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.

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 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, right? 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, a 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 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. 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.

And the second, which I'm getting to now, Trinity Christology and James White exegetical concerns.

And so I provided numerous of corrections in the first one. It said, hey guys, you've missed the boat here on some really foundational stuff.

But 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.

So 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.

And 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, 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 it 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. You know, they could have gone to some of the much lengthier discussions that are 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, the 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 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 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 of 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, and sufficient. 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 wrote a few books.

This book's got a whole lot of exegesis in it. Did I? God adjustifies.

Did I engage in that kind of? No, of course not. Of course not. But you have to start someplace.

And the question, the real question, I've brought this up over and over 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, 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 the 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 it? 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.

And a dear friend of mine was, that I taught Greek to, was saying,

I heard this Jehovah's Witness and he said this. And, you know, I can see how they get that from the text.

So, how do we refute that? And my response was, well, yeah, that is a possible reading of this particular text.

And he was like, really? I'm like, yeah. There are times when you have texts that there's nothing in the original language that refutes the heretical understanding of it.

Christian truth is not communicated in a single text. It is communicated in the entirety of scripture.

And so, you can have a heretical interpretation of a text that has equal grammatical probability with a non -heretical.

That will be determined as you go from, these are the possibilities. Now, look, there's all sorts of texts of scripture where there's only one possibility as to what's being said.

It's very straightforward. But there are other difficult texts, and I'm not even raising the issue of textual variance here.

Okay, leave that off to the side for the moment. But there are difficult texts, and we have to allow for these are the possible meanings until we go to broader context, authorial context, genre context,

New Testament context, and it, like I said, at some point, that heretical interpretation falls out because it runs into the rest of Christian truth as revealed in scripture.

So, no one's denying that there is a process.

The question is, does that process require a presuppositional lens of dogma?

So, when people today, and they are saying it, when people today are saying the only way to interpret scripture is in the context of Nicene orthodoxy, whatever they define that to mean, that's where the problem is because my argument is

Nicaea's authority is due to the fact that what it teaches flows from the text of scripture.

If we say, no, not really, we need to start there and then read scripture to get it, that's a completely different perspective.

And I would say completely indefensible perspective. On this model, theology relates to exegesis as grammar does to sentences.

Think about that. On this model, theology relates to exegesis as grammar does to sentences.

As grammatical rules exist and help us understand sentences, so too do theological rules exist and assist us in our exegesis.

Theological rules or theology itself, because if the theology exists prior to the reading of the text, then you're going to have to explain where that theology came from, and you can't root it in scripture because you're making the reading of scripture depend upon the pre -existing theology.

That's just inevitable. These theological rules

Jameson and Whitman maintain are intrinsic to the text rather than extrinsic. Just as subjects, verb, direct objects, indirect objects are not foisted upon the text but present in the text, so too is theology.

The same might be said for logic. Now, wow,

I don't see that at all. Logic is thinking

God's thoughts after him. God's made us in that way. And grammar is inherent in the text and it's necessary for the communication, but the theology flows from it.

At this point, a distinction needs to be made. We do not contend that it is our theology imposed upon the text or even intrinsic to the text.

God's theology is present as the substructure of the text and is the theology we seek to discern in scripture.

God's theology, God's study of himself, I don't find this language helpful at all.

God's theology, what is that? Is that the truth about himself that God intends to reveal in scripture?

Well, that's sort of a duh statement if it is. God's theology is present as the substructure of the text and is the theology we seek to discern in scripture.

I thought God's was the result of listening to all that God has to say. I mean, are we just simply saying here that God will be consistent in his own self -revelation in scripture?

Again, a given that no one ever argued. The Reformed theologian,

Franciscus Junius, distinguishes between various kinds of theology. In his sixth thesis on theology, he writes, this theology is either archetypal, undoubtedly the wisdom of God himself, or it is ectypal, having been fashioned by God.

Okay, so archetypal, archetypal theology is the wisdom of God himself.

So that's simply the truth about God. But how do we know that? We know that as it's revealed in scripture.

Archetypal theology is God's perfect and unaccommodated knowledge of himself, the chief object of theology, which therefore means it can only be known by God.

Of ectypal theology, Junius writes, God has fashioned the second kind of theology on the model of the divine and immutable exemplar, proportionately to the creator's capacity, creature's capacity.

Ectypal theology truly represents archetypal theology without exhausting it. Okay. It is true knowledge from God fashioned after the knowledge of God has of himself so that creatures might know him.

Well, nothing to argue about there. Although many more distinctions can be made and are made by the likes of Junius and Turretin, these suffice for now.

Ectypal theology is fashioned after archetypal theology and comes to us in scripture as the substructure in the text and the grammar of our exegesis.

Oh, well, wait a minute. So it's not archetypal theology. It's ectypal. But I thought ectypal was what we come up with, and that's the substructure?

That's said to be the substructure in the text and the grammar of our exegesis. It is intrinsic to the text as it is

God's thoughts expressed through the words of scripture. Well, that'd be archetypal, wouldn't it? See what happens when you start introducing all sorts of terms that no one, you know,

Bible doesn't use. Try to explain what the Bible is saying. Just as God's thoughts, archetypal theology, precede his communication of his thoughts, ectypal theology, contained in scripture, so too does the truth revealed in scripture precede the communication of those truths in scripture.

Well, yeah, the truth of God is what's being expressed in scripture, okay?

By analogy, our thoughts precede our words, and our words exist to serve the communication of our thoughts.

Our duty is to read the text in such a way that the theology that resides in the subject, ourselves, is corrected by and comes closer to the ectypal theology revealed by God in the canon of scripture.

That sounds like semper reformanda to me, that we always need to be being reformed by the word of God, which

I would certainly accept. But none of this is grounds for using doctrinal formulations as a lens through which to read scripture.

But we'll see if that's what ends up happening. With this said, we are now in a position to examine some of White's statements regarding the

Holy Spirit. Writing in Matthew 24 -36, he says, we observe the progression, man, angel, son, father.

Parentheses, there is no reference to the Holy Spirit, and bringing the Spirit in the text is invalid.

Likewise, on a basic theological level, we must affirm in any context the Spirit searches all things, even deep things of God, 1

Corinthians 2 -10, and that since the day and hour is part of the divine decree from eternity past,

Father, Son, Spirit fully know that day and hour always have and always will. We confuse exegesis and theological formulation, we skip the one step to get to the next.

Now, as I said, there's a big old parenthesis to start, big old parenthesis at the end.

There is no discussion of the Holy Spirit in Matthew 24 -36, and to try to push him in there is to engage in exegesis.

That's not what Jesus is talking about. That's not what Matthew was communicating. And to say that we have to force every text to address every question we want to address is manhandling the

Scriptures, and it's indefensible in debate. Again, sorry if you all don't take this outside the

Christian faith. If you don't take it to the Muslims, you don't take it to the Mormons, you don't take it to the Jehovah's Witnesses, you don't take it to the

Unitarians, sorry if you don't do that, but some of us do because there's a command in Scripture to do so, right?

So, it is a basic, simple observation. If I had a student that tried to create some type of theological conclusion about the fact that Jesus does not mention the

Spirit in Matthew 24 -36, I would have to sit them down and go, wait a minute, you are not handling the text as the author intended it to be handled if you force them to address subjects that they have no intention of addressing.

So, I simply point out the role of the

Spirit in a parenthetical thing by saying, there is no reference to the

Holy Spirit and bringing the Spirit into the text is invalid. I stand by that. We'll go a few more minutes because, like I said,

I need to get out to ReformCon today. Now, with their commentary, let it be said that we agree with and appreciate why a statement that the

Spirit fully knows the day and the hour as well as the assertion that He always has and always will. We find this to be clearer than his statements made elsewhere.

They gave a reference to a dividing line, said around 117 -30.

I looked it up, there wasn't anything there. 117 -30 isn't a meaningful reference and so there's no way

I can even respond to the implicit accusation of lack of clarity because I wasn't talking about that at that point in time.

It's just a bad reference. However, we believe that greater clarity can be achieved by a clear articulation of the

Word alone. While the

Spirit remains unnamed in the text, it is not invalid to ask whether or not the Spirit knows the day or the hour based on Jesus' Word choice.

Really? We're going to go ahead and shoehorn this in here no matter what.

In other words, in order to determine the meaning of alone, one must engage in dogmatic reasoning.

Oh, would that be dogmatic reasoning that Matthew understood and that his readers would have understood?

Does alone mean the Father exclusively as a person of the Godhead? Is that even what's being discussed in Matthew 24?

Or does alone include the Spirit? Or must we remain agnostic since the text does not name the

Spirit? Or maybe we should just let the text define its own context?

Maybe we should interpret this in the flow of the text in light of the verse before and the verse after and the whole meaning of Matthew 24.

I know I'm just being simplistic, but that's the only way you can actually answer this text when talking to people who do not start with all of your presuppositions.

How does 1 Corinthians 2 .10 bear upon Matthew 24 .36? It doesn't. You cited it in a parenthetical comment where I had said, this isn't relevant.

Is it allowed to inform our reading of Matthew 24 .36? Well, if the

Holy Spirit was in Matthew 24 .36, then it would, but since he's not, then

I would say no. But you see where we're going here? These questions are neither invalid nor an imposition on the text.

Rather, they are questions that seek to discern the meaning contained within the text, enabling greater precision and fuller answers more suited to the organic nature of theology.

Okay. I'll make a mark here somehow so that we know where to...

Well, I guess I'm supposed to be able to do that. Aren't I supposed to be able to do that? Oh, I'll try.

We will pick up after this. But rather, they are questions that seek to discern the meaning contained within the text.

So we have a text that no one mentions the Holy Spirit, but we're going to discern the meaning of the text so that it actually does address the

Holy Spirit. We're going to do it by creating our dogmatic understanding of the

Trinity outside of that and then shoehorning it into a text about the coming day of judgment.

And that's theological exegesis. We'll get into it because they're going to, at least they put it out there.

I'll just simply close with this. I want to ask every individual, if you take this out with you, we have a place called

Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona. It's over near Arizona State University.

And we send... There's groups that go out. Matt DeJesus leads a group out there witnessing to people, university students all the time, and they carry a

Bible. And if you are going to seek to defend the

Christian faith in that context, then you need to be able to open this text and explain its meaning to others.

And that means you need to be able to talk about context because a lot of people have got a lot of really bad ideas about what the

Bible says. Perfect example.

What does homosexual mean in 1 Corinthians 6 and 1

Timothy 1? How are we going to answer that? Whole movie coming out in just a matter of days.

On this subject, I submit to you the only way to respond to what that movie is going to say is by doing old fashioned, in the context, what

Paul intended to communicate exegesis. Theological exegesis will fail massively.

It will accomplish nothing. But unnecessary complication.

Unnecessary complication. The word's clear. The word's clear. There's a great example.

But if I encounter a Unitarian out there on the street, it takes me to Matthew 24, 36.

I just ask everybody, read what these brothers say, and then try to figure out how on earth they would ever communicate this to the person on the street.

There you go. There you go. So we'll continue on with that, but we have things to do. I'm looking forward to seeing those of you who made the trip out here.

We've got beautiful weather. I think it's like 79 today. It's supposed to be 81 tomorrow.

So sunny, beautiful. And so looking forward to seeing you all at ReformCon.

And we will, Lord willing, I mean, things could happen. We're going to be live on location, but Lord willing, should be back with a program with Joe Boot and other folks here on the dividing line tomorrow.