SRR 103 Steve Matthews, Knox Seminary, and Imagining a Vain Thing

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February 21, 2019

00:02: I do a podcast. I'm not interested in your podcast. The anathema of God was for those who denied justification by faith alone.
00:13: When that is at stake, we need to be on the battlefield, exposing the error and combating the error.
00:24: We are unabashedly, unashamedly Clarkian. And so, the next few statements that I'm going to make,
00:30: I'm probably going to step on all of the Vantillian toes at the same time. And this is what we do at Simple Riff around the radio, you know.
00:37: We are polemical and polarizing, Jesus style. I would first say that to characterize what we do as bashing is itself bashing.
00:57: It's not hate. It's history. It's not bashing. It's the Bible. Jesus said,
01:06: Woe to you when men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way, as opposed to blessed are you when you have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness.
01:21: It is on. We're taking the gloves off. It's time to battle. Welcome back everyone to another episode of Simple Riff from on the radio.
01:38: This is your host, Carlos, joining you with Steve Matthews, a very special guest,
01:44: Steve Matthews from the Radio Lux Lucid podcast. And I've really been looking forward to this interview.
01:52: We're going to talk about some of his publications in his book, Imagining a Vain Thing. And I was, it was kind of a bummer because we had done this interview a while back, but we had some sound quality issues come up and we just haven't been able to redo the recording until up until now.
02:10: So I'm very excited and looking forward to getting to talk to Brother Steve about his book and some of the things in it.
02:18: And so without further ado, I wanted to welcome you to the party.
02:25: And if you could introduce yourself to our audience. Carlos, yeah, thanks for having me.
02:30: I'm really excited to be here with you. And yeah, we had that interview you and I did a little while back and it ended up that, as you said, we had some sound quality issues.
02:42: So Lord willing, we'll be able to get through this. So, yeah, it's great to be here. So I really look forward to having a chance to talk to you.
02:51: Yeah, definitely. It's a privilege to have you on with us. And I'm really grateful for you joining the network and having your excellent podcast.
03:00: You're pretty much one of my main sources that I go to for getting a Christian perspective on what's happening in the news and politics and economics.
03:09: And so I'm very grateful for your podcast and for your book as well. And your articles that you've written have been very, very edifying personally for me.
03:18: So I'm really excited to introduce people to you and to some of your publications so that they can also benefit from them.
03:29: And so basically the topic of our interview is going to be your book called
03:36: Imagining a Vain Thing. And the subtitle is The Decline and Fall of Knox Seminary.
03:42: And this was published by the Trinity Foundation. Let's see. Back in when was this?
03:49: 2008. 2008. That's right. Yeah. OK. So I read this book and I enjoyed it very much.
03:59: I learned a ton from this book. I was very, very pleased with it. Very surprised by a lot of the subject matter.
04:06: And so I was just wondering if you could kind of give some of your book why you wrote it and things like that.
04:16: Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, one of the things I think that really motivated me to to write that was just.
04:24: Well, I can tell you. I went down. I attended Knox Seminary in the fall of 2006.
04:32: So the fall semester 2006 is when I went down there, which I believe was over 12 years ago at this point.
04:39: And I went the thing that really motivated me to go there.
04:44: Robert Raymond. Well, there are there are a couple of main reasons I wanted to study with Robert Raymond.
04:50: I want to study with Cal Beisner, both of whom were had done work with the
04:55: Trinity Foundation. And I very much admired John Robbins work and the Trinity Foundation. And, of course, both of them were were
05:05: Clarkians. You know, there are men who. Right. Or at least, you know, men who admired Gordon Clark.
05:10: Maybe let's put it that way. And they were men who, you know, I think were logically sound in their thinking.
05:17: And one of the things that really impressed me about Knox was they put a strong emphasis on logic. You know, most seminaries these days don't do that.
05:26: You know, for most seminaries, you know, logic is if it's included at all, I mean, it's kind of a an elective.
05:32: It's kind of something off to the side. But, I mean, that was really central. It was really core to to the
05:38: Knox mission, to the Knox degree program. And that that really intrigued me. So anyway, I went down there and I had had some concerns before I went there.
05:49: Because of some things that Knox had on the Web site, they had this thing by by the
05:55: Old Testament. Professor Warren Gage was called the John Revelation Project. But, you know, I thought to myself, well, you know, it's it's the seminary that that has, in my opinion, the best teachers.
06:07: And maybe there's going to be some things that I don't agree with, but I'll go there and we'll see what happens. So I went down there.
06:14: And as I said, in the fall of 2006. And there were some very good things about Knox, but there were some things that very much concerned me about Knox.
06:24: And principally that that thing was the teaching of of Warren Gage. And, you know,
06:30: I remember we had a convocation ceremony before the whole semester started.
06:35: And, you know, and everyone, all the professors got up and they said, oh, yeah, you know, we're going to teach according to Westminster standards.
06:40: And we're going to be, you know, adhere to these things. Well, you got into class with with Warren Gage.
06:48: And I mean, almost from the very moment we sat down in class, he started attacking Westminster standards.
06:54: You know, with him, you know, you know, the Westminster standards are very clear. You know that we know we you know what we know from scriptures, what we know about God, what we know about Christian doctrine.
07:05: Comes from the express statements or the necessary inferences that we get out of the statements of scripture.
07:14: Right. And and he immediately began attacking these sorts of things and teaching an interpretive method that was really more
07:25: Roman Catholic medieval than it was reformed. And long story short, without going too far into this,
07:33: I ended up leaving after the first semester and on my way back to Cincinnati.
07:38: I'm from Cincinnati. So I was down there for a while. I actually put all my stuff in a U -Haul truck and got a trailer and hitched my car up to it.
07:48: Going back to Cincinnati. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a pretty good haul. And the I actually broke it up into two days and and the second day that my trip actually took me through eastern
08:01: Tennessee, which is where John Robbins was living. So I had made an arrangement to go talk to John Robbins. And then we sat and talked for about three hours at his.
08:10: Yeah. In his study. And anyway, when the meeting concluded, you know, he had asked me,
08:18: I was afraid he was going to do this. I'm glad he asked me, but I was afraid he was going to do it. He says, well, how about you write something on this?
08:25: And so that was really the genesis of the book. It was it was it was John Robbins prompting me to to write that.
08:32: So so that's that's kind of a nutshell how I came to write the book. So had you met
08:38: Robbins prior to that point? I had not. No, that was the first time I had met him. He and I had corresponded a little bit via email.
08:45: That was the that was the first time I ever met him in person. OK, very cool. Yeah, maybe someday, some other day we can schedule another interview to talk to your interactions with Robbins.
08:58: And that would be great, I think, because a lot of people have a yeah, a lot of people have very bad information and just kind of caricatures of who he really was.
09:09: So, yes, that would be fun to do sometime in the future. Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to ask you what what was your motives for for attending seminary to begin with?
09:21: Were you pursuing pastoral office or what was the intent there? Yeah, my my basic thought was to study for the ministry.
09:31: So, I mean, that's really what was my what my motivation was at the time. And and so I think now you said you have your retirement plan or something like that.
09:43: So you're not really. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
09:48: I'm in a totally different line of work right now. I work in retirement plans. I do administration for 401k plans at an insurance company.
09:57: So, yes, it has nothing to do with with anything seminary related.
10:02: You know, and Lord willing, you know, who knows? I mean, you know what? What I've been doing here is, as you mentioned in the introduction,
10:08: I've been doing some, you know, some blogging, doing now doing some podcasts.
10:14: Right. Since you and Tim have been urging me to do this and I'm glad that you have. So I've been you know, that's kind of been where my ministry work has been.
10:23: And then, of course, I've been doing over the past year, Trinity Foundation radio as well, doing podcasts for the
10:31: Trinity Foundation. But I have not been involved in full time ministry at this point.
10:36: No. OK. Yeah. Interesting. So, you know, and I was going to I was going to joke about this because in the book, it was really funny.
10:46: You you mentioned that you were a Reformed Baptist, but then I recently heard again that you are a
10:53: Presbyterian now. So what happened? What happened there? Well, let's see.
10:59: I I actually went over. I joined the church where I attend right now, which is a
11:04: Presbyterian church. You know, it was just for me, you know, and I mean, it was something that for me over time that really just kind of grew in my conviction that that that's what the
11:17: Lord called me to do. You know, in terms of that's where I felt most at home theologically was as a
11:24: Presbyterian. OK, and it's like a PCA or OPC or?
11:30: It is actually no, it is it's it's it's something that probably a lot of people haven't heard of.
11:36: It's called the Bible Presbyterian Church. I have I think Pastor Hines used to be one of those.
11:43: Yes, Pastor Hines, but no. Well, in fact, Pastor Hines, he was the associate minister at my church before he got his current position.
11:51: So, yeah. So, you know, I know each other. Yeah. Wow. OK, cool.
11:57: Very cool. Yeah, we were we were joking about it with some of our other because obviously we've had, you know, the
12:03: Reformed Baptist Presbyterian debate with Brandon Adams and Pastor Hines and had a lot of really interesting episodes about baptism that really interesting episodes that have kind of forced me to think about this a little bit more carefully.
12:17: And we were joking. I was joking with him about how you drink the Pedo Baptist Kool -Aid and we're going to try to see if we can win you back over to the to the truth.
12:26: But, you know, yeah, it was it was an interesting comment because part of your the your your defense for writing the book or against accusations that you said you were
12:36: Reformed Baptist. You didn't really have, I guess, like a bone to pick in the fight. Right.
12:41: So so that was that was interesting. So I wanted to write.
12:48: I want to jump into the the the book. Yeah. And I wrote a little review.
12:55: I gave you five stars on Goodreads. It was an excellent book. I really enjoyed reading the book. And I really heartily.
13:02: Yes. And I heartily without reservation recommended to our listeners to to read it. It's a very fascinating book.
13:08: You will learn a great deal from it. And the the theology that you're criticizing is horrendous.
13:15: But what the what you're defending was outstanding. So I really appreciated your book for that.
13:21: And I read a short I wrote a short review. And this is what I what I said here. So it's
13:26: I said this expose by a former Knox student demonstrates how neglecting the historical grammatical hermeneutic of the
13:33: Reformation leads to all sorts of fanciful, fanciful eisegesis and ultimately heresy. A case in point is
13:39: Warren Gage, the John Revelation project and the controversy surrounding the medieval hermeneutics he taught at Knox Theological Seminary.
13:47: It's a shame when such fiascos and reforms institutions are not resolved biblically. Very informative and insightful book.
13:54: And I learned new things about reforming hermeneutics, including an enlightening discussion about typology.
14:01: So I thought it was an excellent book. So why don't we now that we've kind of set up the groundwork, why don't we talk about your, you know, who is
14:14: Warren Gage? Who are these people? Warren Gage, Fowler White. Who are they? OK. Yeah.
14:19: OK. Very good. Good question. Warren Gage, as you mentioned, and as we kind of talked about earlier,
14:25: Warren Gage, he was the at the time he was the Old Testament professor at Knox Seminary.
14:31: And he was he's a very charismatic. Now, I use the term charismatic. I don't mean in terms of speaking in tongues, that type of thing.
14:39: But he was somebody that he could be very engaging, I guess, if you will.
14:44: Pun intended in terms of his personality. Very smart. And he was was actually by profession.
14:51: He was a was a lawyer. And so he's good at speaking publicly, very good with words, very persuasive in many ways.
15:01: And he wrote he his educational background was was actually I mean, he was was a
15:07: Presbyterian, but he got his doctorate from the University of Dallas, which from the sound of it may not necessarily tip you off, but that's actually a
15:16: Roman Catholic school. And he was was very Roman Catholic in his teaching, in his thought process.
15:25: So he was he was almost a Roman Catholic and in Presbyterian clothing.
15:31: I mean, he wasn't officially a Roman Catholic, but much of what he taught was what had or had a
15:38: Roman Catholic cast to it. And he was very much into typology. And I mean, one of the things
15:44: I remember he said in class, and maybe this would kind of give listeners sort of a sense of where he was. I remember one time he says, well, you know, you need logic, but you need imagination, too.
15:55: He was always talking about imagination. You had to use your poetic imagination. So when you read the
16:00: Bible, you had to use imagination and intuition. You know, those are not hermeneutical categories that are recognized by the
16:09: Westminster Confession of Faith. That is, however, the sort of thing that is very common in in Roman Catholic circles, especially like the sort of medieval mysticism that a lot of people like.
16:24: And he wrote this John Revelation project. And it's a little hard to get into it in great detail.
16:31: But he he tried to draw that there was a literary connection between these two, these two, these two books.
16:40: And and it was again, it was it was really the conclusions that he drew were not based upon express statements and scriptures or logical inferences of scriptures, but they were based upon literary structures and imagination.
16:54: And as you can probably guess, that can lead you into you use the term easy
17:00: Jesus reading into the text. Right. You know, he it lets people read into the text pretty much whatever they want to do.
17:10: And, you know, these he presented these ideas at a couple of on a number of different occasions that public seminars that were held at Knox Seminary before that, before I got there.
17:24: But he presented these ideas in public seminars and in his his his ideas were put out there on the
17:31: Web site. They called it the Knox Web site. They called it the John Revelation project. And his
17:37: I can see not only were his conclusions not reformed. But his method was not reformed, you know, as I said, instead of using plain statements, logical inferences, comparing scripture to scripture, he was was reading into scripture, his own ideas.
17:56: And this created major problems. And he also had persuaded some of the faculty to go along with him.
18:03: So, you know, Warren Gage was kind of the key figure in this whole thing. He was the the ringleader, if you will.
18:10: The whole John Revelation project was really based on his his doctoral dissertation.
18:15: So he was the guy that was really driving this whole idea that that we have to interpret the
18:20: Bible using our imaginations. But he pulled a lot of other people along with him. You asked me about Fowler White.
18:27: Fowler White was the dean of faculty at the time, and he was also the professor of New Testament when
18:32: I was there as well. Interestingly enough, Fowler White and Warren Gage had a relationship that went back many years.
18:40: Warren Gage was the older of the two by probably about 10 years or so. And I believe if I'm going by some memory here, but my understanding is that way back when
18:52: Fowler White was a teenager, that Warren Gage was I don't know if he was a youth minister or youth leader, but they went to the same church.
19:02: And I think that that that Fowler White sort of looked up to Warren Gage maybe as an elder brother in Christ type of a thing.
19:10: And and, of course, by the time when I was at Knox, Fowler White, he had a he had a doctorate as well.
19:18: I mean, he was a professor there and he was a Westminster seminary graduate. But I think, you know, he looked up to Warren Gage and I think to a large degree was really pulled along by Warren Gage.
19:33: And he actually taught a lot of Warren Gage's material or ideas that were inspired by Warren Gage in his
19:39: New Testament class. So not only was I getting Warren Gage in Warren Gage's class, I was getting Warren Gage in Fowler White's class as well.
19:48: And I'm going to say something here in Fowler White's defense as well. And this is kind of an interesting thing.
19:57: I left seminary, I was only there one semester, I was there in the fall of 2006. And I could kind of see one of the one of the reasons
20:05: I left is because I could kind of see where the school was going. The school was was being pulled along after Warren Gage.
20:12: And I realized, you know, this is not a direction that that I thought was healthy for the school. And it wasn't something
20:18: I really wanted to continue to be a part of. And so it's one of the reasons that I left, not the only reason, but it was one of them.
20:23: Well, in at the end of the 2006, 2007 academic year, so about six months after I left, a graduating student made a complaint to Fowler White because Fowler White was dean of faculty and said, you know, the
20:36: Gage is teaching a lot of stuff in class that's maybe not really very reformed, which was the case.
20:43: And and Fowler White, to his credit, and I think he deserves credit for this. Over the summer.
20:51: Spent a lot of time listening to classroom recordings, basically led an investigation and concluded that, yes, you know, that Warren Gage was teaching doctrines that were, you know, that were against the
21:04: Westminster Confession. And I was kind of surprised at that because I didn't know more. You know, Fowler White was very much someone who was, as I said, followed
21:15: Warren Gage quite a bit. But to say to Fowler White's credit, he actually.
21:23: At some point, you know, finally said, you know, this stuff's gone too far. Enough is enough. Of course, he ended up paying for it with his job, too, unfortunately.
21:33: But but to that extent, you know, to the extent that he was willing to criticize
21:38: Warren Gage eventually, too late, unfortunately. But he did criticize him.
21:43: He ended up paying for it with his job. OK, so thank you for setting up the background there.
21:50: And you attended the seminary like in was it 2006 or? Yeah, it was fall of 2000, fall semester 2006.
21:58: That's when I was there. Interestingly enough, that actually coincided right with the very end of D.
22:05: James Kennedy's ministry. For those people who are familiar with Knox, Knox was actually literally right across the street from from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church there on Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale.
22:19: That's right. And it was actually under the the session of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
22:26: It was almost a little bit. You might think of it as an extension of Coral Ridge itself.
22:32: And yeah. And yeah, D. James Kennedy was still preaching there. And over over the Christmas break, right at the end of December, he had some very serious health problems and he was no longer able to fill the pulpit after that.
22:46: And he passed away. D. James Kennedy did in in August of 2007.
22:52: So I was there really the last few months of his his long and well -known ministry.
23:00: Interesting. So you mentioned the John Revelation Project, and I guess that was sort of the thesis of Warren Gage's work.
23:11: And, you know, I I haven't been I've I haven't been a
23:16: Christian for that long. I guess it's been about maybe 10 years. And I guess for most of that time now,
23:22: I've been more involved in the reform world, been more reformed by conviction. And to be honest,
23:28: I've never heard of this before. I'd never really heard of this this problem, this issue, this controversy before.
23:36: And I'm not exactly, you know, Tim and I, we're not we're not Presbyterian, but we do stay we do try to stay informed as to what's going on in the, you know, in the reform world, because that's what we are.
23:50: We agree we agree with it. And for the most part, in a lot of ways. And and we we do research and things like that.
23:58: But I had never come across this before prior to reading your book. And I was might be the case for some of our listeners as well.
24:06: So if you could for explain for us, what what exactly is the John Revelation project?
24:13: Sure. Yeah. As I said, it's it's kind of I think maybe to kind of encapsulate me,
24:20: I could go in and maybe get into a lot of the weeds on it, but maybe more just kind of a high level answer for it.
24:27: A high level answer to you, it is it's a project that is it's it's an attempt to interpret the book of Revelation using literary structure and imagination rather than using the the tools of logic that are that are outlined for us in the
24:52: Westminster Confession. The you know, as we've already talked about, you know, the the idea of the
24:57: Westminster Confession, you know, talks about using the express statements of Scripture or the good and necessary consequences or another way of talking about good and necessary consequences is to say good and necessary inference.
25:14: Comparing Scripture to Scripture, you know, going in and comparing different passages of Scripture.
25:20: You know, what do these things say? How can we reconcile these things logically? And, you know, instead of using those things, you know,
25:28: Warren Gage's approach to trying to talk about Revelation was to say to use literary structures and to use imagination.
25:39: I mean, literally, he would talk about using you have to to have a poetic imagination.
25:44: That was or something that he would talk quite a bit about in class. And and, you know, poetic imagination is simply another way of saying that it's just making stuff up.
25:55: It's just I mean, I remember, you know, one time literally, I mean, that's what that is. At one time in class, he even said, you know, he says,
26:03: I can't defend this stuff, you know, logically. And I thought that was a pretty extraordinary thing for him to say.
26:11: I mean, it's yeah, it's it's it's a form of irrationalism. Maybe that's a way of talking about it.
26:17: And and listeners have probably come across this in one way or another, because irrationalism is very, very popular in a lot of so -called reformed circles today, whether you reform
26:29: Baptists, whether you reform Presbyterian, you know, whether someone's a Presbyterian. There is a a a hatred.
26:37: Of of logic in many circles, you know, and Warren Gage just represents really one particular variation on that, that common day hatred of logic that you that you see nowadays.
26:53: Right, and that kind of leads into my next question. So in terms of its influence,
27:00: I know you you is it mainly confined to the Presbyterian world or to the the the seminary, to the seminary itself?
27:12: Or do you see other like you mentioned, kind of other forms of it or other or its influence in other movements that are more prominent today?
27:21: Sure. Yeah. Now, the Journal of Revelation project itself, I haven't really seen that quoted or or.
27:30: Having been influential much outside the the walls of Knox Seminary, kind of interestingly enough, just without getting too far afield here, just to give maybe a little bit more history of what happens,
27:42: I said I was there in the fall of 2006. Well, I mentioned earlier that D. James Kennedy passed away.
27:48: He died in, if my memory serves me correctly, August of 2007. Well, this was just as this whole controversy with Warren Gage was coming to a head.
27:59: And the I won't won't get off into too much of that right now.
28:05: But the school, and I believe this was late in 2007, they actually took the
28:12: John Revelation project off the Web site. Now, I went and I actually copied it off the
28:19: Web site before they were able to do that. So I have a full text of the John Revelation project, but they actually took it down.
28:25: And so far as I can tell, they don't publicly put it out there.
28:31: I at least I haven't seen any evidence of it now. I'm not saying that they didn't teach it in class because it was
28:36: Warren Gage actually just retired from Knox Seminary back in 2014. And so he was there for many years after I had left.
28:45: And, you know, I don't know how hard he pushed that stuff specifically in class, but I would find it hard to believe that that he didn't teach some of those ideas, at least some of them, maybe all of them or maybe some of them.
29:01: I don't know. But it would be kind of odd if he didn't teach at least some of that stuff in class for many years thereafter.
29:09: So I don't know. I mean, you know, it's one of those things with ideas. Sometimes it takes a while for them to to to have an effect.
29:16: You know, somebody might teach something now and it really doesn't blossom, so to speak, you know, for maybe many decades later.
29:23: Right now, I haven't seen a lot of influence of the John Revelation project. But as I said,
29:29: I think it's very easy to find that sort of irrationalism that drove
29:34: Warren Gage in in many different areas. Doug Wilson's a guy that comes to mind.
29:43: You know, Doug Wilson, somebody that hates logic and is very influential. Right.
29:49: I remember in the book you talk about how there's a connection between the
29:57: John Revelation project and federal visionist, that they also valued or admired the work of of Warren Gage to some extent.
30:10: So I remember you talking about that. And I guess it's not a surprise because, yeah, they do go hand in hand in some of these points that there is some overlap there.
30:19: So that's that's. Yeah. Yes. And that's like one of the major false teachings plaguing the reform world today.
30:29: And it's even bleeding over into, you know, it's it's pretty pervasive, you know, given the fact that we're obviously talking about an extended series on John Piper and just how pervasive this problem is.
30:41: And so, you know, so I didn't before.
30:47: And it's funny because I mentioned that I wasn't really aware of this controversy. I had never really come across it.
30:54: And then interestingly enough, I kind of spoke to you soon because I was watching a
31:00: DVD called The Marks of a Cult. It's by the same people who produced Amazing Grace, the
31:06: History and Theology of Calvinism. It was a very good DVD. It's one of my favorite
31:11: DVDs. Actually, I highly recommend it to our listeners. And it was it's by the
31:16: Nicene Council, I think, or they also call themselves the Apologetics Group. And they I believed the president was
31:22: Jerry Johnson. And he had a pretty active ministry and blog a few years back. I don't know if he's still around, but I think he went to Knox Seminary as well because he interviews
31:33: D. James Kennedy in the Amazing Grace DVD. And but when
31:39: I was watching The Marks of a Cult, sure enough, he had I think he had R. Fowler White on there. And so,
31:46: I mean, they're definitely they're out there. You know, it's like, yeah, it's it's only just a matter of time when this stuff kind of starts to seep in and hit you.
31:56: So, yeah, there's definitely out there. Yeah. Yeah.
32:02: So and I think really maybe that for for most listeners is maybe the biggest lesson to take away from.
32:08: And we talk about the John Revelation project isn't so much just specifically what Gage taught in the
32:14: John Revelation project, but rather the dangers that come with irrationalism.
32:20: And there can be a lot of different forms of irrationalism. You know, as soon as somebody abandons clear thinking,
32:28: I mean, he's going to go. There's a million different ways somebody can go with that. You know, and one one man may go off on one tangent like Warren Gage.
32:36: Somebody else is going to go off on another tangent. But they all have in common what they all have in common is the fact that they reject sound, logical thinking.
32:46: And I think that's really the big one. Yeah, then that makes sense. So now that we're you know, you mentioned a lot about hermeneutics and, you know, the
32:57: Westminster Confession. I want to go ahead and read it. I believe this is chapter one, section nine of the
33:04: Westminster Confession. It says this the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself.
33:10: And therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture, which is not manifold, but one, it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.
33:19: So this is a standard, you know, sort of reformed.
33:25: That's the standard reformed way of doing hermeneutics is that there is a you have to search out
33:33: Scripture with Scripture. And so and then there's the also the
33:38: I guess the compliment to that is that the meaning of Scripture, you can deduce you can either deduce it by the express statements or by good and necessary consequence.
33:53: And so this is a very this is kind of like a sort of a standard way of understanding the
33:59: Bible that helped the Reformation to recover the gospel and a lot of truths that were lost during the medieval ages.
34:06: And so how and you mentioned the quadriga and in the book, you mentioned the quadriga and also the census plenar method.
34:18: And so I was wondering if you could talk about those a little bit and compare, you know, kind of compare and contrast them to the to the reformed hermeneutic.
34:25: Sure, exactly. Very good question, Carlos. The you know, you kind of going back to the quote there that you had from the the
34:35: Westminster Confession, it talked about, you know, that's chapter one, section nine.
34:41: It talks about, you know, that the meaning of any scripture is one. Now, the the purpose behind that, the behind the having that in the confession of faith, that was a denial of what
34:56: Rome taught and still teaches about about biblical interpretation in in in Roman Catholic circles.
35:07: This is something that began as this is really a medieval concept. There's something that they called the quadriga.
35:13: Now, if anybody's ever studied Latin, they might recognize that word.
35:18: A quadriga is is a Latin word for a four horse chariot. Think about a four horse chariot.
35:25: A quadriga was kind of like a Roman version of a stretch limousine. OK, not everybody had a four horse chariot.
35:33: Yeah, that was something only Caesar would have. Now, maybe like you've seen, I don't know, there's you seem like these triumphal arches and sometimes it'll have at the top of it'll have, you know, some important person, maybe
35:44: Caesar, you know, and he's driving a four horse chariot. Well, that's a quadriga. That's what that is.
35:50: And and so that's where this interpretive method takes its name. It takes its name from this four horse chariot.
35:56: And the reason that they call it a quadriga is because the Roman Catholic Church taught that every passage of Scripture has four different meanings.
36:08: And I apologize, I don't have the those four meanings here in front of me.
36:15: I've forgotten what those are right now, but they say that each passage has four meanings. There's a literal meaning, there's like an allegorical meaning, etc.
36:26: I have the book in front of me and I'm on page 20 where you talk about that so I could read it.
36:32: Why don't you go ahead and do that? Yeah, yeah, I can read and you can comment on it. So you have a footnote here that says on page 20.
36:42: In fact, no passage of Scripture has more than one meaning. This foolish medieval method is still the official practice of the
36:48: Roman Catholic Church state. Paragraph 115 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1992 states, according to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture, the literal and the spiritual.
37:00: The latter being divided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses.
37:06: The recent controversy at Knox Theological Seminary centering on Professor Warren Gage was to a large extent prompted by allegations that he advocated the use of the quadriga.
37:16: While a student at Knox Seminary, this writer personally heard Dr. Gage promote the use of something very similar, a hermeneutic principle called the sensus plenior,
37:24: Latin for the fuller sense. Like the quadriga, sensus plenior finds multiple senses in a single passage and conflicts with both the laws of logic and the confession of faith.
37:35: Sensus plenior, said Dr. Gage, is the basis for his approach to typology. Yeah, yeah.
37:40: So, I mean, it's just the idea that you can somehow imagine into it.
37:47: I mean, these are the kinds of words that Warren Gage used. He would always talk about imagination and intuition. And that's how you kind of pull out these additional meanings of scripture.
37:57: I mean, you can't get there using logic. You have to be able to intuit this stuff somehow.
38:03: And, of course, all of this is, you know, his cast of mind was very Roman Catholic.
38:09: And maybe that's a second big lesson that we can draw out of the whole issue at Knox Seminary.
38:18: We talked about the John Revelation Project and the hatred of logic. Well, a second big lesson we can draw out of it is how influential the
38:26: Roman Catholic teaching has become in many putatively, supposedly, conservative reform circles.
38:38: I mean, you know, Warren Gage was importing Roman Catholicism, attempting to do this into reform circles with his teaching.
38:46: And this idea somehow that you can read multiple senses into scripture is,
38:52: I think, a very dangerous idea. Because, as I mentioned, it really lets you take scripture in any direction you want to.
39:00: It's eisegesis, you know, again, to go back to that good term that you used before. It's reading into the text.
39:07: It's not reading the text. It's reading into the text. Yeah, right.
39:13: And that's helpful. I think is directly, like you said, the confession explicitly says that in order to contrast and go against the medieval hermeneutic.
39:28: And I earlier alluded to chapter 1, section 6 of the Westminster Confession, which says this.
39:34: The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith in life, is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture.
39:46: Unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the spirit or traditions of men. So, yeah, you're kind of clearly contrasting the two methods there of interpreting scripture.
39:58: And I thought that was very helpful. And so given that, now we're starting to get into the issue of typology.
40:09: And this is one of my favorite parts of the book, actually, because I learned really fascinating material.
40:18: And it actually equipped me to better understand the Bible myself. I was really pleased with your discussion of typology.
40:28: I learned a lot from it. And so one of the main concepts that you discuss is called
40:36: Marsha's dictum. And so, again, it kind of baffles me because I'd never heard this term before.
40:42: I'd never heard who this person was, what this teaching was about. I'd never heard of it before.
40:48: And I'm here. I've been Reformed now for some years.
40:56: I've never heard it really being talked about. It kind of amazes me because this is a very important concept.
41:04: And it's like almost null and void from everything, all the preaching, the books that I've read.
41:10: It doesn't come up. And so if you could please elaborate as to what
41:17: Marsha's dictum means and how it's relevant to this controversy. Sure, Carlos.
41:22: Yeah, yeah, thanks for that. Another very good question there. Well, you know, it's interesting you say you had never heard of Marsha's dictum.
41:29: Well, you know, before I wrote this book, I'd never heard of it either. Yeah, yeah. And I think that I think probably 99 percent of our listeners would probably say something similar to that.
41:40: Yeah, Marsha's dictum, it comes it's named after Herbert Marsh. He was a 19th century,
41:47: I guess, 18th, 19th century Church of England fellow. And he wrote some on typology and the basic gist, the idea.
41:59: And I quoted Marsha at some length in the book. But if you just kind of want to take and put
42:04: Marsha's dictum in a nutshell, what Marsha said is that, you know, we can declare those things types only what the scripture expressly calls a type.
42:16: And I think, you know, what he was doing is he was really writing in reaction to some of the fanciful typology that a lot of people were pushing in his day.
42:24: I mean, he lived, you know, he lived and worked about 200 years ago. And so, you know, people have, you know, typology has long been a subject of a lot of speculation.
42:36: There is a guy, he was a 19th century Scottish Presbyterian by the name of Fairbairn.
42:44: And he wrote a big, long book on typology. And I remember when I was researching the book, the
42:51: Imagine in a Vein thing, I actually tried to sit down and read through it. And it was it was almost impossible.
42:56: I mean, I gave up after a while because it was all it was just very, very speculative. And I remember, yeah,
43:04: I actually had a little bit of a dialogue with Doug Dalma. Some probably some of our listeners might be familiar with Doug Dalma.
43:11: He's the one that wrote the Presbyterian Philosopher, you know, writing on. Of course,
43:16: I was a biography of Gordon Clark. And, you know, and I know Doug said he was trying to read that thing. And eventually he he mentioned to me, says
43:24: I gave up. You know, he abandoned ship. Yeah, he abandoned ship on the thing.
43:29: Well, because you get into this typology, it just becomes so speculative. It's just very, very speculative.
43:36: So, you know, Warren Gage is not the only guy to get involved in speculative typology. You know, Fairbairn was as well.
43:42: And people were doing the same thing in Herbert Marsh's day. And I think, you know, Herbert Marsh probably had about enough of it.
43:49: He said this is, you know, this is nonsense. And the reason what where where Marsh's dictum really came into play in this whole issue over Warren Gage.
44:02: And I talk about this some in the book, just kind of discussing this from a high level. You know,
44:08: I mentioned the fact that Fowler White had conducted an investigation of Warren Gage. And the the recommendation that was made, there was a small group within the the larger board of Knox Seminary where there was initially a recommendation made to to actually terminate
44:28: Warren Gage over his teaching, which is what they should have done. As it turned out, as I said, without diving into too many details here, the board actually recommended that that he be the full board.
44:43: Knox Seminary recommended that Warren Gage be suspended. And Warren Gage, good lawyer that he was, he knew how to fight.
44:52: And anyway, he took this thing, took the recommendation for suspension to the the session of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
45:00: And there was a lot of testimony that went back and forth.
45:05: And one of the things that Warren Gage and his supporters, they fought back against Fowler White and some of Fowler White supporters.
45:16: And they said that, well, you know, that that Fowler White and in his group, that they were pushing
45:24: Marsh's dictum. They were trying to impose Marsh's dictum on Warren Gage and that this was wrong.
45:31: And it is the interesting thing. And so that was where I first really had heard about this. And it prompted me to kind of dig and find out,
45:38: OK, well, what's this all about? Well, the thing is that Fowler White and in his side.
45:47: And by the way, R .C. Sproul was on, was part of this this whole debate.
45:53: Yeah, that R .C. Sproul, the very well -known R .C. Sproul was was part of this, all this testimony that was going on.
46:01: And he was on the side of Fowler White and the board of Knox Seminary, you know, saying that Warren Gage should be suspended.
46:10: And and the say the the R. Fowler White, R .C. Sproul faction, they they said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
46:17: We're we're we're not saying, you know, we're we're not supporting Marsh's dictum. You know, they they kind of ran away from Marsh's dictum, you know, like Superman would flee kryptonite.
46:28: So, you know, so so on. So on one hand, you know, you had you had
46:33: Warren Gage accusing Fowler White of trying to to hold him to Marsh's dictum.
46:38: And you had Fowler White and R .C. Sproul in that group saying, oh, no, no, no, no. We're we're we're not we're not we're not trying to advocate, advocate for Marsh's dictum.
46:48: And I say that's one of the things that kind of prompted me to study this and say, OK, so what exactly is
46:54: Marsh's dictum? You know, what application does it have to to this controversy?
47:00: And I thought it was very unfortunate that the the
47:05: R. Fowler White that his I'm calling it R. Fowler White's faction. It was really the board of Knox Seminary, R.
47:11: Fowler White, R .C. Sproul and some other people that that were taking a stand against Warren Gage.
47:19: It was very unfortunate that they ran away from Marsh's dictum. Because that was the one thing that they could have stood on that I think would have helped them in that fight.
47:29: As it turned out, just to kind of fast forward ahead a little bit, the the the session of Knox Seminary ruled against the board of Knox Seminary.
47:41: And they said, oh, well, there's there's no reason to to suspend Warren Gage.
47:47: They vacated his suspension. They restored him to his teaching duties. And then when when
47:53: Warren Gage got back in and the faction that supported him, they actually terminated.
47:59: They fired R. Fowler White. And they also. Yeah. And they also terminated
48:06: Calvin Beisner, E. Calvin Beisner. That's a name that might be familiar to many listeners. Yeah.
48:12: He was a he was a professor of logic at at Knox Seminary. He was fired.
48:18: And then Robert Raymond, the Dr. Robert Raymond, you know, the one that wrote the famous and justifiably famous, very well known systematic theology.
48:29: He quit. He resigned in disgust at the whole thing. And so basically what happened is that Warren Gage and his whole imaginary faction took over, took over the school.
48:43: And, you know, sometimes I wonder, you know, if if the if the the board of Knox Seminary and Fowler White and R .C.
48:50: Sproul, if they'd taken a stand with with Marcia's dictum. Yeah.
48:55: I wonder if things maybe had gone differently for them, but they ran away from it. They they just they fled. Oh, no, no, no.
49:00: Don't accuse us of having anything to do with Marcia's dictum. And that was very unfortunate.
49:06: Yeah, that's really interesting. I remember reading about that in the book that you kind of cover some of the background that Beisner and Sproul getting involved.
49:18: And it really struck me because, you know, they were saying, no, we're not we're not that restrictive when it comes to typology.
49:26: And I think they were trying to use the confession probably out of context when it talks about types and shadows.
49:33: And but I you know, but they were using it in a hermeneutical sense. And so I guess they were they were going against the the dictum itself.
49:42: And that really was very interesting. And I think you made a very good point in the book that the the wrong side, which was
49:52: Gage, they were they were more consistent than the Orthodox side that was trying to uphold the truth.
50:00: And so because the the wrong side was more consistent in their present and their view, they really kind of won the day because the because the
50:10: Orthodox side sort of abandoned Marcia's dictum, which was their main one of their main lines of defense and holding a consistent reform hermeneutic.
50:19: And so that was very revealing. I think that was a very revealing point that you had brought out in the book.
50:25: Carlos, that's a that's a great point. I'm really glad that you brought that up. That's very perceptive of you.
50:30: That's another if you want to say maybe a third major lesson that we can take out of this. In that that what you were just talking about, that was actually
50:40: I got that from a personal email while I was writing the book.
50:45: I was communicating with John Robbins and he sent me an email. He talked about that. He made the point that in any controversy, he said the more consistent side tends to win and the less consistent side tends to lose.
51:00: And the you know, and here's how that broke down. So you had on one hand, you had Warren Gage and his supporters.
51:05: On the other hand, you had the board of Knox Seminary, Fowler White, R .C. Sproul. And and.
51:15: Warren Gage, I have to I have to give give him some grudging credit here. He was very bold in his heresy.
51:24: He was he was he was as bold as all is, as could be in promoting his heresy.
51:30: This is one of the things that really struck me when I was a student down here, down there at Knox is,
51:36: I mean, he would go out and and I mean, he would just talk the most ridiculous nonsense in class.
51:44: He taught a very large Sunday school over at at Coral Ridge and he would talk nonsense over there.
51:52: And he never made any apologies. He never varied from it. It was almost like he was going around this great big neon sign saying, hey, everybody,
52:01: I'm a false teacher. I double dog dare you to try to call me out on it. And nobody did. You know, and yeah, it was amazing to watch this, but he was very consistent.
52:12: He was very bold in his assertion of his false teaching. On the other hand, you had the board, you had
52:17: R .C. Sproul, you had you had Fowler White, you know, and they would say, well, you know,
52:23: OK, so so maybe, you know, Warren Gage has just gone a little bit too far.
52:29: You know, we're willing to accept maybe a certain amount, maybe of your rationalism, but we don't want to go all the way.
52:35: And that's what they say. That's weak sauce. Right. You know, that's that's yeah, that's weak sauce.
52:42: You're just saying, oh, no, he just goes too far. That's weak stuff. You know, I mean, if you're going to accept your rationalism, go all the way with it.
52:50: You know, be Warren Gage. Of course, the worst to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Go varsity. Go big or go home.
52:56: All right. And Warren Gage, he went big and his opponents didn't go big.
53:01: You know, Warren Gage went big with a lie. His opponents kind of said, you know, yeah, but, you know, some of that you're just going too far.
53:11: Well, no, that doesn't cut it. You know, if you're going to if you're going to if you're going to go into a fight, you got to put on the full armor of God and you got to go at it.
53:18: And unfortunately, the the opponents of Gage, they had some right ideas. They said some very good things.
53:25: I'm not going to deny that they did some good things. I'm glad that they took a stand. They deserve credit for that.
53:30: But they didn't go all the way. They didn't. They were not as bold in their defense of the truth as Warren Gage was bold in the defense of his his false teaching.
53:43: Yeah, that is. That is very sad. Yeah. But it is an important lesson for for us to learn in our time.
53:50: Yeah. Because it still happens. I mean, it's still a very prevalent problem. And I wanted to read another quote from from your book on page 63.
53:59: You actually quote Herbert Marsh and he defines what a type is in this way. He says, whatever persons or things therefore recorded in the
54:07: Old Testament were expressly declared by Christ or by his apostles to have been designed as prefigurations of persons or things relating to the
54:16: New Testament, such as persons or things so recorded in the former are types of the persons or things which with which they are compared in the latter.
54:24: So this is this is really good stuff. It was very insightful because basically, as you kind of explained already,
54:34: Marsh's dictum would only affirm. The only way that you can affirm a biblical type is that if it is expressly laid out in in Scripture and the
54:47: New Testament. Right. So how did you how did you when you learned that?
54:53: What what what kind of what changed in your thinking or what? How did that color your perspective on, you know, the the reformed faith that your experience at Knox and you know, what how did that influence you?
55:05: Sure. Well, I think really the big thing was and one of the reasons that I featured Marsh's dictum in that book so prominently was just because it was the only thing that I found from a or one of the few things
55:20: I should say, and certainly probably the clearest statement that I found of logically sound typology.
55:30: As I said, you can pour through the writings of even reformed writers and I'm talking about writers even maybe that are quite good on many things.
55:39: But when it comes to typology, it's like they just abandon their their they just forget that that, you know, that Westminster Confession, Chapter one,
55:52: Section six even exists and they start speculating. And it's like, no, you know, come back to it, you know, get back on the straight and narrow here.
56:00: Now, one thing I wanted to mention about Marsh's dictum, and I know R .C. Sproul had mentioned this during the during the controversy.
56:09: He said that he intimated that he disagreed with Marsh's dictum because he says, well, it doesn't allow for determining types by good and necessary inference.
56:20: He'd say, you know, Marsh says it has to be expressly set forth. You know, he's saying, well, well, it could also include necessary inference into which
56:27: I say, you know, OK, you can make that argument. The one thing, though, that I never heard from the people
56:34: I mentioned this in the book that I never heard from from, you know, the R .C. Sproul, Knox Seminary Board or Fowler Whiteside, I never heard them make give any examples of a type determined by good and necessary inference.
56:46: Now, I mean, if someone could show that, I mean, if someone can demonstrate that, that's one thing. You know, so you might say,
56:52: OK, is it possible that that Marsh's dictum could be improved a little bit to include not just express thing, express statements, but good and necessary inferences?
57:02: It's possible if someone would just need to demonstrate that. But but all they would do is they would just be using still biblically sound, logically sound principles.
57:12: You know, that's, you know, that's far from the kind of imaginary typology that that you get in Warren Gage and not just Warren Gage, but many other people who claim to be reformed.
57:24: Yeah, that's those are some really great points, and I wanted to kind of dig deeper into that a little bit, because when when
57:32: I read your book, I mean, it just it was so stimulating that it got me thinking about a whole bunch of other things that I that I was picking up in other areas.
57:39: And so one of those things was it got me thinking about a lot of the discussions or,
57:46: I guess, debates regarding certain passages like a very prominent one is Abraham's son.
57:52: Right. The issue of Abraham's son, whether you can say legitimately that Abraham's son was a type of Christ, even though the
58:01: New Testament doesn't necessarily explicitly make that connection. And so I remember hearing one time a message by Paul Washer where he basically and he says that when
58:16: God tested Abraham, that was not the end of the story.
58:22: So in the sermon, Paul Washer is telling the story of Abraham's son, and he's saying that that was a great test of Abraham's faith.
58:32: And he passed the test and so on and so forth. But then he kind of keeps going and he says that that was not the end of the story.
58:40: That was just the interlude. And what happened was that God took that that knife and he slaughtered his only son with it.
58:48: And so I thought that was a pretty compelling point that he was making that connection.
58:54: Now, he didn't explicitly say that Christ was a type of Abraham's son, but it was obviously an explicit connection that he was making.
59:05: And so I found that somewhat compelling. I was kind of wondering like, OK, well, what about that?
59:10: I suspect that they may not have mentioned that example in Sproul and those guys that were defending, trying to defend the right view.
59:21: But what do you make of that? And Paul Washer, he's not one of those guys to go off into some wild, imaginative heresy like Gage and maybe
59:29: Fowler White do. But what would you make of that? Yeah, well, I mean, again,
59:34: I think I would be very. Yeah, I would not certainly would not say I think you're talking about was the idea.
59:42: It sounded like maybe Washer was intimating. Maybe I may have misheard you. Maybe you can clarify for me if I'm stating this incorrectly, perhaps.
59:51: Was Washer saying that he thought that what Abraham or Isaac was was a type of Christ?
59:57: Is that the idea? Yeah, essentially because Abraham was going to slaughter his son, the son of promise.
01:00:07: And, you know, he ended up sort of being a foreshadowing of Christ being slaughtered on the cross by the father pouring out his wrath on him.
01:00:18: And so that he's and he wasn't again, he didn't make the connection explicit, but it kind of made me wonder, like,
01:00:25: OK, well, what could you make the case that Abraham's son was a type of Christ?
01:00:31: I wouldn't wouldn't say that. No, I mean, again, because I just I don't think you can draw that that idea from Scripture.
01:00:38: I mean, you can here's one of the things that where I think you get get to be a gets to be a real challenge is that you can find similarities between all sorts of things in the
01:00:51: Scriptures. But simply because something is similar, you know, you know, the
01:00:56: Scriptures don't necessarily identify those things as types. There's actually relatively few things that the
01:01:01: Scripture actually points out as types. You know, we talk about, you know, very clearly there's you know,
01:01:07: Adam was a type of Christ. Well, how do we know that? Because Paul tells us explicitly that he was a type of Christ. You know, we don't have to guess or to speculate at that.
01:01:15: And, you know, can you find some similarities? Can you find some parallels between the situation with Abraham and and Isaac and and God, the father and Jesus Christ?
01:01:27: You can find some parallels there. You can draw some parallels, some useful parallels. But I mean, I don't know that again, the
01:01:35: Scriptures don't call it a type. They don't necessarily imply that it's a type. And as I said, even with when it comes to necessary inference,
01:01:43: I mean, if you know, you can find similar things. You can find similarities between all kinds of things in Scripture.
01:01:52: And just because things are similar doesn't necessarily mean that that those things are types one of the other.
01:02:00: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, and I guess when you think about it, all the analogies tend to break down at some point because obviously
01:02:08: Christ went willingly to his death. Whereas Abraham's son, I'm sure, I'm sure Abraham's son had some reservation about being slaughtered as a sacrifice.
01:02:17: And the other point, obviously, being that he was he was not, in fact, slaughtered, whereas Christ was.
01:02:23: And so, correct. Yeah, I mean, exactly. You can you can you can find parallels, but then you get all these problems, too.
01:02:31: You know, you mentioned these analogies break down at some point. And so then you're you're if you want to use this idea that we're going to say, well, one thing is similar to another, you know, and use that as the basis for types.
01:02:44: I mean, you could technically turn just about anything in the Old Testament into a type of something in the
01:02:49: New Testament. I mean, you could just let your imagination run wild and then you end up right back to Warren Gage. Yeah, and that's a perfect segue into the next topic here.
01:02:58: So speaking of of Gage and and typology now, what is this?
01:03:04: This was this is now we're getting into the bizarre because apparently Gage makes the claim that Rahab is a type of the church.
01:03:14: Yes. And so that was some of the most bizarre stuff that I've that I've ever read.
01:03:19: So could you would you would you care to explain a little bit what he meant by that? Yeah. Yeah.
01:03:26: You know, just to kind of preface my remarks a little bit, Carlos, it's kind of funny that you would use that term because, you know, talk about bizarre stuff.
01:03:33: Because when I sat and I talked with John Robbins and this what
01:03:38: I met John, we as I said, when I drove back from Fort Lauderdale, Cincinnati, so this was actually
01:03:45: January 2007. And we were sitting there talking and he said he told me, he said,
01:03:50: Steve, you know, I I've thought about writing something on Warren Gage, he says, because, you know, when
01:03:56: I read read his his stuff, his John Revelation project, he said, that's some of the most bizarre stuff
01:04:03: I've ever seen. That's what he called. He said some of the most bizarre stuff I've ever seen.
01:04:08: So it's kind of interesting that you use that same term. And it's really true. I mean, this stuff is just flat out bizarre.
01:04:14: And no, I don't believe that Rehab is a type of the church. And I don't have some of his arguments here in front of me.
01:04:22: So I'm a little bit of a disadvantager. But no, you know,
01:04:28: Rehab is not a type of the church. I mean, it's not something that's ever explicitly stated. It's not something that's from a logical inference standpoint that you can establish.
01:04:38: And some of the reasons that he he actually gives for Rehab being a type of church, frankly, are pretty strange.
01:04:46: And as you said, they're just bizarre. Yeah, well, and I have a
01:04:52: I'm looking at your book here on page 94. You have a whole chapter on this. Is Rehab a type of the church?
01:04:57: And here the authors, you say the authors clearly state that the whore of Babylon will become the bride of Christ.
01:05:10: That was really kind of I was kind of awestruck by that.
01:05:15: It's like, what in the world are they? I mean, that's that's almost that almost sounds blasphemous.
01:05:21: Yeah, it really is. And what he tried to do. And thanks for for bringing that up.
01:05:26: You know, he he tries to argue that, you know, that Rehab was a harlot, you know, who was saved. And then he tries to to apply this to the
01:05:37: Book of Revelation. Of course, you know, we have mystery Babylon, the great the mother of harlots. Right. And he identifies mystery
01:05:46: Babylon, the great the mother of harlots. You know, the woman drunk with the blood of the saints. And he tries to say that that's the church.
01:05:52: You know, that's that's transformed into the bride of Christ. Well, if you read, all you have to do is read, read the
01:06:00: Book of Revelation. Well, what happens to the woman who rides the beast? And she's destroyed, doesn't become the bride of Christ.
01:06:06: Yeah, I mean, that's you know, I mean, it talks about, you know, she's she's burned with. I don't have the exact quote in there, but she's destroyed.
01:06:14: Yeah. So, I mean, this this idea that somehow that Rehab is a type of the
01:06:20: Babylonian harlot that that's that's saved is just rubbish. It doesn't hold up if you actually read, read the
01:06:27: Book of Revelation, you know, instead of instead of coming up with all these wild speculations. You know, this just this just occurred to me.
01:06:36: This actually just struck me, given that this is such a medieval way, a Roman Catholic way of interpreting
01:06:42: Scripture, saying that the whore of Babylon is a type of the church, that's almost like saying that the
01:06:50: Roman Catholic Church is a true church. Because, as you know, the Protestants historically have said that the whore of Babylon is the
01:06:57: Catholic Church. Then so that's that's pretty that's that's kind of disturbing in a sort of ironic way that having it was and it shouldn't be a surprise to us that having a if you use a medieval
01:07:09: Roman Catholic hermeneutic, that it could lead you to make the same very same deductions and conclusions that they make the
01:07:16: Roman Catholic Church makes. And so that's that's pretty that's profoundly disturbing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.
01:07:22: Very that's an excellent point, Carlos. And of course, Roman Gage, Warren Gage, he he was educated at a
01:07:28: Roman Catholic school. He got his doctorate, his theological doctorate he got at a Roman Catholic school. He was very heavily pushed
01:07:36: Roman Catholicism. I mentioned this in the book. You know, he criticizes the Puritans. Yeah, he didn't like the
01:07:43: Puritans, but but he you know, he loved the medieval Roman Catholics. Yeah, that's right.
01:07:48: Yeah, yeah. And yet he's teaching at a putatively, you know, conservative Protestant reformed seminary.
01:07:57: You know, and it's yeah, I know he he very often defended
01:08:03: Rome, very often. I remember on his office door, he had a picture. It was like a medieval picture painting of the pope.
01:08:12: But he had it in place of the pope's head. He had his own face. So I guess I don't know. Maybe he had this fantasy about being pope or something.
01:08:19: I don't know. But yeah, he was was very pro Roman Catholic, you know, and you're absolutely right.
01:08:25: You know, of course, what did the Puritans think the Babylonian harlot was? Well, it was a Roman Catholic church and the Puritans were right.
01:08:31: They were right about that. Right. You know, that that is the historic that is the correct identification of the
01:08:39: Babylonian harlot. But, you know, Warren Gage tries to shift the attention from that. And he actually became very emotional in class one time when he was talking about that.
01:08:48: I thought he was going to cry when he was talking about how Protestants had had had identified the
01:08:54: Babylonian harlot as Roman. In fact, in the John Revelation project, and I think I quoted the book, he talked about the
01:09:02: Protestant identification of of Rome as the Babylonian harlot. He called it,
01:09:08: I think, what, 500 full years of slander or something like that. Wow. Yeah.
01:09:14: And he was very upset at this. This whole idea of Rome being identified as the
01:09:22: Babylonian harlot, which is what it is. It's a false church. You know, you know, in the book of Revelation, you see two women, right?
01:09:29: You've got you've got the Babylonian harlot. You have the bride of Christ. They're not the same individuals.
01:09:36: They're not the same people. Yeah, I think you made a good point about Gage, that he really was sort of a
01:09:42: Roman Catholic dressed up in Presbyterian garbs, because, I mean, that's for you to say those things and believe those things that you're not you're not even close to being a
01:09:51: Protestant at that point. And so I like what you said on page 95. You do.
01:09:56: You kind of sum up the issue here very nicely, and it really exposes just how bad this this theology is.
01:10:04: So you say there is no happily ever after for the Babylon, for Babylon the harlot. Far from becoming, quote,
01:10:10: Lady Babylon, as the confused commentators grotesquely call her. She lives and dies as a harlot, although a remnant is called out of the harlot city and saved.
01:10:19: Revelation 18, 4. But as the Bible makes clear, even after this remnant leaves, there is still there still remains a harlot city that is finally destroyed by the wrath of God.
01:10:29: The quote lady, it turns out, is a tramp, not the bride of Christ. So that was a very clever way of refuting the nonsense that they were espousing.
01:10:40: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's it's. Yeah, thanks for reading that.
01:10:46: Yeah, you know, it's it's it's truly amazing that that someone in a, as I said, a punitively
01:10:56: Protestant seminary, you know, a seminary that really did have many good things going for it.
01:11:02: There was some you know, there was some what even in the short time I was down here, I had the privilege of sitting under Dr.
01:11:08: Raymond as a teacher. I had Cal Bison's logic class, which was an excellent class. I had an opportunity to meet a lot of wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ at Knox Seminary.
01:11:19: But the stuff that Warren Gage was pushing was he was, as you said, he was really a
01:11:27: Romanist in Presbyterian clothing. And, you know, and he he was so driven.
01:11:33: He was driven by his imagination. He was he was driven by literary analysis to the point where he would ignore the plain statements of Scripture.
01:11:42: Yes, there is a Babylonian harlot and that Babylonian harlot is destroyed. Yeah. Yeah.
01:11:49: There's that one I in Revelation talks about, you know, come out from among her and, you know, be not partakers of her plagues.
01:11:55: Well, you know, many people have come out of Rome. People are constantly being saved and leaving the
01:12:01: Roman Catholic Church. And I would say to anyone who's a Roman Catholic listener, get out of there. You know, don't be a partaker of the plagues of the of the
01:12:09: Babylonian harlot, because Christ will judge he is judging and he will finally judge that church.
01:12:15: Amen. Yeah. Yeah. And as you may know, Tim and I were former
01:12:21: Roman Catholics. And so I'm living testimony to the to the grace of God. And I'm very glad that God gave me revealed the truth to me through his word and enabled me to see that the
01:12:33: Roman Catholic Church is not is not a true church. That it is definitely a false, false religion.
01:12:40: And so, yeah, that's really it's it's it's profoundly disturbing stuff.
01:12:45: And you spoke about you mentioned literary analysis that Gage liked to use a lot of literary analysis.
01:12:52: And I wanted to ask you about some of the stuff you talk in the book about the parallels. One of the main points of the
01:12:59: John Revelation project, I guess, is Gage attempts to draw a parallel between the book of Revelation and the book of John.
01:13:05: And it was very bizarre stuff like he tries to say that they happen at the same time or something weird thing.
01:13:13: And, you know, could you could you get into that? Yeah, it's kind of hard to to to even to to convey this.
01:13:20: The stuff is so strange. It's almost a little hard to talk about it. And when I talk about it, I probably sound like some lunatic,
01:13:26: I'm afraid. But but yeah, what what what he argued and. He argued that that the book of John, on the one hand, the book of Revelation, on the other hand, were describing the same events.
01:13:40: One from an earthly perspective, John, and one from a heavenly perspective, Revelation.
01:13:46: And it was almost, you know, it was like like parallel. It was
01:13:55: I know it was like like parallel movies, you know, that were, you know, maybe one movie was was shot from one one perspective.
01:14:03: And then another movie was shot from from another character's perspective. But it was the same basic story. And so what what he says is that these things, you know, all the events that happened in John happened at the same time as all the events in the book of Revelation.
01:14:18: Well, I mean, stop and think about that for a moment. What what does that imply? You know, I mean, either that implies that, you know, that all of the events in the book of Revelation have already taken place, including the second coming.
01:14:30: Or I don't know, maybe maybe Christ is still walking on Earth and hasn't been crucified or ascended yet.
01:14:37: I mean, it's it's just it's absolutely bizarre. And it was interesting, too, when
01:14:44: I mentioned that that Warren Gage presented the John Revelation project at a couple of seminars.
01:14:50: And this was before I ever went down to Knox. But I got this I got the seminar recordings.
01:14:56: And it was very interesting because they had a a question and answer session after one of these presentations.
01:15:04: And. Someone from the audience picked up on this and they and I don't remember the exact wording of the question, but they said, well, doesn't it seem a bit odd or are you saying that the events in John all happened at the same time of the events in Revelation?
01:15:19: And how do you reconcile this? And and I remember R. Fowler White. Who was assisting with the presentation of the
01:15:27: John Revelation project, and he gave a somewhat long winded answer and he said, well, yeah, but we believe that those things that refer.
01:15:35: I don't remember exactly how he phrased it, but he said something to the effect of, you know, we believe that that the the things in Revelation refer to the future.
01:15:46: Really do refer to the future and are not part of the past. Well, here's the problem.
01:15:51: If you're going to be consistent, if you're going to say that Revelation and the book of John are telling the same story, you can't pick and choose which parts occurred at the same time in which parts occur in the future.
01:16:06: I mean, if you do that, then your whole and then your whole analysis breaks down. So, I mean, either you have to either you have to try to say that all the stuff in John happened at all at the same time as all the stuff in Revelation or they didn't.
01:16:20: And if if they did, you if they did all happen at the same time, you have a very strange that implies all kinds of weird things.
01:16:28: And if you say, well, OK, well, some things didn't happen at the same time, then your analysis breaks down.
01:16:35: Yeah, it's wow, it's it's pretty ridiculous. I mean, it's almost I guess it leads the two extremes.
01:16:41: It could lead to either full preterism or like, I guess the belief that the gospel of John is still we're still living in the same situation in times of the gospel of John and Jesus must still be alive.
01:16:55: It is just a very, very bizarre. And as I preface my remarks, I said, you know, when I talk about this, people are going to think
01:17:01: I'm probably some lunatic. Like I'm saying this is really what they taught. I don't believe this stuff.
01:17:06: I'm just trying to say this is what was being taught. And this is what was being taught very publicly in a pretty important place.
01:17:13: I mean, as I said, Knox Seminary was associated with Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. There was you know, there was no more there was no better known
01:17:21: Presbyterian church. There was no better known Presbyterian teacher for many decades than D.
01:17:28: James Kennedy and Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. And this stuff was being put out right at the very heart of conservative
01:17:35: Presbyterianism. And this is actually really what was being taught. And as I said before, it's almost like Warren Gage was going around with this great big neon sign saying, hey, everybody,
01:17:46: I'm a heretic. And I double dog dare you to call me out. You know, and he was actually teaching this stuff in public.
01:17:52: And it's just sitting here and talking with you about this, Carlos. I still can't believe it. You know, and I actually witnessed some of this stuff myself.
01:17:59: Wow. I mean, yeah, it sounds like a massive pile of heretical nonsense.
01:18:04: It's just so ridiculous. And, you know, since you since you touched on D.
01:18:11: James Kennedy, do you know if he had did he have anything to say about it?
01:18:16: I know he was close to his I guess to his death at that point. But did he I suspect he probably would have disagreed.
01:18:23: But, you know, I don't know. Do you know what happened? Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I deal with this a little bit in the preface to the book.
01:18:31: I in the preface to my book, I kind of give a little bit of the history of some of the upheaval at Knox and and the controversy that occurred in 2007 and how
01:18:41: Warren Gage took over. One of the things that I didn't know when I was a student and I learned this after I had gotten out of school and I was doing some research for the book, is that Kennedy actually did not want to hire
01:18:54: Warren Gage. And he was he was prevailed upon to to bring him on board.
01:19:02: You know, he listened to some, in the end, ultimately bad advice and hired him.
01:19:08: And what I also found out, too, is that there had been Warren Gage came to Knox.
01:19:14: And I hope my memory's serving me correctly here. I believe he started a teaching there in 2002. So he had been there about four years before I got there.
01:19:22: And there had been some some some issues with his teaching that had been raised.
01:19:29: Some concerns had been raised. And and I guess, you know, he was called into the principal's office, so to speak, on a few occasions.
01:19:39: Yeah. And and but nothing really came of it. I mean, there's never any real disciplinary action.
01:19:45: I guess maybe he said, oh, OK, you know, maybe I'll deemphasize this doctrine or something.
01:19:50: But but there was never anything that really came about. There was never any any discipline that was enforced upon him.
01:19:56: And so he just kept on doing the same stuff that he he that he always did. And in fact, he just became more and more bold the longer he was there.
01:20:06: Wow. Yeah, that is unfortunate. You know, this this rings such a similar bell.
01:20:12: This sounds so familiar to other unfortunate cases in in the history of the church where, you know, it's almost like one one really big bad apple can can spoil the entire seminary, but it can spoil the entire denomination even.
01:20:27: I mean, it's just the way this stuff goes unchecked and it doesn't get properly addressed. And that was one of the most striking things to me is that just how much damage one one bold and consistent heretic can really do.
01:20:42: And yeah, did you want to know? I was just going to say, well, what's what's the biblical saying there?
01:20:49: A little leaven leavens the whole lump, right? Right. Amen. Yeah, that's yeah, that's definitely a very vivid example of of that of that illustration.
01:21:01: And so, you know, this this kind of there's this this really was so interesting to to to learn about all this stuff.
01:21:10: And I wanted to kind of touch on a few points here with respect to.
01:21:18: Oh, well, and I was going to say that, you know, like the current justification controversy, what happened with Opalma Robertson and Norman Shepard, all of these cases where there was no proper church discipline administered to these false teachers.
01:21:32: And the denomination really kind of just loses its way. It's very sad to see that and how just how unfortunate it keeps it continues to happen.
01:21:43: And so a lot of these issues are still very relevant in art even today. And so I kind of wanted to touch on some of those issues.
01:21:50: So I learned a lot of important lessons in your book. I was really one of it was an excellent book.
01:21:57: And so one of the things that I wanted to go back a little bit to talk about hermeneutics, because there's and to show you how to show our listeners how relevant this is, is one of the most popular methods of interpreting the
01:22:14: Bible. And it is by far one of the most popular, if not the most popular method of interpreting the
01:22:21: Bible. And evangelicalism is sort of what Chris Rosebrough comically calls
01:22:27: Narcissus, Narcissus. And so, yeah, it's a very it's a very clever term.
01:22:32: And I have Chris Rosebrough. He's from Pirate Christian Radio. He's a Lutheran who has some really good. He has a discernment podcast in ministry.
01:22:39: He has a lot of really good stuff. And so he defines Narcissus as this.
01:22:45: This term combines the word narcissist with the word Isis Jesus to form this me centered way to interpret
01:22:50: Scripture. A narcissist is someone who is in love with and consumed by themselves. And Isis Jesus puts a person's own interpretation into the biblical text while completely ignoring the objective meaning within the context of the surrounding verses.
01:23:04: So Narcissus is the process of reading yourself into the text and turning every verse, every
01:23:09: Bible verse into a story about me. And so this really struck me because one of the this is how so many popular
01:23:18: Bible teachers teach the Bible. They say, oh, the story of David and Goliath is not about. It's really about you.
01:23:24: You are David and Goliath are your problems in this life. And just all the nonsense that gets touted as Christian teaching, as Bible teaching is really just bad typology.
01:23:36: I mean, it's just sort of that's just the simplest way to put it. And so if we properly understood a biblical typology, the way the
01:23:46: Westminster Confession defines it in the way Marsha's dictum defined it as well, I think it would really save the church from a lot of disastrous consequences that are sadly so common and prevalent in our day.
01:24:00: I agree with you. And of course, we live in a time that is very much anti -antilogic.
01:24:08: I love your term, the term that you use there, Narcissus. I wish I had that if I had known about that when
01:24:14: I wrote the book, I probably would have used it. But, you know, this is one of the things, you know, if you've read much and I know you have, but maybe for listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the work of John Robbins or the work of Gordon Clark, you know, one of the things that they both talked about at great length was how the modern church has really rejected logic.
01:24:38: And we sort of embrace this kind of fuzzy, you know, you know, what's that saying in the 60s?
01:24:45: You know, if it feels good, do it. You know, it's all about it's all about feelings. You know, Warren Gage was all about feelings.
01:24:52: He was all about intuition and imagination and feelings. And of course,
01:24:57: I say he's not the only one. I mean, this is very, very common. And, you know, if I feel that a certain passage says something, well, then that's what it means.
01:25:06: You know, and you're right. I mean, when we we go down that path of thinking,
01:25:12: I mean, there's no limit to the amount of error that we can find ourselves in. Yeah, it is.
01:25:19: It just made me it really made me appreciate so much more the the reformed hermeneutic, the grammatical historical hermeneutic and what as Westminster describes the scripture, interpreting scripture with scripture, using the literal sense of the of the of the passages and not trying to impose yourself on the text the way so many prominent
01:25:42: Bible teaching does today. And another interesting case in point, this really like there's just so much application to these to these foundational principles that that you cover in your book.
01:25:56: And it really kind of helped me to resolve a lot of sort of internal.
01:26:03: And I was unsure about certain things like, for example, you know, one time my my church had a Bible study.
01:26:09: They did a they showed a video, I think, by Michael Reeves about the Song of Solomon. And a lot of a lot of people, not just reformed folks, but will will say that the
01:26:22: Christ is that the Song of Solomon is really talking about Christ and his and the church.
01:26:29: And so I kind of thought about that when when I had already read your book at that point. And I kind of thought about it and I was like, well, wait a minute.
01:26:36: But where does it say in the New Testament that that that that Christ is that is specifically talking about Christ in the
01:26:44: Song of Solomon? And so I thought about it a little bit and I was like, wait, OK, so there's there's two different things at play here because you have to be really careful.
01:26:52: And it kind of made me realize, no, the reason it points to Christ is because marriage in general is is a picture of Christ and his bride.
01:27:04: It's by the virtue of the fact that it's a marriage, not because not because it just it's in the
01:27:11: Bible and it's talking about a marriage in the Old Testament. And so that really kind of gives you some really good hermeneutical sort of fences to really help you understand.
01:27:21: And and just what the limitations are of what the Bible is actually saying. And so I thought that was profoundly helpful.
01:27:27: I mean, it really does help you in so many of these areas that become speculative. And there's a lot of discussion and back and forth about what exactly the passages mean.
01:27:36: And I think those those these these principles that you're teaching, that you explain in your book, I thought were extremely illuminating in in situations like those.
01:27:46: I think that's Carlos, you said that very well. I can't really add to that.
01:27:51: But I think you really stated that very clearly. Yeah, I know. And I do really appreciate learning that.
01:27:57: And this this one one other hugely prominent example, especially in Presbyterianism and even in the evangelical evangelicalism as a as a as a larger whole is, you know, we talk about how wild and nutty the
01:28:13: John Revelation project was. But this stuff is still alive and well and even thriving today, namely in a very prominent
01:28:22: Presbyterian called Tim Keller. And so this really struck me because we had engaged in a pretty a pretty extended controversy about Tim Keller back in my old church.
01:28:34: And we ended up leaving in large part because of this issue with Tim Keller. And I don't know if you've ever read his book,
01:28:41: The Prodigal God. But he he Keller in the same almost in the same way that Warren Gage uses typology to justify his his false teaching.
01:28:54: Keller, almost in the exact same way, uses parables, biblical parables to illustrate his to isolate his false teaching into the into the
01:29:04: Bible. And so it really struck me because the parallels were just they were just they became immediately immediately apparent when
01:29:11: I when I saw that, because he has also a very similar way of interpreting the Bible in a sort of census plenar, you know, this fuller sense where he starts talking about the parables and he starts adding all of this ridiculous stuff and just erecting a massive theological tower of Babel.
01:29:27: And similar to how the Church of Rome does when they talk about Mary being full of grace. And from that, they get these all of these false teachings about how she's a mediatrix of grace and all of these things when that's nowhere near what the
01:29:41: Bible intended to say. And likewise, Keller and using the parables because they're ambiguous by their very nature and in disregarding the literal sense or meaning that the
01:29:53: Bible gives, he uses that as an as an occasion as false teachers before him have before to impose his his his false teaching into the text.
01:30:04: And so that really struck me. I was like, this is this is still happening by even by one of the most popular
01:30:10: Bible teachers of our time. Sure, sure. Yeah. And and yeah, it's interesting how when you as soon as you abandon.
01:30:22: You know, the idea that, you know, that we know about God through the express statements or the necessary inferences of Scripture, as soon as you in the least little bit say,
01:30:33: OK, well, that's just good. But but we can add this other little thing to it. You've opened a door to every manner of heresy.
01:30:41: And you've opened the door to just letting your imagination run wild. And yeah.
01:30:47: And there are there are a lot of people out there. You mentioned Tim Keller. I'm not as familiar with Tim Keller.
01:30:54: I've read some about him. I haven't really read a lot of his stuff. But, you know, anyone who who sets aside sound logical principles of reading the
01:31:04: Scripture just opens himself up for. Every sort of bizarre thing, you know, in in really the the the extent the degree of someone's error is limited only by his imagination.
01:31:18: Yeah. Right. And I remember we talked about this before in our in our previous interview where I think for people to say, because I know some people might struggle with Marcia's dictum and say, well, like, well, you know,
01:31:30: I don't know if it's really a legitimate biblical principle. But but just like so we've been just talking about parables.
01:31:39: And in when Christ is explaining the parables, he says, you can't know the meaning of the parable unless I explicitly give it to you.
01:31:50: And so otherwise, you're not going to know what it means. How else? He talks about that in Mark chapter four,
01:31:55: I think. How else will you know the meaning of any parable if you don't have the literal interpretation of the parable itself?
01:32:01: Because they're by nature ambiguous and they were designed not to illustrate, but to confute and to confuse and obscure.
01:32:09: And so given that that remarkable parallel there with with parallels, you have a very strong case.
01:32:18: I think a very strong case for for supporting just how important and really how biblical
01:32:24: Marcia's dictum is. And the reformed, the consistent reformed hermeneutic of interpreting
01:32:30: Scripture with Scripture and express statements of the Scriptures. Yeah, I think that's an excellent point you brought up there about the parables.
01:32:37: And so many people don't understand, as you do, that, you know, when
01:32:42: Christ gave those parables, he gave those to confuse people. Right. And then he explained them in literal language what they meant.
01:32:49: And that's the only reason we really understand what those things mean is because Christ explained. Right. Yeah, that's that.
01:32:56: So this is just I'm trying to give people I'm trying to salt their oats a little bit to to really get
01:33:02: I got so much out of this is really one of the most. This is one of the most influential books I've read that that has helped me to grow in my understanding of the
01:33:12: Christian faith. I really appreciated your book for this. And I hardly and I was very I'm very grateful that you sent
01:33:18: Tim and I copies to read it and take a look at it so that we could interview you. And I'm going to turn back to it time and time again to to cover to help shed some light on a lot of these issues that continue to come up and and are so prevalent today.
01:33:33: And so I guess I wanted to see if we could close with with this. And you've already touched on it a little bit.
01:33:38: But as regarding the the aftermath of of Knox Seminary, you know what?
01:33:44: What really happened after this this debacle? You know, you kind of touched on the some of those sound professors.
01:33:52: They ended up getting fired or leaving, resigning. And it sounded like Warren Gage stayed.
01:33:59: Yeah. Yeah, he did. It's kind of it's actually pretty amazing what happened down there.
01:34:05: As I mentioned, you know, Warren Gage was a lawyer and the guy knew how to fight. I will not
01:34:11: I won't deny that. I mean, I don't agree with his theology at all, but he knew how to fight.
01:34:17: He knew how to work a system. And and he he defeated the he and his faction defeated the board of Knox Seminary.
01:34:26: They defeated Fowler White. They defeated R .C. Sproul. He was reinstated to his teaching position.
01:34:33: And all the people that oppose Gage actually got the boot. So so it went from from from Gage being being sent packing.
01:34:42: That was the original set up. You know, they were going to they they originally recommended that they were going to fire him.
01:34:48: But then they backed off and they said, OK, we're just going to suspend you. They recommended the suspension. Well, Gage's suspension was vacated by by the board of Knox Seminary or by the by the session of Knox Seminary.
01:35:01: He was reinstated in his teaching position. And within a few months,
01:35:07: Fowler White was was dismissed. And E.
01:35:15: Calvin Beisner, Dr. Beisner was dismissed. And then Robert Raymond quit.
01:35:22: So, you know, it it was a thoroughgoing victory for Warren Gage.
01:35:28: You know, the bad guys won that fight. And in terms of, you know, what effect did that have on on Knox Seminary?
01:35:35: Well, I wrote a blog piece a few years ago. It was interesting when
01:35:40: I went to Knox Seminary, as I mentioned, one of the things that really attracted me to it was the strong emphasis they had on logic.
01:35:46: You had to take a course. You had to take courses in logic and in apologetics. And as I said, this is not something that's very typical anymore of most seminaries, but it was at Knox at that time.
01:35:58: Now, if you I went on the Knox website and they have a very nice website and they have their their their student handbook is all in an electronic form.
01:36:10: And you can go on there and you can search terms. So it's kind of funny. I went on there and I searched the student handbook.
01:36:16: I searched the term logic. OK, just to see what if they had anything about that. Well, it came back and said, sorry, no results found.
01:36:23: Oh, man, left the building. Yeah. Yeah. Logic. Yeah. Elvis left the building. So so I actually wrote this blog piece that it was it was the title.
01:36:33: I think I titled it Knox Seminary. You know, no logic found. Oh, yeah,
01:36:39: I think I think and I saw those posts and on Thorn Crown Network. You I think you called it logic.
01:36:45: No results found. Yeah. Yeah. Logic. No results found. Thank you. And so that's one of the ways in which in which
01:36:53: Knox changed. So so when when Warren Gage and his faction took over, I mean, they, you know, you as I mentioned,
01:37:01: Dr. Bison was let go. And apparently, as far as I'm aware, as far as I'm aware that he he was never replaced.
01:37:08: His his whole program teaching logic and apologetics was never replaced.
01:37:13: And if you look at it, you know, I still have a copy of a paper copy of my my, you know, the student guide for 2006 and it talks in there quite a bit about logic.
01:37:26: But now that term is completely absent from Knox Seminary, sadly. Yeah, that that is that almost sounds like logic.
01:37:34: So I kind of left with the Clarkians that that were that were there. And, you know, you mentioned that he stayed until 2014.
01:37:42: Correct. That's a long time after the. And did he leave in good standing?
01:37:48: He just retired calmly. There was what? You know what?
01:37:54: Yeah, that that's that's a very interesting question that you put up there. I'll answer it this way.
01:38:01: The his his official officially he left in good standing without any controversy.
01:38:06: That's that's the official line. Now, here's why I put it that way.
01:38:13: For some reason or another, I was still, you know, even though this was eight years after I had left,
01:38:19: I was still on the Knox email list of some sort. And so I get this email one day in the spring of 2014.
01:38:27: And it talks about, you know, Warren Gage leaving. And you kind of read through it's a fairly short email.
01:38:36: But at one point it makes a pretty striking statement and it says, you know, please be sure to squelch any rumors circulating about, you know,
01:38:43: Warren Gage's departure. And so that immediately says to me,
01:38:49: OK, so what was it? What are these rumors that they're trying to squelch?
01:38:54: I don't know to this day. Yeah, I don't know if they're true. I don't know whether they're false. I don't know.
01:39:00: And I don't claim to know. But I can say the official line is, yes, that he left in good standing.
01:39:06: But yeah, that that line really kind of makes me wonder. Yeah, and that is that is sad that I mean, it is.
01:39:16: You mentioned part of the reason you went is because there was three like three
01:39:21: Clarkian professors. It sounded like the seminary had a lot of promising things going for it. It did.
01:39:27: And yeah, and it just the way it all turned out, all the damage that was done by this false teaching is just basically a heap of ashes now.
01:39:34: I mean, there's not there's nothing really decent there, it seems from the seminary.
01:39:41: I mean, and I have seen I don't know if you if you knew or if you met Jonathan Lindbaugh.
01:39:47: He seems to be saying some good things about justification. And I don't know if he's still a professor there. I think he was a he's a professor at Knox.
01:39:55: But other than that, I mean, it just seems like it's sort of just it's a it's no good now.
01:40:01: I mean, it's just another sad story of how when false teaching doesn't get properly checked, it really wreaks havoc.
01:40:10: Yeah. And, you know, Carlos, I think that maybe is is. Yeah, that's that's one of the big lessons that I think you can take out of that book.
01:40:18: You know, if you don't address false teaching boldly, consistently and fairly early on, you know, you really put your seminary, you put your church, whatever organization you're talking about at risk.
01:40:35: Yeah, very true. Because, you know, false teaching spreads like, you know, it's like kudzu. It's like weed. You know, I mean, it can just take off again, giving back that biblical principle and a little leaven leavens the whole lump.
01:40:47: You know, you've got to deal with that stuff early and boldly. And unfortunately, Knox did not do that and they paid the price for it.
01:40:55: Sadly, yeah. And one of the things, though, that I am grateful for is that your book really illustrates how
01:41:02: God uses sovereignly uses controversies like these to to clarify and more solidly define the truth and what it means to what it is that the
01:41:14: Bible teaches. And I think one of those really important things was Marcia's dictum and just how valuable and important of a of a biblical principle it is to to having a solid biblical hermeneutic.
01:41:26: I really I really do appreciate that, that I got from getting that from the book. And I really highly encourage people to check out your book.
01:41:36: It's at the Trinity Foundation. I think it's I haven't checked if it's on sale, but it's at a it's a very affordable price.
01:41:43: Yeah. And highly recommend our listeners to check out this book. It will. It's one of the most influential books
01:41:48: I've read on my on my Christian walk. And so you have a lot of other really good stuff that you that you're putting out on Thorn Crown Ministries.
01:41:58: I mean, we're so we're very privileged and blessed to have you on the network. You have an excellent podcast, like I mentioned earlier, the
01:42:06: Radio Lux Lucid. And you have a lot of really good articles, some of which you've published also on the Trinity Foundation.
01:42:12: I know you have one about Warren exit stage left Warren, Warren leaving.
01:42:18: And then, yeah, you also have one about the Fed, the fight and the currency. I think so.
01:42:24: You've got some excellent stuff on on all of these issues, a very diverse range of issues.
01:42:30: And so we're very grateful to you kind of help us to give you to give people a full, full or biblical worldview and really a scripturalist understanding of all of these things, of the entire gamut of thought, not just, you know, church matters.
01:42:48: And so I'm very grateful to have you on. And I think one of the great things that you have a lot of really good articles,
01:42:55: I highly recommend people check out the you've tackled the immigration issue. A lot of these political problems that are going on with the wall, immigration, the
01:43:06: Catholic church's involvement in all of this thing. It's getting vastly overlooked by the media, even by, as you say, the alternative media.
01:43:17: It's just it's really remarkable. And so we're very grateful to have you on here talking about a lot of that stuff.
01:43:23: And I'm also very grateful that you've kind of helped to publish some great material on one of the things that I had.
01:43:30: It was funny because I wanted to publish an article explaining Robbins is teaching of Romans chapter one and what it means, what the things that are made means in that passage.
01:43:41: And now it's really referring to us as God's workmanship and not necessarily as as creation in general, but but really specifically to to us as human beings, as God's creation workmanship were created in the image of God.
01:43:56: And so I was very grateful that you put out that article and all of these other excellent content that you've been putting out for us.
01:44:05: Well, thank you very much, Carlos, for kind words. I really appreciate that. And it's you know, it's an honor and it's it's really.
01:44:15: Very gratifying to hear you, you say that they found the book helpful as an author. I mean, that's really, you know, as a
01:44:23: Christian author. I mean, you know, and you're an author, you've written things, you do podcasts. I mean, you know,
01:44:28: I mean, why is it we do this? Well, we want to glorify God and we want to edify his church. We want to help people.
01:44:34: I mean, that's that's that's really the reason you and I do what we do. And so, you know, to hear that from you, to hear you say that you found those works helpful, that means a lot to me.
01:44:44: So thank you very much. Yeah, I do think it's an extremely important book. I'm going to encourage people to read it at my church.
01:44:50: I'm going to actually teach a historical theology class. And I may I may even incorporate some of this into the class when we're talking about modern day controversies.
01:44:58: And so, again, I'm very grateful for the book. I really highly encourage this is I want to say it's it's extreme.
01:45:05: It's too important of a subject matter to not know about. And so many people don't know about it.
01:45:11: And so I'm grateful that you came out with this book really, really hammers the point and really ties everything together very nicely.
01:45:19: And so I wanted to, again, thank you for coming on. There's so much that I want to there's so much more
01:45:25: I want to talk to you about. And I know we're going to have to probably ask you again to come on some more into the podcast.
01:45:32: And but with that being said, did you want to close with anything, anything that you want to leave our listeners with?
01:45:38: Really, other than, you know, I think we had a really chance to discuss things pretty fully here. I mean, just to say, you know, that that I think if you you really look at at Knox Seminary and you look at some of the lessons that we've talked about here, you know, about the fact that, you know, the dangers that the
01:45:54: Roman Catholic teaching can compose, you know, and how much of that really is out there and in imputably
01:46:01: Protestant circles, that's one big lesson to take away from it. You know, the the the big lesson, you know, the fact that it's important to be consistent.
01:46:10: It's not just, you know, we need to be right, but we need to make sure that we are consistent, logically consistent in the way we present our arguments.
01:46:17: I mean, you can have, you know, you take a lesson from the, you know, the Board of Knox Seminary.
01:46:22: I mean, they they they did do a lot of things right. And I want to give them credit. I don't want to sit here and say that, you know, that that that that everything they did was wrong.
01:46:30: Everything they said was wrong. Unfortunately, they were not consistent. They weren't bold.
01:46:36: They weren't as bold as they needed to be. Be bold for Christ. You know, put on the full armor of God, armor up and have at it, you know, be consistent in your thinking.
01:46:48: And again, you know, another lesson from that is, you know, when we see false teaching, it's important to point that out.
01:46:55: I mean, the scriptures tell us to do that. Right. You know, mark those who cause divisions, you know, mark them and avoid them.
01:47:03: You know, we need to refute their teaching and we need to warn others of them. So, you know, those are all important lessons.
01:47:11: And I think that those are some, like I say, some big takeaways that you can get from the book. And it's
01:47:16: I'm glad that we had a chance to talk about that today. So thank you, Carlos, for having me on the program today.
01:47:21: I really enjoyed our conversation. And as you said, I hope we can can have a chance to do this again sometime.
01:47:28: Absolutely. It was a privilege to have you on with us, Brother Steve. And I do look forward to talking to you about other topics, you know, talking about John Robbins and just politics.
01:47:37: I mean, there's so much. Actually, a little shameless plug. I do. We are planning to have you on to talk about the
01:47:45: John MacArthur and Ben Shapiro interview. And he made a lot of political commentary there that I really want to get your take on.
01:47:53: So I'm really excited and looking forward to having you on and to talk about that. And yeah, so I'm definitely hoping to schedule that soon with you.
01:48:02: And I just wanted to let our listeners know we can close with this that I was right.
01:48:09: So the book is on sale at the Trinity Foundation. That's trinityfoundation .org.
01:48:16: And it's on sale for five dollars and 48 cents. So I you really I cannot stress.
01:48:22: I hope if you get one thing, it's to buy this book and read it carefully and look at just how much application there is to our time, modern times.
01:48:32: And so thanks again for coming on, Brother Steve. I know we've been strapped for time a lot and we lost this recording.
01:48:40: I mean, we recorded this so long ago now. It's been months. And I was so bummed out that we couldn't, you know, get it published.
01:48:46: And so I'm very, very glad that we finally got it done. And I really hope it blesses our listeners.
01:48:53: And so I thank you again. And with that, we'll sign off and we look forward to having you on next time.