On Emotionalism, the Accusation of Socinianism, Further Clarifications on Exegesis and Sola Scriptura

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. And I want to start off by apologizing for all the different announcements we made today.

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Best laid plans of mice and men, as sometimes said. I intended to be in the office today so that we would be able to do

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Zoom calls. Was looking forward to being able to do that, but have been providentially hindered. I am now, of course, in the

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Trinity Library reading room, which is a much nicer place to be. I have actually been in that room twice.

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And it is an astonishing thing to walk up out of the gift shop down below around these circular stairs.

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You come out and that's what you see is what's behind me right now. Actually, that's not behind me right now.

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It is for you, but it's just a green screen back there for me. But I can see it.

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And it is an amazing place to be. If you ever have the opportunity, I don't know that I ever will again, but if you have the opportunity, you will.

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The only thing we can't reproduce here, it doesn't look as big as it is in reality, the way that we're set up here.

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And you can't do the smell. The smell of thousands and thousands of very, very old books.

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It's very distinctive and it's wonderful. It really, really is. So with that,

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I want to begin by extending my sincere condolences to Doug Wilson and the

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Wilson family, Christ Church, King's Cross, Canon Press, everybody in Moscow at the death of Doug's father.

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I had the opportunity last year when visiting for the Grace Agenda Conference to sit and talk with him for quite some time.

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Everybody up there loved him. He was sort of a, well, I guess

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I'll use the term patriarch, though that's not considered to be a good word anymore.

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Patriarch and, of course, expected age -wise.

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My father passed away back in February and had made 90 years of age. We never expected him to live that long, but he did.

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And so you have the grief that always comes, the lost loved one.

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But in those situations, you, as a Christian, have the great, not just consolation, but comfort and the great joy of understanding a life well -lived, ministry accomplished, all of those things.

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And so it's so very different than what I experienced many times as a hospital chaplain where you had just hopeless individuals facing death with no, they had never expressed even a thought of eternity.

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And it was truly a horrible thing to see. And as Christians, we do not have that.

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We grieve. Anyone who is old enough to love is old enough to grieve.

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And so we grieve, but not as those without hope. That is the key phrase.

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And I definitely found that to be true in my years as a hospital chaplain. Hope was the key.

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Whether you were gonna be going upward or downward in the cycle of grief, all what hope.

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And hope is a wonderfully biblical term and a wonderfully biblical concept that I don't think we talk nearly enough about.

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We don't talk about comfort and hope. We don't talk about pleasing God nearly as much as I think we should, because these are very, very much biblical categories.

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And so our prayer is that the God of all comfort will comfort

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Doug and his family and all those who are grieving at this time.

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So we extend our thoughts that direction. Next, I was not going,

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I always make the decision when these things happen to try to, as best

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I can hold off in making commentary on major explosions of evil,

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I guess would be the way to express it as what happened in Uvalde, Texas.

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And really my, the main thing

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I wanna say right now about that is to speak of the wisdom of that used to be common.

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It was a common sense wisdom that many people had that you do not make snap decisions.

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You do not make any decisions when you were in the state of emotional upheaval.

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Maybe it was just my tribe, my people, Scotch -Irish,

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Scots primarily, but from that part of the world. People who had gone through so much for so many centuries and hardened by difficult living and having a common sense that has abandoned

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Scotland and Ireland in the past number of years, but was very much a part of my people back then.

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And I don't ever remember my parents sitting me down and having a conversation about emotionalism or logic or any of those types of things.

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But it was communicated to me that an important part of adulthood, of maturity is not only controlling your emotions, but not making decisions in the heat of a period of emotion.

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Obviously, Scots are not really known for a lot of expression of emotion.

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So there would be a lot of people who consider them to be somewhat cold and distant. But the reality is that it is a necessary aspect of growing up and being mature to seek to make decisions that are wise.

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And wise decisions are not made by emotional people. Wise decisions are not made by the individual who is in a state of panic, grief, anger, even giddy joy.

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Emotionalism is a flaw. It is a degradation of a wise person.

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A wise person makes decisions based upon, well, as Christians, based upon eternal truths.

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And you must be able to weigh important issues from numerous perspectives to be able to make a wise decision.

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And that's the one thing emotions short -circuit. The more emotional you are, the more narrow the spectrum of information that you will examine and that you will consider.

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I obviously have a program that has decided to start looping and I always know which one it is.

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Turn it off and the fan on the computer will very quickly start slowing down. Anyway, an emotional person focuses upon the source of their current emotion, anger, betrayal, sadness, whatever, and will apply to that a much greater weight than they would even a week later or two weeks later.

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And that's why you hold off on making decisions. Until those emotions are under control.

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And yet today, our culture just doesn't even think about things like this anymore.

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It's be your authentic self. I mean, we're literally destroying little girls' lives by convincing them with a single

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YouTube video that they're actually men and they run off and make decisions and do things that will impact them for the rest of their lives.

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That's childishness. It truly, truly is. And we used to shame childish people.

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We used to shame people who did things on the basis of foolish childishness.

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And now we accept that as being authentic when it's just simply being childish and nothing more.

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And so my take in this current situation is, first of all, you have a lot of people, well, you had the president of the

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United States who immediately utilized this for political gain, for political power.

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And those type of people are just despicable on either side. But the great danger as I see it is

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I cannot help but think of the videos that are readily available to anyone today of people locked in boxes.

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That's all you can describe them as. Whether it be in Australia, all across China, who knows how many hundreds of thousands, millions of people are locked inside their apartments or locked inside these boxes that are no bigger than this bedroom that I'm in right now.

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You can't tell that. Looks like a big room from here. And when

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I see those people, the one thing that unites all of them, all those people that are experiencing tyranny and oppression, and only in eternity will we know the number of deaths that have resulted from that kind of activity over the past couple of years, the one thing that they all share together is that at some point in their past, either forcibly or often in the

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West, by their own emotional decisions, they have had removed from them the ability to defend themselves and their families and their country against this kind of tyranny.

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Now, obviously, a people who do not love liberty and freedom and do not realize the value of these things and necessity of these things, the importance of these things to pass on to the next generation, a people who fall into the deadly trap of thinking that government is intended to meet the responsibilities that we, as the creatures of God, have been given for ourselves, those will be people who will trade their liberties and freedoms for a sense of security any day, and will become enslaved as a result.

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They will enslave themselves. And that's what we're seeing all across the West is a voluntary enslavement to tyrannical forces that a lot of people say, well, why can't you just trust?

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Because when any regime that is primarily influenced by secular understandings of man will inevitably bring about a position of enslavement of the population, it takes place in fits and starts, little steps, and then bigger steps.

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But secularism has no foundation within itself to resist in any way the constant human tendency toward tyranny.

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And so, as I think about the situation in the United States, I can't help but think back how many times people in other countries said to me over the past couple of years, yeah, it's a whole lot worse where we are than where you are, and it's obvious why.

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Not only do you have your constitution, but your populace is armed. And so, there is a hesitation because the number of enforcers, thugs, is much smaller than the number of people.

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And that's just all there is to it. And so, when you, and this is what we're being told, how dare you suggest we should lay aside our emotions yes,

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I am suggesting that you lay aside your emotions and actually rationally consider things.

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Because as far as I can tell, that's not happening anywhere in social media right now.

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It's all pure emotion. And as such, it is tremendously lacking in fundamental wisdom.

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All of this, of course, when you then back away from even that element of the conversation to the overall question of why does

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God allow bad things to happen to good people? Hopefully, you know the answer to that.

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Hopefully, you understand that in a nation under God's judgment, just judgment, for all of the squandering of the privileges that he has given to us, for all of the murder of unborn children, for all of the perversion of marriage, for all of the mistreatment of widows and orphans.

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Once you recognize the justice of God's judgment, then you have to start dealing with what does judgment look like?

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And that allows you to actually explain to people why we call for something called repentance.

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Because vast majority of people in our society, repentance is nothing more than the weird word on the sandwich sign of the strange guy that's been walking around downtown forever.

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I don't even know what it means. Repent of what? Turn to what? And with a

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Christian church that in many instances does not believe that the term repentance should even be used, it's understandable.

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Very understandable why the call for repentance is met with rolls of the eyes and incomprehension.

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We have to be explaining what that's all about. And when you're talking to the first two now generations of Americans who are thoroughly secularized,

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I mean, you can very easily now assume that the young person you're talking to on the college campus has no knowledge whatsoever of the

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Bible. That was not the case when I was young. Everybody at least knew stories.

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Well, they may not have been Bible scholars, they knew the stories and they knew the overarching narrative was still there.

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But it's being dug out as quickly as possible. And we need to be the ones not only replanting it, but planting it in its fullness, not just in the parts that will allow us to remain comfortable.

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The days of comfort are passing us by. I'll buy a big shot. Buy a big shot? Anyway, buy a long shot, there you go.

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So on our last program, we spent just under two hours discussing the subject of exegesis, hermeneutics, the so -called great tradition,

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Christian Platonism, Reformed Thomists, and these other issues.

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Now it was only 48 hours ago. And I would not expect truly thought through responses or expect them in 48 hours.

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But at the end of the program, you will recall that I looked right in the camera and I said, if you're going to respond, respond to the issues, respond to the questions that I ask.

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What is the gospel of the great tradition? Upon what meaningful foundation can you distinguish between what you consider to be central consistencies of the great tradition in regards to divine simplicity as it comes to Aquinas?

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How do you differentiate between that and what the great tradition said about the papacy, about the priesthood?

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Because, and there's a, the priesthood is very, I pointed out that one of the favorite

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Roman Catholic sources of this movement, Dr. Levering, when he discusses these things, the sacramental nature of language is tied together with the sacramental nature of the sacerdotal system.

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And in fact, you really aren't dealing with the Roman Catholicism that develops from Aquinas if you don't recognize the centrality of to mystic metaphysics to the concept of transubstantiation.

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And hence the rise in the centrality of the

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Eucharistic sacrifice within Roman Catholic, not only Roman Catholic piety, but the entirety of Roman Catholic theology.

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If you don't recognize that the mass is the central mechanism within Roman Catholicism of the glorification of the triune

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God, and that they quote Thomas for this just as much as anybody else, then you're not understanding what you're talking about.

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You're not really dealing with the quote unquote great tradition as it actually existed. And I'll be honest, again, most of the people, because again, this is a new movement amongst reform folks.

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And so most of the people who are now so confidently promoting this stuff,

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I know really don't know anything about Roman Catholic theology in regards to the sacrifice of the mass, the relationship of the sacerdotal priesthood to the mass, the indelible mark that's made upon the soul of the priest.

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See, I keep bringing these things up and no one ever says anything about it. They never say a word. The stuff that they attack has nothing to do with the substance of what

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I'm actually saying. That tells me that I'm right over the target and the target's being obliterated when you're talking about stuff that has nothing to do with anything.

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And so I said to the camera, I said, deal with what

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I said, answer the questions. What's the gospel of the great tradition? What basis do you make these differentiations, this distinction that you're talking about?

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And I think I made it clear, but if I didn't, then let me make it clear now. There is a huge difference between having the discussion about how to define, apply, and how far to take the doctrine of divine simplicity, which again,

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I'm constantly seeing these incredibly wise Thomists who say, ah,

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White denies simplicity. He just denies simplicity. So what they're saying is, you agree with my understanding.

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And of course, there are 47 ,000 different interpretations of Thomas Aquinas, but my understanding determines whether you will actually be allowed to be considered to hold to any particular theological doctrine.

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I'll be honest with you, the arrogance that I see amongst Thomists is astonishing.

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Now, I see arrogance amongst reformed people and non -reformed people, and it's everywhere, but there does seem to be a special badge you get.

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It's just, I don't know if you have to get a Tomster cut just for a while, because it would grow out for me.

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That's one of the reasons I shave it, is that I would have a natural Tomster cut.

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I would make a great Thomist as far as that goes. It would be real easy to do. And that's the main reason

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I get rid of it. But do you get a special badge once you get your

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Tomster cut in utter arrogance? It's just astonishing, the kind of stuff you get. But anyway, that was a rabbit that ran back across the trail.

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We can have all the conversations we want about a topic that no one was talking about amongst us only a matter of years ago, and that is the relationship of God's attributes at extra and at intra, intra and extra.

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And as I've said many times, if you're convinced of that, fine. If that is of assistance to you in some way that I cannot fathom, and if you hear the concerns of others as to where that might go, and you don't go there, and you say,

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I realize that there are those, there are brilliant theologians, and I'm not talking about myself.

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I'm talking about other people. There are brilliant theologians who have said that it would seem that the trajectory of that hard form of Thomistic simplicity moves toward monism and a form of pantheism, a non -differentiation, an undifferentiated

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God. And if you've heard those concerns, and you say,

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I hear you, and this is why I don't go there, and this is why

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I will never go there, and you have biblical sound reasoning, just as when people say to me, well, if you don't do that, then that's gonna lead to tritheism.

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I go, it can't lead to tritheism, and here's why. Here's the biblical reasoning. Here's why it can't go there.

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There's only one Yahweh, and therefore, you can't have three Yahwehs, and so that one being of God is shared by three persons in the text of the

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New Testament, and so if you're gonna continue believing all of scripture and only scripture as your infallible rule of faith, then

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I can't go there. So I'm not gonna become a tritheist, and you're not going to become a pantheist or a person promoting monism or something like that.

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Then great, fine, wonderful. We've laid out our positions. We have listened to the concerns of the other side, and can we get along?

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Can we still cooperate in the gospel? Can we even be in the same church? I would certainly say yes, but it certainly seems to me that there are lots of other people now that are saying no, but I only say that from the other side.

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I say that from my side, but I'm like, hey, fine, no problemo, just as long as you understand that I understand why you believe what you believe,

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I understand what it is you're believing, and I just don't see any reason to accept those things. It does not help me in any way, shape, or form, and I don't see that any apostle would have ever said, oh yeah, you gotta go there.

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Don't see that that's the case. That's one thing. Literally asserting that we, to be true

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Trinitarians, must embrace some form of Platonism.

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We must become Christian Platonists. Can't go there.

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When people start saying that you're to interpret the Bible through the grid of Nicene dogmas, when

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I hear someone saying that, that's someone who has never taken those Nicene dogmas outside of the

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Christian faith and sought to present them to other people because the circle's too obvious.

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It's plain as day. Now we're talking about how to do the interpretation of Scripture.

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Now we're talking about ultimate issues of authority. Because no one, well, one person sort of tried to make an argument that you can find unity amongst

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God's attributes from the Psalms or something, but other than that one attempt, no one else has, and I don't think that person would necessarily be saying this either, no one's saying that it's the consistent exegetical result of examining the page of Scripture is going to force you into accepting the

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Thomistic metaphysics and everything else. But now we're talking about something much more definitional because it impacts everything.

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And that is the relationship of Scripture to tradition, the perspicuity of Scripture, the sufficiency of Scripture.

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This is a major, major issue. And again,

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I'm not seeing that very many of the people who are promoting this stuff have ever, ever, ever taken this outside of their own narrow confines.

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Certainly not outside the confines of what's just the world calls Christianity. So even leaving aside the arguments with the

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Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, certainly outside to the Mormons and Muslims and Buddhists and everybody else.

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And so this impacts far more, far more than any discussion of ad intra attributional sameness.

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And I made the argument yesterday that given my experience over my ministry and the people

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I've talked to, this will inevitably lead a people to follow the logic to the point of an abandonment of Sola Scriptura because it is a fundamental compromise of it.

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So those are very different issues. You could say one's the foundation of the other, but I can see someone who would hold a view on this issue over here and not even get close to saying, yeah, you need to embrace

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Christian Platonism to be a true Trinitarian. Because if you're gonna say that, then you gotta say that Paul was, unless you're gonna say

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Paul wasn't a true Trinitarian, which I guess some people would say. I mean, honestly, if you're actually gonna argue that the dogma of the

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Trinity, as it reaches its apex of definition in Aquinas, and there are certain people who say exactly that, then you would have to say

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Paul was not a Trinitarian in the way that we are today, that we are better Trinitarians than he was.

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Now, it's obvious that the church had to answer questions that were not asked of Paul in the centuries after Paul.

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But the question that you then need to struggle with is, all right, if the church had to answer questions after Paul, then what can we demand to be believed concerning the doctrine of the

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Trinity? Is there a, was Cardinal Newman right, even on the central aspect of the

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Christian faith, was Cardinal Newman right, that there is a development hypothesis? Now, at that point, you are, you're not gonna be able to continue to hold this whole scripture for very long.

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You can pretend, you can close your eyes, you can go la, la, la, la, la, and close your ears and stuff like that, but you're not gonna be able to, because you're going to have to have some type of inspired source outside of scripture to guide this development.

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You're gonna, and there's only if, there's gonna be people who are gonna stand up and say, hey, we're your guide, you know, the guy in Rome will do it, and the guys in the

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East will do it, and then you got all sorts of newcomers that come along, they all messed it up, but we are your ticket now.

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You'll find lots and lots of folks who will go those directions without any question, but you're not gonna be able to hold the solo scriptura.

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And that's not solo scriptura, and that's not nudist scriptura. I would like to just simply request that people stop with those lies, because they are lies.

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We've said they're lies before. Let me just say them again. I'm not talking about solo scriptura.

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In fact, I had a guy, Andy TGD, and my recollection is that maybe my memory's just wrong.

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That's one of the problems with Twitter nicks and stuff like that. Sometimes you might get them mixed up because you don't have a face with it or something like that.

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But I thought we had been compatriots at some point in the past. I thought we had been pretty much on the same side of certain battles.

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But he comes popping back into Twitter. I guess he had been gone for a while. He only had a few followers, so I think he had left and reconstituted his account.

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But decides, does this, oh, I remember the days when

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James White was speaking against solo scriptura as if now

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I'm somehow promoting. Now, there is no official definition of sola or solo or nuda.

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And so what I'm seeing is that one side will want to utilize certain definitions.

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Now, it's not that I haven't offered very clear definitions for decades.

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And I've published books, done debates for a long, long time, and I'm saying the same thing now.

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I said them. But I think it was

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Keith Matheson who sort of popularized popularized about 17, 18 years ago, maybe, the solo scriptura thing, or at least amongst

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Reformed folks brought it up and described the difference between solo scriptura and solo scriptura as if you could separate the utilization of scripture from the purpose of the church, ministry of the church, teaching authority of the church, and hence the church's history, and hence the tradition, why we wanted to find that, that develops in so many different ways in church history.

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So the idea of you and your Bible under a tree is all I need. I don't need to know anything.

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And I've spoken against this and nothing I've said by any rational person or any honest person could be construed as promoting that idea.

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Nothing I said in the last program, again, no honest person could possibly do these things.

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There's been a lot of dishonesty in the responses. And I don't know where this is coming from. And a lot of people have commented about it to me.

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They're like, are these people watching the same things that I'm watching? I don't know, can't say.

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Don't know what's causing all this. But sola scriptura is first and foremost defined by the nature of scripture itself.

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It is unique. And hence, because of its uniqueness and because of its nature as being

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God breathed, cannot be a subset of a larger concept of tradition as you have in Roman Catholicism, where you have written tradition, oral tradition as subsets of sacred tradition, capital

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S, capital T. The nature of scripture prohibits such a strange reordering of things.

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So all this strange stuff in regards to solo and nuda,

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I've been teaching church history for a long time. I know that I have my own lenses.

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And this is the next thing that I did. I was accused by an Orthodox Presbyterian church member of being an arrogant man for thinking that I have no presuppositions or lenses or traditions or whatever the terminology was that he used.

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This is, again, one of my critics, this is a man who is never fair in anything he says at all.

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And so take that for what it's worth. But I, of course, have always been straightforward and fully understanding, but those who've been around a while, remember me and Dave Hunt, remember?

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Remember in the year, what was it, 2000? Almost quarter of a century ago, when interviewing

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Dave Hunt on KPXQ radio in Phoenix, Arizona, we're talking about John chapter six because he's slaughtering it.

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And he says something about it. I said, Dave, I said, that's just your tradition speaking.

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And he said to me, James, I have no traditions. And what did

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I say in response to that? What have I said for decades now? The person who thinks he has no traditions is most enslaved to his traditions, right?

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That's what I've said all along. So every one of you that's saying that I'm thinking I don't have presuppositions, you're just lying through your teeth or you're as ignorant as the day is long.

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You just need to shut up because you're embarrassing yourself. You really are. It's just like, wow.

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You can just be buried under the documentation of the inanity of such blabbering.

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So the point is that how do you detect and filter out your traditions, presuppositions, lenses, et cetera, et cetera.

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That's why you need the discipline of exegesis. You need the discipline of exegesis to identify your traditions and your lenses so as to allow the word to speak.

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And it's when you use one form of exegesis over here and a different form over here, that's the clear red flag flying in the air.

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Here is a person's tradition and he doesn't want to deal with that tradition.

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If we don't have a means of doing exegesis so that people in multiple cultures, in multiple places around the world at multiple times can come to the same conclusions, then again, there's no reason to believe in Sola Scriptura.

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Just be honest that you don't really believe it anymore. You don't believe in the sufficiency of scripture.

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You don't believe it's perspective. You don't believe in what our own confessions say about these things.

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Because that is the inevitable result here. It's amazing. The hyper -confessionalists yelling and screaming about defending the confessions are the ones who will end up destroying the foundations of the confessions.

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Because the road you're going down, there's only one place that it ends. It's only one place it goes to.

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No matter what you do with it. So someone sent us a link to the old

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Puritan board. Some of you don't even know what the Puritan board is. Man, how long has the

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Puritan board been around? I mean, it has been around a long time.

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It's not as old as the old BBS stuff and things like that. But it's been around for a long time.

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And I invested some time in it long, long ago, but I don't know how anybody keeps up with all that stuff anymore.

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But there was a thread on the Puritan board, James White on reformed

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Thomism. And it didn't take long until a guy who goes by the

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ID, Nick, whatever. It says

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Ramist Thomist, no idea what any of that means.

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Puritan board clerk. So I guess you got Puritan board freshmen, junior, clerk.

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No idea. Like I said, I haven't been on it for a long, long time. And started talking with some people.

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Obviously from a different perspective than I take. He of course accuses me of rejecting divine simplicity.

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And again, it's just, if you don't have Thomas's extended version, then you don't have it at all.

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Doesn't interact with the articles that I've written on it and published stuff like that. These folks don't care about any of that stuff.

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Thomas is all. And if you criticize Thomas, then you can, this person may have a reformed gospel in common with you that you don't have with Thomas.

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You're not gonna be bowing in front of the statues of Virgin Mary with Thomas. But that doesn't matter.

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We will still throw the people who agree with us on almost everything right over the board if that means we get to keep our tonsure cut.

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But then he says this. Do you have, okay, here's it.

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To me, this is Rammus Thomas. To me, it truly sounds like James White is becoming a

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Sassanian. Now he says truly. He says, to me, it truly sounds like James White is becoming a

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Sassanian. Now, similar to when you accuse someone of being a

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Gnostic, there are a lot of accusations that can be made today where you use fine sounding words, but you're filling them with your own definition that frequently doesn't have anything to do at all with what's going on in the rest of the world or what went on in history.

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And so I would imagine that most people, if you were asked to define

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Sassanianism would go, I've heard of it, I heard of it in a negative context, but no idea.

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So I want you to know what Sassanian, what Sassanianism historically has meant. So you can understand what this reformed brother is accusing yours truly of, because like I said at the end of the last program, what

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I expect is ad hominem, what I expect is deflection, what I expect is sand throwing, but what

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I'm hoping for is actually dealing with the issue. Well, here's the ad hominem, here's the slander, here's the throwing of the mud and everything else.

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But the amazing thing is it's just so patently and obviously false that you just wonder how anyone has the temerity to push the keys down.

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Because you know you're lying, you're lying before God, you're lying before men, you're slandering a brother. You know you're lying, but you still do it.

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What is the dedication that causes you to lie?

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What causes you to do something like this? It is truly difficult to understand. So what did

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Sassanians believe? Well, there isn't any one definition of everybody who would be called a

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Sassanian, but there are certain fundamental things. Rejection of the incarnation and preexistence of Christ.

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So rejection of the Doctrine of the Trinity. So I'm rejecting the

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Doctrine of the Trinity. Why? By questioning

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Thomistic metaphysics in the extended assertion of the

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Doctrine of Simplicity. So the author of the Forgotten Trinity is rejecting the

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Trinity. You see what's going on here? I get to make these tiny little narrow definitions based on Thomistic metaphysics that come 1 ,200 years after the birth of Christ.

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And if you don't agree with me on that, you're denying the Trinity. It's childish, it truly is.

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It's astonishingly childish, but it's happening constantly right now, all over the place.

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It's horrible. So some rejected the virgin birth, incarnation, deity of Christ, Doctrine of the

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Trinity, denied original sin, and really the nature of the fall.

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The propitiatory view of the atonement. Yeah, I'm denying that too.

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Who knew? Had to go to the Puritan board to find out. And of course, we're basically, so Sinianism was really an early form of open theism in their denial of the omniscience of God.

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And really they use the exact same type, many of them use the exact same type of definition of,

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God can only know the knowable. And so if it's a necessary truth about future actions, then

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God would know it, but if it's not, then he doesn't, you see. So at each one of these points, and there were issues in regards to biblical inspiration and stuff like that.

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No sane person would make that, because any person knows, you look at what

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I said, you look at what I said two days ago on this program. No sane person makes this, but here are reformed people doing it.

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And so what is the source of this insanity, this slander? I'm not sure.

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It does seem that what we have is the rise of a form of reformed scholasticism.

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And scholasticism has a long history. And just go read some of, go read some of what

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Luther said about the scholastics, which I can't necessarily repeat everything that you have in the table talk.

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About that or many other things along the same lines, actually. Okay, still got a few minutes here.

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Let me talk about something else that was relevant to the last program.

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Started filling some stuff out, and that'll be a nice addition to that. Like I said, Lord willing, we'll be able to next week do the

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Zoom call thing, and eventually what we'll do is we will test doing what we're doing now with taking

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Zoom calls. And I just, I have confidence Rich can figure it out.

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He can do it. If it can be done, we'll figure it out. I don't know if Dr.

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Carter, I get the, I have the suspicion, that Dr.

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Carter would not actually take the time to listen to the last dividing line or something like that.

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I think that in general, he would say he's too busy to do things like that. Whatever. I mean, we can read his books, but not everybody then returns that favor.

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But I think, yeah, yesterday morning, he posted a thread on Twitter that pretty much demonstrated the truthfulness of one of my primary criticisms of his thesis that I posted right on, there were people saying, all right, these people just don't even bother reading books.

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I posted this stuff on the screen. You can tell how many of these people did not watch.

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They will not watch. They will just assume and spout slander.

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It's just so many people are willing to do that. It's a sad thing. But here's the thread.

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What is Christian Platonism? One more time. CP equals the classical metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle.

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Now, right there, I just stop and go, think about that. Because there are fundamental differences between Plato and Aristotle on the metaphysical level.

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So we're already doing a mixture thing, and that means you get to pick and choose.

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In his book, he has the five points of Platonism. He knows, anybody knows, that those five points could be questioned by all sorts of folks and say, no, you need a minimum of seven, or couldn't be more than three.

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At that point, really, it depends on which part of Plato's writings you're looking at.

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There's just all sorts of argumentation that can take place and should take place. But the classical metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, as integrated into theology, so as filtered in theology, by Augustine and Aquinas.

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Now, Augustine isn't really influenced by Aristotle, at least not directly. And there's a 800 -year gap between those two, massive amounts of theological development.

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And yet, this is what Christian Platonism is? Is that,

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I mean, everyone's always recognized that once the question was asked, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?

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That there were a lot of different answers that were given. But let me finish reading it.

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The reformers presuppose it. So the reformers presuppose

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Christian Platonism. I don't think that's true. I don't think any reformer, if you had asked them that, would have said yes.

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But I'm sure the other side's response would be, but that's only because they wouldn't have seen the very benign, kind definition we're putting on it.

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The reformers presuppose it, and Protestant scholastics used it. So the great tradition, and remember the definition of the great tradition, goes from the second century,

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Justin Martyr, all the way to Turretin. Now, I simply ask anyone who has read

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Justin Martyr, and anyone who has read Turretin, to recognize that the continuities there are very definable, very limited, and do not require

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Plato at all. Now, Justin is more heavily influenced by Greek philosophy than he is by scripture, by a long shot.

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It's astonishing that he got, that he did as well as he did, to be honest with you, especially given the limited canon that he probably had.

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Justin, I'm referring to, Justin Martyr. But this kind of claim that you've got a great tradition from Justin Martyr to Turretin is so vague that you can cover anything with it, and you can ignore anything with it.

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The Protestants who wrote the great confessions, including 39 articles, Augsburg, WCF, Savoy, Second London Confession, all worked in the context of this tradition over against what else?

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Knowingly, this again reminds me, and this is why I'm wondering if there won't, if there already isn't a connection with the traditional text claims.

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I don't see why that connection wouldn't develop rather naturally, because it's so vague.

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All worked in the context of this tradition, but the Enlightenment rejected

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Christian Platonism, and liberal Protestants tried to revise doctrine to fit into the philosophical naturalism permitted by the

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Enlightenment. Had that worked out, liberal Protestantism has been a flaming failure, and the wreckage is all around us.

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Christianity cannot be revised to fit the Procrustean bed of empiricism, idealism, or any Kantian synthesis.

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Liberal Protestantism has collapsed into Gnosticism and the moral anarchy. So what was our criticism last time?

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It's either or. It's either the great tradition in Christian Platonism, or it's the anarchy of the mainstream denominations don't believe in anything anymore.

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And so nobody else has been doing anything other than those two. Well, that's just historically laughable.

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As I pointed out, from the Reformation onward, there have been people doing meaningful hermeneutics and exegesis in no way, shape, or form, doing the great tradition stuff he was talking about, not spiritual exegesis, not all the rest of this kind of stuff that he's promoting, and producing the great commentaries and the defenses of the

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Reformation, not based upon what we're doing or Thomas did, but upon a solid foundation of biblical exegesis.

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Those people don't exist in this type of black and white dichotomy.

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They're just not there. The problem with rejecting the metaphysics of the great tradition is that if you do so, it is impossible to hand on the faith.

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Because historic orthodoxy, Trinity, two natures of Christ, requires certain metaphysical truths to make sense.

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Recovering metaphysical realism is essential to maintaining orthodoxy. So orthodoxy cannot exist without being platonic, without Plato.

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That's what he's saying. And I say bunk on that. I say that the

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Trinity and the two natures of Christ is taught to us in scripture. And that while the church was right to answer questions that were raised by Greek philosophy, it is the transformation of the biblical categories and the biblical metaphysics into Greek metaphysics that has been at the root of all the problems that have developed ever since.

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And so I say, I can go to scripture, that's what the book was about, and demonstrate the foundations of the doctrine of the

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Trinity in such a way that that is communicable in every generation, in every culture.

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And that that was God's intention, and that's what the Holy Spirit preserves, is that testimony of the word and that dedication to the word.

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And that would be true whether Plato ever lived and that you do not, that we do not have any business going into the world and trying to take people and turn them into Christian Platonists so they can be

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Orthodox. I find this dangerous. And I think most people who don't, who aren't trying to join the cool kids club sees it as well and recognize it.

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I really think they do. That's certainly my hope and prayer. Okay, well, thank you again for allowing me to make changes that were necessary today just in the providence of God and hope that the conversation was still worthwhile to everybody and useful.

01:00:15

Like I said, hopefully next week, maybe as early as Tuesday of next week, we can try for that Zoom call program and discuss some of these things.

01:00:27

Be more than happy to do it. So thank you for watching the program today, and we will see you next time on The Dividing Line.