Oct 15, 2026 Show with Dr. John V. Fesko on “The Protestant Reformation: Wiping the Slate Clean?”

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

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

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

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

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 15th day of October 2026.

And I am thrilled to announce that a neighboring church to mine, where I'm a member, a neighboring church, Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is going to be hosting a special event on Friday, October 23rd, which would be a week from tomorrow.

It's a Reformation lecture on the theme, The Protestant Reformation, Wiping the Slate Clean? And the speaker for this event will be Dr. J. V. Fesco, who just so happens to be my guest today, and I am looking forward to interviewing him.

Dr. John V. Fesco is an ordained Orthodox Presbyterian minister. He is the Harriet Barber Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, and prolific author, and he is going to be addressing the same theme as this, or should I say, next Friday's lecture, The Protestant Reformation, Wiping the Slate Clean?

And it's my honor and privilege to have you back as a returning guest, Dr. J. V. Fesco.

Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be back with you, Chris, as well as with Andrew.

Yes, and co-hosting the program with me today is Andrew Miller, a regional home missionary for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and it is a joy to have you join us here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio for the very first time, Andrew.

Thank you, Chris. Glad to be here with your esteemed guest, Dr. Fesco.

Amen. Well, we have a tradition here. Whenever we have a first-time guest, we have that guest provide for our audience a summary of their salvation testimony. And even though Dr. Fesco has already done this because he is not a first-time guest, it's been eight years since he's been on the program—over eight years.

So I would like you to provide for our listeners a summary of your salvation testimony that would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which you were raised, and the kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you.

So let's hear your story, brother.

A Lifelong Christian Upbringing and Call to Ministry

Yeah, you know, I used to think that my story was boring, so to speak, but the more that I live, the older I get, I recognize how much of a blessing it is, and then I never have known a day apart from Christ, so I was, you know, raised in a Christian home.

Both of my parents were Christians, and when I was born, my mom and dad told me that on their way home from the hospital, they stopped off at the church, and they went in and took me in, and, you know, they prayed for me and, in a sense, gave me back to the Lord and said, you know, He belongs to you no matter what happens.

And so I can remember very distinctly when I was four years old, my parents came to put me to bed, and they started talking to me about the gospel, and they asked me if I wanted to pray to receive Christ, and at the time, I said, yeah, absolutely, and I prayed, and I can remember asking my mom, am I supposed to feel different?

And she said, well, do you? I said, I think so. And so that was 52 years ago, and so since then, my parents would take us to strong churches where there was strong preaching, and eventually, we ended up in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

That's many, many years down the road since I was born, of course, but, and so as joining the OPC back in, I think it was the spring of 1997, it may have been the winter of 96, but I ended up pursuing ordination in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

At the time, I was doing my doctoral studies, but ended up getting ordained in 1998, in December of 1998. So it's coming up on the 30-year anniversary of being an ordained minister in the OPC, and I've served in a number of different capacities over the years.

I've been a church planter. I started off as a church planter, and then the church that I planted called me as the pastor, and so the first installed pastor. Praise God, that church is still there in the greater Atlanta area.

It's Covenant Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Marietta, Georgia, and I think it's doing well and thriving. I served, I was at Westminster Seminary, California for 10 years, I think literally to the day, the day that we arrived was 10 years to the day that we left, and so we started in 2009 and ended in 2019.

I served there as the academic dean and a professor of systematic and historical theology, but now I've been at Reform Theological Seminary since the summer of 2019, so we're coming up on about seven and a half years, and you know, as you noted to our listeners, I serve as the Harriet Barber Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology.

I've got three children, and one is in college, one is a junior in high school, and the other is a seventh grader, and she is 13, and then my wife and I, we've been married for almost 25 years. It'll be 24 years this December, so that's me in a thumbnail sketch.

Praise God, and providentially, Dr. Fesko and I have two brothers in common who are dear friends, one being Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III, who is pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia, but when he was pastoring Calcedon Presbyterian Church, Dr. Fesko and his family were members there for a time after coming to the Doctrines of Reform Theology, I believe, and also my pastor, Simon O'Maney, at Trinity Reform Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was a student of Dr. Fesko's at Westminster West in California, so quite a small world.

And, Andrew, you are a first-time guest today, actually a co-host today, but if you could also give a summary of your salvation testimony, including the kind of religious atmosphere, if any, in which you were raised and the providential circumstances that our Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you.

Yeah, sure. Similar story to Dr. Fesko's in that I had the blessing of being raised in a Christian home, and so I've really never known a time when I didn't believe in God and know an element of the gospel.

I remember going to Christian school, I think it was first grade, and every single day they had an altar call, and I would ask Jesus into my part, because I really wanted to avoid hell. Whether or not that was genuine, I don't know.

When I was a teenager, the Lord really convicted me of my self-centeredness. I knew the Westminster Shorter Catechism, question answer one, what is man's chief end? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

But the Lord convicted me that I was not living that way, that I was living essentially to glorify and enjoy myself. The Lord used a number of things in those years. I was part of the youth group at our church there, part of the PCA.

The Lord used a number of different things to convict me and show me the wonders of the gospel. Coinciding with that, I came to love God's Word and see new wonders in it. There's a text in Colossians 2 where it says, if with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive to the world, do you submit to regulations, do you not handle, do you not taste, do you not touch?

I don't know if this is exactly what Colossians was dealing with, but I realized that I was living by the world's rules and that I didn't need to anymore, that that wasn't the values that I needed to live by and the priorities I needed to live by.

I started to really dig into God's Word and the Lord showed me what it was to really trust in Christ and be a disciple. People noticed that I was always reading the Bible and into that, so I got to teach a little bit in the youth group as a high schooler.

People encouraged me then to go to seminary and I read a book by John Stott called The Preacher's Portrait and said, you know, there's really nothing I would rather do than be a steward of the mysteries of God as a preacher.

I went off to college and then I went to Westminster West and I actually started there in 2008, so just before Dr. Cusco got there. Then after seminary, I went back home to Virginia and I was public supplied for a little while.

I was an intern and then I was pastoring in Virginia, northern Virginia, for about 10 years before three years ago in 2023, I got called up here as a regional home missionary. Part of the reason I got that call was because I got to help out with a couple mission works church plants in Virginia, one in Yorktown and another in Richmond.

And so since 2023, I've been doing that role of regional home missionary, which is probably one your listeners might not be familiar with. It's somewhat unique in the OPC, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but to give you a brief summary, I'm kind of a pre-church planter church in that I identify different areas in our region and suggest, let's try to get a mission work started, a church plant started.

And so I serve the churches in the presbytery. So a presbytery is a confederation of our churches where we hold each other accountable and we support one another. And so we have about eight churches in central Pennsylvania that support me and I kind of work with a group, work with contacts to get a group started in a particular area and get a Bible study going.

And then hopefully as that grows, it turns into a church plant. So right now we've got a church plant in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, just south of State College. And we'd love it if your listener would pray for that work.

We've been at it for not quite a year and I'm encouraged by that. And hopefully the group will keep going and growing and we'll be able to call a church planter to come and take over the duties where right now I'm kind of the de facto pastor on loan.

And so I'm trying to work myself out of the job by growing that group. And you have a website yet for that church? Yes, it's lewistownopc .org. So it's pretty simple. And my work, you can kind of find an overview about it at goodnewscentralpa .org.

So lewistownopc .org and goodnewscentralpa .org. And Lewistown, if our listeners aren't familiar.

With that town in Pennsylvania, is spelled L-E-W-I-S town O-P-C dot org. Great. And if I'm not mistaken, my dear friend for decades, Bill Shishko, who was the pastor of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Franklin Square, Long Island for decades and then moved on to plant an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in another county on Long Island, Suffolk County, the Haven Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Comack, Long Island.

I believe he is now a regional home missionary as well, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know if you know, Bill.

Yeah, I think he's definitely served in that role. I don't know if he's retired now or not, but I know it is a similar role, yeah.

All righty. Well, as I said at the very beginning of the program, my friend Pastor Jeremy Brandenburg and the saints at Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just about five minutes from where I'm sitting right now, they are having a Reformation lecture a week from tomorrow, Friday, October 23rd at 7 p .m.

It's a free event, and it is on the theme, The Protestant Reformation, Wiping the Slate Clean? And if you are able to get to Carlisle, Pennsylvania or are already living in this area and you'd like to check this out, the website of that church is redeemeropc .org, redeemeropc .org, and then just click on Event, and you will get all the information you need.

But Dr. Fesko, there is, I'm assuming, an important reason why your subtitle of this theme has a question mark at the end, wiping the slate clean? Is this to differentiate between what the Protestant Reformation was and what in later centuries became known as Restorationists?

Does that have anything to do with the reason for your question mark?

The Reformation Reformed the Church Rather Than Starting It Anew

No, not in that sense, although I'm sure that could be an interesting question to ask and answer. It goes to, I think, a more common, I think, understanding, or perhaps we could say misunderstanding of the nature of the Reformation in that a lot of well-meaning Christians that attend Reformed churches or they are a part of congregations that would see their historical roots in the 16th century Reformation, they look at the Protestant Reformation as if it was wiping the slate clean of everything that has gone before and then starting anew and starting afresh.

And, you know, as common as that understanding might be, one of the things that we want to keep in mind is that the Protestant Reformers themselves, whether we're talking about Calvin or we're talking about Luther, or more specifically, I'll be talking a bunch about what Calvin has to say on the topic, is that they did not believe that they were starting a new church because if they had claimed to be starting a new church, then I think that the Roman Catholics would have characterized them as schismatics.

And so they definitely wanted to avoid that label as well as any appearance that that was the case. And what they claimed is that, no, the Reformation, we could say, is two things. One, it lies in continuity with the very best of the patristic and medieval churches.

You know, if we can divide it into those contexts, though it's one church, but we could say it's the very best of those two periods of church history. And so one of the things that you'll find, you know, regular citations to a number of the church fathers, for example, in Calvin's Institutes.

In fact, Calvin has in excess of 700-plus references to St. Augustine in his Institutes, and he even says that he could create a book of his views on theology by quoting wholeheartedly from the writings of St. Augustine, and he wouldn't need anything else.

And so that's the first observation. The second observation is it's embedded in the very nature of Reformed, in that to be Reformed or to reform something doesn't mean that you wipe the slate completely clean, but rather you merely reform problematic areas of doctrine.

You know, so I remember, you know, years ago, I used to watch this show on TV called Overhaulen, and it was one of my favorite shows because what they would do is they would take old cars, and they would completely strip them down and, you know, take the body off the car, strip it down to the frame, media blast the frame, powder coat the frame, put in a new engine, new transmission, new interior, I mean, everything to the point where I wanted to say, I don't think that that is in any way the same car because you've replaced so many parts on it.

You know, it kind of invokes that old Greek conundrum of the ship of Theseus. How many boards can you replace on a ship before it's no longer the same ship and it's an entirely different vessel? I think that's the way a lot of people look at the Reformation.

It's an entirely new vessel. And instead, you know, the Reformers were like, no, we're just fixing areas of doctrine. So one of the things we often do in the Reformed church is we focus on the differences.

Now, that's an entirely legitimate and necessary thing. We want to be able to contrast to say, this is where we differ from Rome. But on the other hand, we should always be careful to note, well, where is it that we have agreement?

And whether it's in the writings of Calvin or, say, in the writings of somebody like Francis Turretin, they'll talk a lot and often positively cite Roman Catholic authors in their own day, as well as medievals and patristics to show that, no, the patristics and the medievals, they agree with what we're saying here.

And so that's the overall, you know, general thrust, you know, to try at the same time to say, yes, there are significant differences, and we don't want to set those aside. Sola Fides, Sola Scriptura, Soli Deo Gloria, Solus Christus, and, you know, Sola Scriptura.

But we also want to note those continuities, those connections where we do agree, where the reformers would say this, and it sounds kind of odd, perhaps, but they would say they're reformed Catholics, Catholic with a lowercase c, and that they agree with the Catholic teaching of the church, Catholic lowercase c, in terms of the universal affirmations of truth across the ages.

So that's the overall, you know, thrust of, you know, what I'm going to be talking about next week, and I'm pretty excited about it, because there's a lot of great stuff that a number of the reformers have talked about that I want to hopefully bring to people's attention.

Tom Hanks. By the way, before I forget, I want to heartily recommend to our listeners a three-volume work on the patristics written by two dear friends of mine, a Reformed Baptist, William Webster, and a Presbyterian, David T. King.

David has been both an Orthodox Presbyterian and now is associate pastor in a PCA church in Texas. But these three men have co-authored—I'm sorry, these two men have co-authored a three-volume work, Holy Scripture, the Ground and Pillar of Our Faith, and it contains a whole lot of patristic evidence proving that the church fathers believed in many things that Bible-believing Christians and Reformed Protestants carry on today, including Sola Scriptura, which is claimed by Catholic apologists to be an invention of the 16th century, and not only an invention but a heresy.

And so if anybody is interested in investigating that three-volume work, you can find it at christiantruth .com. I just thought I'd throw that out there since you mentioned the patristics. And isn't there, though, a serious line of demarcation when the Church of Rome, in response to the Protestant Reformation, had gathered the Council of Trent and made declarations and anathematized anyone who believes in certain things that Rome had come to officially reject, including, most importantly, areas of the very gospel of Jesus Christ?

Isn't that an area that dogmatized the departure of the Church of Rome from biblical Christianity and from being rightly considered a true church?

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I try to always tell my students about this, folks in the church, and this will be something that I address in my lecture next Friday, is that a lot of Reformed Christians have a Roman Catholic understanding of the history of the church, and they don't realize it.

Because what they do is they say, the 16th century brought us the Protestant Reformation. Okay, good, yes. And therefore, everything before the Protestant Reformation is Roman Catholic. And so they perceive the Reformation as the breakaway branch, if you will.

And I want to say, no, that's a Roman Catholic understanding of the history of the church. And it's one that Roman Catholics would say, yeah, that's right. Whereas, historically, if you read, for example, one of the things that we would say, and this is what essentially Calvin materially argues for in two works of his, one is his letter to Cardinal Sattelato.

This was a letter that Calvin wrote to refute the local cardinal that was trying to bring Geneva back into the Roman Catholic fold. And then the other is on necessity of reforming the church, which, if you don't have the time to read Calvin's Institutes, that's, of course, a worthy read.

But read on the necessity of reforming the church. And that explains kind of the rationale for the Reformation. And what he would say is, this is what he materially argues, is that no, there's only one church from, say, the first to the 16th century, and that the Protestant Reformation is the continuation of that church as they reform doctrine, and that with the Council of Trent, they're the breakaway branch as they formally condemn key doctrines, such as sola fide and the doctrine of justification, which is at the heart of the gospel, and putting up Roman Catholic authority on equal footing with Scripture formally, or formally defining the canon as including non-inspired books of the Scriptures.

Now, Roman Catholics, of course, would object to that characterization, but that's one of the things where we disagree with them on. And so we would say this, is that the Roman Catholic Church, therefore, starts formally at the Council of Trent.

Prior to that, there's only one church. And many of the doctrines that get formalized at Trent had not previously been formalized. Some of them had been, like transubstantiation at Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, but most of what Trent says, or a good percentage of it, had never been formally put down on paper.

People believed it in various and different ways. And so in that sense, we can say that Rome is the breakaway branch. And so there's a great statement that Hermann Boving, you know, the 19th century and 20th century Reformed systematic theologian in the Netherlands, where he says that the Church Fathers Irenaeus and Augustine and Tertullian and the Medievals, such as Thomas Aquinas, belong to us, that is, as Protestant, Reformed Protestants, as much as they belong to Rome.

That doesn't mean that we have to agree with everything that they say, and we always hold whatever they say up to the bar of Scripture to make sure that they're speaking truth, writing truth. But we shouldn't be afraid of investigating what they have to say, because that's what the Reformation is all about, capturing the very best of what those theologians had to say.

To further clarify, you are saying that although Roman Catholics and even evangelicals and other Protestants in ignorance will even refer to the Church Fathers as Roman Catholic, but the Roman Catholic Church did not exist until Trent.

That's right. In fact, I was just going to say, there's even Roman Catholic historians that acknowledge that. John O'Malley, he does great history work on the history of the Roman Catholic Church. He calls the pre-Tridentine Church the Latin Church, which is, I think that's an accurate historical description, and it's not really until the Reformation, boom, that you get,.

The Roman Catholic Church per se. And before Trent, there was, I'm not saying that there was full freedom of conscience to disagree and debate over matters, but there was a much more frequency of debating over theological issues than after Trent when.

They became anathematized, certain views anyway. Yeah, that's right. Because again, they hadn't, for whatever reason, hadn't put it down on paper. And so Trent, they decide to finally put a lot of things down on paper, I think in part to differentiate their teaching from the teaching of the Reformation.

And so in that sense, that's helpful to us as Protestants to know, okay, this is what you officially believe. That's helpful so that we can differentiate our own views from your views. So yeah, that can be helpful.

And just an example of this would be the.

Fact that Jerome, who the Roman Catholics refer to as Saint Jerome, did not believe that the apocryphal books, which they call the Deuteronical books, were a part of the Old Testament canon because he knew the Jews had never viewed them as a part of the Hebrew Scriptures, and yet he was the one that compiled the Latin Vulgate and under duress included the apocrypha in there with some kind of notation.

Yeah, I think one of the things.

That comes to my mind, for example, is that when you read what Thomas Aquinas has to say as he defends the doctrine of transubstantiation, that's the false teaching that the elements of the supper, the bread and the wine, transubstantiate, the substance changes into not bread and wine, but into the substance of the body and blood of Christ.

And when he goes to appeal to early church fathers on what they say about the Lord's Supper, he claims, oh, they're talking about transubstantiation. But in all of the references that I looked up that he cites, as I looked them all up in the church fathers, none of them talk about transubstantiation.

In that sense, I want to say it's a series of wishful citations from the standpoint that they say that, oh, sure, we consume the flesh and blood of Christ. Okay, we as Protestants can say that so long as we're talking about that sacramentally, not that the actual elements themselves are the body and blood of Christ, but none of them talk about the substance of the supper changing.

And yet that's the effect to which he cites them. And so that's why I say that a lot of Roman Catholics will appeal to the church fathers, but I'm not persuaded that their appeal to the church fathers is accurate or all that persuasive.

And I think we have more ground to stand upon than many Protestants realize. So, yeah. Well, we have to go to our first commercial break, and when we come back,.

We'll have Andrew Miller, my co-host, chime in. And if you would like to join us as well with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com.

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Tom, welcome back. And we are, if you just tuned us in, we are interviewing today Dr. John V. Fesco, ordained Orthodox Presbyterian minister and Harriet Barber Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology at Reform Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, and a prolific author.

We are addressing the theme, The Protestant Reformation, Wiping the Slate Clean. And my co-host today is Andrew Miller, a regional home missionary for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And Andrew, if you could now pick up our conversation from the beginning on Jerome, and some additional information you have about his denial of the Apocrypha, or Deuterocanonical books, being a part of the Hebrew canon.

Oh, sorry about that. I have you on mute. Go ahead, brother.

Yes, I just wanted to point out that one of the things that I appreciate about Dr. Fesco's writings, he has a book called Death in Adam, Life in Christ. And there's an illustration there that I've used a few times, where he talks about one of the prominent figures at the Council of Trent, Diego Lainez.

And he wanted to preserve this personal merit in saving yourself, essentially. And so he gave this parable where a king's son has inherited all of his father's wealth, and he wants to share this wealth with two servants.

And, you know, just think about which one you'd rather be. Because the first one, he says, only believe in my promise, and I, having received the right to all my father's wealth, will obtain a great gem and give it to you freely.

And to the other servant, he says, I will free you of your servitude, ensure your well-being, and give you weapons so that you can fight and earn the great gem. And really, these represented the two different positions, the Protestant position, the reformer's position, and the one that was essentially enshrined at Trent.

The second one, where the servant is freed and given all of the resources to then earn the gem, that's the Roman Catholic position, whereas, of course, the Protestant reformation position is that everything is a gift from first to last.

And, you know, there, one of the things that the Council of Trent was condemning is imputation, the imputation of Christ's righteousness to us, which, you know, to me is very clearly taught in scriptures, like 2 Corinthians chapter 5, where it says, you know, we implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

For our sake, we made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And, you know, all kinds of places that talk about that faith was credited or imputed, counted as righteousness.

And so there you have the Council of Trent, I think, in actually kind of a helpfully clarifying way, saying that they don't believe in imputation, but one of the things that they lose is, of course, assurance, because if you have to, you know, if you get God's help to then save yourself, which is their position, how can you ever really be sure that you're going to make it?

And sadly, I think this is one of the big things that people lose when they go to Rome or remain in the Roman Catholic Church, is that they lack assurance. And yet what a better picture we have in the imputation of Christ's righteousness to us.

And that goes back, again, before the Reformation, you know, the Reformers talked about the great exchange. So Martin Luther said, this is the mystery which is rich in divine grace and sinners, whereby a wonderful exchange, our sins are no longer ours, but Christ's, and the righteousness of Christ, not Christ's, but ours.

But of course, you know, that goes back even further. So going back to the epistle to Diogenes we have a writer who says, he put upon himself our sins, a sweet exchange of incomprehensible work of God.

Oh, the unexpected blessings that the sinfulness of many should be hidden in the one righteous person, while the righteousness of one should justify many sinners. So anyway, that's just one of the little tastes of insights that I think you get from going to a Reformation conference like this, where you'll hear about the continuity with the early church, but also, as we pointed out in the show, the clarifying that the Roman Catholic Church did.

Great. And Dr. Fesco, what would be, in your opinion, the result of making the the crucial error of having a wipe-the-slate-clean approach to Christianity? I understand the temptation that many people have because of some of the grotesque aberrations and heresies and idolatry of the Church of Rome, where they would assume, oh, nothing good can come from this.

Why retain any of it? Why just reform it, destroy it, and start from the ground up? I can understand the temptation of that, but what would be the tragic outcome of that? And what is the tragic outcome of that approach?

Because it does exist, and it exists in many ways amongst most of the cults that identify as.

Christian. Yeah, I see a number of things that can problematically arise if you take the wipe-the-slate approach to it, and I can't give these in any particular hierarchy of priority, so I'll just talk about them as they come to mind.

The Dangers of Cutting the Church Off from Its History

As you said, first of all, it was the Anabaptists who took the wipe-the-slate-clean kind of approach to the Reformation. And by Anabaptists, I always tell my students, we're not talking about contemporary Baptists.

They're like zebras and horses. They look similar, but they're very different creatures. You know, when you get closer, you realize, no, these aren't the same animal. So there's a bunch of Baptists out there that hold very strong and wonderful reformed convictions, and we're grateful that we all can agree on so much.