Steve Meister on the Doctrine of God (Part 2)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, Michael Lee Abendroth, year 14 on No Compromise Radio. I think that's like 3 ,500 shows. That's incredible. We're just going to go into syndication.

And actually these days, you know, when Pride starts to get the best of us, we are on two radio shows, only out in the middle of the boonies. It's certainly not like we're in New York City or something, but we are on KAGV 1110 AM, Anchorage, Alaska.

Evan Burns, I think, goes to that church. So, I think that's how that all worked out. And then somebody that got trained underneath Pat Abendroth, and then he went to West Cal, Pastor Brian in Trinity Bible Church, Powell, Wyoming, and that is KFGR.

How do you like that, bub? Yeah, it's great. Steve Meister's in the studio again. He's here for the Fount of All Joy Conference, A Doctrine of God, kind of recovering the classical theistic view of God.

And the first show I had him on, which played yesterday, we talked about a variety of things. Today's not really edification. I have to take Steve to the woodshed. It's rebuking Steve. Steve, how in the world are you able to quote Thomas Aquinas with a straight face?

This is New England. This is 80 Roman Catholic here. Are you like a papist? How's that all working out for you?

No, I'm not a papist. And if you read what I confess in the Second London Confession, then we would be really clear that we are not at all concerned about that Antichrist, the Pope of Rome.

So, Steve, I don't run around telling a bunch of folks here at the church, these are all the Aquinas books I want you to read. I mean, I have other fish to fry, and we're reading Machen, and we're reading Owen, and we're reading Jerry Bridges, right?

Good introductory drug to a lot of the things that I like to teach. That's what I'm pushing. On the kind of the internet debate, it seems like there's a group of people that if you ever quote Aquinas on simplicity, out of all the Aquinas stuff that I've read, which isn't a whole lot, I've read the most on simplicity.

When he's right, he's right. So, cannot we say he's right in that area and he understood, along with the rest of the church, this is the right way to think about God? Does it automatically mean we're going to go down and cross a Tiber?

I crossed a Tiber three weeks ago, by the way, and I walked back. I mean, seriously, here's what I think. You tell me if I'm wrong. I think it's, Aquinas, it's not even the issue. The issue, there's two sides, and one side hates the other side so much, or the doctrines contained to the other side, that they have to try to use Aquinas against them.

That's kind of what I think is some, there's something, there's some truth behind that, in my opinion. Am I right?

Oh, I couldn't disagree with you. I think it's mostly an ad hominem slur that has little actual.

Intellectual and studied basis behind it. So, when I kind of was a new pastor and I'm in seminary, and it's Bernard of Clairvaux, and I'm thinking, oh, here we go, some wacko, weirdo, whack-a-mole guy, and he's doing some mystic Catholic who knows what.

Then all of a sudden, I'm reading the Institutes and he quotes Bernard of Clairvaux a lot. I'm like, Calvin, what are you doing? When they're right, they're right. Right, exactly. And so, why can't we say he was right on this?

And I know this is not a perfect illustration or analogy. I grew up in a liberal Lutheran church, but they taught me the Trinity. They taught me the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, and we said it every single week, very God of very God, light of, you know, light of, did you just use our restroom?

Did you see what was in there? Yeah, it was awesome. I was waiting for you to go in there. We put those up about a year ago or something like,.

There's a Nicene Creed posted on the wall to contemplate.

Uh-huh, I know it is to walk through it again. And so, I was taught those things by the Lutheran church. I don't believe in baptismal regeneration. I don't believe in some of the liberal things now of the ELCA, but what they taught me about the Trinity was right.

Why can't I just say that and say, thank you, Lord, for having them teach me about the Trinity. Before I got saved, no one ever had to say to me, Bible's the Bible. They didn't have to convince me. God is one, three persons.

They never had to convince me, all because this, essentially, apostate group, when it comes to salvation, taught me the right thing. So, why can't Aquinas teach me something?

Well, and it's not what the debates, the areas that we would agree with him as bringing clarity in the history of the church on the doctrine of God are not where the debates have been with us and Roman Catholicism.

Even John Owen said in his catechism as a footnote, this doctrine alone was uncorrupted by the papacy. And he was talking about the doctrine of God and his triunity. And so, that's not an area that we're even fighting over in terms of the material controversies during the Reformation.

And it's just simply not. The idea that if you take this or that view of Aquinas in particular, you'll end up one direction is just false. I like to point people to J .I. Packer and R .C. Sproul. R .C. Sproul, tireless defender of sola fide and the truth of the gospel, said Aquinas is the greatest theologian in church history.

J .I. Packer, who said some untrue caricatures of Aquinas, also signed ECT and made some errors in that direction. So, it's just not, it's just not true that agreeing with him on the doctrine of God's going to upset the gospel.

As I read John Owen, kind of just working through his works, when he attacks the Socinians, he attacks them on the deity of Christ. He doesn't attack them on, I don't know, you know, can God do miracles or something?

I'm just trying to make something up because I don't really know what they teach on the other subjects. But he's attacking them on the obvious error, and same thing with the Roman Catholic Church. The attack is ecclesiology, and the attack is soteriology, and somebody said to me the other day that Aquinas taught double predestination.

Is that true?

Peter T. Leeson. As I haven't done a ton of study in that area of his thought, I do know what I've read of secondary stuff from like Carl Truman, that his understanding and doctrines of predestination are far closer to the Reformation that would make people comfortable who like to, you know, caricature his views.

You have to remember too, I mean, he's writing…. Peter Sam. It's like a thousand years ago. Peter T. Leeson. Yeah, well, there's a really, in a very real sense, Roman Catholicism, as we understand it, didn't exist yet.

And a lot of, that's a lot of things modern Christians don't understand that we're, the Roman Catholicism that we may have grown up in or that we encounter now is a direct response to the Reformation.

So, you have to be really careful that you don't anachronistically read that back into everyone.

Who preceded it. All right. So, when I go to your office and I take a picture of your Aquinas books, there's a reason for that. So, is there anything in you, Steve, that if you quote Aquinas, you want to, to the people you pastor, do you qualify it?

Do you soften it? Do you, like, if I'm going to quote J. I. Packer, I might say, you know, the good Packer says such and such, or, you know, I think MacArthur did that once, the old J. I. Packer. That was right when he got done writing the foreword to the Roman Catholics book that said he got hit by the surfboard in the head and then figured out that everybody goes to Mary, the guy over here in Boston College, who's the famous modern scholar, Peter Craft.

And so, then MacArthur would say, well, the old Packer that wrote Knowing God said such and such with a qualification. Do you qualify your quoting of Aquinas?

I mean, I don't quote him all that often in public teaching and ministry. It's not, in fact, I can't even think of a time I've named him in any sort of pulpit ministry. It depends, you know, if I'm teaching, like, one of my theology classes in the church for church members, where you have, where it's more of a lecture format and you have time to dialogue and interact, we'll do that.

If I'm dropping people in the pulpit that I necessarily feel the need to qualify, sometimes I'll just say one writer or one theologian said, although when I, my son, 13-year-old son got me the other day, because I said one medieval theologian, and he just, after the sermon, he said, Dad, we all know you're saying Aquinas.

You should just say it.

Funny. How many years have you been pastoring in Sacramento?

Nearly 15, was as associate pastor at another church for about five years, and I've been where we're at now for over eight at IBC. Steve, earlier today, we were talking about.

The eternal subordination of the Son, eternal functional subordination, and what does a language of Father-Son mean, and three wills, and all these controversies that happen. I asked you or said something by the sink in my house.

It's not that hard for us to be confronted by biblical evidence in church history and what the church has confessed. And then we say, and I've said it on the show before, and I can say it again. I taught through 1 Corinthians 11, and I taught it.

I can't blame Grudem. I can't blame Ware. I can't blame the commentaries that I read. I have to blame me. I didn't do my due diligence. I didn't research well enough. I didn't study to show myself approved, and I taught eternal functional subordination.

And then it made it easier for me to say, see, the Son submits to the Father, and therefore, then we have wives can submit to their husbands, and they're equal, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I was wrong. I repent. I'll never teach that again. It was stupid. It was sinful. So, there it is. Why is it so hard for some people, and we're not talking about lay people, you know, like, oh, okay, incarnation, human will, divine will, human will, human nature submitting to the divine.

Maybe they don't know all that. So, some lay people, they get a pass. But if you're writing books, and you're on the preaching circuit, and you're teaching people, and you've been confronted with evidence by numerous people, and you still won't change, what does that tell you?

What's the deal with that?

Well, I think without knowing, of course, each man's heart and falsely attributing motives, you have to at least raise questions about the very thing you just mentioned, the conference and speaking circuit.

And too many celebrity, notable teachers in visible Christianity today have a vested interest in having never been wrong. And I think part of it is the whole circuit issue, and not that you're attached to a particular local congregation as we are as pastors whose souls were called to shepherd.

And if I've ever led them astray on any important area, that needs to be rectified and fixed and corrected. But I think the construal of ministry in the public venues, and in different media has created this issue where you're, when you've built your name on a certain doctrine, or doctrinal, you know, aberrant doctrine in this case, you have a vested interest in never admitting you're wrong, because otherwise, what else are you standing on?

It is a, it's a big problem.

Steve, don't you think there are some Christian celebrities, maybe they didn't try to become a celebrity or try to be famous? Who knows? Maybe they did. But if you're not teaching the Bible, I think you can still do things if you're, you can still be a seminary professor.

I'm not saying that this is only pastors, but pastors, at least every week we're teaching through Ecclesiastes or Matthew or Luke, and we're learning, we're growing, we're confronting these things. Things pop up in the church, so we have to either affirm or contradict, and so we're dealing with folks.

But I guess if you're just kind of in an ivory tower, and you're teaching the same old thing every time, or you're speaking all the time across the country, that's all you do is you're the speaker or the preacher.

It seems to me that some of those men fall prey to this air more than the guy that has his head down and just keeps preaching week in and week out. So, for instance, I watch a Conrad Mbiwe, and I respect Conrad, and I don't say to myself, he's off into some weird doctrinal thing.

Yes, he's on, he speaks and everything else, but he's a pastor, and that's where he mainly is, is in, I've been to his church, what's it, oh, Zambia? Yes, Zambia. Yeah. So, it can be done, but some of these other people, I think, well, what do you do?

You just travel around the world and preach and speak. No wonder your doctrine's weird, because it doesn't seem like you're trying to study these important things. Like, almost everyone I know in my world, in my world, comma, almost everyone I know, we're studying the doctrine of God and the Trinity because it's important, and we got it wrong.

And we were never, and maybe I didn't listen in seminary, we weren't taught about inseparable operations. We weren't taught, I mean, if somebody says, how many wills does Jesus have? Is this like a trick question?

So, I want to know now, and so I'm going to learn, but I don't know if these other guys are concerned with that because they're off, I don't know, doing their next preaching circuit.

Well, I can say I've been very discouraged when I've spoken to speakers that would be known and the admitted ignorance of different writings, theological issues, and even putting the time invested in understanding these things.

And I just think you have a massive problem when you have more output than input in that way, and you're speaking about things that you haven't done due diligence to know and understand properly, and then leading astray and misleading the saints and the church.

God having all life, glory, goodness, blessedness in and of himself is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creature which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them.

He is alone the fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. And he hath most sovereign dominion over all creatures, to do by them, for them, or upon them, whatsoever he pleases.

In his sight all things are open and manifest. His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to him contingent or uncertain. He is most holy in all his counsels, in all his works, and in all his commands.

To him is due from angels and men whatsoever worship, service, or obedience as creatures they owe unto the Creator, and whatever he is further pleased to require of them. Period. That is one sentence.

Pete. Amen. When I read that sentence, what do you think about?

You think about the glories of God and his blessedness. I just tweeted that sentence, actually, before we recorded. Yeah, it's paragraph two of chapter two of the Second Lenten Confession, if folks don't know.

Well, I love what's contained there, and I obviously would read it too fast because you need to kind of let it settle in, right? But I just thought one sentence, he just, just go, sorry, they just go on and on.

God's glorious sufficiency. He has no need of anything, as Paul told the Athenians in Acts 17, and our wonderful dependence upon him as the source of all goodness, and glory, and blessedness, and happiness, and joy.

Steve, you're a husband and a father, and what does your home look like for dinner time, or for Bible time, or worship time, or Sabbath school? Oh, speaking of which, I took Steve today to the Seventh-day Adventist bookstore here in New England.

This is home of the Seventh-day Adventist in New England. Of course, kind of started here, and you walk in, and it kind of smells funny because they sell a bunch of, I don't know, Santa Cruz kind of herbs.

I'm not talking about marijuana, but just like turmeric and all these other kind of smells. And then they have these weird things about, you know, Rome is the one who makes us worship on Sunday, and the Mark of the Beast is, I don't know, people that eat pork or something.

I have no idea. It was kind of a weird place, wasn't it? It was a bit. You liked it. Yeah, I like weird places. All right, well, I deviated for a second, but now I forgot what I, why did I deviate? What.

Were we talking about? Dinner time, family time. Oh, yeah. So, this is just simple. There are some.

People that say, you know what, Christianity is just going to be kind of caught, and they'll just kind of see, and it's ordinary means of grace, and they'll get their preaching on Sundays, because that's the most important thing.

And other people, they'll say, you know what, unless you have Bible time, family worship every single night, don't call yourself a modern-day Puritan, at least of the continental stripe. What do you do at home?

I assume you're busy with kids, and they're coming and going, and sometimes you teach the Bible, sometimes you don't, but kind of what does a week look like for the Meisters that might give us a template of some.

Good ideas of something to do? Yeah, it was certainly a lot of coming and goings. We have four kids from 13 to 8, two boys and two girls. Wonderful, grateful for all of them, and my lovely wife, Jen, we've been married now nearly 21 years.

Dinner time, we don't have a kitchen right now because a tree fell on our house, but when we did have a kitchen, in the past that we remember, the days of yore, we would, we try to foster just natural conversation during dinner time, of course, meal time.

I like to do theology questions with the kids, so sometimes we'll do true-false with them, God is self-caused, and see if they get the answer right, and then we'll talk about ultimate causation. We have a great time, the kids are great.

They love dialoguing about that. And then if it's an ordinary night or we're not at, like we have Good News Club at the church where the kids will be at that, we don't do a family worship on that night, or we're doing things like that, we'll just have a simple Bible reading.

Sometimes it'll be tracking with a particular theme we'll go for a length of time. Sometimes it's just what I'm studying, and other times it's what the kids, we've given them, David Murray has really good introduction to personal worship books for kids, and of course the titles are now escaping me, but we'll track with what the kids are reading in their personal Bible reading and dialogue and read again together.

As a family and pray. Well, I don't know if that's true or not, because according to Twitter, you're making your children memorize the Summa by Aquinas. Yeah, no, we don't do that. I bet you they know who Thomas Aquinas is.

They do. Well, we want our kids to be informed,.

And we teach them, I want my kids to be exposed to, we've taken them to bad churches and then had family debriefs afterwards, and we do that as a, like when I'm on vacation, we'll do like field trips and have them just, I want them to start thinking discerningly and critically, and not uncharitably, but thinking biblically and engaging the world and the churches in which they're going to interact with as they grow and be able to have foundation to process what they're.

Looking at. Well, this will touch a lot of chords with you, and I think we've already had this discussion because I know your background. The day that I took my wife and children to, I can't remember the name of it anymore, the Santa Cruz Emergent Church, not village, but.

Dan Kimball's deal. Yeah, I was there for a couple of years in the 90s.

Right. And we went there and there's a bunch of like broken beer bottle area where you could go take self-communion and you could do markers on the wall and stuff like that. My kids were looking around with huge eyes, and then they're looking over at daddy because they want to know what I'm thinking.

And I had told them, if I look at you kids and I give you the look with my eyes, like, let's go, you just get up and go. You don't say, well, this is rude, or you just follow me. But we had a good conversation afterwards, not only with Dan Kimball privately, but just with the kids to kind of expose them to other things.

Yeah.

I'm continually doubted by the inside of my children and their perception. It's wonderful and being able to encourage and foster that and just enjoy them growing up with what I didn't grow up with in terms of just continual exposure to God's Word and then trying to interpret their world and grow to hopefully be faithful to Him in it.

What I try to tell the folks here at Bethlehem.

Bible Church and what I try to tell the listeners of No Compromise Radio, if you are a dad and every single night you sit down with your children and you pray, you sing two psalms, you have a Bible reading, you have catechism and prayer requests, I say to you, amen, wonderful, way to go.

I'm glad you teach your children. But it is, I think, easier. Maybe that's not what I'm looking for is easier, but, you know, practical too. Sometimes as the kids get older, they're gone different nights.

And so, when the kids are younger, it's almost like the trivium in my mind, Steve. I just put a lot of data in. We're reading through Exodus chapter by chapter. Who sinned in this chapter? And how do we know about forgiveness and grace?

And what do we learn about God? Next week, chapter two, next week, I mean, the next day, chapter three, etc., etc. Then we moved kind of to the logic thing. What does this mean? What's the doctrine of sin?

What's the atonement? And then I started having them get up and they would stand by the table and I'd ask them a question and what is forgiveness? So, they could kind of take the data, put it together logically, and then talk about it.

That's the rhetoric. Some nights we'd talk about what about common grace and why are some Christians mean and some lesbians nice, right? And just, we're kind of just a little bit of everything. And so, hopefully every night that we sat down as a family, Dad did open the Bible, maybe it's just a psalm, maybe it's just a quick prayer, but there was something there.

And then the kids have moved out now and they would say to you, probably Steve, oh yeah, we had Bible time almost every night. I mean, we didn't, but it was something like that, depending on what I think our family needed.

Pete. Right, right. Jared. All right. Pete. Good. Jared See Meister here on No Compromise Radio. Steve, I don't know if you can say what you're doing, but are you writing some articles for a magazine?

Steve I just turned in a couple for Credo, and there's an issue coming out on can we be reformed and scholastic? And then I wrote an article on the relationship, should preachers read and incorporate reform scholasticism in their preaching and their study?

Jared.

Nice. Who edits that for you? Does the magazine do it for you? Steve. Credo, yeah. Jared. Oh, that's nice. Steve. Yeah. Jared. See, I need, my problem is I need an editor. I, it's just like on the radio show, I need somebody to edit all this.

Some people have called, I've called them in to have, you know, be guests on the phone, Steve, on NoCo, and they'll say, well, you know, what about editing? And when do you do, who does your editing? I said, editing?

This is raw. This is punk rock stuff. This is punk rock radio. We just do it. You know, why do I have these buttons of things? Because it's just ADD.

You want answers? I think I'm entitled. You want answers. I want the truth. You can't handle the.

Truth. See, and then, then you're off to the next thing. That's right. Are you thinking about writing a book at all in light of all the stuff that you're going through in the doctrine of God and these arguments?

Steve.

We'll see what the Lord has. I mean, there's, there's, I'd like to continue to encourage accessible works on the doctrine of God. And I think especially, I think front-loading divine blessedness is an important key to help Christians understand what is a saiety matter and how to understand it in the proper context.

I also think it's important that we think of as confessional Baptists, what it really means to hold to the confession and why it, how it operates and functions in the local church. And that's an area I'd like to explore as well, and doing more work on that.

Pete.

Steve, last question on our show today. When we sing Charles Wesley's emptied himself of all but love, what is the kenosis? I think for a long time, not only did I teach eternal functional subordination, I had some type of kinetic error about Jesus and the emptying passage.

How could you tell our listeners in a few minutes or so, what's the way to think about Philippians 2 when it comes to the doctrine of the incarnation? And as people talk about kenosis and emptying, what's the way to think about it properly?

We go back to what we talked about yesterday in understanding God's accommodated language to us and accommodated speech to us. And so, we can't forget our doctrine of God whenever we're looking at any passage of scripture, and God doesn't change.

The incarnation didn't change God. God in the person of the Son assumed human nature to himself. And it goes on in that passage, still talking about him existing in the form of God. Deity didn't change.

God assumed humanity and joined in the person of Christ, God and man in one nature. It's actually, I think a lot of probably right. And I know that's probably true of me as well. There was a lot of kinetic influences.

And all of that is downstream from bad doctrine of God, because our doctrine of God was off. We didn't fully understand aseity, simplicity, immutability. So, when we come to the incarnation, you already have pulled God into the created order.

So, the incarnation is really just putting skin on a God who's already almost like us because he's mutable and so on. But when we have our doctrine of God properly set, we understand it actually just highlights the explosive wonder of God assuming humanity to himself to be our Savior, and the significance of the unchangeable God taking on changeable humanity, human nature in the person of the Son.

Pete. That's called Moneyball right there. Two reasons. Number one, you said, as we talked about yesterday, even though it's still today, but you've got a good radio mentality. So, number one, Moneyball.

Number two, that's exactly right. We forget the doctrine of God and it flows downstream for good or for ill. And we come to the passage and we say, all right, well, Jesus, you know, he's deciding not to exercise certain divine prerogatives or something like that, divine attributes.

I'm just like, well, why would I say things like that? What I can't do is change divine nature in any way, shape, or form. I'm going to have to say something about the incarnation. I could say something about human will and human nature.

I could say something like that. But once I start saying something about the divine nature as not being the divine nature, I'm in trouble. Pete.

Well, yeah. And you've effectively eroded the gospel because now you don't have true humanity either. You have some tertium quid, some third thing. And while it's not always caught by those who say it, it erodes the entire gospel away in the wonder that the only true God assumed humanity for us, that in Christ, we would have a real human, fully realized human holiness and righteousness to be imputed to our account.

And when you monkey with the doctrine of God, you end up destroying our only hope in the work of Christ for us.

We're going to call that like Nephilim theology or something, some kind of hybrid third way, right? Because we need a real human to earn real righteousness under the law who was born of a woman. Would it be fair to say Jesus is in Mary's womb when he was in Mary's womb?

His humanity is in her womb and his deity is upholding the universe? Pete.

Oh, yeah. That's, it's called that now, it's called the extra Calvinistic. It's the reality of the true divine nature. When he was on the cross, he was upholding the existence of those.

Who were crucifying him. What about when his body was dead? What was going on? Was he, was it, was his divine nature dead? No, no, he can't kill God. Nietzsche tried, but it didn't work out. I mean, there's a context for his quote, of course, but I like the t-shirt and I almost bought it when I was a new Christian, when, you know, you love to wear t-shirts, Christian t-shirts, you know, he loved you this much, you know, Jesus on the cross.

I never would do that. But it's the one where it says, God is dead, Nietzsche. And then on the back, it said, Nietzsche is dead, God. And I always loved that shirt. I thought, I think I need to get one of those things.

Steve, thanks for being on the show today. I really appreciate you and your ministry. I look forward to those articles on Credo. And you can always go to Emmanuel Baptist website to listen to Steve preach on a regular basis.

Thanks for being on the show. Thanks, brother.