Synoptics 344 to 345

Alright, I guess I should have had people passing out the blue books before we, while I was reviewing stuff.

Yeah, he has the, he has the heretical version. Heretical what?

A little bit more conservative actually than ours. Alright, we are continuing a study that we began nearly a decade ago.

Over nine years ago anyways, and we are getting close to being completed. So, the blue book is a harmony of the gospels.

We have been going through primarily the Synoptic Gospels. Well, I think we covered almost all of John, now that I think about it, in the process.

So, we haven't totally ignored John. So, I guess it could be a complete gospel study, but our focus of course has been primarily upon the

Synoptics. And we are in section 344, the

Crucifixion. There are less than 20 pages left in the blue book.

I'm getting antsy to get it done, personally. As I mentioned on Facebook, I think

I mentioned to you last week, but some of you weren't here last week. The next series up for me anyways.

How many of you were here, this is a long time ago, this is the 90s. How many of you were here for the

Church History series that we did? Wow, very few.

Mr. Callahan, you didn't even raise your hand. I guess you were sort of assuming that... I assumed that you had been, yes, very good.

Well, it was a long time ago. I think it was about a year, if I recall correctly, about 1952.

If I'm recalling correctly, some people have taken those recordings and put them together.

Unfortunately, it was back in the day when we had a microphone sitting out here on a stand. And I'd go walking around, so I'm over there someplace talking and you can barely hear it.

It was recorded primarily on these things called cassette tapes.

Now, I realize for Brother Fry, that's still pretty cutting edge technology, but most of the rest of us have moved past the cassette tape era.

Much to the chagrin of some, I know. I love these memes on Facebook where you've got a cassette tape and a pencil.

And it's retweet if you remember what to do with these. Because you'd stick it in there, trying to fix it.

The pencil was a perfect fit. Yeah, it's right in there. It was great. That was how you fast -forwarded.

So, anyway, and it was also then digitally recorded on something called Real Audio. Do we actually have those stored somewhere?

A friend of mine has them on the web. I don't know that we do. I don't know that we do.

The cassette tapes are probably back there someplace. So, the point being, it's been a long, long, long, long, long time.

And we've had a lot of people actually write in and request that information and stuff.

And I really doubt that Brother Callahan or Brother Darrow or any of the other long timers would go,

I know all that stuff. I don't need to hear that again. I remember everything you have to say.

Now, Brother George might, because he took all the notes. So, he may just bring in the church history notes and just sit there and check things off as I go through again.

I don't know. But the plan is to do church history again.

And that's from the beginning up through the Reformation. I'm not real big on post -Reformational church history, to be perfectly honest with you.

I took a few classes on that. But we'll probably go up maybe through Westminster or something like that.

Maybe up to 1689. Hey, why not? Something along those lines. But especially early church history.

People ask me when I, and if you don't know me, you'll find this odd. But people ask me, what classes that you took in college and seminar have been the most helpful to you in doing what you do?

Which is an interesting profession that I do. But doing debates in mosques in South Africa and teaching in Kiev and Zurich, Berlin, wherever.

What have been most useful to you? And I've said many times there were two classes that have proven the most useful.

And that was Greek and church history. And the reason for that is when you do apologetics, vast majority of the arguments against the faith either involve a twisting of the scriptures.

And hence knowing the original language of the scriptures is extremely useful. Yes, I've taught Hebrew as well. But even in dealing with the

Old Testament, very often the problem and the objections is based upon the

Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament rather than the Hebrew anyway. So Greek, very, very important.

Best commentary on the New Testament is the New Testament in Greek. No question about it. And we've brought that up a number of times over the course of this study.

But then church history. And I think Reformed folks tend to be better at this.

I think Reformed folks tend to have a little better understanding of where we are. The fact that God has a purpose.

Christ has been building his church. We stand in a long line of people. But for the vast majority of even what would be called, if this word means anything anymore, conservative evangelicals.

Church history. Who was Ignatius? Well, which Ignatius? Depends on which one.

But who was he? Why was he important? Does he really have any influence upon my life?

For most people it would say, well, no. But actually I would argue that, yeah, actually you have been influenced by Ignatius.

Ignatius of Antioch, that is. And you've probably been negatively influenced by Ignatius Loyola. That's a different Ignatius.

Separated by many, many, many years. But I think it's important for us to know these things.

Very often, especially now that we are facing such a rabidly anti -Christian society, it might be good to study the early church and how it responded to persecution.

Sometimes we think we are facing stuff that no one else has ever faced. Well, no, actually.

Sure, there are some unique twists. You know, all the technology today. Okay, Ignatius did not have to worry about cell phones.

I'm not sure we can learn too much in church history about how to deal with handling interruptions in the middle of a service.

You're sitting there making a great point and all of a sudden someone's incredibly obnoxious ringtone starts.

And I've been in that situation many, many times in many, many different places. And sometimes you can just soldier through.

Sometimes there is nothing else to be done but to stop and mock the person who is having trouble finding their phone.

There's this nothing, you know, moments that are bad. You know, looking around, the husband's going...

And it's never just a little...

sound. It's some sort of... You know, you can't ignore it. But I don't think we can learn much from church history about that.

I mean, there are some interesting stories about how, during the monastic period, you could try to keep people awake during the rather dull sermons by dripping...

You know, the monks up above would drip wax down the monks below them and stuff like that. I suppose there are some things like that you might be able to draw some lesson from.

I don't know. But anyway, obviously in regards to persecution, one of the biggest issues in the early church was how the early church responded to persecution.

And what do you do with people who gave in under persecution? And now that the persecution ends, they want back in. That divided the church.

It was one of the biggest issues the church faced. And we go, oh, we never have to worry about that.

Really? Really? I'm not so sure. So, anyway, church history.

Hopefully you'll find that to be a useful study. But we've got to get there. And to get there we've got to finish the synoptic study.

Because we'll eventually, I'm sure, put all that together into one big old large...

It will be very interesting to see how many studies we've actually done. Now, we actually read through most of 344.

And I just simply made the comment at the end of class last week that there was one thing I needed to address.

I mentioned to you from John chapter 19 that you have...

So the soldiers did this, but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister,

Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. And I mentioned we're not going to get into this. I would have to dig out a bunch of old notes because it is incredibly complex and confusing.

But there's this big, huge controversy. How many women were there?

Is his mother's sister Mary, the wife of Clopas? Or is it his mother's sister and Mary, the wife of Clopas?

You've got his mother's Mary, and then you've got Mary, the wife of Clopas, and you've got Mary Magdalene, so you've got at least three

Marys. Were there four Marys? We don't know. It's relevant only to the huge argument that has only been a dogmatic argument since 1854 when the

Roman Catholic Church defined the immaculate conception of Mary.

As to who these guys are that are running around being called the brothers of Jesus who can't really be the brothers of Jesus.

They might be the cousins of Jesus or something along those lines. Very, very complex. But as a result, we didn't get a chance to mention the centrality of verses 26 and following When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother,

Woman, behold your son. He said to the disciple, Behold your mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home.

Now, traditionally, this has been understood to refer to the author of the gospel, the disciple

John. There is a very popular theory today that the gospel of John is actually written by John the disciple who was a younger disciple that lived in Jerusalem associated with the upper room.

It's a complicated thing, but it's a fairly popular theory these days. But the point is that if you take it in the traditional sense, then here is

John. And John is standing with Mary.

And from the cross, Jesus says, Woman, behold your son. And then to John, he says,

Behold your mother. And traditionally, John then took

Mary under his care. And that's why, for example, speaking of church history, there's all sorts of interesting traditions.

One of the things you have to learn to do is evaluate traditions. You can't just accept them on face value, but they're there.

And it's interesting to look at what they have to say. There is a tradition of a tomb for Mary in Ephesus.

And as you know, traditionally, John goes to Ephesus and eventually is banished to Patmos.

And there you get the Book of Revelation. So it makes sense that if John takes

Mary, you've got this connection. Of course, the objection that some people make,

Roman Catholics specifically make, is that this would be inappropriate if these brothers of Jesus were actually the sons of Mary.

If they were, then this would be an inappropriate thing. Of course, at this point in time, they're all unbelievers.

They will become believers. Well, some, at least one, will become a believer at a later point.

But at this point, they're unbelievers. And so what you might be able to garner from this is the necessity of interfaith trust.

Jesus does not entrust his mother to unbelievers. He trusts his mother to a fellow believer, and that is the disciple whom he loved.

But the reason I mention this is that in much, much, much, much later development, nobody in the early church dreamed of what

Rome has developed in the centuries thereafter. But in later

Roman theology, this text is one of the key

Marian texts. Well, let's be honest. Every text about Mary is a key

Marian text, because there are so few texts about Mary to begin with. So, if you're going to develop this huge, massive theology of Mary, which is exactly what has happened, especially since 1950, in the dogmatic definition of the bodily assumption of Mary, but even before then, really over the past 250 years, has been the greatest, massive amount of Marian development in theology, you're going to have to read into every text about Mary, because there are only a certain number of them.

A huge mountain of theology. And so what you have here, you may be aware of,

I've mentioned it in years past, the movement which was really gaining steam toward the end of the last century.

Wow, that sounds so weird. The end of the last century. That makes sense now.

The end of the last century. Does that make you feel old, Brother Callaghan?

He just grins. But I can remember more of that last century than you can.

That's, I think, the knowing look from Brother Callaghan there. But there was a movement to have the

Pope, John Paul, define the fifth Marian dogma. And the fifth

Marian dogma would be that Mary is co -redemptrix, co -mediatrix, and advocate for the people of God.

And this was one of the key texts that is a part of that particular movement.

Because as the Popes have interpreted, and remember, make a distinction here,

I'll try to hurry this up so we can keep making progress, but in Roman Catholicism you can have doctrine and dogma.

Dogma is de fide, by faith, you have to believe it. Doctrine is on a lower level.

So a Pope can teach something as a doctrine, but unless it's defined as a dogma, unless it's defined as de fide, then you can disagree and not lose your standing with the

Church. This is historical Orthodox Roman Catholic theology. With Francis right now, all bets are off.

Nobody knows. Everybody who's honest knows that this guy is as liberal as day is long and clearly does not believe a lot of this stuff, but won't say anything yet.

And if he does, what's going to happen? Don't have a clue. Would be interesting.

Anyway, many Popes have taught this idea of Mary as co -mediatrix, co -redemptrix.

Those are just simply the feminine Latin forms of co -mediator, co -redeemer, and advocate or intercessor for the people of God.

And this has been taught by Popes for over 100 years, 150 years now actually. And what has been understood is this section,

John chapter 19, is John represents the Church, and therefore this is

Jesus establishing Mary as the mother of the Church. This is the key text that has been utilized, especially in the pressing for this fifth

Marian dogma definition. And a lot of that is focused, by the way, in the University of Steubenville in Ohio in the

United States, not just some place off in Italy or some place. Right here in the good old

US of A. And so that's what you have here is this interpretation that John represents the

Church, therefore Mary is being given to the Church as her mother. And that we would refer to Mother Mary, and this of course flows from Mother of God, which initially, as we'll see in the

Church history thing, had nothing to do with Mary at all. Initially that term, Theotokos, was a

Christological term. It was a term that emphasized the fact that when Jesus was really conceived, that he was the

God -man at that time. This was over against other beliefs that we'll look at, such as adoptionism, where Jesus was just a regular man, and then

God sort of came in and dwelt him, adopted him. The original meaning of Theotokos, or as they say,

Theotokos in modern Greek, was an emphasis upon protecting

Orthodox belief about the hypostatic union. Only over time did the emphasis shift from what it was saying about Christ to what it then says about Mary.

And so, historically and theologically, we don't have an objection to the original use of the term, because the original use of the term was

Orthodox and correct and so on and so forth. But, you can see what happens over time, when something that was originally about this, you know, the light's over here, and now you put the light over here, and it's gone off in a completely different direction.

And eventually, leading after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, to what we have in the development of Roman theology and the abuse of a text such as this.

So, just be aware of that. Yes, sir? It seems to be... Yes, yes.

Do you think that's what this is all about? Oh, yeah. When we do the development of Marian doctrine and theology, even in the early church, because it's a long time, it's a long period.

What you're going to learn in the church history is, if you've ever seen any of those lists that have a date and then purgatory, and a date, and Mary is mother of God, something like that.

As our scholar here knows, you can't do history like that.

People don't wake up one morning on August 3rd, 343, and all of a sudden everybody believes that Mary is mother of God.

Nothing happens that way. It's all development over time and differing streams coming together in sometimes ways that no one could ever have predicted.

Could ever have predicted. I mean, we're going to look at what Augustine said about the Donatists and see how it eventually ends up leading to the

Inquisition. Augustine never saw that coming. He had no idea that what he said would lead to the

Inquisition. But it did. And we can see that looking back through history, but it's a totally different thing to look back through history than to try to look forward into history.

Totally different thing. So, what you're referring to, obviously, that influence comes in a bunch of different times.

But the development of Marian theology, I mean, there are seven different popes that taught contrary to the concept of the

Immaculate Conception. Seven of them. It's now dogma of Rome. How does that happen? Well, there's a constant pressure toward that kind of idea.

And we'll read from a book called The Glories of Mary by Alphonsus de

Liguri. I would not suggest anyone read it. It is outlandishly depressing.

One of the most idolatrous books ever read. But he is a doctor of the

Church and numerous times throughout that book has explained that mankind needs a mediator with a mediator.

And none can be better found than Mary. And it's all about her being so loving and compassionate and motherly.

It's all the feminine aspects that are being inserted there to where Jesus becomes this...

Well, I've read you the... I know I've read you the... Well, again, it's been years.

There's the prayer that eventually led to my writing the book that I wrote on Mary and that whole movement.

I have a book called Mary, Another Redeemer. It's not in print anymore, but it is electronically available. And it's on the movement to define that fifth

Marian dogma. And I go through the other four dogmas and I quote from Liguri. And I tell the story of having found this booklet in the seat in the chapel at Thunderbird Samaritan Hospital.

And I read this opening prayer and I was just absolutely scandalized by it.

I just could not believe anyone could ever say something like what was found in this prayer. And not very long later

I was in the radio studios of WEZE in Boston doing a debate with Jerry Matitix on the air.

We were debating at Boston College doing formal debates on the Apocrypha and Justification at Boston College.

But we were on this radio program. I remember looking through this field of microphones to Jerry on the other side of the table.

And I got that booklet out. And I read that prayer. And basically it says,

I entrust my soul to thee. This is addressed to Mary. And I ask thee for my final salvation.

And I ask thee to protect me. And there are three things the petitioner asks Mary to protect him from.

The devil, the flesh, and Jesus. Because Jesus is my judge.

But with one prayer from you, he will be appeased. And I expected

Jerry's response to be, Oh, Mr. White, Mr. White, these are just pious things.

These are not defying dogma, blah, blah, blah. And I about fell out of my chair when he looked through those microphones at me and said,

James, my hope for you is that someday you'll be able to pray that prayer with me. Now, remember,

Jerry Matitix was at the time all but dissertation at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. He was the first ordained

PCA minister to convert to Roman Catholicism. He is now, by himself,

Jerry now travels around to holiday inns and meets with half a dozen people in a conference room and gives four hour talks on how the

Illuminati took over the Roman Catholic Church. It's really weird. But that's what he does. And he's debated the guy 13 times.

13 times. But anyway, the point being that throughout

Liguri, over and over again there was this theme, we need someone to intercede before the mediator.

And that requires a woman. And, yeah. Is there a good source that details all of the dogmas that Rome has defined?

You mean other than my book? Well, OK. Have you read my book? Actually, my book is probably the nicest, shortest little introduction.

I go through all the dogmas, their development. But this is a Marian dogma. Yes. But I mean all of the various dogmas.

Oh. The whole church, entire. No, because, I mean, well, I suppose there are.

There have been a couple of books that have come out recently that I actually haven't gotten to yet by some Southern Baptist scholars on Rome and its developments and stuff.

I can't comment on them, to be honest with you. But almost all of the books

I could recommend are either very old or they're focused upon one area. So, Rome and Scripture, solo scriptura.

So, Infallibility of the Church by George Salmon. And two classic

Reformation era works that I'd have to get the specifics on.

The names, Whittaker is one of them. And I can't remember the other one.

Off the top of my head right now. But yeah, there are lots of things out there. Most of the good ones, though, are quite old. Not much has been done recently that's really good.

Yeah. When you engage a Roman Catholic... In this neighborhood, it would be.

In other words, it's extremely cultural. In Hispanic neighborhoods like ours here, yeah.

You bet. Mary's absolutely central. In Europe, despite all the statues and stuff, in Spain, still, there'd be

Southern Italy, places in Spain, sure. But when you say your average

Roman Catholic, I don't even know how to define that anymore. There's such a massively wide spectrum represented by that today.

That it's, you know, Brazil, Mexico, you still got old style

Roman Catholicism with the Lady of Guadalupe and stuff like that. Tremendous devotion primarily to her.

Yeah. But then you've got vast majority of Roman Catholic academia will explain all that away as folklore and magic.

So, what's the average Roman Catholic is the question. Well, if you're talking about the person who's really focused upon Mary?

Yeah. How would you... Right.

Right, right. Well, you know, we can't have a cookie cutter approach.

We have to talk to the person to find out where they are. When you discover that you're talking to someone who has a deep commitment to Mary, from my perspective, the best thing to do is to demonstrate that Mary herself would never have contemplated the things that this person is attributing to them.

That no one, for example, in the first 500 years of the Christian faith ever believed in, taught, promulgated, lived in light of a concept called the bodily assumption of Mary.

And even then, when it comes up, it's only found in literature that it was considered even by the popes of the day to be heretical.

And so these are very, very, very clearly not only unbiblical concepts, but they were not a part of the tradition of the church either.

And so this is something that's developed much, much later. Mary recognizes herself to be a sinner.

She speaks of God as her savior. They have a way around that too. We'll get into it.

But the fact that Mary was a very faithful, worshiping

Jewish girl would utterly preclude this nigh unto exaltation to Godhood.

They don't do that, but if you can hear the prayers of everybody and you're paralleled with Jesus in almost every aspect of his life, it's pretty hard to...

It's not difficult to understand why when I debated the imam at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando about six months ago, he defended what the

Koran said at Surah 5, verse 116 by going to Wikipedia and showing what

Roman Catholics believed about Mary. That made... It makes perfect sense because there is a clear and obvious level of idolatry there.

So I just simply point out that not only did the early church and the apostles never teach this, but Mary would have been scandalized by it.

And to actually honor Mary would be to honor the real Mary who actually existed, not the creature that has been created by the imaginations of monks over centuries.

But that's going to get you back to whether scripture is sufficient or not, which is always what you end up talking about in that situation.

Wow, we're getting nowhere today. Yes, sir? I've run into some trouble. Of course.

So is that official doctrine? Oh, yeah. Yeah, the whole concept of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary, from the point of her conception by a special preemptive application of the grace of Christ, that's the important part to get, was protected from the stain of original sin.

So she not only did not commit any sins consciously in life, but she was protected from the stain of original sin by a preemptive application of the redemptive merit of Christ.

So the analogy that I'll use is, you can be, for example, I said Mary in Luke chapter 2 identifies

God as her savior. And if you point that out to a Roman Catholic, their response, a well -read

Roman Catholic, their response is going to be, that's not an objection to what we believe. Because we believe that Mary was saved by Jesus just in a different way than we are.

Specifically, if you fall into a mud puddle and you can't get out and someone comes along into a mud bog, and someone comes along and pulls you out, they're your savior.

But if you're about to fall in and they grab you and keep you from falling in, they're also your savior.

So for all of humanity other than Mary, God pulls us out of the mud bog having fallen in.

But for Mary, because of her unique position, the one that was to bear the Son of God, before she fell in, she is pulled out.

And so she never contracts the stain of original sin. That's their argument. Now, hopefully you're sitting there going, so you really think that's what

Mary was talking about in Luke chapter 2? You really think that when

Mary said, God my savior, she had all this theology that developed 1500 years later in mind, where she was saying, my savior, by the preemptive application, the merits of my son, who

I don't even understand why he has to go to the cross, but it's just ridiculous. It is beyond any kind of defense.

And Roman Catholic scholars would not say that that's what Mary intended in Luke chapter 2.

But the person on the street you're talking to, that's what they've been taught to respond to.

That's how they've been taught to respond to it. Like I said, there's always a way around almost anything.

Alright, so there's the text. At least you're aware of it now. If you ever get into a conversation with a

Roman Catholic and they start talking about John chapter 19, at least you'll be able to go, I remember something about this.

The crazy guy in the bow tie said something about this one day. I just wish I could remember what it was. And there you go.

Alright, section 345. You have a, very clearly, the exact same incidences just being told from slightly different perspectives.

You have the two, again, I don't think robbers is the best term here, but insurrectionists who are crucified with him on the right and the left.

Luke is going to expand. Luke is going to be the only one in 346 to talk to us about the conversion of one of the two criminals on the cross.

Only Luke records that. Matthew and Mark do not record that.

And we might just ask the question, why not? And, again, you need to be aware of the fact that there are bunches of folks,

Muslims, agnostics, who will say, if Mark and Matthew knew about this, there is no way they could not have mentioned this.

Well, I utterly reject that assertion. Utterly reject that assertion. There are all sorts of reasons why

Matthew and Mark might have known of the conversion of the thief and did not narrate it.

And remember, what did Luke say? I know this is years and years and years and years ago, but remember that Luke says at the beginning of his gospel that he has done research.

He has done historical research. He has interviewed people. He has gathered documents. He has done what a good historian does in providing a sound foundation for his construction of his story.

Not only the gospel, but remember, it is a two -part story. The gospel of the early church. Luke acts.

And so, is it possible that Mark and Matthew did not know about this individual?

Could it be that his story was kept to a very narrow number of people because of living relatives who might have been endangered at this early period?

Could this be evidence of the very early writing of the gospels, that you don't want to make reference to something that would cause problems during the period of persecution at that time?

There are all sorts of reasons to say to someone who says, well, if they had known, they would have had to have said something about this.

To say, no, you are assuming things that you have absolutely no evidence of whatsoever.

But because people like Bart Ehrman do it, people are afraid to say, you're making it up.

You're blowing hot air here. It's the thing

I've talked about so many times for demythologizing scholarship. Somebody's got a bunch of letters after their names.

You just automatically assume they've got letters after your name that you know what you're talking about. Half the time atheists have letters after their names.

I mean, people like Dawkins and half the other people who run the atheist websites, their specialized area is, you know, remember when, and I'm so thankful that Brother Callahan did this.

Thank you, Brother Callahan. You're the one who introduced me to the Bonson -Stein debate so long, long ago. Boy, I wish they had recorded that on a higher quality unit, don't you?

It remains one of the classic debates of the atheists and one of the funniest things,

I play it for my classes all the time. I'll play it again. I'll be teaching apologetics at RTS in Charlotte in January, January 11th and 15th.

And the guy who was debating, a guy named Gordon Stein, his

PhD was in the natural sciences and his doctoral dissertation was the ovarian cycle of Japanese quail, if I recall correctly.

Quail. I thought it was quail. He's a marine biologist. Marine biologist. Okay, alright.

Did you know that he died within six months of Bonson? Yeah, fascinating. Anyways, the point is, his

PhD is in a field utterly disconnected from anything relevant to the debate that he was undertaking.

But people in our society, as long as there's letters after the name, just go, yes sir,

I believe, I'm not going to challenge you, I'm not smart enough. And we have to demythologize scholarship.

We really, really do. And in fact, I would argue that today, the more letters, probably the less credibility outside of your specific area.

And here's why. In my experience, in the educational system as it is organized today, unlike in the olden days, where you had someone like an

Erasmus, who was a renaissance man, who had this broad and deep knowledge of pretty much the entire breadth of human knowledge.

No one can do that anymore. And so everyone has become more and more and more and more and more specialized into narrower and narrower and narrower fields.

And what is really broken down, because of a worldview issue, is the necessity of seeing how that narrow field is to be interpreted in the much broader range of a meaningful worldview and epistemology and things like that.

So you've got people who've got bunches of knowledge in a little narrow area, and yet they can end up coming to really dumb conclusions because they've not been taught to see how that has to interface with the other areas of epistemology or knowledge around it.

And so we end up with all these people making massive pronouncements. And Bart Ehrman is a good example.

Oh, he's a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. OK. But his PhD was in the development of the proto -Alexandrian text type in the writing of a particular

Alexandrian church father. That's a narrow range of study, and it was specifically in textual criticism.

And so I'm sitting here reviewing a debate that he did recently with a Dallas professor on the deity of Christ. He doesn't even have a meaningful orthodox understanding of the doctrine of the

Trinity as a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, because his focus was right here. And it didn't used to be that way.

It didn't used to be that way. Look at a Jonathan Edwards. Totally different way of learning back then than the very narrowed, focused that we've got today.

And that's why I can... I made a comment on Facebook recently. I read the institutes.

I read Calvin's institutes. And I've commented over and over again. The ink still runs.

The ink smudges. What I mean by that is it's still so relevant to us today.

Almost nobody today writes anything that 500 years ago, 500 years from now, I'm sorry, 500 years from now, will be relevant to anybody.

But we're still reading what Calvin wrote. And it still gives us great assistance. Why? We're just not as bright as those people were.

We're just not. I think our technology, our attention spans, are you kidding?

My attention span in comparison to the average Puritan 300 years ago.

Ridiculous. Ridiculous. In the 1600s in England, to get your bachelor's degree by your third year, you did not only have to be able to read

Greek, you had to be able to debate in Greek. Debate in Greek.

I don't know a single Greek professor that doesn't speak, didn't come from Greece, that can do that.

And that was only 300 years ago. Things have changed. Things have changed. Do not ask me, please, after this is over, how in the world we got into as many topics as we did in only 45 minutes.

Because this was truly a shiny object class. Squirrel!

I can relate. Squirrel! Sorry about that, but hopefully something in there was interesting to you.

I didn't see anybody sleeping anyways, so I suppose that's a good thing. But we will press on.

We didn't get very far in accomplishing our goal, but we'll press on.

Let's pray. Father, we do thank you for this time. We thank you for the freedom you've continued to extend to us to be able to have this opportunity of study.

We ask that even now, as we go into worship, you will protect us from distraction. You will help us to do the work of worship.