Transcript

Brother, we are now live for the people watching on my YouTube channel.

As people already know, because we're using StreamYard, there's going to be about a 20-second delay when our precious brother here, Jonathan Prejean, says something and it reaches you.

Nonetheless, this is when you guys take a moment to pray for our speaker, who has been gracious enough to come here and sacrifice some of his precious time to educate us.

I'm going to let him introduce himself, what his background is, and what his current position is, and we'll take it from there.

So, brother, thank you for doing this.

I really appreciate it.

Can you hear me?

Thanks.

Nice to meet you, Sam.

Jonathan Prejean, and I have been.

. . I'm a layman.

I have not done Catholic theology formally, but I've been interested in it for a very long time, since I got a passion in 2002. So, you know, I've been studying these things for a while.

I had some very good dialogues, a lot of times with the Eastern Orthodox.

I'm good friends with Perry Robinson, and he was a guy who really kind of helped me find things to learn about.

I've been studying the faith for a long time.

My background is in physics, so I've had an awe of creation for a long time.

That's really going to be the theme tonight: what we have to have as Christians to properly respect God is a sense of awe, just realizing how far beyond us God is.

When we don't do that, that's when people make mistakes.

So that's what I'm going to talk about a lot tonight.

Interesting little fact.

My ancestor, Joseph Willis, was the first Baptist preacher of the word west of the Mississippi River.

Finding out about that a number of years ago was one of those things that gave me some perspective, because at the time it was illegal to be a Protestant minister in Louisiana.

So, this was a big risk for him.

He swam across the Mississippi River on a mule to preach the word of God.

That's a man who was just on fire for the Lord, and I absolutely believe that his faith was as great as anything I'm ever going to have.

The point here is not to trash people who are Calvinists or Baptists who love the Lord, because there are plenty of them.

And, you know, because we have theological disagreements, and because I think that people can make theological mistakes, that doesn't mean that I don't think they're Christians, that I don't think they love Jesus, and that there's anything wrong with them or anything evil about them that causes them to have those beliefs.

That's just not what I believe, and that's not what I'm going to try to get across tonight.

I just want everybody to understand that before I start.

My focus is fundamental theology.

So, what that basically means is: how do we affirm that Jesus is God in a coherent way that uses our reason to worship God?

And why do I pick Jesus as fundamental?

Because that's basically it.

1 Corinthians 15, verses 12 to 19, talks about how important the resurrection is for the faith.

The words that St. Paul uses there are: if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you're still in your sins.

If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

That's basically it.

That's what we have to believe, and so that's the core of our Christian life; that's the core of our Christian belief.

If we don't believe that in a way that we can explain, justify, and defend by reason, then we're in terrible shape in terms of being able to witness to the world.

That's why I focus on this; that's why I have focused on this for many years, and why I believe that it's the most important thing to do.

So, what does it mean to say that Jesus is God?

Well, God is what we know by nature.

He's the one immaterial creator of everything that is.

By revelation, we know that that's the one God that was worshipped by Israel in the Old Testament.

That's the definition of God.

What we believe as Christians is that the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, is the only begotten Son of God, God from God, numerically one God with the Father.

That means one God; there are not more than one.

Fully God and fully man.

So, that's what we believe about Jesus, and what I'm talking about is what we need to be able to coherently say that.

So, there are different beliefs on what God is.

When I talk about God, what I mean is monotheism.

The belief in monotheism is that there's one true divine nature and power of the creator of everything that is.

So, that's the concept of monotheism.

In that sense, we call Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all monotheist religions.

Now, we'll talk about why we may think that certain Christian beliefs and Muslim beliefs don't line up with what we think is the true belief about those things, but that's what monotheism is, and that's why we consider them monotheist: because we do believe that there's only one God who created everything that is.

Polytheism is the belief that there are many divine powers.

Those are typically just parts of the universe.

We're not going to be talking about polytheism tonight, but that's what that belief is.

Then there's pantheism, which is the idea that divinity is a property of the universe or in the universe itself.

There are several philosophical beliefs that have that, but that's again not what we're going to deal with.

So, we believe Jesus Christ unites divine nature and human nature in one person, and that person is the Word of God, the Son of God.

So, why am I talking about Calvinism now?

I have believed for a long time that Calvinism is not Nicene; that it does not teach what the Nicene Creed says about what God is and who Jesus is.

But I'm not a Calvinist; I've never been a Calvinist, so I haven't had a lot of common ground with Calvinists for discussion.

You know, I've got some sympathy because, like I said, I found out my ancestor was a Particular Baptist preacher who was on fire for the Word of God.

So, I've got some sympathy.

But, you know, in terms of intellectual discussions and experiences, I haven't had those.

However, I have been doing some work on the Trinity recently, and just providentially, a Calvinist asked me to justify that position, to explain why I thought that Calvin wasn't Nicene.

So, it fit with the work that I was already doing on Nicene theology.

I said, "Okay, sounds like a good time," so I did a piece on it.

In researching the piece, I found out that this was actually a big deal among Reformed Baptists at this time, because there were a lot of Reformed Baptists who were writing about Nicene theology, especially divine simplicity.

The eternal begetting of the Son and eternal functional subordination was another discussion that was being had.

Some of the people who have done this include James Dolezal; he wrote a book recently called "All That Is in God," which addresses errors basically in divine simplicity but also on the nature of God—on the same thing I'm going to be talking about tonight—because they have made kind of an open theist version of God.

I had read his book "God Without Parts," which came out about 10 years ago about divine simplicity, so I knew who he was.

He's a smart guy and has done a lot of research.

He had an interview on the Particular Baptist YouTube channel on April 17th, 2021, that was just excellent.

I mean, he does a fantastic job of summarizing the doctrine of divine simplicity.

So, there was that discussion.

Matthew Barrett had written a book called "Simply Trinity," which again covers a lot of these issues that we're going to discuss.

Then there was a Romanian Baptist theologian, Adonis Vidu, who wrote a book called "Same God Who Works All Things" on inseparable operations, and there aren't many books about that.

We'll talk about it.

But this is a very good book, and then just this month, he came out with a book called "The Divine Missions: Introduction," that I'm going to talk about a little bit.

So, you know, he did a lot of good work, and there was a lot of this discussion.

Well, at some point, someone accused James White, who I think people on this channel will know of, of denying the doctrine of divine simplicity.

I'm not sure how that came up, but I assume it was based on these discussions that people had had.

I think so.

I've been aware of James White for a long time, and we've gone back and forth a little bit.

Perry Robinson and I actually both thought that he made some serious errors in Nicene theology, and you know, we've known about this for more than 10 years at this point.

But for some reason, they decided to start paying attention to it, so he was getting called out pretty often.

What I'm going to say tonight is that all of those internal discussions are basically about the fact that Calvin was the heretic.

Calvin was the guy who denied divine simplicity.

Calvin was the guy who made a lot of these errors.

The reason that they're having these problems in the Reformed Baptist community is that Calvin was wrong, and to some extent, even in their confessions, they've got these errors built in.

So, that's what I'm going to talk about.

There have been some recent discussions, you know, that Richard Muller—this is because Richard Muller started a historical revolution in Calvin.

That's true; I mean, he did bring back sort of the study of Calvin in a way that really lets people understand him today.

Well, the only problem is there's also been a patristic revolution, so we've learned a lot about the early Christians too, and what the people, especially after Nicaea, believed.

That's the problem: we've learned now what Calvin actually believed, and we've also learned what the Nicene Fathers believed and the pro-Nicene Fathers after Nicaea believed.

Those two can't be put together, and that's essentially what I'm going to go through tonight.

So, let's turn to James White as an example.

He's basically continued to talk about this.

I know he doesn't want to, but he's continued to talk about it.

He has a January 6th Dividing Line about divine simplicity, and then he was on Iron Sharpens Iron with Chris Arnzen on February 2nd, talking about this issue of divine simplicity.

The short version is he just gets it wrong.

Actually, there's part of it that he gets right.

The part of it that he gets right is that simplicity—divine simplicity—means God doesn't depend on anything else for perfection, doesn't change, or become in Himself.

That's all St. Thomas Aquinas means by emotion: that He doesn't change or become.

It's not really a Catholic thing.

What he was talking about with divine simplicity actually isn't problematic.

Then he said a bunch of things about the debate that are just wrong.

For one thing, this isn't an issue of speculative philosophy.

Both Scripture and natural relations say that God doesn't depend on creation and is unchanging.

That's all divine simplicity is, so there's not really a problem there.

You know, saying God doesn't have parts is really no more controversial than saying God doesn't have a body or that God doesn't have emotional passions.

You know, rejecting anthropomorphism is a good and necessary consequence of Scripture.

We have to go into Scripture, reading it and understanding that when it talks about God having hands, He doesn't have hands.

So, it's not really speculative philosophy to say that God is simple; it's just acknowledging what we know about Him as Creator.

It's not particularly Thomist or Aristotelian.

This same belief was held by Augustine; it was held by all the Cappadocians and all the pro-Nicene Fathers generally, not to mention Scripture itself, which says that God doesn't depend on creation and that God doesn't change.

The reason that I think White associates this with Aquinas is because Dolezal cites Aquinas particularly, but Aquinas is really only one example, and he's just following St. Augustine.

So, I think he's just, again, missing what this is about.

This is not about trying to convert everybody to Thomism; it's not really even about Thomas Aquinas.

Then, another bit of confusion is that he seems to think that this means we can't think about God having attributes; we aren't supposed to speak or talk about God's attributes according to how James White understands divine simplicity.

That's just not true either.

What we say is that what we think about is a reflection of our limitations; it's not what God is Himself.

So, there are going to be a lot of true statements about God.

You know, about God's wrath, for example, we talk about God's wrath, we talk about God's will, we talk about a lot of things that don't reflect real distinctions in God as far as we understand it.

Because He's simple, He doesn't depend on anything else, He doesn't have parts; He's not going to have a will separate from something else.

But there are a lot of different ways to explain that.

In some cases, for example, in Eastern Orthodoxy, they view it as the divine energy being in God, so that there's a real distinction between those things.

But God is still simple; that's not really the problem.

It's not about being able to say, "Oh, all these things are the same in God," because we all have different versions of explaining how, even though they're the same in God, we can really talk about different attributes of God.

What we really have to understand is that with divine simplicity, it's something that we can't fully grasp.

So, we have to be aware of our limitations in this area.

But that's not really the problem.

The problem is that Calvinists have divided divine simplicity in the way they view God.

What I mean by that is that Calvin has followed an anthropomorphic metaphor of conversation between the persons of the Trinity as literal, saying that there is an ad intra distinction that causes them to be three persons.

And that's the problem, and James White has had this issue for a long time.

I actually pulled up something from 1998, and I'll read the quote here because it's kind of surprising.

It says, "Finally, we see real and eternal relationships between the persons.

The opera ad intra—one of the characteristics of personal existence is will.

Few would argue the point in relationship to the Father, as He obviously has a will.

So too the Son has a will, for He says to the Father in the garden, 'Not as I will, but as You will.

' Now, of course, the Orthodox way to understand that is that He's talking about His human will.

But really here, He's talking about that being a characteristic of person.

"Then he goes on, "The ascription of will to the persons indicates the ability to reason, to think, to act, to desire—all those things we associate with self-consciousness.

" So, he's saying that there are three different wills: the Father has a will, the Son has a will, and the Spirit has a will.

By that, it means divine will, so they essentially are conversing as if they were three persons like three men.

That doesn't make any sense in the context of the Trinity.

And like I said, this is from 1998; this has been a long time.

But the problem is that comes from Calvin; that doesn't come from James White.

That comes from Calvin.

So, that's why we have to really think about: is it even possible for Calvinists to be reconciled to the Nicene doctrine that says there's one will in God and one nature in God?

I don't think it's possible.

So, we can agree that, as people who believe in Nicene orthodoxy, Scripture signifies that there are three persons, but we can't treat them as three men with three wills in harmony.

Basically, the Reformed Baptists who have been complaining about James White violating divine simplicity should really be lecturing Calvin about it, because he was the guy who came up with this idea.

So, it's good that they're having a discussion about it now.

I think it's great that they're starting to discuss these things, but the reason that I'm talking about this now is that they haven't corrected the errors.

So, let's move on to what the problem is, and I sort of basically alluded to it before.

The problem is anthropomorphism, and the issue with anthropomorphism is that you can't read Scripture correctly if you have an anthropomorphic understanding going in.

That's a mistake.

Basically, if you think it's possible for God to have hands, then you're going to misread things.

Well, you can do the same thing with His mind.

Jonathan, I don't mean to cut you off, but just explain for those who are just learning theology what anthropomorphism is, because a lot of us don't know these terms.

So, I don't mean to cut you off; I won't do it again, just because there are people here who are like that.

No, go on; you're asking the question.

No, it's good; thank you.

So, anthropomorphism.

The idea there is—and this is what I was talking about—the awe of God.

God is not like us in a fundamental way.

Okay?

So, when you talk about anthropomorphism, that's a big long word that translates to "in the form of a man.

" So, people are thinking about God being in the form of a man, so He has some characteristics that are man-like.

We have to watch out for that because God is just different from us.

He doesn't depend on anything else; He's eternal.

He doesn't make decisions; He doesn't change.

He doesn't operate the same way that we do.

So, the problem that we're talking about here is that James White is basically thinking of the Trinity as three people who are talking to each other.

Perry's got a correction for you, so there's a little bit of a difference between how God operates.

I'll get to it in a minute.

But basically, what we're seeing is we're on the outside of God.

We see God as Creator, and we can't see into what God thinks; we can't see into the Trinity.

Those activities are what we call ad intra activities, so those are what happens with God among Himself.

We have some understanding of that because He's revealed it to us, but we don't really understand what it's like to be three in one.

That's something that we don't encounter anywhere else; it's a mystery to us.

We don't get it.

So, what we have to think about then is that we can't put our ideas of what a person is and expect God to be like us in that way.

This applies both physically and mentally.

For example, we might get angry if somebody says something to us, but God doesn't get angry in that way because He's immune to passion.

He controls everything; He doesn't depend on anything.

Everything depends on Him, so He's never surprised, He's never upset.

We talk about Him having wrath, but that doesn't mean that He has some emotional state that changes.

So, when we talk about things that are happening inside God, we have to recognize that that's a mystery.

We can't fully understand them.

We take that understanding—where we say, "Look, there are things beyond our understanding"—and we read Scripture in that way.

This is how we basically protect ourselves from saying wrong things about God.

Okay, so for example, we know that God has an intellect and will because we have an intellect and will, and we're created in God's image.

So, He has something like a mind, but it doesn't work like ours.

It's not something that we can empathize with.

So, Scripture says, for example, in Isaiah 55: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways," declares the Lord.

"As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

" Then in Numbers 23, it says, "God is not man that He should lie, or a son of man that He should change His mind.

Has He said, and will He not do it?

Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?

" These are passages that are talking about God's mind being way beyond ours and God's will being way beyond ours.

So, we can understand that God is rational in some sense, but we have to put limits on our ability to understand what it means for God to be rational.

That's basically what James White transgressed in that previous discussion where he talks about, "Oh, well, He's a person and He's got a will.

" None of those things are right.

If we read passages about God in an anthropomorphic way, which is trying to turn Him into a man, we're not really respecting Him.

So, you know, if you get there and you're thinking about God as a man and you're thinking about the Trinity as basically three men talking to each other or agreeing with each other, then that philosophical concept is going to get in the way of your ability to understand Scripture.

This is the mistake.

What I think is the mistake when they anthropomorphize God is that they're really thinking about Him like an earthly sovereign.

The reason that I think that's bad—there are a number of reasons, but it should be obvious—is that God's kingdom and Christ's kingdom is not the same.

He doesn't govern the same way that an earthly sovereign does.

So, I'll give you some passages about that.

One is in John 18. "My kingdom is not of this world.

If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting that I might not be delivered to the Jews.

But my kingdom is not of this world.

" If He wanted to, He could call down a legion of angels, but He doesn't behave that way.

He could have saved Himself from the crucifixion, but He doesn't behave that way.

In fact, when is He labeled as King?

On the cross.

So, it says in John 19, "Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross.

It read, 'Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

'" That's when He gets marked as King—when He's on the cross.

So, what does that say?

God as King is loving.

God is a jealous God, not because He's angry with us, but because He loves us.

You've got some examples in Scripture about what it looks like to have an earthly king.

In fact, people were dissatisfied with God as King and decided they wanted their own king like other nations.

So, in 1 Samuel 8, there was a request for a king: "That we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.

" They asked for a king.

That's not the kind of king God is.

God isn't bossing people around; God loves us.

And that's what it means for God to be a king.

But there are religions that try to put God into the mold of an earthly king, and Calvinism and Islam actually both lean that way.

So, what do earthly kings do?

If we go further in 1 Samuel 8, Samuel actually tells them what they'll do.

He says, "These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots.

He will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.

He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.

He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants.

He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants.

He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys and put them to his work.

He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.

In that day, you will cry out because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.

"So, earthly kings are not loving; they are selfish.

They take things, and that's the difference between God.

God doesn't need anything from us.

He's completely loving toward us, and so that's the kind of king you want.

But that's not the kind of king they're asking for.

He doesn't need anything from us; He doesn't even need glory from us.

The only reason He does any of this is because He loves us, and that's the part that people don't get.

You can actually see this; one of the best examples of it is in Romans 9, because you can understand what the difference is between God's understanding of sovereignty and man's understanding of sovereignty.

What's interesting is that in Romans 9, they're actually asking for a king.

So, Romans 9 starts out where, you know, Paul's interlocutors are basically saying, "We're the children of Abraham; God made a promise to us; He owes us.

" That's basically what verses 4 and 5 go through.

Then Paul's reply is, "No, no, no!

You think you know better than God, but God has always been able to decide who will receive the blessings," like He did with Jacob and Esau.

So, he goes through in verses 16 to 13 to explain that God can decide.

Just because He said you're the children of the promise doesn't mean He can't decide who actually gets it.

Then the interlocutors accuse God of injustice.

In verse 14, based on their understanding of His promises, he's like, "No, that's not what God said.

God said He was going to do these things.

" Then Paul replies again, "No, you don't understand what the Abrahamic covenant is.

We've always been able to have other people in, and it's always been over everybody.

" So, you've got in verses 15 through 18 him saying, "No, He can give mercy to Gentiles; He can give mercy to anybody; He can harden anybody.

" It's like just because you put yourself in this situation where you're hardened in your sin, that's not unfair by God.

The last answer is basically to ask for a king.

They're essentially saying in verse 19, "Why didn't He just make us do what He wanted if He's so just?

" The thing is, a lot of, especially Calvinists, will say, "Well, you know, these guys are denying God's sovereignty.

" They're not denying God's sovereignty; they're saying He's misusing it because He's not forcing them to do what they should be doing.

This is the same request that they had for the king in 1 Samuel 8: "You're supposed to boss us around.

" It's asking the king to judge us so we can avoid responsibility for our actions.

That's the context of Paul's response in Romans 9:20: "Who are you to think that you know better than God who is good?

" That's when he says, "Who are you, O man?

" And it's not because they deny God's guarantee; it's because they're saying, "You know, God really should be more like these kings and just boss us around so that we're not responsible for ourselves.

" That's the kind of answer that's given in Romans 11:33 to 35, and really in Job 40 and 42. The answer is, "Look, I created the universe; you don't get to say that I'm doing it wrong at this point.

" And that's really what they're asking for.

So, this entire chapter is about, you know, why isn't God forcing us to obey the covenant so that we can be what we think He promised to us?

That's a false understanding of the covenant, and that false understanding of the covenant is actually another gospel.

That's what they're talking about in Galatians 1:6 or 9. There are really bad consequences to misunderstanding God's sovereignty and trying to make Him into basically an earthly king.

So, that's anthropomorphism.

Let's get to what we should actually be believing about God.

What we should actually be believing about God is that He has creative power.

What we mean by that is that God, the Trinity as Creator, has one divine nature and one divine power.

So, that's the rule, and this was the principle that everybody after Nicaea focused on.

So, all of those Fathers after the fact were basically like, "Look, if all of these persons are doing God's work—if the Holy Spirit does God's work, if the Son does God's work—then the Father obviously does God's work.

That means they have the same nature and the same power.

" This principle is essential for believing that God is a Creator.

The idea is that if they have the same essence, they have the same divine power, and that power is numerically one.

So, just as they are the same God, they have exactly the same power.

It's not three powers; it's not three persons doing separate things with the power.

It is one power, and that's called the doctrine of inseparable operations.

But you should really call it identical operation.

That means there is no distinction in what they do—no distinction at all.

They always all do the same thing.

An individual person can be the object of a divine action; for example, only the Son has humanity assumed to Him, so only the Son acts in humanity.

But the Son, according to His divinity, is still only acting as a Trinity.

That's an important thing to remember: you cannot distinguish between the acts of the Trinity.

Everything that they do with respect to creation is the same for all of them.

There's a little idea of missions, where the missions are supposed to be an extension of the procession of the persons.

What they mean by that is the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds, and basically, the mission is kind of how the Son and the Holy Spirit extend into creation, like they extend from the Father in eternity.

But the thing that we have to remember is that even then, that doesn't mean they're actually doing separate things.

What that means is that they are able to act for us as a point of contact.

In the way that we reach out to them, we understand that—or we are aware of the fact that it starts from the Spirit or is characteristic of the Spirit.

So, it lets us relate to God through the person, but it doesn't mean the persons themselves are doing anything different.

Generally, there are some acts that are more characteristic of a person, and we call that appropriation because it's just something to help us understand.

But the reality is they’re always acting the same.

That unity of power is basically what differentiates God as the Creator.

That power is something different than anything we have.

There are no inseparable operations among human beings, and there’s nothing among any created thing, actually.

One of the best explanations that I've seen of this from Scripture was actually not very long ago when Sam talked about Greg Stafford.

This was on February 21st, and it starts around 15 minutes in, but he really picked some great passages that illustrate this.

The first one—and I love what Sam did with this—was John 5:19. It said, "So Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of His own accord.

'" But only what He sees the Father doing, for whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.

There is "homoios," and it can be a great explanation for why "homoios" means the same.

That's what it means: whatever the Father is doing, the Son is doing, and the Holy Spirit is doing.

It's identical; it is the same.

There are similar statements in John 12:49, John 14:10, and John 17:22-23. The thing that I also want to bring up is that this actually relates to—and Sam also brought up this passage—2 Peter 1:17: "For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to Him by the Majestic Glory, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,' we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven.

" So, that's describing the Transfiguration, which St. Peter was actually there for, and it explains how this works in the Trinity.

It's clear that the honor and glory that the Son has received from God the Father is the one that He received in eternity; it's identical.

What’s also interesting is that in that same chapter, Peter is talking about our participation—in chapter 1, verses 3 through 4, our participation in that same power.

He's talking about divine nature being common to all three and also talking about our participation in that nature.

That gives you an idea of how critical this is for Christianity.

So, I want to spend a minute now talking about what "nature" and "person" mean for Christians.

This is what I would call natural theology.

Sometimes that term gets used kind of badly, but natural theology is basically just how we understand God as Creator from looking around at creation.

We understand a lot about God from creation, but we also know that there are things that we can't understand.

We've talked a little bit about how we don't want to make God limited or treat Him like He's a person like the rest of us.

So, you know, natural theology and revelation both say that our knowledge of God is limited.

God actually gives people a break for some of this.

In Luke 23:34, Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

" That's because they can't possibly know the magnitude of crucifying God; it's not possible.

In 1 Corinthians 2:8, it says, "None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

" So, there's recognition that we can't understand everything.

I mean, we have limits to what we can know about God.

But the problem isn't a lack of knowledge; we can know things about God.

The problem is the wise use of knowledge.

There's a lot that says, you know, the famous one: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 14:1). That doesn't mean he can't possibly know that there's a God; it means he's just not behaving like it.

In Ecclesiastes 1:14 and 18, he talks about, "All is vanity, for in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.

" That's not to say we don't want to know things about God; it's just saying you can use it in vain.

I mean, it's possible, like any other gift that you have, to use it wrong.

So, you know, there are a lot of passages like this that say it's possible for us to misuse the knowledge.

But the good thing is that means it's possible for others to have knowledge too.

I see this as an avenue of charity.

Everybody can understand things about God; everybody has reason.

If you lose touch with that reason, then you're going to have trouble dealing with them.

So, that's the part where, you know, let's view it as an avenue of charity.

If people disagree, say, "Okay, well, I think you're reasonable; otherwise, I couldn't appeal to you.

" You have to think that they're reasonable.

On the other hand, it's okay to point out when somebody's being foolish, too.

You know, people make mistakes, and you should treat it like anything else—it's okay to say, "You're just wrong.

" You're crazy!

So how do you use natural theology as apologetics?

I've kind of taken my view of that from 1 Peter 3:14 and 17. It says, "Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.

Yet do it with gentleness and respect.

" There's actually the Greek word there, "phobo," which is kind of interesting because it's really about the fear of the Lord.

The result of that is having a good conscience, so that when you're slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.

So, you know, I think you ought to be kind to people; I think you ought to be gentle, especially if you're appealing to natural theology.

Like I said, you can say that they're wrong; you can say, "Wow, you've totally missed this.

" But I try to be kind, and this is for unbelievers.

I mean, this passage is about when you're being asked to give a defense.

Nobody asks you to give a defense unless they're accusing you.

But, you know, it's asking for a reason, so saying, "Look, it'd be a waste of time if they don't have the power of reason.

" It's possible for people to listen to you and understand you.

So, that's it: just have the discussion with them, treat them like people, because they probably are.

Now, there are a couple of passages that you should also think about.

One is Matthew 7:6: "Do not give to dogs what is holy.

" "Do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.

" Now, what does that mean?

Well, everybody has reason, so they're not literally dogs or swine.

What that's saying is that if people have lost it—I mean, you know, they're not being reasonable at all—there's not much you can do with it.

And that's unfortunate; you just kind of have to cut them off.

You have to say, "Look, we can't have this conversation because you're not in a state where you can do it.

" That's basically what you have to do; you have to cut people off.

So, that's being wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

If there's a fight and there's no point in it, you're going to have to get away from it.

But what my general approach is more like 1 Samuel 26, and this is the story of David and Abishai.

In this case, you know, Saul is basically in camp.

God puts everybody to sleep, and David and Abishai sneak in.

There's the spear behind Saul's head and his water jug next to him.

Abishai is like, "Look, just let me stab him, and he's dead.

" And David says, "No, let's not kill the Lord's anointed.

" Well, if you think about it, every Christian that we're dealing with is going to be God's anointed because they've been baptized.

So, that's how we should deal with them; we should say, "You don't kill the Lord's anointed.

" You can also think about it as everybody being made in the image of God and having reason.

So, when you're having these disagreements, the goal just isn't to destroy them.

What David says is, "The Lord delivered you into my hands today, but I would not lay a hand on the Lord's anointed.

" He took his spear, took his jug, and ridiculed Abner for letting the spear and jug be taken away.

That's how I view the power of reason.

It's like if they're making arguments, take their arguments away from them—take their spear, take their water jug—so they can't nourish it.

If they're misusing Scripture, take their spear, take their water jug, so they're not getting refreshed by it.

So, that's the job that I see in apologetics.

All right, so let's talk about natural theology.

What are natures?

Well, natures are the good ideas that God has about creation.

They're basically why God created everything.

We know God created everything out of love, so everything that exists has part of God's love in it.

That's what the nature is.

It's why it was created.

We've defined evil in Scripture as violations of nature.

So we understand reason; we know nature by reason, and we violate reason when we sin against nature.

It says sinners suppress the truth and have a debased mind, and that's in Romans 1:18-32. So, everything that is evil—that's how we explain evil.

Evil is not something that God creates; it has to be a violation of nature because God doesn't create evil at all.

So, natures are the basis of how God makes sense to us.

If there aren't such things as natures, if we can't understand natures, we're basically saying God doesn't make sense; there's no way for God to make sense to us.

But we know that God's nature is also infinite, so we have to affirm that God is the author of natures.

There are such things as natures, but we can't comprehend God's nature in itself.

There's a verse in Romans 11 about that: "Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers.

" So, we can't get into why and how God runs everything.

That's the same thing that we were talking about; we don't understand what it is to be the Creator.

So, we understand it a little bit by analogy, and we know that God loves us because otherwise things wouldn't exist.

But there's only so much we can do.

One important thing about natures and what is impossible to understand if you don't understand natures are these universal passages in the Bible.

The reason is that natures are the goodwill of God toward everything, and that's why all of creation gets saved in some way.

Sam's pointed this out.

So, like Colossians 1:20 says, "And through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.

" There are a lot of passages that are universal, and what that really means is that all kinds of creation—all of the natures—get saved.

1 Corinthians 15:22 and 15:28, 1 Timothy 2:4 is the universal will for salvation.

1 Timothy 4:10 also has a similar idea.

Romans 5:18 says, "Therefore, as one trespass leads to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men.

" God has confined all to disobedience that He may have mercy on all, as stated in Romans 11:32. 2 Peter 3:9 is similar: "Patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish.

" 1 John 2:2 says, "He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

" Then 1 John 4:14 states, "And we have seen and testified that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world.

" So, that's nature; that's what that's about.

Then salvation, we believe, is the unity of the natures in Christ.

What saves us is the fact that Christ's human nature is divinized by union with the divine nature.

And the Bible passage about this is John 17:19: "And for their sake, I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

" That's Jesus consecrating Himself, and that's what the Fathers believed—basically, that this is participation in divine nature.

That's the part that was mentioned in 2 Peter 1. So, we know that’s what we have to believe: we have to believe there are such things as natures, we have to believe that the divine nature is beyond our comprehension, and we have to believe that in Christ, there is the union of the human nature and the divine nature.

So, that covers what is necessary here and what is basically in Nicaea.

One thing I’d like to cover a little bit here is, you know, since Sam’s in the Church of the East, I just want to point out that we can all agree on this; that's not a problem.

Actually, I've got my own idea about what I think happened with Nestorius.

A lot of Nestorius' theological terms were from Syriac.

So, they had an idea of a "kayyana," which is like our nature.

They had "konoma," which was like the expression of the nature, and then they had a concept of "parsopa," which is kind of what we think of as person, but it was more like role.

Greek had a lot more terms.

Greek had "ousia," which was nature, and Greek had "physis," which was also kind of nature.

They had.

. . "Denomis," which is power; "energia," which is activity; "hypostasis," which we all know; "prosopon," which was another version of person.

Then Latin actually had slightly more than the Syriac terms.

They had "substantia," which was used for substance, which is essence, basically.

They had "sentient," as well, and "persona," which they used for person.

They also had "forma" and "species," which is basically form or appearance, and it was kind of like the expression.

Those were the terms Tertullian used.

So, what happened was I think that if Nestorius could have had a discussion with the Latin theologians, I think we probably could have gotten past it.

Because "konoma" would have been very similar to what the Latins meant by "forma," and Leo actually used "forma" in the Tome; he was talking about the expression of the natures.

So, there were real things here that we had in common.

The problem was that Nestorius really didn't understand—he didn't understand what Cyril was talking about.

He wasn't familiar with it, so when Cyril was saying "hypostasis," he saw it as "parsopa," and his understanding was that Cyril must be confusing the natures.

He thought, "This doesn't make any sense.

Why is 'konoma'—he's confusing the natures?

" Even at the end of his life, Nestorius still didn't understand why his translation into Greek wasn't getting the point across.

Fortunately, we had this 1994 Common Christological Declaration, at least on the Catholic side, between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of the East, stating that we have a common belief.

But, you know, this was a misunderstanding, I think, and it's kind of unfortunate because we just didn't have the theological terminology to deal with it.

The way Nestorius explained it in Greek was honestly wrong because no one understood it that way, and it misused the terms.

From my perspective, the Church of the East has no significant difference on this point.

I'm just saying that to basically say we don't have a problem.

I'm not being a hypocrite here and saying we can't agree.

Obviously, we don't disagree with the Eastern Orthodox on this; we completely agree on this.

So, essentially, all of the apostolic traditions are in agreement that this is how it works: person and nature are real categories, metaphysically comprehensible things that we can see in nature—things that we can understand.

I'm not saying that Nestorius didn't make any mistakes, but I'm saying we've gotten to the point where we can agree on that.

So, how did all this go wrong?

What happened to Calvin?

Well, Calvin followed William of Ockham.

William of Ockham was a philosopher, and he was responsible for what we call nominalism.

It basically converted all of these philosophical ideas about nature and person into concepts based on our rational understanding of them.

There's a question as to whether he really believed that metaphysically or not, but practically speaking, that's what created all these problems.

He certainly didn't make it clear enough that he wasn't dealing with it.

He had basically three problems.

One was univocity.

Univocity is a long word that just means when we say something about God, it means the same thing in God that it means in us.

It's hard to make that work.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's hard.

Most theologians embrace some kind of analogy, basically saying that what we know about God is real knowledge, but it's not exactly the same in God as it is in how we know it.

Ockham also believed in nominalism, which is that natures are basically just the names we put on things that have similar characteristics.

So, it's something that's imposed by our reason.

Then he believed in voluntarism.

Voluntarism, named after the will of God, basically means God's freedom has priority over His knowledge.

So, when you put all three of those together, basically what you end up with is that God's will is used to explain everything.

You can think about when God's will is the explanation for everything, and you're also thinking of God as an earthly sovereign—that's a bad combination.

The consequences are that divine will and human will are operating on the same plane.

That means they conflict; there is just no way around it.

So, everything about nature and grace just doesn't work because God's will is going to override everything.

It makes evil a really big problem.

Causality is basically just God working in whatever it is, and that makes God the real cause.

The traditional understanding of evil is gone because how is God not the author of evil if He's the cause of everything?

Actually, evil was traditionally understood as a logical limit on God's power.

He creates nature, but He can't make it—He can't make things that are evil.

That goes back to St. Peter Damian, who was one of the first guys to talk about divine omnipotence.

If you don't understand natures, you'll misinterpret Scripture because there are times when Scripture talks about a nature that doesn't literally mean a nature, and we know that because it's evil.

For example, in Ephesians 2:3, it says, "Among them, we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

" Now, you could interpret that as there being a sin nature, but that can't be a nature that causes you to sin.

However, if you talk to Calvinists, you will see them make that mistake over and over again.

The reason they do this is that they don't understand natures; they're basically operating in this Ockhamist framework, and that doesn't work.

At the end of the day, the divine persons end up reduced to their activity because will is the only category they have to explain.

So, it's like the divine persons are essentially what they do and the roles they play, and that’s where we get into problems.

What’s interesting about this is that the same thing happened in Islam, and you can see these ideas are so similar that it's hard to even think about distinguishing them.

What happened in Islam was that there was a school of philosophers, and Avicenna was kind of the greatest of them, probably.

They were open to learning from Christians and had access to Greek philosophy, so they had this idea that God was transcendent.

However, then there was the Ash'ari school, which was really started by a philosopher named Al-Ghazali.

He wrote a book called "The Incoherence of the Philosophers," where he argued that their ideas were nonsense and basically took away every explanation except the divine will—exactly the same thing Ockham does.

Scholars have pointed this out for a long time; this isn't new with me.

So, Ockham and Al-Ghazali are basically the Christian and Muslim versions, respectively, but they end up in the same place.

What was interesting was, you know, when I was looking into this, I found an article by a Muslim scholar named Hamza Youssef, where he blamed a lot of the things that were going wrong in Muslim society on Ockham, saying that we got it in there.

There was a historian of philosophy named Meherig who responded in a blog entry, pointing out that it actually came from the Ash'ari school, not from Ockham.

So, you can really see that this is not a problem that is unique.

This is like—if you do this wrong, if you're a nominalist, this is going to happen to you.

It doesn't matter; it's not even a particularly Christian thing.

This is going to have the same consequences in Islam.

So, where do you land?

You get this idea of control over creation, like if they're not bossing creation around, they're not being a good sovereign.

It's this idea of earthly kingship.

Then the defining attributes are like God's sovereignty over creation.

It's like unless He's bossing creation around effectively, He's not sovereign.

So, you end up with all this predestinarianism and all this occasionalism; that's all just trying to turn God into an earthly king.

And that's the same thing that happened in 1 Samuel 8. If you ask for a king, that's not right.

So, you know, I mean, this is the same thing.

And you know that Ockham is the problem because even in a completely different theology, the same thing happened when everybody did the same thing as Ockham.

So, we can really blame Ockham for the problem.

I mean, if you're following Ockham, you're going to be a mess, and Ockham is the guy who basically invented Protestantism.

And the way it came up within the Pelagian controversy got reimagined in this completely Ockhamist system.

There are a couple of different people who have done this.

One is Father Louis Bouyer; he has a book called "The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism" that discusses how nominalism affects Protestantism.

But, you know, it really makes this nature-grace issue into a fight that nobody can win—there's no right answer left in it.

There was a scholar named Joseph Incandela; actually, he's still around.

His 86th dissertation described it as a clash between the wills of God and man.

I mean, it's just a fight, and there's no way around it.

That's the background for Protestantism.

Then one of the anomalous figures, a guy named Robert Holcott, introduced this idea of covenant to make God's will stable because God's will was the only explanation.

You didn't have a philosophical explanation for why God didn't just change His mind or fix things or do whatever.

So, he said, "Oh, well, you know, there's this category of covenant where if God makes a covenant, then He can't change His mind.

" That gets taken, as you might expect, into this Pelagian conflict.

There was a guy named Thomas Bradwardine who was shocked to find himself labeled Pelagian because he was in this nominalist scholasticism at the time.

Then he wrote anti-Pelagian texts, but he started attacking Holcott because he said, "Well, you aren't respecting God's sovereignty enough; the covenant really needs to be an eternal decree that.

. . " That decides who’s saved and who’s not.

The end of it was Gregory of Remini, who was at the University of Paris at the time, took these ideas and disseminated them.

That was the beginning of Protestantism.

Gregory of Remini is essentially patient zero for Protestantism.

So, that’s how this Ockhamism just spread around.

It’s like, basically, there were fights between what they called the "Via Scola Augustiniana," which was supposed to be the Augustinian version but was nominalist, and then there was the "Via Moderna," which included people who were more scholastic modernists.

But it's all Ockham at that point.

They were all super voluntarists in exactly the way that we were talking about.

They all had this false dilemma between nature and grace; they didn't have the real Christian understanding of nature and grace.

Some people will try to blame this on Duns Scotus, but Bradwardine and Gregory of Remini weren't Scotists.

When they talk about earlier scholastics, it’s not earlier scholastics to me; it starts and ends with Ockham.

Once Ockham's thoughts started getting out, that was how it all went wrong.

So, anyway, that’s basically how you get there with Calvin.

You know, I talked a big game at the beginning.

Now here’s where all of that comes together.

Calvin makes three big theological mistakes, and they’re essentially all because of this background in Ockham—all from getting nature and person completely wrong.

The first big theological mistake is anthropomorphism.

He’s thinking of person in an anthropomorphic sense, like a literal divine council where they talk among themselves, make decisions, and establish decrees as covenants among people.

That doesn’t work.

Then he gets his metaphysics of relations from Ockham.

Because he’s a nominalist, he’s thinking about the relations and the essence as just ways of speaking about God.

Since they’re just ways of speaking about God, he thinks that there has to be this absolute disconnect between them.

He’s not thinking about it as metaphysically real things that are underneath there and actually have real relations between them.

So, he’s essentially destroyed the basis for the distinction between person and nature.

He doesn’t understand the patristic concepts of person and nature at all, so he’s reading the Fathers wrong all the time.

He just doesn’t get it.

I mean, he even gets Augustine wrong, and that’s obviously the one that’s supposed to be well-known.

So, he’s gotten his metaphysics of relation from Ockham; he can’t understand anything that came before him.

That’s where it all comes from.

And then the big idea is this divine missions as roles, and this is why it's so important and why we talked about the idea that everything God does is one.

That’s really one—no distinctions.

Calvin doesn’t think that; James White doesn’t think that.

So, you know, I mean, it’s this idea of divine missions as roles.

What I mean by that is especially the problem with Christ as Mediator.

The problem is he thinks that Christ is doing something different in His role as Mediator in His divinity, and that’s impossible.

He’s wrong about it because he actually got called on it.

This idea of Christ as Mediator was addressed by a Lutheran, Francesco Stancaro, who’s orthodox on this point.

He says, "No, what Christ does as Mediator, He does it as a human being.

" That’s how that works.

It’s human activity that mediates between us and God.

Now, it's important that He’s a divine person; that’s what gives His sacrifice value.

But that’s not the same thing as saying that there’s a different divine act associated with His mediation.

It’s just flat-out wrong.

It violates the identity of operations—the inseparable operations—unquestionably.

There’s no way to save it, and it breaks divine simplicity.

So, I don't know how there's any way to say it.

If we go through three problems, the first is anthropomorphism.

This is where I'm going to start using Calvinist scholars just so people understand this is not something I came up with.

I'm not diving into Calvin's writings looking for something that's wrong; this is just me reading Calvinist scholars.

For anthropomorphism, the way Stephen Edmondson, who wrote a book called "Calvin's Christology," puts it is this: in the classical Latin to which Calvin was committed—this is Roman philosophy, basically—"persona" designated principally one's role or character in a play or office within the fabric of society.

It’s not just the role, character, or office that one simply filled, but that which defined one’s significance within the outworking of the greater whole.

So, that’s what he’s thinking about.

He’s thinking about roles.

"Persona," in this classical sense, was focused primarily on one’s activity within the surrounding economy and then only secondarily on one’s status as a substantial self or personage who fills this role.

That’s what he’s thinking of; he’s thinking of a role in society, but he’s talking about persons in God doing this.

It doesn’t make any sense.

You can tell that he’s misunderstanding the Greek view because he actually has a quote in the Institutes about the Greek view saying where he tries to say that the Greeks are using that same idea.

So he says, "Nor indeed was the use of the term person confined to the Latin Church; for the Greek Church, in like manner, perhaps for the purpose of testifying their consent, have taught that there are three prosopa in God.

All these, however—whether Greeks or Latins—though differing as to the word, are perfectly agreed in substance.

" It's true that "prosopon" was understood as a role in Greek thought, but what they did was to make absolutely sure that when they were talking about "prosopon," they were also talking about "hypostasis.

" They were very clear that when they meant "person," they meant the same thing as "hypostasis.

" So, they were aware of that definition of "prosopon," but they rejected it in the Greek Fathers.

Calvin clearly thinks that they’re thinking the same thing he was, and that’s just a perfect misunderstanding.

He’s thinking of God as a person playing a role, which is exactly the same thing that the Eastern Fathers all rejected.

There’s just no way around that; it’s simply a mistake, and you can’t fix it.

Similarly, on the divine relations and the properties, he’s just making it up.

The reason he’s making it up is that Ockham could never solve the problem of relations.

There’s a great book by Paul Trom, spelled T-H-O-M, called "The Logic of the Trinity," that actually traces this whole thing back to Augustine.

But the bottom line is Augustine had a very metaphysically robust concept of relations, and that was what he used to define person.

That’s the same subsistent relation that Boethius talked about and that St. Thomas Aquinas talked about.

So, it’s a real thing.

And Ockham, because of his metaphysics, has basically destroyed the basis for nature and destroyed the basis for person.

It doesn’t work for relations either, and he never figures it out.

Well, Calvin's trying to figure it out, but he doesn't succeed.

So, he comes up with this idea that the persons are, um, autophiles—God of themselves.

But with respect to the essence, they’re all the same.

However, when they’re relating to each other, they’re not.

Since relation deals with person, the essence can’t be coming between the persons; it has to just be the subsistence.

The subsistence is what we call the person.

There’s no relation between subsistence and nature in his view.

What ends up happening is this kind of bizarre tritheism, where it’s almost like the persons get along because, and I don’t know, because they’re subsistences from each other.

But basically, they have a free choice; they have to essentially exercise their will to be united instead of having a common nature that was given by the Father to each of the Son and the Spirit.

Again, it’s something that is completely outside of the patristic consensus.

It has nothing to do with Nicaea, and again, it’s tritheistic, because if there’s any kind of division in the operations like that, as we saw, that divides the nature.

So, the effect of that is it also reduces our participation.

The way Calvin understands participation is that we’re basically participating in this communion of the Trinitarian persons.

But what he sees is this agreement—this agreement of will.

So, it’s like basically what he sees as our participation is that we agree with God, which just isn’t real.

You know, from the perspective of Christian salvation, that’s nothing.

So, he’s in a situation where this autotheos problem is just never going to be solved.

His understanding of relations is totally gone.

His idea of the properties of the relational properties is incoherent because he has no connection between the essence and the person.

He’s saying that the person is connected with the essence by an indissoluble tie; that’s how he describes it in Institutes 1. 13. What does that mean?

No idea.

I mean, it’s not anything metaphysical.

What kind of tie is that?

Nobody knows.

It’s not identity, which is what everybody else understood it to be—that the persons were the essence.

It doesn’t make any sense.

He comes up with this idea that’s basically like, well, when we’re thinking about persons, it’s really just all in our thinking.

When we’re comparing, then we can think about it, but it’s something in our thinking.

It just doesn’t make sense.

It’s talking about, you know, things being attributed to the Father as a mark of distinction.

And trying to separate this is just never going to work.

Perry, I noticed he’s had some great comments, so he made me read this book by Brandon Ellis.

I won't say he made me; I actually read anything that Perry suggested.

But it's "Calvin, Catholicity, and the Aseity of the Psalm," and it goes through all these ideas.

What he basically says is, yeah, it's the separation.

He tries to reinterpret all of Christian history around this idea of the separation between person and essence, and it just misreads essentially everybody he cites from the patristic era.

I like to be sympathetic, but it’s just—it’s basically like this is what happens in nominalism: you just can't make sense of anything anymore.

And like I said, if you contrast that with Paul Trom's "The Logic of the Trinity" and see what was actually going on metaphysically, it’s so obvious what Ellis is doing wrong that, you know, I think it speaks for itself.

And so finally—and this is the big one for Calvin—the power is alike but not the same.

If you look at Christian history, when something is supposed to be the same and people start saying, "Well, it's like, you know, the Son is like the Father; Christ is like a man," every time they do that, you know something is wrong.

That’s what Calvin is doing with the operations; he’s saying that the operations are alike but not exactly the same—that they’re distinguishable.

The big quote from the Institutes again, from Book 13, is: "The distinction is that to the Father is attributed the beginning of action, the fountain and source of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and arrangement in action; while the energy and efficacy of action is assigned to the Spirit.

" So, the idea there is that even though they're all doing the same thing—okay, they’re all doing the same thing—they’ve got different roles.

They’re doing it in different ways.

You can’t have that distinction; there’s no way it’s not the same act if they’re doing different things.

He has this idea where they’re basically behaving in different ways in the acts they’re doing, and it just can’t be.

What’s really important in that is that he says specifically that the distinction of order is not unmeaning or superfluous.

That means he thinks this is a real thing, and he’s a nominalist, so it’s very important that he views it that way.

It’s clear that Calvin’s idea is just wrong, and again, there’s no way to save it.

So, you know, that’s basically the idea.

If we look at the different Calvinist scholars, they’re very clear on how this turns out.

When they’re talking about internal activities, they’re talking about a compact among the three persons of the Trinity—a covenant among them.

That doesn’t even make any sense unless you’re a tritheist; that’s just not even possible.

In the Institutes, Calvin says specifically in 3. 21. 5 that he "compacted with Himself what he willed to become of each man.

" That’s what he views as the decree: a compact among the persons of the Trinity, like a literal compensation, a literal deal that they make among themselves.

Richard Muller calls this the keystone of Calvin's doctrinal arch—this eternal decree.

Michael Horton calls it the intra-Trinitarian covenant of redemption made in eternity that realizes itself through the mutual working of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

There you go.

Herman Bavinck states that the basis of all covenants was found in the eternal counsel of God in a covenant between the very persons of the Trinity—the "Pactum Salutis.

" Girolamo Zanchi, who was a Reformed scholastic, wrote a book on the Triune Elohim.

It’s clear that he thought that meant there were three in council.

He asked how could those to whom he spoke hear and collaborate, each in their own way, to make man in their own likeness unless there were substances subsisting through themselves and understanding?

That’s basically thinking that the Trinity is three guys.

Gerald Bray noted that Calvin held to a doctrine that said the three persons were co-equal in their divinity and united with each other not by sharing an impersonal essence but by their mutual fellowship and co-inherence—the Cappadocian doctrine of perichoresis in God applied at the level of person, not essence.

Paul Helm actually talked about Bray’s position as well, describing it this way: according to Calvin, each person of the Trinity is autotheos—God of Himself.

This ensures that the relations between them must be voluntary since no one person can claim the authority to impose his will on others.

I don’t know how that happened, but it’s just tritheism.

I’ve read a bunch of these guys, and it’s the same thing.

What about the external activity?

There’s a Calvinist, Armandus Polanus, who tries to give an explanation of this.

He basically says that considering how the acts terminate, they are the work of individual persons, so it’s basically possible for God to decide that the acts are going to be the work of the individual person.

Now we talked about that before; it doesn’t make any sense.

What it means is that they can be the object of the act so that we can come to God through the Spirit, to the Son, to the Father.

That’s possible; we understand that.

But that makes them the object of what we're doing; it doesn't make them do anything different.

That’s exactly what Polanus is saying here.

Calvin himself, again in 1. 13. 18 of the Institutes, says, "For Peter also testifies that it was the Spirit of Christ which inspired the prophets.

" So the Scriptures so often say that it was the Spirit of God the Father.

He clearly thinks that the Holy Spirit is doing something separate at this point—that that’s His role.

After I wrote the article, my attention was drawn to some things that John Owen was saying.

When I was reading the books that these guys had written, John Owen was the one who basically took that same route as Thelonious, which is basically that God can decide that one of the persons is doing something separately.

That makes no sense.

You can't have a distinction between an act that’s supposed to be identical; that breaks them up into three gods.

It’s just not possible.

There’s some great work by a guy who’s actually on the International Theological Commission, Father Simon Francis Gaines, who has been writing many responses to this.

I just encourage you to read those because it’s not— But anyway, I mean, the answer is there’s just no way around it.

So finally—this is the discussion that’s happening among the Reformed Baptists, and this is why we just can’t get on board with them.

They’re trying very hard, but there’s no way around it.

The two guys that I was looking at were Adonis Vidu, who just had a book on the missions that makes the same mistake, and Matthew Barrett.

So, Vidu, when he wrote his book on the divine operations, followed Bruce Marshall's what I view as a misreading of Aquinas.

He was a Lutheran at the time; he’s a Catholic now, but I think it was a misreading of Aquinas, and I’m not sure that he would agree with it today.

Barrett follows St. Basil because he actually said that the Spirit was the perfecting cause.

That’s where they had this kind of idea that it’s like, okay, well, maybe they’re doing separate things.

There’s a technical reason for that, but I think that is probably just inaccurate.

I don’t think we would accept that these days as it’s meant.

You know, this is early in the development; people aren’t always perfect, and I think that was not perfect.

But they’re relying on that.

I’m like, the patristic consensus doesn’t support that.

So even if Basil said this at the time, it doesn’t really matter.

The bottom line is I’ve read all of the attempts to try to make inseparable operations, as Calvin explains them, orthodox—and they’re just not.

They’re never going to get there, and what’s sad is they’re right about all kinds of things, but they’re just wrong on this.

Finally, the real reason that I think this is not going to work in confessional bodies is that the mistakes have made it into the confessions.

In the Westminster Confession of Faith 8. 7, it states, "Christ in the work of mediation acteth according to both natures, by each nature doing that which is proper to itself; yet by reason of the unity of the person, that which is proper to one nature is sometimes in Scripture attributed to the person denominated by the other nature.

" So they’re flat out saying that Christ works in His divine nature individually in His work of mediation.

It’s heretical; that’s all it is.

In the 1689 London Baptist Confession, this is in 8. 1 and 8. 7: "It pleased God, in His eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus, His only begotten Son, according to the covenant made between them both, the Father and the Son, to be the mediator between God and man.

" That’s tritheism explicitly in the confession.

Then they also have essentially exactly the same language about Christ and the work of mediation acting separately.

So they’ve got tritheism and divided operations in their confession.

I don’t know how you fix that.

And by the way, that’s the same position that James White took in 1998, so he’s following the confession, but it’s not nice.

So, you know, that’s where we get to.

I’m going to list the bibliography here because, you know, I’ve gone on a long time, but this is just coming from Calvinist scholars.

So, the books that I think people should read are by Richard Muller.

He’s got a classic, "Christ and the Decree," which covers all of this, and he also has a more recent book, "Divine Will and Human Choice.

" That’s your historical theology; Muller is great.

Stephen Edmondson's "Calvin's Christology" is a fantastic book.

His explanation of Stancaro and the dispute they had on whether there is human participation or divine participation in Christ's work of mediation is excellent—everybody should read it.

Gerald Bray's book "The Doctrine of God" is a systematic theology that’s also very useful.

Paul Helm has a book called "John Calvin's Ideas on Philosophical Theology," which is a very good read.

James Dolezal's "God Without Parts" and "All That Is in God" are also important.

His interview on the Particular Baptist channel was fantastic; you should read that because if you read what he says, he’s not saying something different than I am; we just disagree on what the consequences are.

Matthew Barrett's "Simply Trinity" is good, and Adonis Vidu's "The Same God Who Works All Things" on inseparable operations is very hard to find, but it’s a good book to read.

"Divine Mission" is also a good book to read.

The problem is just to make sure you're watching out because he’s going to miss things, and I pointed out some of those on the website.

But he’s going to miss things.

Ellis's book, I don’t actually recommend it because the problem is that there’s too much theology in it, and it messes up the historical methodology.

So, I think you have to filter too much, and it’s a really expensive book.

There’s really no interaction with the philosophy at all, so I don’t recommend that one.

I don’t think that’s great.

Then there are some good books about Calvin's theology of participation and union with Christ.

Julie Canlis wrote a book called "Calvin's Ladder," which is fantastic.

I actually read it and thought, "Okay, finally, I actually learned about what Calvin believed and what his mistakes were" from reading that book.

So, Julie Canlis's "Calvin's Ladder" is a very good book, and I don’t have any reservations about that.

I disagree with the conclusions, but it's great scholarship.

Michael Horton has a Zondervan digital short called "Union with Christ.

" Michael Horton is a well-known guy; you can trust what he reads.

Robert Letham, who’s a little bit farther out there, has a book called "Union with Christ in Scripture, History, and Theology," which is also a good book.

Mark Garcia has a book called "Life in Christ" about union with Christ, and that’s excellent.

The book that I think everybody’s sleeping on, which is really, really good, is Charles Raith's "Aquinas and Calvin on Romans.

" The reason I really like this one is that he goes into detail on the exegesis, so it’s a very scriptural book, and it’s fair.

It really explains the differences between them on this, and I hadn’t seen anything like this.

It’s a fantastic book, and I would absolutely recommend that one; it’s just a really great book.

So, anyway, that’s the reading to do; I think that’s great.

But I’m kind of—this is about how long I wanted to go, so I’m here.

Here’s my question: if it turns out that I’m right about this and that Calvin’s basically endorsed tritheism and endorsed divided operations, then what’s the point anymore?

I think that there are non-Nicene Calvinists who are sort of openly non-Nicene, like Karl Barth.

So, neo-orthodoxy might be consistent and might be consistently confessional, and that’s interesting.

But then the question is, okay, but where are you with the tradition?

Where does this non-Trinitarian belief come from?

Why are we reading Scripture in this way?

Where did it come from?

What are the historical signs of orthodoxy at that point?

I’m not saying that they can’t think about it, but it’s like, why?

Where is that coming from?

And certainly with respect to Calvin himself—okay, this is a lawyer from the Middle Ages who doesn’t have scriptural support, doesn’t have historical support, doesn’t have traditional support.

We know why he made the mistakes that he made.

So why would we listen to him?

He doesn’t have any miracles, he doesn’t claim to be a prophet, he doesn’t have any mystical activity; there’s no real sign that it’s like, "Okay, yeah, this lawyer is the person that we should be listening to on this.

" His only argument is how good an exegete he is of Scripture.

Well, I think that if we compare him to the Fathers, he’s certainly no better.

So, that’s my question: why is anybody listening to Calvin in the 21st century if we know all this?

I think it’s just because we’re getting late to it.

But, to me, the futuristic scholarship has basically decimated Calvin, and there’s not really a good reason to listen to him.

And even with his contemporaries, he got rebuked by Francesco Stancaro, correctly, and basically said, "Yep, I’m going to double down on this, and I’m going to be an unrepentant heretic.

" That heretical belief in double mediation is in the Westminster Confession and the London Baptist Confession.

So, why are you going to be in a confessional communion that’s non-Nicene?

Why do you want to be in a confession that says we’re denying the Nicene Creed?

It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Then, you know, the claims of scriptural support are generally based on anthropomorphism.

Well, I mean, Sam decimates people who use anthropomorphism.

If you look at Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Unitarians—other attacks using anthropomorphic understandings of Scripture—we don’t listen to them.

So why would we listen to Calvin?

Every major theologian who followed him is making the same mistakes.

Peter Vermilye does, Francis Turretin does, John Owen does, Jonathan Edwards does, B. B. Warfield does—all of these guys who accept the Reformed distinctives are making these mistakes.

So that’s essentially where I am at this point, and that’s why I wrote the article and that’s why I’m giving the presentation.

What are we doing?

Why are we hanging around with Calvinism anymore?

You know, and like I said, it’s not that I don’t believe there are some fantastic people who really believe in God and really love Jesus.

I believe they do, and that’s why I’m making this appeal.

It’s like you don’t need to be over there; this is a mistake, and it’s a mistake that I hope they’ll correct.

So that’s where I am—that’s my pitch.

If you’ve got any questions, Sam, or anything like that, I’m ready to go.

Yeah, it actually is a phenomenal session.

Glory to the Triune God, glory to the Father, the Lord Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

Thank God for this presentation!

I want to listen to it more than once; there’s a lot of meat, and I want to encourage everyone to share the link.

You can upload any of my sessions, but I highly recommend you upload this one.

Very in-depth; it’s amazing.

And also, upload Perry Robinson’s 10,000-year-long lecture—no, I’m just kidding!

That was a phenomenal five hours of intense dissecting of the problems with trying to read sola fide into the early Church Fathers.

That was phenomenal, so these are some great sessions.

I may start off asking questions.

Guys, if you want to ask questions, I’ll take several.

I don’t want to keep our brother too long because it's already close to 11 PM where he’s at, and as you can see, like me, he needs beauty sleep—just kidding!

But I want to just ask you, you mentioned that John Calvin spoke of Christ being autotheos—God of Himself.

Now, for those of us who are not philosophically astute—and I’m not—because when I first came into the faith, I got attacked by Jehovah's Witnesses.

When I say attacked, I mean spiritually, obviously not physically, by Jehovah's Witnesses and Muslims who wanted me to make a case from Scripture.

They were not philosophically trained, neither was I, so most of my time has been spent on scriptural support for what I believe in.

Now I need to brush up on my philosophy because I don’t want to be saying things that are heretical unbeknownst to me.

Why, for someone who doesn't understand autotheos and its implications, would that be a problem to say that Jesus is autotheos?

And how would that go against Nicene Christology?

Yeah, well, the trick is how do they get there?

Because the way you have to think about it is we need to get back to one God.

How do they stay one God?

The reason they stay one God is because they’re in these eternal relationships, and they’re the kind of eternal relationships that make them the same.

So, that's really what this image is, and the biblical language of Father and Son is why we describe it as begetting.

We say it’s eternal because it happens forever.

But you’ve got to be in a situation where they’re all God by nature.

If they’re not all God by nature, or if they’re just God by agreement—which is what I was talking about earlier—if it’s just voluntary, then in principle, they might break up.

If they’re the same God, then they’re actually one; there’s no distinction.

So that’s the problem.

If you think that each person is God of Himself, you can’t get them back together.

That’s why they say the Father is God of Himself, and the Holy Spirit and the Son are the offspring; otherwise, you’re going to create a division that you just can’t have.

The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, whereas the Son is begotten.

I just don't want people to misunderstand what you're saying.

So, that was one question, because I was trying to figure out what Calvin was trying to say by autotheos and why this is problematic.

Because, like you’re saying, then you can’t have one God if they’re all God of themselves; it leads to tritheism.

Now, what if—and that was, by the way, confusing for the people at the time too.

St. Robert Bellarmine was trying to figure out what he was saying and only sort of got it.

So, what if someone says, "Well, what Calvin intended and what the Reformers are intending to say isn’t so much that there are three gods, but they’re just articulating it, though not as accurately as they should be, because if they take it to its conclusion, it leads to tritheism.

But that’s not their intention; they still want it to be one God in three persons.

" Can we say that we can give them a pass because their intention is sincere, and therefore the charge of tritheism shouldn’t be leveled against them?

What would you say to that?

Because their intention is to safeguard that these are not the same person, meaning the Father is not the Son in a different mode, and it’s not three gods.

I think that in terms of autotheos by itself—which is again what some people were looking at—I think there’s an explanation that you could give that would make sense of it.

The problem is really this idea of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit interacting by will.

That’s kind of like, if you think about going back to Arius.

The problem with Arius was that he thought the Son was begotten by an act of will.

There’s no way you can fix that.

And they tried, and they came up with a lot of things, but there’s no reconciliation between those.

It’s either black or white, and that’s what Athanasius really put the screws to him on: you know, it’s black or white.

Either the Son is made by an act of will, or He isn’t. That’s the same thing with this, you know, bill in the Trinity.

It’s just not enough; it can’t be a communion of will.

It has to be identity of nature, and there’s no other orthodox way to explain it.

Even if they mean well by it—because I’m sure there were some Arians that meant well by it—even if they mean well by it, it’s just wrong.

There’s no way that this can be right according to Nicaea.

Excellent!

This leads me to a question I want to ask because we’re talking about Calvin, but now these are Reformed.

What do you do with someone like William Lane Craig?

He’s not a Calvinist; he’s an Arminian philosopher, Wesleyan.

But he pretty much jettisons Nicene Christology altogether, saying this is outmoded because it would subordinate the Son, making Him an inferior deity.

So, to speak of the eternal beginning procession would pretty much make them creatures if you take it to its conclusion.

He’s also reviving a neo-Apollinarian view of Christ’s two natures—the divine nature.

What do you think about that?

So, he pretty much—I’ve read it; it’s on his site.

He says that "Father" and "Son" are terms that they took on when Jesus was incarnate.

In other words, he becomes a Son at the Incarnation, and that’s where God is Father to the Son.

It’s not really referring to their eternal relationships.

Why is that dangerous, and why should we avoid this type of philosophizing regarding the nature of the Triune Godhead?

I’ve got a couple of responses to that.

First, this essentially neoclassical philosophy—what they call it—is built around some of these ideas.

I could go into more detail on that, but you’ve got a philosophical position that’s really developed out of Ockhamism and the skepticism that came out of it.

So, how they’re practicing theology doesn’t take nature into account and doesn’t really accept the things that they need to.

I mean, first of all, it’s like, okay, well, what platform are you operating on?

How are you thinking?

I think there are good arguments for being a classical philosopher.

But there’s a guy named Joshua Sijuwati who does neoclassical philosophy but with actual orthodoxy.

So, it’s possible to be orthodox and still do this, but it’s hard.

You know, I think a lot of the assumptions that Craig is making are inconsistent.

And by the way, I think that—I mean, he’s a Molinist.

Molina believed himself to be a Thomist.

Joseph Incandela, who I mentioned before, makes a pretty good argument in his dissertation that Molina just doesn’t understand what St. Thomas is about.

So that’s an example of how, you know, it’s all philosophically based; it’s not traditional; it’s not based on Thomism or Scotism.

I’m not a Molinist, by the way, because I think it’s just off.

I think the questions it’s asking are wrong.

So, I have a problem with the whole methodology in a lot of ways, and that’s the problem.

Then the second thing is, okay, well, if I have a problem with the methodology, I also have a problem with the genealogy of the methodology—because where did it come from?

Like, you know, who authorized Craig to deviate from the Fathers?

He’s saying, you know, "Look, I think I’m better than the Fathers at this.

" Well, you know, how does he make that claim?

The criteria he’s using to make that argument are not things that I trust.

There’s a reason why the Fathers are called Fathers, and that’s because the Church has said so.

So, you know, I mean, if you’ve got an individual from an NSA, it’s Calvin because I think Craig probably has a better handle on the issues than Calvin did.

But still, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s like, why do this?

Why would you throw over the traditions?

And why would you even believe this without the tradition behind you?

So, you know, I’d say, look, anybody who is doing anything outside of the Christian tradition, I always wonder a little bit, "Well, how did you get here?

What is it that you believe in?

How do you believe this is true?

" Yeah, exactly.

You have this question, and not many people are asking these questions because I guess they’re trying to take it in.

It was amazing—your clarity.

I praise God you made it very clear for someone like me to get it, because, like I said, philosophy is not my strong suit.

So, glory to God for that gifting that has enabled you to take these very complex subjects and simplify them, just like Perry Robinson as well.

The Lord bless you guys for that ability; a lot of people can’t make it simple, so for people like me to get it.

But here’s a question from Orthodox Shada: to what extent is Calvin's autotheos attribution to the Son rooted in Roman Catholic hypostatic understanding?

Yeah, so you got it; you got the question.

Yeah, no, I got you.

So basically what I would say to that is it's Ockhamist thinking, and I don't think that Ockham is reflective of the tradition.

I’ve actually given a talk about this, but I think that the metaphysics of relations actually go all the way back to Augustine, and that’s basically where all of these ideas come from.

So, I think where Calvin is, is just awkward; he’s broken all of the metaphysical platform that he would have built on, and that’s where I think that comes from.

I don’t think it has anything to do with the Filioque, which, like I said, comes from the Augustinian notion of relationship.

These are not questions from Perry Robinson; he’s just also adding clarification to what you’re saying.

Now, to your final question: there are some people saying they need to watch it several times to ask the right questions.

You were talking about when Jesus says, "Not my will, but your will be done," because that’s referring to His human will since He has two natures.

He’s one person, and therefore, in the Godhead, there can only be one will of the Father, Son, and Spirit because the nature is one.

Here’s a question: what if someone says—because I’ve thought about this and wrestled with it—what if someone says, "Well, how does someone know that the will is a property of the nature and not a property of person?

" In other words, because there’s one nature, there has to be one will, but that assumes that will is essential to the nature of a thing as opposed to being an extension of personhood.

How do we know that the will is part of the nature of a thing, not part of what makes a person a distinct person?

And who can settle such a metaphysical question?

I mean, yeah, they’ll say, "Well, the Fathers agreed," but they were not inspired, so why should we then assume they were right?

Because again, why I say this is—well, just I’m not going to get into it further because of the Miaphysites, but forget about it.

But go ahead, yeah, just that’s the question, right?

And it’s a good question.

So what I would say is, yeah, the Fathers can err, but why do we believe them on Arianism generally?

What’s important about this principle of wills with nature and that the operations are undivided is that that was the apologetic against the Arians.

It was the victorious apologetic against the Arians.

So, you know, we know that there was an error, and that’s how they answered that error.

If we get to the point where it’s like we can’t rely on them for that, that’s fundamental—that’s the "Jesus is God" stuff, right?

That’s fundamental theology.

It’s getting to the point where it’s like if we don’t believe this, do we really believe that Jesus is God?

That was the argument they gave, and I’m convinced by it.

I think it’s still the correct argument today.

There are a couple of historians who have really been all over this: Michelle Renee Barnes and Lewis Ayres, that’s A-Y-R-E-S. And those guys' works are respected, so it’s not like there’s really a huge amount of controversy over whether that’s the belief.

So I just say, look at the history.

We believe that Arians are heretics.

If you believe Arians are heretics, I have no idea why you would accept Calvin.

If we don’t, then I have to now apologize to Greg Stafford and fellowship with him.

But Orthodox Shahada just had another question.

Now, I’m shocked to learn this; I didn’t know that John Calvin refused to sign the Nicene Creed.

I had no idea.

Can you elaborate on Calvin refusing to sign the Nicene Creed?

Calvin seemed to constantly want to frame the issue as one of politics, not theology.

I had no idea he refused to sign it.

Yeah, that one’s a little bit tricky.

I’m familiar with the incident—not really familiar because I’m not a historian—but my understanding of that is that it’s fair because there was essentially a fight, and somebody was trying to push it as basically like, "This is—you know, they’re basically trying to play it as a trump card," and he knew it, and he said no.

But on the other hand, here’s what I think: if he had signed, I don’t think he was refusing to sign because he thought it wasn’t valid.

If you look at his writings, he says he believes that the Nicene Creed is binding and that it has scriptural warrant.

What I would say is his understanding of the Nicene Creed that he would have been signing on to is completely different from how the Fathers understood it.

I think he could have signed on to what he believed was the Nicene Creed.

I don’t think what he believed was the Nicene Creed was actually what the Nicene Creed was intended to say.

In fact, that was going to lead me to ask you a question: is his understanding of "autotheos"—Jesus, the Son of "autotheos"—compatible with Nicene Christology, that the Son is begotten?

It could be, but I don’t think it is.

Ellis's book actually explains that, but like I said, that’s a long, painful read.

I don’t know who else has said this, but I don’t think he can actually consistently argue for that.

I don’t think that what Calvin meant by it could be explained as orthodox.

I think he was actually heterodox on this point.

The bad fruits of Protestantism—may God have mercy on us in Jesus' name.

Now here’s a question on Tyree Robinson from Perry: can you explain more about how Calvin views the operations as united but different?

Yeah, so this is basically his idea, and I quoted it.

It’s the idea that they’re all kind of acting—doing a piece—in everything.

So, the Father is the origin.

Basically, he thinks of the actions as kind of flowing through the Trinitarian relations.

But, you know, for that to happen, there has to be a distinction in the actions corresponding to the persons, and I don’t think it works.

Then with respect to the roles, they’re separate.

I mean, they’re just divided.

So, that’s kind of the idea: the actions are sort of flowing through the persons, but that kind of flow just doesn’t really work for unity.

Well, this is not so much of a question but more rhetorical in nature: if the will is not according to nature, then what else would serve as the basis for anything that the persons share the same nature?

So, it’s not so much a question; it’s just saying, if they don’t have the same will, then what would be the grounds for us assuming they possess the same nature?

That’s from Perry Robinson.

So, I do not—well, if you want to comment, that’s fine; that’s up to you.

Yeah, no, I think that in that case, you’re just left with the individuals—basically, the persons themselves.

There have to be some explanations, like a common will or something like that, for why they stick together.

But that’s basically the occupant situation; you have to impose unity on them.

That’s pretty much the only way that can happen.

That’s pretty much it for the questions, brother.

I just linked to your blog in the description box.

Lord willing, I’ll pin it as a comment.

Here’s his blog.

Please, brothers, you don’t have a YouTube page?

Because I only saw a link to a blog.

You have a YouTube page?

No, no, no, I just started doing this.

Well, if the Lord gives you more time and you’d be willing, I’d highly encourage you to take your articles and turn them into YouTube sessions because, sadly, we live at a time where people would rather watch something than read.

Like these books, you have to be very, very serious because we live in an age where everyone wants it on YouTube, on a forum where they can watch someone articulate.

So let me encourage you—if the Lord puts it in your heart, try to start a YouTube channel and take your articles and make sessions where you either read them or just present them as freely as possible, like you did with this presentation.

So, brethren, this is his link to his blog, and you have an open invitation.

You, Perry Robinson, Kai, all of you guys—you have an open invitation.

You can come anytime you want on my channel to talk about any important topic.

I think if we share these facts with more Protestants, they will see why, though some of them think that Protestantism was something good, at the end of the day, the damage it’s done outweighs any good that came out of it.

This is something I praise God that He’s allowed me to see, which is why I’m not trying to offend anyone.

I’m not a Protestant anymore, and I’m still on a journey wherever God guides me toward the fullness of the truth.

I yield to the Spirit, and I pray that from my heart.

Thank you, brother.

If you have any final comments, make them, and then we’ll wrap it up.

Well, what I like to say about that is, like I said, there are Jesus-loving people everywhere.

You know, this is part of us trying to move forward because, I mean, I agree with you.

I don’t think that Protestantism, in net, has been a good thing.

I think that it’s a reflection of vast division, but that doesn’t mean that they’re bad people.

You know, I mean, it’s not that, and it doesn’t mean that they’re not Christians.

So, like I said, you know, I see it as— To the extent we have to clash, you know, take away the spear and take away the jug, and then say, "Look, I took away your spear and your jug.

How’s that?

" But, you know, that’s how we have to do it.

I don’t want to hurt everybody; they’re doing a lot of good work and things like that.

It’s just—it’s just a mistake, and it’s a bad mistake.

Those beliefs have been dangerous in the past, so let’s try to get past it and move on because there’s a whole tradition, and let’s try to get everybody there so we can keep being a powerful good influence for the world.

Glory to God!

May the Lord Jesus hear your prayer.

I also pray that we work towards a reunification of the Apostolic Churches that sadly are in division.

May we see that in our lifetime before the Lord Jesus tarries, so that Christ will be honored.

Because He said, "By this they shall know you’re my disciples, if you have love for one another.

" He prayed, "May they be perfectly united as you and I, Father, are one.

" May we seek to make that prayer a reality by seeking to reunify the Apostolic traditions on the basis of the truth that was passed on by the Apostles.

In Jesus' name, I showed you Perry's comments and said, "Good job, Jonathan.

" OKC Thunder says, "Great job, Jonathan," and Orthodox says, "I came to learn of you from Perry, and I thoroughly enjoyed your recent article on Calvinism.

I praise God for your work.

" I praise God for Orthodox Shahada's work and Perry Robinson and a host of others.

May God continue to use you!

Christ is risen!

Risen indeed!

And may Jesus increase in us, and may we decrease, and may we be filled with the Spirit.

To do our utmost for His eyes because Jesus is worthy.

Amen.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.