Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

And before I say anything else, I need to start with this.

I love William Lane Craig.

He's a personal hero of mine, even when I disagree with him, as I will be doing very much so today.

I'd even suggest that he should be a hero of yours too, despite his faults.

It's hard to quantify just how many people he's led to Jesus Christ, but it's gotta be a lot.

But perhaps the best homage that can be paid to him is not from a fellow Christian, but from the atheist Sam Harris, who once referred to him as-

The, uh, one Christian apologist who seems to put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.

Craig's not just a great debater.

He's actually a brilliant scholar in his own right.

He's doing important work on a variety of philosophical and theological topics.

The website Academic Influence ranks Craig as the world's 11th most influential living philosopher, as well as the 6th most influential living theologian.

Now, I can't speak to their predice- precise methodology, but those numbers at least seem roughly correct.

They point to the fact this is someone of enormous influence in philosophy, in theology, and in apologetics and religious debates.

But here's the problem.

While Craig is in one sense arguably the greatest living Christian apologist, or at least up there, his version of Christianity is wonky, which might be a polite way of saying heretical.

His views on both the natures of Christ and the nature of God are, from the perspective of historical Christianity, heresy, and in a way that arguably places him outside of Christianity itself.

And if you think I'm exaggerating about this, allow me to show you what I mean.

Now, as I make my case, I want to be clear that my aim here is twofold.

First, I think this is extremely problematic, not only as a fan of William Lane Craig, but even if you don't know who William Lane Craig is, you should still be worried about this, particularly if you're a Protestant who believes in sola scriptura, because I'm gonna argue that the whole Craig affair shows the impossibility of even the more sophisticated forms of sola scriptura.

I'll ex- explain what I mean when I get there.

If someone as brilliant and as devout as William Lane Craig cannot arrive at Christian orthodoxy using scripture alone, what hope do the rest of us have?

Moreover, it's not that Craig is heretical despite his belief in sola scriptura.

He quite explicitly cites to sola scriptura as the reason that he views himself as having the authority to reject Christian orthodoxy on Christology and Trinitarian theology and on the nature of God.

I'm going to get to all of that, but just give me some time to kind of lay it out piece by piece.

By the way, as I always say, if this is something that you find beneficial, if this is something that you find helpful, I encourage you to go over to shamelessjoe.com, which is my Patreon, and sign up there.

One of you in the comments recently asked me to get a fade, and I did.

So imagine what I'd do for money.

The spoiler is, answer your questions every week in a livestream Q&A, and then have some banter back and forth throughout the week.

But still, let's get to William Lane Craig's bad Christology first.

Because even though he professes that he believes in a Jesus who is both truly God and truly man, when you drill down into it, the truly man part is extremely suspect.

Now, why should we care about Christology?

Occasionally, you'll get people who ask this.

Like, Why do we care about the person and natures and Christ and all this?

I think there's a couple answers to that question, but I actually think Craig himself does a good job of explaining why we should care.

Currently working on the doctrine of Christ, which is called Christology, and the doctrine of Christ is traditionally composed of two parts.

One is on the person of Christ, and the other is on the work of Christ.

The person of Christ asks, Who is Jesus Christ?

The work of Christ asks, What did he do on our behalf to win our salvation?

So when we're talking about Christology, the point here isn't to just be arcane for no reason.

We're talking about one of two things, either who Jesus is or what he's done.

And many Christians understand it's important to understand what Jesus has done.

But I would argue if you're a follower of Jesus Christ and you don't care who Jesus is, that's a big problem.

And this is uniquely a big problem in Christianity, because unlike other world religions, as Bishop Robert Barron has pointed out, Jesus makes a message extr- like, front and center about himself.

He famously asks in Matthew 16, Who do you say that I am?

That's why Jesus compels a choice in the way that no other founder does.

Muhammad, to his infinite credit, never claimed to be God.

Muhammad said, I'm a messenger.

I received a message from God.

Moses, to his infinite credit, never claimed to be divine.

Moses had received the law from God and gave it to the people.

The Buddha, to his infinite credit, never claimed to be divine.

What he said was, I found a way.

Then there's Jesus, who doesn't say, I found a way.

He says, I am the way.

How strange that is.

He doesn't say, I found a truth, let me tell you about it.

I am the truth.

He didn't say, Hey, there's this new mode of life that I've discovered.

Let me share it with I am the life.

This is why Jesus takes the disciples up all the way to the region of Caesarea Philippi, just to ask them two critical questions, not about his teaching, not about his actions, but about his person, who he is.

He asked first, Who do men say that the Son of Man is?

And when they give the answers, and they're all over the place, he then asks, But who do you say that I am?

And it's a question each one of us is compelled in some way to answer.

Now, in his great defense, William Lane Craig gives, in some ways, a good answer to that question.

When asked about Jesus being 100% God and 100% man.

He's going to nuance that, but affirm that he believes in the full humanity and full divinity, or maybe the very humanity and the very divinity of Christ.

We're often taught that, uh, he was 100% God and 100% man.

Eh, is that logically problematic?

I think the problem is that that is misleading, Kevin, and I think that Godfrey did a good job of explaining what he meant.

When he says Christ is fully God and fully man, he doesn't mean he's 100% God and 100% man, which would be a contradiction.

Rather, he means he has a complete divine nature and he has a complete human nature, and in that sense, he was fully God and fully man.

But the creeds actually use a different expression.

They say, Vera Deus, vera homo.

Truly God and truly man.

And I think that's a better and less misleading way of expressing the fact that Christ had two complete natures, human and divine, uh, to say he was truly human and truly God.

So here's where we are going to agree on basic Christology.

Christ is one person.

He's a divine person.

And this is something that often throws people.

He's not a human person, he's not a human being in the strict sense, but he does have a full human nature and he has a full divine nature.

So, what does that mean?

Now, look, there's no way around getting into some deep waters and actually using our intellects to try to better understand Jesus.

That's a good thing, but I admit it can be a little bit of a stretch.

So, here's my best explanation at a simple level.

Person refers to who you are.

Nature refers to what you are.

So, there's one who.

When we're talking about Jesus, he is one person.

There are not two actors, you know, Christ the God who's maybe roommates in the same body with Jesus the man.

No, that's not it.

And so when you hear people talk about, uh, the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith and they're treating them as two separate peop- no.

Jesus is the Christ.

This is one person, one actor, one agent.

One who, if you will.

But this who has two completely distinct, unmixed aspects to who he is.

He is, on the one hand, fully God, and on the other hand, fully man.

And who he is, another way of saying that is what he is.

What he is, is truly God.

What he is, is also truly man.

So far, I think William Lane Craig would agree with everything I've just said.

The problem is if you were to press him or press the early Christians about what it means for Jesus to be fully human or truly human, they're gonna give very different answers to those questions.

So, even though on paper he's affirming the full humanity of Christ, in reality, he denies it.

We can look at that by asking a few more specific questions, starting here.

Did Jesus have Does Jesus have a human mind and a human soul?

Now, maybe you've never thought about that question.

Totally understandable, but scripture and 2,000 years of Christianity have said yes, he does, and this matters.

I mean, this comes up actually over and over again in theological debates, but you see glimmers of this directly on the pages of scripture.

For instance, at the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus says, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.

Remain here and watch with me, he's obviously talking about his own soul, seemingly his human soul.

He's not just saying the second person of the Trinity in his divinity is really tired right now, or sorrowful, or overwhelmed.

No, he's talking about this human experience, this extremely human experience of overwhelming sorrow that he's feeling, and he refers to it at the level of his soul.

Saint Augustine, in one of his commentaries on John, talks about how this is part of what it is for Jesus to be truly man, that he's not man as being flesh alone.

In other words, when we say Jesus is fully God and fully man, or truly God and truly man, we don't mean that he just has a human body.

That would not be You are not just a body.

And so if Jesus is going to take on all of humanity, he can't take on just a body, 'cause that's not the fullness of humanity.

He's like us in all things but sin.

That includes things like a soul, right?

That includes things like a mind.

And as we're gonna see, intellect and will.

So, Jesus, to take on the fullness of our humanity, has to have not just a human body, but also a soul.

As Augustine says, As man consists of flesh and soul, so in Christ there is a complete humanity.

For he would not have assumed the baser part, the body, and left the better behind, the mind, or the spirit, the soul, seeing that the soul of man is certainly superior to the body.

Like, why would he take on our human body and not our human soul?

And then he asks, Since then, there is entire manhood in Christ.

What is Christ?

The Word and man.

He is both the divine Logos and also truly man.

What is the Word and man?

Well, if you were to say it another way, you'd have to say, well, you've got the divine Logos, you have a human soul, and you have human flesh.

And then he says, Keep hold of that, for there have been no lack of heretics on this point.

That recipe, if you were, that Christ is made up of divine Logos, human soul, human body, heretics get parts of that wrong.

They'll say he's either not fully divine or he's not completely human, he doesn't have a human mind, doesn't have a human body.And he says that these heretics, expelled from Catholic truth, have denied this.

But nevertheless, they still persist, like thieves and robbers who enter not by the door to lay the snares around the fold.

Now, notice how Augustine talks about this.

His view is that people like He gives the example of the Apollinarians, who deny that Jesus Christ has a soul.

He says they are heretics.

And not only heretics, he refers to them using the language of John 10, the passage he's commenting on, as thieves and robbers who are destroying the flock of Christ.

Now, notice as well, he's gonna explain why is He, he acknowledges, look, the Apollinarians say Jesus is the Divine Word and he has human flesh, but they deny that he has a human soul.

And as a result, he says, uh, they take away Christ's reason by losing their own.

In other words, some of the Apollinarians argued, well, there might be some kind of, uh, human s- or excuse me, some kind of soul in the body of Christ.

That he could have animal affections, he can have emotions, uh, he can have, uh, the ability to metabolize, all these things that are powers of the soul, but he doesn't have rationality.

So he has an animal soul and the Divine Logos.

Because what they They have to have some way of saying.

If you're not gonna say Christ is a human mind and a human soul, then how does he experience anything in the body?

What is the 'Cause we can understand the connection between mind and body.

We can understand the soul-body connection, in which case I, you know, process information I've received through my senses and then spiritually can make sense of it through this faculty of the soul.

Look, I'm doing a lot of anthropology here.

I realize maybe you've not thought about a lot of this, and I'm sorry that some of this is deep waters, but this is important to get straight.

Your body doesn't think on its own, right?

It doesn't feel on its own.

All of that is experienced through you at the level of your soul.

And so if you deny that to Jesus Christ, how do you make sense of him feeling anything or experiencing anything in, in this human way?

And the Apollinarians had to come up with some other idea.

And so some of them would come up with the idea that maybe he had like a, an animal soul.

And so the difference between that and a human soul, it doesn't have rationality.

And so Augustine makes the quip that they've taken away Christ's reason at the price of their own, that this is an irrational view.

And Augustine's not alone on this.

If you go to the he, St. Gregory Nazianzen warns about this in very concrete terms.

He has a letter where he warns about the, the nature of this heresy, and he says, If anyone has put his trust in Christ as a man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind and quite unworthy of salvation.

Strong words.

For that which he has not assumed, he has not healed.

Gonna quote that line again, because this is a very famous line in patristic thought.

What Christ has not assumed, he has not healed.

So let's make sure we get this straight.

The reason Jesus takes on our humanity is to heal our humanity.

So if you think he only took on part of our humanity, then you only think he healed part of our humanity.

The flip side being that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.

This is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the incarnation and of the cross.

This is how the early Christians made sense of why Jesus became man.

If he is going to do these things for us, we should understand why.

And one of the reasons why, at the very heart of the reasons why, even, is to heal this problem of sin by becoming like us in all things but sin.

And so, Gregory says, if only half Adam fell, like if he only fell bodily and not spiritually, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also.

But if the whole of his nature fell, that is, if Adam fell to the level of body and soul, it must be united to the whole nature of him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole.

So that's historic Christian thought.

This is the belief of the Catholic Church, it's the belief of the Orthodox Church.

Mainstream Protestantism believes all this as well, if they're deep enough in history to have even kind of thought about these questions.

But then take William Lane Craig's views on this, and he is an Apollinarian, or a Neo-Apollinarian, if you prefer.

And that's not me just throwing that out as a pejorative.

He acknowledges that he is.

We've been looking at a proposed model for understanding the deity and humanity of Christ.

I suggested first that we need to affirm with the Council of Chalcedon that Christ has two complete natures, human and divine.

Secondly, I suggested last week that we can think with Apollinarius of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, as being the soul of the human nature of Jesus Christ.

In virtue of the union of the Logos with the flesh, Christ's human nature becomes complete, so that he has a complete human nature as well as a complete divine nature.

I want to make sure that you understood what he was saying there.

He's saying, with Apollinaris, who he cites explicitly, that Christ does not have a human mind and a human soul.

Instead, his human nature is the union of the Divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity who's existed from all eternity, having his own soul, his own rationality.

This is going to be partly due to his own bad Trinitarian theology.

We're going to get into that later.

These two are very much connected with each other.That Christ supplies, as it were, the rationality for this animal body.

Now, if you think I'm being unfair to him, I want you to continue to hear him in his own words.

In a Q&A in 2023, he says, One of those persons, of the Trinity, he means here, became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth.

He has a soul only in virtue of his incarnation.

That is to say, the body-soul composite that is Jesus' concrete human nature has a soul.

It is a human soul in virtue of it being united with a hominin body.

But I maintain his soul was not merely human, but also divine.

So notice, he is seemingly mixing together whether this is a human soul or the divine Logos.

This thing that, you know, if you remember what I was saying before, Chalcedon is very clear this is not a mingling of natures.

That would be heretical.

And then referring again to himself as a Neo-Apollinarian Christian, he says, On my Neo-Apollinarian Christology, Christ's soul is the Logos, the second person of the Trinity.

Well, here's the thing.

The second person of the Trinity, the Logos, is uncreated.

So one of two things is possible.

Either he has an uncreated divine intellect and not a human soul, or he has an uncreated divine intellect and a created human soul.

It cannot be both of them.

There's no way to mix those two things together and kind of 50/50 it.

Like his intellect, both sides agree that he has divine intellect.

We'll actually get into that 'cause it gets a little more complicated on Craig's side.

But certainly traditional Christians would believe Christ is fully the second person of the Trinity, but also has a created human intellect, just as he has a created human hand, that this is all part of the incarnation.

Something is made that did not exist before.

That includes both the body of Christ, but also the human mind of Christ, the feelings of Christ, like the emotions, right?

All of that stuff is created in the incarnation.

Craig denies part of the incarnation.

He claims that part Seemingly, he claims that part didn't happen.

He says explicitly that Christ does not have a merely human soul as on the traditional orthodox Christology.

He says that explicitly.

He rejects orthodox Christology on the incarnation of Christ.

That is a bad sign if you're following him as a Christian.

He doesn't think Christ fully came in the flesh.

Like when John warns in 1 John about those who deny the incarnation is Antichrist, he partially denies the incarnation.

That's what's happening here.

Now, granted, it's on a more technical point, if you want to put it that way, than someone who just says Jesus never came bodily, but the fact that he came bodily but not spiritually would be just as heretical and just as wrong.

Craig goes on to say this thing that he said in that clip I just played, that allegedly the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, completes the human nature of Christ by giving the body of Christ the properties sufficient for a rational soul.

That soul, because it belongs to a human being, he says, may be truly called human, but not merely human.

Now, that's just wrong.

I don't know another way to put that, because you've now blended the two unblended natures of Christ.

So you have Christ seemingly without a human soul or with some weird demigod soul that's part human, part divine, and he's calling it a human soul because it's giving animation to his human body, but it doesn't become a human soul automatically because of that.

I want to be very clear.

Otherwise, Apollinaris would be right, and the whole reason Apollinaris is condemned as a heretic is because that doesn't work.

Now, Craig acknowledges that Apollinaris was condemned.

He had to do an episode called Does Dr. Craig Have an Orthodox Christology?

And if you're having an episode saying Am I a heretic on Christology?

I don't know, that's not a good sign.

But he says that Apollinaris' original view was that Christ didn't have a complete human nature.

He had a human body, but he didn't have a human soul.

And Craig thinks he can get around that, because he realizes there's a problem with that, because it means that Jesus isn't really, truly human.

He's partially human.

That calls into question the reality of the incarnation and also the effectiveness of Christ's death on our behalf since he doesn't share our nature, right?

Like what, human nature is not just bodiliness.

It's also the possession of a human soul.

Craig wants to have it that he shares our body but doesn't share our soul.

That is a problem if we want our souls to be saved.

Again, Craig thinks he can get around this by making a human nature out of a divine soul and a human body, but that is exactly where Apollinaris tried to go and, and was condemned as a heretic for it, that you can't just say, well, the Logos can supply the rationality, self-consciousness, freedom of the will and so forth.

But that's what he wants to argue.

That a- in other words, that Christ has a divine will; he doesn't have a human will.

We're gonna get into all of that.

And he says when he brought these properties to the animal body, the human body, it completes it and makes it a human nature.

So notice again, he's doing the exact same thing Apollinaris did of trying to take, to make a human, taking an animal's sensation, rationality or lack of rationality.

Like, it's an animal's soul, basically.

He doesn't call it a soul, but all of the aspects of an animal, combining that with the divine Logos and trying to make a human nature out of it.

That doesn't work.

That's not the incarnation.

That is not Jesus being truly God and truly man.

That's something radically less than that.

Like if you find out your neigh- your neighbor- didn't have a human soul, but like, an alien was controlling him, even a rational alien, you wouldn't say, Oh yeah, that's, that's a human like me.

No, you would say, Whatever that thing is, it's not human.

And likewise, the Jesus that Dr. Craig puts forward, whatever it is, is not human, and therefore, is not truly Jesus.

So we can ask, in addition to the question, does he have a human mind and a human soul, we can ask about what are sometimes called the powers or the faculties of the soul.

Let me put it this way, does Jesus have a human intellect, and does Jesus have a human will?

Can he think as a man?

Can he decide as a man?

This is another area where we could go into much deeper waters, and I think it's wise to go into.

So let me give you just a couple things to point to why this question matters.

If you were to look at, you know, w- when you think of yourself, you're a union of body and soul, and so you often don't think about which parts of yourself are related to your body, which parts of yourself are related to your soul.

In some of them, it gets kind of complicated.

Like, when you receive things through your senses, you see something and you hear it, your mind, at an immaterial level, is able to say, Okay, that thing I saw and the thing I heard are both the same thing.

You have what, this is the original meaning of common sense.

In addition to all of those senses, you can put things together.

Is that at the body or the soul?

You can get into those kinda questions and say, Okay, well, how does that work?

What's going on there?

So I'm gonna keep it as simple as I can and just say what are the things that we have in common with angels.

And angels don't have bodies, so this is a good sign that these are things that are powers of the soul rather than just powers of the body.

Make sense?

Two things we know angels can do.

They can reason and they can will.

They can make an assessment of the world.

They can act upon it.

This is why you have things like Satan and his minions rebelling against God.

That only makes sense if they ha- have an intellect enough to make sense of the world in which they live and a will to decide to serve God or not serve God.

So intellect and will, these are spiritual faculties.

What that means is these are things that at the level of the immaterial soul, that exists even apart from your body.

When you are dead, and God willing, before God in Heaven, you will still have an intellect and a will.

You won't have hands, you won't have feet, but you'll have an intellect and will to know and to love God.

Make sense?

Jesus very clearly in scripture, being both fully divine and truly human, has an intellect and a will.

In Hebrews 5, verse 8, it says, Although he was a son, so although he's the logos, the second person of the Trinity, he learned obedience through what he suffered.

Well, learning, that's a human intellect.

Obedience, that's a human will.

So Jesus has, according to scripture, human mind and a human will, and a divine nature.

He's a divine person with a human intellect and a human will.

I wanna make sure that's really clear, because that is not clear for Dr. Craig.

He says He's contrasting his own views with what are called kenotic theologians.

Kenosis is Christ's self-emptying, and you'll find people who claim that Christ literally gives up his divinity.

This is, you know, the Seventh Day Adventist view, that he stops being God in some way.

That's obviously heretical.

That's ridiculous.

It d- like, if you think God can stop being God, you don't know what we mean by God.

So, that's not Craig's view.

It's a silly view.

I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but just know if you do believe that, don't believe that.

That is wrong.

But he says he believes in something slightly different, because he says that kenotic Christianity says that the logos gave up omniscience for the sake of the incarnation.

So Christ literally didn't have superhuman knowledge.

So you might be wondering, well, where is this going?

Surely you're gonna say that this divine person continues to be a divine person when he takes on humanity.

Well, he says this.

On my Neo-Apollinarian proposal, there he is calling himself that again, Christ has such knowledge subconsciously, and the divine subliminal would have the power to make that knowledge surface in consciousness, even if Jesus, in his conscious awareness, couldn't make that happen.

Now, there are some problems there.

One, you have this divine subliminal that seems like a separate actor from Jesus.

So now you maybe have two persons in one nature, rather than one person with two natures.

Do you see how this is a mess?

Also, remember, he doesn't think that Christ has a human mind and a human soul.

He thinks the divine logos is what gives rationality to the body of Christ, so how could the divine logos not know everything?

It's literally the logos of God.

So, this raises a problem.

Now look, any Christian who's read scripture, you read about Jesus learning things, as we just heard.

You might be wondering, how does all that work?

And I admit, that can be a confusing area.

That is adequately explained by Orthodox Christianity, that Christ knows things in one way, in his divinity, and he doesn't know them in another way, in his humanity.

And we don't have a direct experience of what that feels like.

Tim Staples gives the example that I think this can be kind of helpful, that your kids can know that the burner on the stove is hot, but then if they touch the burner on the stove, now they know that in a totally new way.

Right?

Like, they knew it in one way, now they know it in a different way.

That modes of knowledge, any analogy you give here is gonna fall short, but that's the idea.

That's the Orthodox Christian explanation, that in one sense, he doesn't know things .

but he is still the omniscient God simultaneously.

And because we've never had the experience of living that, we can only sort of understand what that means.

Well, Craig has come to a totally different answer, where Jesus can't consciously know things.

He can't access the divine subliminal.

It's like the second person of the Trinity went to sleep inside the body of Jesus, and instead you have, somehow, the second person of the Trinity also being the soul of Jesus.

He has no human soul, but this becomes his human soul, and it doesn't ha- really know things, except as what a human would know.

This is a dog's breakfast of a Christology, I'm gonna put it very bluntly.

And Craig even seems to realize that his view doesn't make sense on this point, because as soon as he gets asked a question about how any of that works, he says this.

You're supposed to have a single conscious subject who is the person of Christ, uh, especially on this Apollinarian view, and so it's hard to understand how this comports with the limitations of Jesus that are so graphically described in the Gospel.

In particular, how can he be genuinely tempted, um, with sin?

It would seem that he would just blow sin away.

Uh, God can't be tempted with evil.

And yet, I think we want to say that the temptations were real.

Um, his struggles in the Garden of Gethsemane, and prayer as he faced his crucifixion were real struggles, not just a charade again.

So, that seems to me to be the chief drawback of this model as so far described.

So, right, one drawback to Craig's version of Christology is it doesn't explain some of the things that we see Jesus doing in the Gospels, and that is a problem.

Another famous problem that Craig has with c- Orthodox Christology is he doesn't believe that there are two wills to Christ.

And this is the one part I'd been kind of familiar with before I did sort of a deeper dive researching his Christology, because he and J.P. Moreland, another brilliant Christian who's totally heretical on Christology, the two of them wrote Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.

And in there, they defended why they reject the ecumenical council def- definition that Christ, in fact, has two wills.

The sixth ecumenical council says Christ has two wills.

They say the ecumenical council is wrong, and they argue Christ in fact only has one will.

Here is Craig in a conversation explaining how he comes to that view.

And I think here the key question to be answered is, is the will a function of a person or of a nature?

Who or what wills things freely?

Um, if you say it is persons who will what they do, then you will say there is one will in Christ, though he have two natures.

On the other hand, if you say, Well, there are two natures, and wills belong to natures, then you're going to have two wills in Christ.

Um, and if you say that, then it really becomes difficult to avoid Nestorianism.

This just is not true.

When the sixth ecumenical council defined that Christ had two wills, it was very explicit that it's not affirming Nestorianism.

But there's a reason, I'm gonna get into kind of why Craig's wrong on this point.

The way he's framing the question is wildly misleading.

If you say who wills or who has a will, well, the person will always be the result of that.

But you can also say, Who has a nature?

And well, the answer's gonna be the person.

You have a human nature.

So, any property of your nature is also something that your person has, because you have a nature.

So if I say, Uh, does your body have sensation or does your person have sensation?

I could then say, Well, who senses things?

Well, you.

Your person, but through your body.

And so, it's a question about So, he's blurred together the boundary of person and nature in such a way that the way he's framed the question will always lead to the answer the person, regardless of what aspect of nature you're talking about.

Who had the full divinity and the full humanity?

Well, Jesus, the person.

It wasn't like divinity had humanity.

So, a person has a nature, or in Jesus' case, two natures.

What does it mean to have a human nature?

is the question he should be asking.

What makes a human nature different, on the one hand, from an animal's nature, and on the other hand from an angel's nature?

And if you were to ask those questions, you would say, Well, what makes it different is a human nature includes a human body and a human soul.

What makes a human soul different from an animal soul is intellect and will.

If you ask it that way, you end up in all the right answers.

If you ask it Craig's way, you're already in the wrong direction, because the question is so muddled that it can't possibly be helpful, 'cause you've confused the who and the what.

Hopefully that's clear that he's asking this totally backwards question, and as a result saying, Well, because a person has these properties of a nature, therefore they belong to him in his person rather than in his nature.

And that's just, doesn't logically follow.

And because he doesn't get that person/nature distinction clear, he imagines that if you have two full natures, that you must have two persons, and that's Nestorianism.

Because if you have two wills That sounds like two persons, because in his mind, person and will go together.

But that's not Christian teaching on this subject, nor is it just basic philosophical anthropology.

Your will and your intellect are what makes you human, not just what makes you you.

You are you because of the nature that you have and because of the person that you are.

So, at the Sixth Ecumenical Council, Pope Agatho addresses this direction in a letter that he writes to the council.

He didn't attend in person, he sent a papal legate, and he sent a letter affirming sound Christology, and the Sixth Ecumenical Council agrees with it.

And the Pope says, When we confess two natures and two natural wills Natural in that context means it relates to your human nature.

So, two natures, two wills, and two natural operations, again, operations according to your nature.

In our one Lord Jesus Christ, we do not assert that they are contrary or opposed to the other.

So, you don't have Jesus' human will being at war with his divine will.

You don't have his human actions and operations at war with his divine actions and operations.

We can nevertheless distinguish, like, there are some things Jesus does in his humanity, when He eats, when He drinks.

There are other things that He does in His divinity, as when, for instance, He performs miracles that are supernatural.

Or if you want to give an even cleaner example, when He's upholding the whole cosmos in being, He's not doing that in His humanity.

Remember, while Jesus is walking the shores of Galilee, he's holding the whole universe together in Himself.

And so, we have to clearly distinguish two sets of natural operations.

What is He doing as God?

What is He doing as man?

Those are important questions to ask for a good Christology.

But if you get rid of any intellectual soul in Christ that's human and not divine, then those questions become meaningless.

You've lost His human nature in, in anything more than a, a mere bodily sense.

So, Pope Agathos says, Well, if you get that right, still understand these two natures are not in competition with one another, as those who err from the path of truth and accuse the apostolic tradition of doing.

In other words, a lot of people who are heretics accuse us of being Nestorian because they don't get that right.

He goes on to say, Far be this impiety from the hearts of the faithful.

Nor is uh, separated in two persons or subsistences.

So, you don't have, like, two persons.

Again, that's a Nestorian thing.

Instead, the same our Lord Jesus Christ has two natures.

Similarly also, He has two natural wills, two operations, the divine and the human.

So, if it doesn't make two people to say He has two natures, then it doesn't make two people to say that He has all the properties of each of those two natures, including the will.

The divine will and operation He has in common with the coessential Father from all eternity, and the human will He has received from us, taken with our nature in time.

That's what he says.

This, he says, is the apostolic and evangelical tradition, which the spiritual mother of your most felicitous empire, the Apostolic Church of Christ, holds.

That's the Pope pretty authoritatively pronouncing on this.

And the Third Council of Co- uh, Constantinople, excuse me, reaffirms this, and they write to the emperor, and they explain, and they agree with the Pope that there is in fact one Lord Jesus Christ, one Our true God, but He has two natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, undividedly, and two natural wills and two natural operations.

And all who have taught and who now say that there is but one will and one operation in the two natures of our Lord Jesus Christ, our true God, we anathematize.

So, this is why this matters.

It is not just, Oh, he's not gonna get a perfect score on theological trivia.

Understandably, a lot of Christians, when you ask them, if you were to just ask a random Christian, Does Jesus have a human soul?

Does He have a human will?

people don't know.

People often guess, and they're gonna guess wrong a lot of the time.

But for a theologian to consciously reject the Ecumenical Council on this when they're anathematizing anyone who teaches what William Lane Craig teaches, that is really serious.

That is really grave.

But it actually, in some ways, gets worse.

This bad Christology leads to bad Trinitarian theology.

It's not that he's got his Christiological heresies over here and his Trinitarian heresies over there.

The two actually go together.

Why?

Because he has conflated natures and persons.

And once you say that wills belong to persons rather than to natures, two things follow.

One is the Christiological heresy that we've already seen.

You have to say Christ only has one nature, because He's one person, so He can't subordinate His human will to the divine will.

Like, He can't say, Not my will, but yours be done about His human will being subordinated to the Father.

Instead, now instead of there being one divine will, you have three.

So, each person of the Trinity has a different divine will that could be willing something different.

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are no longer one.

They're three.

So, we always had three persons, but they were always united in having one divine nature.

But on Craig's model where each of the three members of the Trinity has its own will and its own intellect apart from the other two, the question we should be asking is, how is that not just three gods?

And significantly, the Pope writing to the Sixth Ecumenical Council points that out.

Like, if you buy that, like, if you think that will is a property of person rather than nature, then you're gonna end up believing in three gods .

he puts it like this.

If anybody should mean a personal will when in the Holy Trinity there are said to be three persons, it would be necessary that there should be asserted three personal wills and three personal operations, which is absurd and truly profane.

He goes on to say, Since as the truth of the Christian faith holds the will is natural where the one nature of the holy and inseparable trinity is spoken of, it must be consistently understood that there is one natural will and one natural operation.

In other words, one reason why the three persons of the trinity are one God is they share one intellect and one will.

If you deny that, it's not clear what oneness is left in your version of the trinity.

And Craig explicitly goes exactly where Pope Agatho hopes nobody's gonna go.

Do the three sets of rational faculties have distinct wills, three wills within God?

If so, doesn't this contradict Basil positing one divine will?

Uh, I would say that there are three wills.

I think that having a free will is essential to personhood.

And so, given that there are three persons, there would be three wills just as there are three intellects, um, three centers of self-consciousness.

John McKinley, in an article in Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, points out that one of the reasons the Diothelites, uh, were worried about Monotheletism, which is a technical term for the belief that Christ only has one will, is precisely because they saw this as polytheistic.

If you claim the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have three separate free wills, then how do you not just end up with a pantheon, where maybe the different gods work together, but they're all free to go do something different?

That is a very bad place to end up as a Christian, where you've accidentally unraveled the trinity.

But this is, in some ways, only the tip of the iceberg, because this is not the only aspect of theology that William Lane Craig rejects.

Now, theology in this sense, what's sometimes called theology proper, is the study of God, Theos.

It's not just, you know, the moral life, moral theology, all that.

No, no.

Like, literally, what is your doctrine of God?

And William Lane Craig, appealing to Sola Scriptura, decides to just take a chainsaw to much of the traditional Christian understanding of God.

I think that we should be reluctant to challenge doctrines which have, for centuries, been held by the majority of Christian theologians.

Um, we shouldn't do that unless we're pretty sure that the tradition has somehow erred or gone wrong.

And I think that this is the case, a- and a good many contemporary theologians would agree that this is the case with respect to strong doctrines of immutability, impassibility, and simplicity.

These doctrines are not to be found in the Bible.

You will search in vain for passages in the Bible that teach that God is frozen into immobility, or that He has no diversity of properties or attributes, or is identical with His properties, or that God is not affected by the world, uh, a- and doesn't respond to us, uh, in the world.

Now, you have patiently borne with me this long on issues like person and nature, and the sometimes confusing issues of Christology.

I'm not gonna demand you do the same thing on all of the issues with the doctrine of God.

But I want to at least highlight that he's just said that he rejects divine immutability.

Divine immutability is the idea that God is unchanging.

Why does that matter?

Because if God is perfect, He's unchanging.

To put it another way, if you change, you're changing seemingly for the better, or for the worse.

If God changes for the better, then He wasn't perfect.

If He changes for the worse, then He's not perfect anymore.

If He's totally perfect, there's nothing to change.

So, that's why you have divine immutability, 'cause it's a sign of God's perfection.

You can't logically believe God is all-perfect and still working on Himself.

Second, He rejects divine impassibility.

This is the idea that God doesn't literally have emotions or passions, doesn't literally feel pain.

This is hard for people, but if you think about it, logically, God can't just be like, well, without radically misunderstanding the nature of God, the infinitely perfect God isn't, like, getting emotionally upset over here, and happy over here, and angry over here, and doing all these things.

When the Bible uses that language, just as when it uses the language of God's body, you know, the hand of God, the wings of God, et cetera, that language is an attempt to describe this reality beyond words in a way we can sort of grasp.

God doesn't actually get mad about things.

He doesn't actually repent about thing None of those things are literal descriptions.

Or again, you have a problem with the idea of the perfection of God.

If He's reacting to this situation and then repenting of it, taken literally, that sounds like a moral fault in God, that He's, again, working on Himself.

That's a problem to reject that.

The third thing th- that he rejects is divine simplicity, this idea that God is not composed of parts, and He's identical with His properties.

Now, Craig claims that you won't find the Bible presenting God as identical with His attributes, but that's not true.

You will find that.

For instance, in 1 John 4:8, it doesn't just say God is loving.

It says God is love.

It presents God as being identical with His attribute.

That's- a pretty important point.

Like, He possesses this infinitely, but it's not just as a property, it's a part of who He is.

Similarly, when He presents Himself to Moses in Exodus 3, He says, I am who am.

That's what Yahweh means.

He's identifying Himself with His infinite, uncreated existence.

And this matters for another reason.

If you don't think this, if you think God is made up of different parts, then who created those parts?

Where are those parts coming from?

You know what?

Dr. Gavin Ortlund does a good job of addressing this, and I don't get enough opportunities to point out the really good things Gavin does.

So here's Ortlund talking about why you can't deny divine simplicity without functionally denying that God is the creator of all things.

Simplicity simply means that, uh, God is not made up of parts.

God is not broken down into more basic ontological constituents.

God is His attributes.

So God is not merely loving and righteous, but love and righteousness.

And if we don't say that, if God merely instantiates His attributes, then in some sense, they would exist independently of Him.

God would not be utterly absolute and self-determined.

It'd be like love and righteousness are just floating out here somehow, and then God comes along and just happens to correspond to them, and that won't do.

So divine simplicity is necessary to protect the God-ness of God.

Gavin's being nice there, but what he means when you deny the God-ness of God, it means that what you believe of, as God no longer possesses the necessary qualities to be truly called God.

David Bentley Hart, not as nice, in his book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, is pretty blunt and to-the-point.

He puts it like this, he says, There's an ancient metaphysical doctrine that the source of all things, God that is, must be essentially simple.

That is, God cannot possess distinct parts or even distinct properties, and in Himself does not allow even of a distinction between essence and existence.

Why?

He says, This idea isn't open to dispute if you believe that God stands at the end of reason's journey toward the truth of all things.

It seems obvious to me that a denial of divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism, and the vast preponderance of metaphysical tradition concurs with that judgment.

Now, why would denying divine simplicity be tantamount to atheism?

Because you're saying there are these different parts of God that are not God, that are something else.

So you either believe they're co-eternal with God, or parts of God are created by God, I don't even know what that means, or parts that God then, you know, possesses in some way preexisted God, which is even worse.

And so, you don't have God as the uncreated creator of everything, which is what we know from reason and from scripture to be true of God.

So, what Craig is pointing to in calling God cannot be God.

Like, those can't be the qualities of God.

He can't have different parts making him up.

He can't have emotions running through his system.

That doesn't work if you understand God is pure spirit and infinite uncreated being.

And so, Hart, after saying, you know, It seems obvious this is tantamount to atheism, then says, And yet, there are today Christian philosophers of an analytic bent who are quite content to cast the doctrine aside either in whole or in part.

He then says, I can think of two very prominent American Protestant phil- philosophers I assume that he means Craig and Moreland.

I don't actually know if those are the two he has in mind.

both regarded as redoubtable champions of theism against its cultured despisers, who do just that with some regularity.

Now, you might be saying, Well, hold on.

How could it be that someone could believe they believe in God, and yet still be functionally teaching something like atheism?

And I'll give you an example.

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, pretty famously, in what's called the King Follett discourse, argues that God Himself, if you were to see Him, you'd see a guy with a body, because he's an exalted human.

That as we are, He once was.

As He is, we shall be.

Now, if you were to ask a Mormon, they'd say, Oh, yeah, we believe in God.

But if you press their doctrine of God, well, this is not the uncreated creator of everything.

He's got a body, He's got His own God.

This clearly is not what we mean by the term God.

And then if you press and say, Well, does that God have a God?

Does that have, God have a God?

And so on, and many Mormons, I don't know if this is official Mormon doctrine or not, will just say, Well, the whole There's no top of the system.

There's no ultimate God who created time and space and matter.

Matter just exists.

That was certainly Brigham Young's argument.

Matter just exists.

That's atheism.

All this is, is very powerful spiritual beings.

You can have demigods and still be an atheist.

You can be an atheist who believes in angels and demons.

This is a strange form of atheism, but you could do that.

You could believe there are really powerful aliens and still be an atheist.

The Mormon view is functionally that, that there's very powerful aliens that are like us, but have just gotten more powerful, or superheroes.

Something, you know, you can believe in all of that and still be an atheist.

Well, likewise, you can believe in Craig's version of powerful spiritual beings that are composed of different parts and still be an atheist, because those are not what we mean by the uncreated creator of everything.

That's a problem.

My point here, and I want to really stress this, I'm not trying to do two things.

Number one, I'm not trying to bash William Lane Craig.

And number two, I'm not trying to show that, you know, I'm smarter than him or anything like that.

I'm sure if he watches this, he could come up with 20 different objections to why he's right and I'm wrong, and he would still be wrong.

And that's why this matters for Sola Scriptura .

because the truth of Christology, the truth of Trinitarian doctrine, cannot come down to who's written the most books, who's the better debater, et cetera.

Because sometimes, as Craig shows, the smartest person in the room might still be a heretic.

This, as I said at the top of the episode, poses, I view it as a pretty fatal threat to Sola Scriptura.

Because if, i- it would actually be a lot better, if, if Linley Craig were an idiot, or if he was operating in bad faith, if we thought he was just greedy or megalomaniac or something like that, that would be better for Sola Scriptura.

'Cause you could say, Hey, someone really trying hard, someone really using their intellect, they would get to the right answers.

This guy's just not trying hard, or he's really dumb, or something like that.

None of that's true.

Linley Craig is, by all appearances, incredibly sincere, devout, brilliant.

And if he cannot, using scripture alone, come to Christian orthodoxy, how in the world do you think you can?

Are you smarter than him?

Are you holier than him?

Have you spent as much time studying these issues as him?

Because if not, how in the world do you think you're gonna land in the right place if you're unmoored from any binding tradition?

Here's why I think this defeats even the strongest forms of Sola Scriptura.

Back when I first got on the scene in like 2009, was just starting a, an apologetics blog, this book, The Shape of Sola Scriptura by a guy named Keith Mathison, was really, really big.

And Protestants loved it, of a certain stripe, especially from like a more reformed background.

Because Mathison tried to, on the one hand, attack Catholics and Orthodox for, uh, having this role for the church that he thought was too strong, and on the other hand, he wanted to attack American Evangelicals for having no room for tradition and no room for the church.

So, he tried to chart a kind of middle way, and you could see why it was very attractive.

There's a lot of things he gets wrong in the book, but a lot of the charges he makes I think are important and, and fair critiques.

So first, he tries to reclaim what he considers the historic Reformed or the historic Protestant version of Sola Scriptura.

And he says, It is not a claim that scripture is the only authority.

That claim, he says, he calls it Solo Scriptura.

That's confusing.

Sola and solo mean the same thing, but fine.

But Solo, or Tradition Zero, uh, that gives no room for tradition.

Sola Scriptura, in response, he says, says, there are other real authorities besides scripture, but they're just subordinate and they're derivative, so they don't trump scripture, they don't have any authority apart from scripture, but they still have an important authority beneath scripture.

Scripture is the only inherently infallible norm, and therefore only scripture is the final authoritative norm.

And if you've ever heard, you know, Gavin Ortlund, when he debated Trent Horn on this, I think he argues this exact same kind of formulation.

And this is undoubtedly a- a stronger form of Sola Scriptura than the ordinary Evangelical.

And Mathison is clear, like the position he's arguing for is a minority within American Protestantism.

Like, this is probably not the version of Sola Scriptura you've encountered, but he says all those people aren't practicing real Sola Scriptura, so he renames their version to Solo.

Or sometimes he'll use Tradition Zero versus Tradition One.

There's a lot of overlapping terminology, it can be a little confusing.

Mathison even thinks that there's an important role for the church in this.

He says, It is only within the church that we find scripture rightly interpreted, and it is only within the church that we find the gospel.

Now of course, what he means by the church isn't what early Christians meant by the church, it's not what Catholics today mean by the church.

It's a vaguer concept of church.

But leave it aside.

He still thinks that the church, in some sense, has an important role.

And not just the invisible church, but the visible one.

He says, Unlike modern Evangelicalism, the classical Protestant reformers held to a high view of the church.

When the Reformers confessed 'Extra Ecclesiam, nulla salus, no salvation outside the church, they were not referring to the invisible church of all the elect.

That would be tantamount to saying, 'Outside of salvation there's no salvation,' which would be a truism.

The Reformers were instead referring to the visible church, and this confession is incorporated into all the great Reformed confessions of faith.

So, he is arguing, and this is important, that you're not gonna get an orthodox interpretation of scripture apart from the church.

Now again, he's gonna get the church wrong because of his personal interpretation of scripture, but he's recogn- he's grasping something real, that it's important to be part of the visible church.

And that Modern Protestantism, m- especially in its Evangelical forms, has gone completely off the rails on this.

He says another thing that I think is really worth stressing, we're gonna get back to this.

And I- I wish every internet commentator who thinks they can disprove Catholicism by just quoting a verse would know this: all appeals to scripture are appeals to interpretations of scripture.

The only real question is whose interpretation?

People with different interpretations of scripture cannot set a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve their differences.

In order for the scripture to function as an authority, it must be read and interpreted by someone.

I could not say that better.

There is no such thing as scripture against the church.

There's only your interpretation of scripture against the church's interpretation of scripture.

That's how it works.

The stuff that seems really obvious to you may not be obvious to someone who understands the passage better than you.

Like, there may be something more complicated.And almost every time, the heretic is the one that's superficial or this is just what the text says, without any sense of context.

So all appeals to scripture are really appeals to interpretations of scripture.

When you say scripture says this, you say, I think scripture means this.

You're appealing to your own reading over and against the reading of the church.

That's the point.

Still Mathison says, according to Sola Scriptura, again, the Evangelical form that he rejects, that someone, the final authority, is each individual.

So ultimately there are as many final authorities as there are human interpreters.

That's pretty good, like that's a pretty solid critique, that if your reading of scripture is the final authority, and you can reject the church anytime it disagrees with your reading of scripture, you are putting every individual in this level above the Pope, above ecumenical councils, above any other authority on earth, and every individual is gonna go their own way.

But here's the kicker.

Mathison is still a Protestant, and so he still doesn't believe that the church is infallible.

And so this leads to this really bizarre result where he basically is gonna argue you have to submit yourself to the authority of the church unless you think the church is wrong.

Because in his view, the church can be wrong.

He says it like this, he says, It has to be emphasized that the fallibility of the church does not render her authority invalid.

Like any human mother, she need not be perfect to carry real authority.

And when this fallible church does err, it's her responsibility to correct herself according to the final and perfect standard of scripture.

But again, whose interpretation, right?

Use Mathison's own thinking here.

You might think the church has misinterpreted scripture, but by what authority are you going to say your interpretation is right and the church's is wrong?

For this reason, Brian Krause had a great article back in 2009 that I think of regularly whenever this topic comes up, and it comes up a lot, where he points out that Mathison's difference is without a real meaningful distinction, or a distinction without a difference, that's the expression.

Uh, that he ends up in the same place as the Evangelicals he's criticizing.

He's going to follow the church unless his personal interpretation of scripture is that the church is wrong, because he thinks sometimes the church is gonna get this stuff wrong.

So sometimes you might have to dissent, you might have to go into schism.

There's nothing in principle distinguishing his view from the view he's critiquing.

You can see this very concretely by asking one question, is it okay to reject an ecumenical council?

This is going to get directly to the issue we've got with William Lane Craig, because Craig's views, he knows, are contrary to an anathema in the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

Is that okay if you think the Ecumenical Council was wrong?

On the one hand, Mathison says, The authority of those who rule in the church is rejected by placing the decisions of an ecumenical council of ministers o- on the same level as the words of any individual.

That is, if you treat an ecumenical council the way you would a theologian, you're rejecting the authority of the council.

He says that's certainly the democratic way of doing things, it's as American as apple pie, but it is not Christian.

He argues that in such a view, orthodoxy and heresy just become individualistic and subjective determinations.

You and I disagree, so I think you're a heretic, you think I'm a heretic, eh, that's where we leave.

So, okay, this sounds really strong.

He's saying pretty explicitly, you can't, like it is not Christian to treat an ecumenical council in that way.

If that's true, then Craig is in the wrong, he should not reject the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

So too Gavin Ortlund is wrong, he shouldn't reject the Seventh Ecumenical Council on the veneration of icons.

So too David Bentley Hart, who I quoted earlier, is wrong when he rejects the Fifth Ecumenical Council and its condemnation of origin.

Mathison goes on to say, If the ecumenical creeds have no real authority, then it cannot be of a major con- any major consequence if a person decides to reject some or all of the doctrines of these creeds, including the Trinity and the deity of Christ.

Now, you'll notice even while affirming the Trinity on paper, William Lane Craig functionally undermines the Trinity through his so-called social Trinitarian model.

He's doing the thing that Mathison is saying this is a logical endpoint of thinking that you can overrule a council.

Because why not overrule the First Ecumenical Council if you can overrule the Fifth, the Sixth, the Seventh?

If the individual, he goes on to say, judges the Trinity to be an unbiblical doctrine, then for him it is false.

No other authority exists to correct him outside of his own interpretation of scripture.

This is precisely why, what he calls Sola Scriptura, inevitably results in radical relativism and subjectivity.

Each man decides for himself what the essential doctrines of Christianity are.

Each man creates his own creed from scratch, and concepts such as orthodoxy and heresy become completely obsolete.

The concept of Christianity itself becomes obsolete.

Like, we can't even speak of Christianity in any meaningful sense, 'cause it doesn't have a meaningful objective definition anymore.

Instead, by reducing Christianity to relativism and subjectivity, it reduces Christianity to irrationalism, and ultimately nonsense.

And I will add my own testimony here.

If I say Protestants believe X, invariably I'll have Protestants jump in the comments to say, Not all Protestants believe that.

True.

I try to word that very carefully.

But there should be a warning, like, hey, if we don't actually agree on any doctrines seemingly , like if there are no really clear distinctly Protestant doctrines that we all agree on That looks like we don't have a meaningful objective definition.

And if that's true of one wing of Christianity, what are we doing to Christianity as a whole?

Like if we can't say Christians believe X, Y, Z, even on something as basic as Christology, Trinitarian theology, the nature of God, what are we doing here?

So Mathison is great on all these points, but look, here's the kicker again.

He quotes John Calvin favorably.

Mathison is a Calvinist, and he quotes John Calvin favorably as saying that the church fathers and ecumenical councils are of authority only insofar as they accord with the rule of God.

And he seems completely oblivious that he's completely undermined his own point.

Because if you say you have to agree with ecumenical councils even when they're saying something you don't agree with, but then you add unless you think they're wrong, you've completely eviscerated your entire principle because of course William Lane Craig thinks that the Sixth Ecumenical Council is wrong.

Of course Gavin Ortlund thinks the Seventh Ecumenical Council is wrong.

Of course David Bentley Hart thinks the Fifth Ecumenical Council is wrong.

All three of those guys are very smart and can give you good reasons why they reject ecumenical councils.

So too can all the heretics who deny the Trinity and any number of other things.

If the standard is the church is authoritative if it agrees with the rule of the Word, that sounds great until you remember, and I'm going to quote Mathison here, All appeals to scripture are appeals to interpretations of scripture.

What you're really doing is not saying scripture is above the ecumenical council.

What you're really saying is, My reading of scripture is more authoritative than the ecumenical council's reading of scripture.

Because the ecumenical councils are never saying, We reject scripture and want to do this other non-scriptural thing.

That is not what's happening.

They're interpreting scripture and it just doesn't match your interpretation.

So one of you is wrong.

And if you think that it even could be the council, then you have theological anarchy in which every single person is free to make that same obscene arrogant move of elevating themselves above the whole church, above tradition, above the Holy Spirit, above the ecumenical councils in this way that leads to total chaos.

And again, I'll return to the very words here of William Lane Craig, because if you listen with this understanding, I want to play this part of the clip again because he starts off by talking about how important it is to respect the ancient councils and all of this, and tradition and the rest, unless, and he's doing the exact same move that Keith Mathison is doing, and that so many Protestants do, even while they think they're being docile to the church, to tradition, to authority, to councils and creeds.

So here is Craig in his own words again.

I think that we should be reluctant to challenge doctrines which have for centuries been held by the majority of Christian theologians.

Um, we shouldn't do that unless we're pretty sure that the tradition has somehow erred or gone wrong.

So like everyone else who wants to affirm a heretical Christology and a heretical Trinitarian theology, he can say, I agree with the church unless it has gone wrong.

I agree with tradition unless it has gone wrong.

I agree with the great ecumenical councils unless they have gone wrong.

And then when you want to dissent, when you want to disagree, you just say, Well, my reading of scripture.

And sure enough, that's the exact move that William Lane Craig makes.

Scripture alone is our ultimate authority for Christian doctrine.

And so no matter how old, no matter how widespread a particular ecclesiastical tradition may be, if it contradicts scripture, then I think we are justified in rejecting it.

And I would say that that is the case with regard to these strong doctrines of immutability, simplicity, and impassibility.

In the comments on that video, you have people saying, Yeah, I reject the perpetual virginity of Mary, even though I know it's a very ancient doctrine because I don't think it's biblically supported.

And then a few comments below that, someone saying, I reject the Trinity.

And lo and behold, same reasons.

They don't think it's biblical.

It turns out if you base your vision of Christianity on what you personally think is biblical with no deference to the church, and I mean deference not in areas where you agree, I mean deference in the areas where you disagree.

If you proceed with that, you will end up with theological anarchy.

And not just if you're wicked, not just if you're stupid.

I don't think that William Lane Craig is either wicked or stupid.

I think he is using the best tools he has at his disposal.

He's using sola Scriptura.

He's applying it rigorously.

He has spent more time researching these issues than probably anyone watching this video, myself included.

And without the guidance of the church, he has come to heretical conclusions on the most important aspects of who God is, who Jesus Christ is.

And that to me is extremely tragic and extremely telling.

I don't see how someone can believe in view of William Lane Craig's failures, despite his apparent best efforts, that they're going to succeed where he has failed.

I look forward in the comments to any of you who want to rush in where angels fear to tread.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmair.

May God bless you.