Jay Dyer with Sam Shamoun: Why is Calvinism WRONG!

0:00A vacation rental shouldn't come with surprises. It should come with Verbo Care and 24-7 Life Support. If the hot tub's broken? That's a Verbo Care thing. If my teenager starts calling me Leslie! That's a family thing, Leslie. Verbo Care and 24-7 Life Support. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See Verbo.com slash trust for details. Book a loved by guest property with Verbo and you get a top-rated vacation rental that's love for all the right reasons. Like being in a great location or having great amenities. Ugh, I love my Verbo for the view. Good reason. Ooh, I'm the sauna. Sweet. Another good reason. And that it's one of those goods on us with the hot rock thing? Ugh, love a good hot rock thing. Fancy. That's also a reason. Don't worry about surprises. Book a Verbo you'll love with the love by guest filter. If you know, you Verbo. There was a period, yeah, in my life, I think, from age 19 to 22, roughly, where I was a very serious Calvinist, so I tended a truly reformed a TR church,

1:00that is a church that holds to the Westminster Confession, which is the classic kind of Presbyterian Calvinist confession of faith. And I did do a year at what used to be bonds in seminary. So Dr. Greg Bondson had his own kind of, I guess you'd call it a seminary that was kind of attached to the Southern California Center for Christian Studies. He was already passed away, so I never knew Greg Bondson or anything like that, but I had studied under several people that he taught, basically. So you're going to have to forgive me. This is my third podcast today. So I'm a little bit tired, but I'm going to be able to power through this tonight. So anyway, the point being is that I have a good understanding of Calvinism. I took it very seriously. I still have all my Calvin's commentaries, still have a couple shelves, full shelves of reformed theology. So I can speak to it with the intention of trying to give it

2:02the most appropriate, accurate interpretation. So my goal here is not to straw man a bunch of Calvinist positions because I know what it's like to be a Calvinist or a Roman Catholic and have your positions not treated fairly. Unfortunately, though, the only way really for me to approach the question of tulip and the Calvinist paradigm is to approach it from somewhat of a philosophical theology. And that's because the root error of the problems in Calvinism aren't principally about the interpretation or exegesis of this or that verse. Certainly the verses of text matter. I'm not trying to downplay scripture. I'm not denying scripture. Or anything like that. I'm just saying that for an orthodox person or for that matter for Roman Catholic, who believes the first thousand years of Christianity, there's a different paradigm, a different ethos, a milieu by which scripture will be interpreted. So I'm not denying that the scripture can be read

3:05and interpreted by an individual, but that there's a different matrix or paradigm by which these texts will have their holistic meaning. And so for example, for an orthodox person or for a Roman Catholic, the paradigm will include the ecumenical councils, the teachings of the fathers, the lives of the saints, the liturgy. All of those things will inform and go into the approach that any individual will have to any specific verse or text scripture. Likewise, I think even Calvinists kind of understand this in principle because Calvinists have the idea that the scriptures are interpreted holistically or canonically, right? The whole of scripture is when interprets any specific section or verse, right? Or a piece of scripture. So we agree in principle that yeah, there's of course the New Testament, the Holy Old, the Turbo to New, et cetera. And likewise for us, there's also additional things that because of our paradigm and presubesitions

4:06about the nature of the church, what Pentecost means, the guidance of the Holy Spirit of the church throughout history that allows us to, you know, not be willing to say that the church apostatized at a certain point, or that significant theological errors crept into the ecumenical councils, right? So because we have a different paradigm and view of the church, we're not going to admit the paradigm and view of the church that Calvinists or the West Virginia confession has, right? So it would say something like even though God might work in a way through councils, ecumenical councils and church fathers, et cetera, all can make mistakes even significant theological mistakes, right? That's the position of the West Virginia confession that the councils might be helpful, but they're not guided or infallible or not the word of the Holy Spirit, even though St. Athanasius himself says, it was the Holy Spirit that spoke at Nicaea. I know that obviously a Calvinist is not going to accept that.

5:08I'm just giving that the point that we really, as an orthodox person, I can't separate the biblical theology from the theology of the councils. And so in order to explain on a deeper level, the problems with tulip, it's really not possible to do this without going into some of the nuances behind the philosophical terminology that becomes normative for the Trinity and Christology and anthropology. So with all that said, I think that if we want to talk about tulip, what we have to think about first is, what is tulip? Why is this kind of the key linchpin upon which Calvinism hinges? And how is it really a denial ultimately of the Trinity and the incarnation and Christology? So this is really the key linchpin of why it's wrong. It's not wrong because why just don't like a mean God?

6:10Or I think that that's not fair, right? Those are not good reasons to ultimately reject Calvinism. And this discussion is not going to be about just battling between will you throw out that verse, I'll throw this verse at you. Well, you got a particular election verse. Well, I got a verse that says Jesus came for everybody. Certainly those texts are important and they matter. But I want Calvinists to understand that you can't do trinitarian theology, you can't do Christology and anthropology and ultimately even eschatology and ecclesiology without the correct order of theology. So the first term is orthothology, the order of theology. What is the starting point for our systematic theology that we're going to do? And is that going to impact or affect the rest of our theology? Now Calvinist theology typically believes that you kind of start, I'm just going to say, I'm not saying that there aren't Calvinist theologians that won't talk about the trinity or that they won't put that first in their block

7:10or in their systematic theology. But the presuppositions of satireology dominate. That's my point here. So the first big difference is that when we look at tulip and we're going to go through each of these, they're going to start with the assumptions of what justification is, what righteousness of God is, what all of these things mean, what merit the covenant works, all these Calvinist ideas, that will be the starting point for them. Romans is the starting point of the biblical theology. And then everything else is kind of an afterthought or kind of tacked on later. Again, I'm not saying that Calvinists don't believe in the trinity or they don't affirm the deed of Christ or anything like that. It's rather that the reason that orthodoxy doesn't accept the Calvinist's paradigm is not because they don't want to be biblical or they're unbiblical or they're just follow the traditions of man. It's because there's two different paradigms that start with very fundamentally different approaches to the trinity, Christology, and etopology.

8:11So for example, I dug this one up here, this classic text from James White, which I'm going to be doing a stream or two in the next week where I'm going to really deconstruct a lot of James White's positions. And I don't know if he still believes every single point that he made in this book many years ago. I bought it back when I was a Calvinist. I read this book back in 2002, somewhere in there, three. And what we find as James White lays out his approach to the trinity is a lack of nuance and confusion about things that the church fathers hammer out. So I'm just pointing out that this book vindicates once again, the kind of critique that you're going to hear me give tonight. And you're going to see this later this week as we deconstruct this very book. And because Calvinists just simply typically aren't aware of a lot of the depth in terms of the theology that took place in the seven councils

9:11relating to the trinity and Christology, they really just kind of assume that, oh, yeah, I believe what Athanasius believed. I believe what Calcidon says, sure, yeah, I believe all those things. But they don't actually know what the disputes are and the precision that comes out of the terms of the councils. So that's what we want to look at, which is that when we talk about tulip, it's obviously total to poverty. Total to poverty is the idea that that's the tea, that man does not have the ability in his own volition or power to move himself towards God. The doctrine of the fall and Calvinism is that man so lost the grace that he had in Eden that he's basically in a spiritually dead state. So he's a natural man. And Calvinists do give sort of a kind of verbal credence to the doctrine of free will, such that they don't deny that their beings don't make choices.

10:14There's something like that, right? But ultimately, the willing of man is just really subsumed under the divine decree. And as we get into some of the nuances here, we're going to say that that's going to be problematic. And it's going to be directly connected to a lot of the mistakes that Calvinism just defaulted to inheriting from the Western Latin, Augustinian tradition. And so Calvinism will kind of represent a further consolidation of Augustinian theology, even though Augustin himself obviously was not a Calvinist and did not believe in what a rejected tulip and these ideas. So total of poverty, again, is not the idea that man is completely evil or some sort of mannequin view, even though you could critique it that way, because Luther has his famous book, The Bondage of the Will, where Luther goes really far and says basically

11:14that your man is an ass, a donkey, that's either ridden by God or the no. And so Luther's just completely sort of out there when it comes to almost a mannequin doctrine of duality here and dialectical tension, we would say. Calvin doesn't say or use that kind of language. I think Calvin wants to be a little more reserved and still give a verbal credence to the notion of volition and choice. But Calvin certainly believes that merit or works. A vacation rental shouldn't come with surprises. It should come with verbal care and 24, seven life support. If the hot tub's broken, that's a verbal care thing. If my teenager starts calling me Leslie, that's a family thing Leslie. Verbal care and 24, seven life support. If you know, you're verbo, term supply, seeverbo.com slash trust for details. With the Ameth's gold card, you can earn four times points at US supermarkets because the best nights in start with the grocery run that makes it happen. Apply for the gold card at americanexpress.com slash

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13:15along the lines of Calvinistic theology from the institutes that man has no ability within himself to move himself, to give himself a disposition, to approach faith, to attain faith, or to cause himself to repent. So it adopts what will be called monogism. And monogism is an outworking of total property, which ironically comes out of disputes relating to the fifth and sixth council about mono-energism. That in conversion, there's only one energy at work. And that is the divine energy, in a sense, effectively supplanting or effectively moving the human will. And Aquinas, he kind of has a similar view that the human will is effectively caused by the divine will to go in the direction that the divine wants. And so given that, there is the, and you'll notice that in tulip,

14:16where each one of the ideas is a logical, it's followed through in a logical chain, you could say, from the previous one. So because total property is the case, because man in the Garden of Eden did not fulfill what many Calvinists believe is the covenant of works, which is actually going to be really problematic as we will see in a moment. Because man didn't fulfill the covenant of works, somebody's got to come and keep the law. Somebody's got to check off these marks. And then when they marit that, when they fulfill that covenant of works, then that marited status can be attributed to the bank accounts of the people that opt into that system. Now, unconditional election is the you. That's the next point here. And this is the idea that election is purely on the basis of what they would Calvinists would say is the free grace of God. That there was nothing in the creature that prompted God to make the choice to pick a fixed number of elect

15:19or predestined out of the mass, damnata, that's the Augustinian phrase, the mass of the dam, there's the human, the human race is like a big ball of the damned. And essentially God is saying, these people for my own goodwill and purposes, these individuals, this select number are the elect and they will infallibly, effectively be saved. And nothing will shake that decree or change that divine, well, just divine decree, right? Nothing, the willing of the creature can't affect or change that. And so there is no notion then, as we're gonna see a little bit, that secondary causation plays any role in this. Your synergy that you would, according to a Calvinist, engage in to have sanctification, right? Sanctification for Calvinists, they will admit that there is synergy, but that synergy has nothing to do with the legal status that you're put into by virtue of justification

16:22by faith alone, so Lafide, right? So that you get that theoretical bank account, a credit that righteousness put into your account. So you, as an individual, remember, are filthy rags. You are the menstrual rags that Isaiah talks about and that is taken in an absolutist sense that the heart that you have, right, is always at all times essentially willing the bad, willing evil. You might through what they call common grace do a good natural act here or there, right? But even those are still tainted with sin and even after you're regenerated, which we'll talk about in a minute, even after that, even as you are in the Calvinist system progressing in sanctification through synergy, through doing good works, even all of that is still filthy rags. It's still tainted. So unconditional election, as we said, is that before the foundation of the world decree, on the part of God to pick out the ones that are elect.

17:25And when it comes to the non-elect, there's minutia disputes between various Calvinists and Puritans and so forth, as to pre-Lapsarian and post-Lapsarian, and did God decree the damnation of the reprobate in an equal double predestination? Or is there a kind of, we're not gonna get into that because that's an inter-Calvinistic type of dispute. But just for the purpose of understanding tulip, that's what we see the doctrine of election means. And that's why the Calvinist view of election will necessarily affect the doctrine of the church. Ecclesiology will necessarily be an invisible church. That's the real essential true church. At any point in church history, just the unknown elect, not only to God, and they will persevere because as we'll see the pee in the tulip, it will be the gift of perseverance.

18:26Now, before we get to that though, part of this is the idea that, well, now wait a minute. What about Jesus' death? Didn't Jesus die for everybody? How is that gonna be the case? If there's an unconditional fixed number of the elect, that is not everybody. Well, that's where limited atonement comes in, the L, which is that when Jesus died on the cross, this death was ultimately for only that unconditionally elected fixed number. Okay. And that's a logical outworking of this doctrine because if the atonement is efficacious, then the atonement can't be for the reprimand. Right? There's no reason for, it just doesn't make sense, right? Because if the atonement is what is directly connected to, the basis for the justification, for the imputation of the theoretical bank account righteousness that's given to you, that's the basis of justification. Then the atonement can't be based on anyone's works,

19:26anyone's free will, anyone's movement of will, anyone's merits except for Christ, right? So the atonement does not have, and this is gonna be key to understanding why this is so crystallologically incorrect, that the atonement does not have any recapitulation effect or any cosmic effect that has nothing to do with the realm of the dead. I mean, I said, what do you mean the realm of the dead? Well, we're gonna see that the doctrine of the harrowing of Hades is very important to Orthodox theology. And not just Orthodox theology, it's very important to the theology, the first thousand years of Christianity. And this is a doctrine that Peter talks about, right? Peter talks about Jesus going and preaching to the spirits in prison. That's the word that's used as Tartarus, the underworld, Hades. The Old Testament is full of references to Shio and Hades as a place, a dwelling place of the righteous dead and the unrighteous.

20:27Different places, different areas of Hades, Jesus talks about Abraham's bosom, where the righteous man that died is there and then the unrighteous man, there's a chasm that separates them, but they're both in the realm of the dead Hades. So Hades is not just damnation. It's the realm of the dead. In many of the Psalms, David talks about the descent of Christ into Hades. We all know, hopefully, that those Psalms are prophetic Psalms. But if they're prophetic Psalms, then how come so many of them talk about the Messiah? When he dies, he's persecuted, he knows the pattern, there's a repeating pattern in many, many of those Messianic Psalms and many, many Psalms are Messianic, not just a couple of them, not just five or whatever. Many of them, almost all of them, have reference to Christ. David speaking in the spirit of Christ, the New Testament says, prophesied of the Messiah and his sufferings and his death and his descent into Hades and his resurrection and his ascension and transfiguration. So, limited atonement as we're gonna see

21:30is gonna be principally problematic when we come to this abundantly clear New Testament doctrine of recapitulation. And in fact, probably a lot of Calvinists in the audience, they probably never heard of this doctrine. What recapitulation? We talk about recapitulation. What is that? Cosmic scope of Christ's redemption sounds like universalism. Well, we're gonna see that it's not universalism. There is a universal scope, but it's not universalism. And this is where some of those distinctions are gonna play an important role in this theology. The limited atonement doctrine then has a necessary logical connection to the doctrine of irresistible grace. Irresistible grace is not the idea that fallen men never resist God, right, in the Calvinist view. No, rather, the Calvinist view is that fallen men always resist God. Fallen men are basically in a continual, dispositional state of always doing something against God, rebelling against God, right?

22:31So the man that's the natural man, the man of the flesh, right? Romans two, Romans three, talking about paganism, talking about one, two, and three, talking about the fall, talking about fallen man. These texts are taken to be and to me, well, yeah, exactly. See, note, you don't even move your will. You can't even move your will. Unless there's a irresistible grace that pulls you, that directs you, that causes you efficaciously to believe, to come to God. And again, it's mono-energism. There's one energy, the divine energy. Here's the human inner, you're willing, things, no. God takes over and steers you. That's what it means for the grace to be irresistible. It is mono-energism and guess what? It's gonna be a big problem when we come to the six council especially and the disputes that are had in regard to Christ's fully human nature,

23:33the nature that he has in common with all of us and how we're saved. Because if we start denying the natural energy that humans possess, the natural created energy, then we're gonna have serious, Christological problems. And that's precisely what happens in the disputes at the six council. So there's actually proto-Calvinists, proto-theological debates that will be Calvinistic centuries before John Calvin, centuries before the reformers. Now I know Calvin should say, well, maybe they were right, just because some council somewhere said so and so. Yeah, I understand you don't believe that the six council was correct, even though by the way, a lot of Calvinists claimed to believe the six council, which I don't know how they think that, but they will say to themselves that I don't have a problem rejecting or accepting

24:35any of these councils just based on whatever I see in the scriptures or whatever. Well, it's not that easy, right? You can't get around this issue because the debates that are being had at the six council, as we'll see, about Christology and Anthropology are all based on actually text of scripture. And we're gonna see this here in a minute when I point out certain texts from that council. The debate gets really nuanced. And I wish that it was all simple, but it's not. It's really nuanced. It does require some philosophical discussion because guess what? A lot of that's actually in the New Testament. The energy's doctrine. It's in the New Testament. And it's not just divine inner gay, yeah, right? What Paul talks about in First Corinthians when he's talking about the gifts of the spirit he calls them the energies of the Holy Spirit. When the apocalypse talks about the seven spirits before God's throne, does the Holy Spirit have seven, is there seven hypostasis?

25:35No, what are the seven spirits? Well, Isaiah talks about the seven spirits of God, the wisdom, the knowledge, right? Of the Messiah, those are Messianic prophecies talking about the Holy Spirit. There's seven of them. Does anybody think God's knowledge is created? No, of course not. But that's listed as one of those seven spirits. So the apocalypse talking about the seven spirits of God, classic St. Gregory Palomas argument for the energies. Those are uncreated energies that are really different things. They really are seven. They're not fake seven. They're really seven. It's not a created effect. God's knowledge is uncreated. And it's different from God's wisdom. That's why they're seven. Those things are going to be communicated as the fifth council will say. And the six, they're both going to talk about this to the humanity that Christ assumed. So you start to see that, wait a minute. These attributes, these powers, these energies, this glory, this immortality that the Son of God possesses.

26:37He actually gives a participation to his human nature that he assumed in these energies. Then we're going to start to realize that, wait a minute. So Christology is going to be the model, the paradigm for satireology. This is the biggest thing I want to stress right away, even though you might not, what I'm saying, might sound a little abstract, and might sound a little philosophical, the difference here between the Calvinist view and the Orthodox view is that we have a different paradigm of how to begin the theology, or what I talked about, the ortho theology, the order of theology. It begins with trinitarian theology, the distinction is between nature and person and trinity. And then what flows from that in terms of Christology because Christology will reflectively be based on the distinctions between nature and person and the trinity, because it's one of the Holy Trinity who becomes incarnate. So naturally that's going to impact the Christology that we have.

27:40And that's why the, especially fourth, fifth and sixth councils really get into the nuances of, what does it mean, for example, when Christ is praying, let the cut pass from me? That's a manifestation of the real human energy and desire that he has to not die, which, say, Maximus will call a blameless passion. And that's because he's fully man, he's fully human. But we see Christ doing things at times that, in some texts referred to or referenced the human nature, and other times there's things that shine a light on, you could say the divinity, the divine power, walking on water, right? Other times when Jesus weeps, right? And as everybody probably knows, St. Cyril calls this a Communicoscio idiomathum. But we can't stop with Cyril and the fourth council because in order to understand the Communicoscio idiomathum, we have to understand that the communication is not one of name.

28:41Only. It's a real participation of both of the natures in one another. They interpenetrate one another. And in classic Christology, the word parahesis originally is used of Christology. It doesn't begin as a trinitarian term. It's used eventually to explain, for example, the divine essence, fully dwelling and being in, existing in, the father, as it is in the sun, without diminishing, without partition, without separation or division. But originally parahesis and dwelling is a term that's describing the interpenetration of the two natures in Christ. But the sixth council is gonna get into the energies in Christ. And that's why it's gonna be very important to understand that one of the essential components that human nature must have to be human nature is will and energy, the ability to make choices,

29:43to do things, to be a cause in the world, an agent of cause. And this is where ultimately to make things simple, the distinction between nature and person, both in the Trinity and in Christ and in man, humans us, will be a question of the what, the nature? That's what I have as a human being. And the who answering the question of hypostasis or person, the agent. I'm an agent, I'm an individual who is J, but I share with all of you common human nature. I uniquely instantiate human nature as the person J, hypostasis J, the subject J. But in terms of having human nature, I have the exact same human nature you have and we have the exact same human nature Jesus had, exactly the same. There's one important difference though, which is that Christ is not a created hypostasis. His personhood, the subject that is Jesus

30:45is from all eternity, the second person of the Godhead. And that will be the debated Ephesus between Cyril and the storyus who taught a dual subject, Christology. And that will be the problem that we're gonna notice in Calvinism, when we get to the doctrine of the Atonement and what happens at the cross, that's gonna be very important for the reputation, my response to a lot of these arguments and points in tulip, which we'll get to that in a moment. I've got a couple articles pulled up here, which you can go reference and read on your own. I'm not gonna read all these articles, but we're gonna look at the reform traditions view of what exactly is going on on the cross. And that's gonna be a big part of this argument. I really hope you get that part. That'll probably be the most important part of this argument tonight. You don't understand all the jargon and the terminology that's okay. As long as you get that point, when we go through some of the classic reform traditions view of what exactly happened on the cross, because we're gonna see that you're gonna be faced with a dilemma, you either have to be an historian

31:48or you have to be anti-trenetarian. And either of those options is gonna be a death blow, ultimately to Calvinism being the true version of Christianity, the true religion, whatever. So that was about rewind, I got way up course, but there's this little grace. Obviously, perseverance of the saints is another logical outworking of the previous TULI. And this is just the idea that the elect, those unconditionally elect for whom Christ died, who are given a irresistible grace to come to faith and regeneration and repentance and faith are all gifts, right? They're all, if efficacious gifts of the Holy Spirit, none of them are things that you do or your works in this view. The last one, again, the P is that in order to ensure the election of that fixed number, Christ effectively gives them the grace

32:48and gives them the gift of perseverance, such that they die in the faith and this also gets debated in Calvinism. Does that mean that you had to actually believe in justification by faith alone? Who knows Calvinists? We don't know. In other words, can you believe in baptism regeneration or is that a work? And this is why there's Calvinists and Lutherans and why they don't like each other. And historically, they fought each other, okay? I don't know, right? You can go debate that amongst the Calvinists and the Lutherans, but it gets even worse because, wait a minute, do I also have to believe Calvinism in order to avoid believing in works, you see? Because some Calvinists, some TR, they're gonna say that too. So ironically, actually, the doctrine of justification by faith alone, we come to find out is not that clear of a doctrine. It actually becomes a scholastic doctrine

33:48that centuries of Protestants are having to debate. So if you wanna have the idea that, well, I don't really care about all this, church father terminology of hypostasis and Uzzi, who cares about it? I just believe justification by faith alone. Really? Well, justification by faith alone actually is a pretty complicated disputed doctrine. Do I have to believe in Christ? Or is it I have to believe in justification by faith alone to be justified by faith alone, you see? That's an actual dispute here. And I'm just pointing that out to note that if your objection is that this is too academic or scholastic, that's a problem within Calvinism too, right? So we're not gonna get away from the issues by not looking at the theology and the scholastic debates. Unfortunately, that's just part of what happens. So perseverance of the saints is that doctrine that these elect will efficaciously be brought to salvation. They will not die outside of the faith. They will persevere efficaciously in faith by grace of God.

34:53And thus, all of the predestined elect will be saved. The reprobate will infallibly and efficaciously be damned. And most Calvinists will say yes, they were created for that purpose. And that's the point of many biblical texts. Let's say that God created this in that poor destruction. So now let's go back then and let's see the response to this. So I can't, I mean, we could go through texts, and I'm not opposed to doing that, but this approach that I'm telling you is based on a different Christology. So for us, Christology, based on triant theology, is what determines how we're gonna read a lot of texts. Let me give an example. What about Ephesians? Doesn't Ephesians clearly teach predestination? Doesn't Ephesians just function as this classic text, this classic letter that's gonna prove Calvinism? How could you disagree that Ephesians teaches predestination?

35:53Well, no, wait a minute. Who is Ephesians written to? Well, we always know Protestants always wanna be concerned with the immediate grammatical historical audience, right? Grammatical historical interpretation. Who is the immediate audience? The church at Ephesus. Oh, wait, what? The church at Ephesus, yeah. So wait a minute, the church at Ephesus, which is a visible community, or is the letter written to the elect? Now Paul says the elect in Christ in Ephesus predestined, right, yeah. But when we try to be consistent with tulip, the immediate thing that we have to do as a presubposition is kind of said, well, yeah, it's written to a visible church, but really it's written to the elect. It's only written, ultimately, because they're the only ones that read it and grasp it because it takes grace to understand the scriptures. And only the elect ultimately have efficacious grace

36:54by regeneration to understand the scriptures. So really Paul's writing his letter only to the predestined elect. And this is where immediately, well, so we have the visible invisible split in ecclesiology, fundamentalicalvanism. The church, the body of Christ, isn't really that visible thing. You could say there's a visible institution, but that's a big failure. It's fractured into thousands of cults and sects. It would spend centuries in darkness of rummish popery. It's a big failure, basically, until we had the reformers to come and purify it. But wait a minute. So you're saying that amongst this church of history, that was a big failure, basically, full of rummish popery superstitions, stupidity, heresy everywhere, basically. There was this invisible group amongst them. Yes, exactly. Okay.

37:55But Paul's epistle isn't written to a visible church in Ephesus or it is. It is. Okay. So but Paul is calling the visible church, the elect, you see. And this is precisely why nobody except the donatists before Calvin preferred this doctrine of invisible church. Do you think Augustine believed, we're not gusting their believing this. He was a bishop in the Catholic church. He did not believe any of that stuff. Okay. He taught baptismal regeneration. He taught the real presence. Now I know you don't care. Well, so what he's a man. Yeah, but my point is that wait a minute. So the one guy that you think you pull out of history to say, he's the proto-Calvinist actually teaches a works based doctrine. He talks about works all through his works as necessary. He teaches baptismal regeneration. He teaches all of these things that you also think are heretical.

39:00I mean, that fundamentally is not going to work for you as my point. Okay. Now, where were the other proponents of this doctrine anywhere in that first several centuries, right? And the point here is just to note that you might theoretically think that you can talk about the invisible church. And you can just, I don't really care what all these church fathers do. But wait a minute. You have to also say that the invisible church is existing in these heterodox, Roman, popish, Catholic orthodox apostate groups. And so where was anybody teaching this there? They weren't. Oh, okay. Well, they just didn't know. They didn't. So were they in darkness? Or did they have the light? Were they regenerated? So how are centuries of people believing in baptismal regeneration and all these things that you think are superstition, idolatry and apostasy? How are any of them members of the invisible church when they didn't have this doctrine? Okay.

40:00Have you read Alistair McGrath's book? Right. Famous Protestant scholar. He writes Eusticia Day, arguing that nobody before Luther has this doctrine of a nominalistic justification by faith alone. That's a theoretical bank account where you have the credit put into your account based on a notional idea of faith. So I'm just pointing out that immediately there's a textual assumption and presubesition that goes into when a Calvinist approaches the text. He has to kind of ultimately say, this isn't really written for the visible church. It's written for the elect. They're the only ones that are going to believe it and understand it. And the church is a mixed group. And so all of those other people aren't really the church. But this is going to start to cause the problems. Wait a minute. When Paul's talking about the body of Christ, especially when he makes these

41:01multiple chapter analogies to the body of Christ, you're the hands, you're the eyes. Is that invisible? Is the body of Christ invisible? The body of Christ invisible. So fundamentally, we're going to see over and over Calvinism is Nestorian. It's going to be an historian. Why am I saying this? Because this is a Nestorian ecclesiology. It's going to be a Nestorian sacramentology because the grace of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit will be separated from the sacraments, separated from the church, the body, the divinity of Christ are going to be separated. There's this visible thing, but that's not the real church. And they had to do this because they had to number one,

42:03make it consistent with the predestination doctrine that they have. And also to grapple with the realities of church history, that when you go and read these people, who, by the way, determined the canon of Scripture, didn't teach this, didn't teach Sola Fidey. Uh oh. So a bunch of heretics, determined the canon of Scripture, but they didn't have the gospel. You see, now you start to wrote, this is getting ridiculous, but that is the Calvinist position. So let's get back to the first point. Let's go through these one by one. We're going to talk about total poverty. And there's really just no other way to do this other than to just talk about what you need to look at, what you need to read. And tonight, again, this is not going to be, it's going to be a little difficult, but just just trust me that being a person who was a Calvinist, the things that I'm telling you are the things that you want to read. You want to read these texts. You want to go to these things if you have access to them.

43:06Because this is the way to understand the problem here. So the first thing is that if we were to take any typical reformed theological work, any of the dogmatics on the Trinity, burkhoff, a hodge, Murray, or even something like Lane Brutum, or James White's little book, we're going to notice that this doesn't really have much of a connection to the actual disputes and development of explicating the Trinity. Now, they're going to say, think truth, some things that are right. I'm not saying that everybody's wrong on everything. But they don't get the importance of, for example, the distinction between nature and person. One of these big mistakes that you're going to find in a lot of Calvinistic writings is that when they default to the Augustinian doctrine of the mass damnata that everyone in Adam is damned, so Adam becomes this archetypal man in which all human beings already exist in Potentia,

44:10Adam sin as the federal head of men in Calvinist theology. Not only brings about the consequences of the fall, also the personal guilt is accrued to every single descendant automatically. And neither Orthodox theology nor Roman Catholic theology holds that, so that's a big distinction right away. And so the Calvinist view, and I know a lot of Calvinists are going to freak out when they hear this, the Calvinist view of man in the garden of Adam before the fall is actually the Pelagian view. I'm not joking, it really is. Pelagius and Calvin have the exact same view of man in the garden. And they both believe that the salvation of the descendants was contingent upon merit, works. Establishing and mariting and keeping the covenant of works according to John Murray,

45:12all these famous Calvinists, right? Westminster Confession talks about the covenant works. And since Adam failed at that, now the descendants are born into the state of the mass damnata. The basis for the mass damnata doctrine, which is essentially, that's the Augustinian view, which is just the same as total property. Well, it's not the exact, Augustin doesn't believe in total property, but the Calvinist explication of this agrees that everybody is in this damned mass. And one of the consequences of this is that they confuse person and nature, not just in the Trinity, but also in humans. And for Orthodox theology, there's no way to explain this or give this rebuttal meaning without that fundamental thing. So the first thing you want to understand is that there's a distinction between nature and person. Where's this come from? Well, the capidotions are very important to Trinity.

46:14So when we get into the disputes after Athanasius with the Aryans, everybody knows about Nicae, although probably a lot of Calvinists don't know, that Nicae teaches that the Sun is eternally begotten from the Father to the extent and in the sense that everything that the Sun has, he has from the Father. That means that he is originate. He's not unoriginate in the ontological Trinity. He has an origin. The person of the Father is the origin of the Sun. That's literally what Nicae says. And I say that because Calvin does not believe that. Calvin rejects the eternal begetting of the Sun to mean it the way that Nicae and Athanasius teach it. Calvin believes that the Sun is allse. He is autotheos. He has existence of himself. That is not the Nicaean doctrine.

47:14That is not the capidotian doctrine which is confirmed at the next economic council. So, trinitarian theology, this is something that again many many Calvinists just don't really know about or go into. Trinitarian theology is capidotian. At Constantinople I, the Church affirms the capidotian theology of the monarchy of the Father, of the relations of origin, of hypostatic properties that distinguish the persons and that the Sun is the eternally generated Sun. And that his essence also is given to him by being generated from the Father. Everything that he has, the Sun, his person and his nature, come from the Father from whom he has eternally begotten. That's very important because Calvinists to my knowledge do not teach the monarchy of the Father. This is 101 in the doctrine of the

48:20capidotians. It's 101 at Constantinople 1. And there was this is so fundamental to capidotian theology and the second ecumenical council. When I was a Calvinist I didn't know this and I didn't read this stuff right. I just assumed well I believe the Trinity, yeah sure I believe about the Naces, yeah whatever. But this is crucial because not only is that the case, guess what the capidotians also include in that doctrine. The energies. Fundamental to St. Basil, read letter 234 is the doctrine of the energies. Basil says that the essence of God is unknown, the energies of God come down to us. So the energy's doctrine, the Father is the monarchy, the soul calls and source in the Godhead. The distinction of the persons by their relation to the origin point of the Father and by hypostatic properties. The doctrine of the energies is all taught by the capidotians and Constantinople 1 says that you have to interpret Constantinople 1 according to the capidotian

49:24teaching. So I know that Calvinists, I don't really care what men say, I don't care what men say. Okay, but you do care what men say because you claim to believe Nicaea and Trinitarian theology didn't stop at Athanasius and Nicaea. Okay, the next council is the Trinitarian council. And St. Gregory of Nista is the father of Paraxalans in terms of theology of that council as well as Basil and as well as Gregory Nazia and they all have voluminous writings about the Trinity and those voluminous writings all, all three of them, teach a distinction between essence and energy and they teach the Eastern model, the Orthodox model of the Trinity. They do not teach Philly Oakway for one. You can read Edward Sashinsky's book, Philly Oakway, the classic text. Sashinsky says capidotians don't teach double eternal hypostatic source of the spirit. So right away we're starting

50:25to notice, wait a minute, there's different models going on here of the Trinity. And this is going to be important because I'm telling you this is going to affect the doctrine of grace, the doctrine of anthropology, the doctrine of satiriology and ecclesiology and sacramentology that we have and why this doctrine, this view, this two of you is false and ultimately blasphemous and ultimately leads to the story of Nazism and anti-Trinitarianism. So human nature is created in the image of the Trinity we would say and in the fall man didn't lose his natural powers and faculties. So we know as I think Calvin has sort of agreed with this, there's two types of things that exist. There's the uncreated and the created. Created things however have natures that God gives them and you say well what Calvinists doesn't believe that created things have natures. Oh actually, they don't because many Calvinists are nominalists and they believe that things don't actually have

51:30natures that kind of subsists or that they pass on or that they have the power to affect secondary causes. No, actually it's just whatever God wills at any moment for that thing to be or to have. And God arbitrarily sort of can change it or do whatever he wants, right? That's theological volunteerism, that's almost occasionalism, right? And some Calvinists actually have affirmed Islamic-type doctrines of occasionalism. For example, I think Jonathan Evers, I'm going for memory, so you've got this is not correct and don't spur yell like you've got me. But if I recall, Jonathan Evers has an occasionalist view. He thinks that at every single moment God creates and then destroys the world and every second, every creates it and Edwards believes that because he thinks that if you give creatures the ability to be secondary causes, then you've taken away from the glory of God. That's the Islamic argument and doctrine. By the way, if you didn't know that and go listen to the debates of the Muslims, go listen to the Medevate with Az-Ra'r-R-Sheet,

52:32that's exactly what it's called creatures don't have causation. They don't do things. They can't cause things because if you say that, you're taken away from God's glory. So notice right away, so interesting parallels between Islam and Calvinism. Creatures don't have secondary causal power. Well, if they do have secondary causal power, what does that mean? How do we explain that? That's where the doctrine of energies comes in. For example, St. John Damascus, you've heard, I think Sam was recently quoting St. John Damas on several strengths. If you go to book three of on the Orthodox faith, go down to chapter 15. In that section, John Damascus will say, there's a distinction that we make between nature, person, will, energy, and effect. All those are distinct. Really distinct. Not nominally distinct, really distinct. Why? Because being made in the image of God, in the image of the Trinity, man has the ability to do things in the world and to cause things and to affect change. And man has his own created energy

53:38where it wise John Damascus arguing that that's his section about Christology. He's arguing about what's going on in Christ and Christ has a fully human nature. And guess what? There's actually a meaning to that. It's not just that he has a body. He has body, soul, mind, rational will, a reasonable soul, some of the church fathers said, to refute a pulmonaryism. Wait a minute. So Christ has fully human nature. And he has a rational soul. And he has a human will and energy proper to that human nature. Then a constituent component and faculty for human nature is to possess a will that can affect change and that has its own natural energy. Energy proceeds from the nature that has that power. That's our view. And that's what John Damascus is talking about there. And where do you think he got that? Did he get it from philosophers?

54:39No, he got it from the capidotions. Where the capidotions get the idea that energy signifies the nature that has that energy of that power. The bio. Okay, so this is not made up. This is all coming out of exegetical debates that these church fathers have in scriptural texts and passages. I don't have the time to go through all of the passages. But for example, if you want an example of this, I would say start with letter 38 of basil. Now that might actually be grugger of Nis's letter, but it's called St. Basil's letter 38. Letter 38 isn't a treatise basically about the distinction between nature and person. And basil applies this principle both to the Trinity and to man to humans. So just as there's a distinction between nature and person and God, so also humans bear the same distinction between nature and person. Just as God has His own natural will and faculty and energy and power to act to do,

55:46humans by virtue of being made in image of God also have the ability to will to act to do via their own natural energies that they possess because they have human nature. And in humans, in an analogy to the Trinity, not a one to one correspondence, an analogy to the Trinity, they have a distinction between the person and the nature that they possess. I am the person J. I am an instantiation of human nature. Bill Cosby is the person Bill Cosby. Between us both, we share the same nature. He's just as much fully human nature as I am. But I am uniquely the hypostasis or agent or subject J. He is uniquely the hypostasis or subject Bill Cosby, Hamshamoon, etc. But we all have the same human nature equally. There's no like 80% human and 50%. Everybody has human nature in the same degree in the same sense.

56:47Full human. And to have a full human nature also includes those other faculties, right? Body, soul, mind, will, rational soul, or will, and the energy proper to that nature to affect that action. So, nature, person will energy and the effect of that energy in trinitarian theology is directly taken and put into Christology in the Third and Fourth Council and in the Fifth and Sixth Council. And then it's also the same in anthropology in those councils for humans. So in other words, we have a revealed anthropology based on Christology. And that's something that when I was a Calvinist or I should say I became Roman Calvin when I was

57:49Roman Calvin and I was reading Orthodoxyology, this was something I never thought about. It's a revealed anthropology. That's interesting. And that's precisely because as many Orthodoxyologians elucidate like Father Floroski, the notion of person is a uniquely Christian category. There's nothing in the ancient world that is a perfect correspondence to the notion of person. It's a revealed idea because we are based on the revelation of the persons of God. When God says I am that I am in Exodus 3, he's not saying I'm an essence. I'm it. I am He. That's the argument of St. Gregory Pome. Yes, God possesses the supreme being. Yes, he's the highest being. Yes, he has the fullness of being. But God's hypostasis, the persons and the Trinity. They're not identical to the being of God. What does James White say? God is his being. God is his essence. James White teaches basically a, well, nowadays he's teaching something

58:53different because he's got this controversy going on with other Calvinists, for example, about what exactly divine simplicity is. Anyway, we're not getting into that tonight. We're getting into that later as I deal with James White this week. But so the first, again, distinction, nature and person, letter 38 of Basil, on the Holy Spirit, same basil, another work where he applies these principles to the person of the Holy Spirit. And he explains the energies of the Holy Spirit prove that he has the same nature as the Father and the Son. Because if he didn't have the same essence, he couldn't do the same energies or works or operations. So operation, Basil says, signifies nature or essence. And then Basil says, guess what is the same in humans? When Jesus does the works, the energies proper to the human nature, that proves that Jesus has a fully human nature. You understand that's in the New Testament, right? This is not philosophy making up stuff. The New Testament uses these terms, inner gay many times,

59:58to signify the operation proper to the nature that has that power. Human beings are not just instances of nature. If we were, we would be clones of Adam. Are we just an instance of a nature? No. We are also persons, which is a unique, theologically revealed category, all of the Trinity, that is more than just an instance or a a clone of nature. The Calvinist doctrine of accepting that a mass demnata makes mankind a ball of human nature. And the hypostasis does not have a unique existence for humans. That's the point. That's why, for them, they can't conceive of an individual mode of willing that has the ability to progress in God, to make a choice as a secondary cause, as a created cause.

1:01:03But I would just say, if God is all powerful, which is, why can't He create a world where beings have the ability to affect secondary causes? Now, some Calvinists say, well, I do believe that they're secondary cause. I have no problem. And many theological divine to believe that they're secondary cause. Okay. But the point here is that that applies to Christology. Because when we talk about the person of Christ, this is where it's going to get again, I'm sorry, it's going to get a little heavy. Christ is a divine person. His agency, his personhood is from all eternity, the second person of the Godhead. So when he assumed human nature, that nature that he assumed does not include a human person. There is no human person Jesus of Nazareth. Okay, that's what an historian thought. Because he thought that a person just has to be an individuated nature. No, it's not just an individuated nature. If a person was merely an

1:02:05individuated nature, when we apply that to the Trinity, what would we have? We would have three individuated natures, tri-theism. The Trinity is not three natures. It's three hypostasis, one nature. So the nature, person distinction, and the Trinity has to apply to human nature. Now, the next big point here is that human nature is not just instances of individuals. James White actually says in his book towards the end, human nature, human person is just strictly speaking an individual nature. No, it's not. And in the early disputes, particularly amongst the capidotions, particularly in Gregoravna Sza, and is accepted, the theology is accepted in the council. Human nature isn't just individual, it's also a universal thing. So we're not nominalists when

1:03:06it comes to human nature. Because human nature is universal, it's going to play, this is going to be a big thing. This is why there's a recapitulation. When Christ assumes human nature, he doesn't assume just his body, he also assumes the nature of all mankind in the sense that he's able to resurrect and recapitulate everything that Adam lost. Now, I know every Calvinist reads the text in 1 Corinthians 15, or Paul talks about, wait a minute, as an Adam all die, so in Christ, all will be made alive. And in Romans 8, the scope of the redemption is just as universal as the effects of Adam's fall. But did you notice that Romans 8 says that the whole universe is actually put under bondage because of Adam's fall, right? Now, wait a minute, so

1:04:09the scope of Christ's redemption is also cosmic in scope. As in Adam all die, who is that? As everybody, right? So in Christ, all will be made alive. Well, that's not everybody Calvinist, right? Oh, so wait a minute, Calvinist. If that's the case, why are the wicked resurrected? Why would a reprobate non-elect person be resurrected? Yeah, he has no connection to Christ. Why is he resurrected? Oh, God just wills it. He just wills it. Oh, okay, so then it's just whatever God arbitrarily wills, then the incarnation was an actually necessary. I think good. Could God just will everyone to be saved? I will everyone to be regenerated. So now we're back to theological volunteerism, determinism, nominalism. If you didn't know, there's a whole book on that Hikell Obermann's book on medieval nominalism. And what he shows there is that the reformers in order to have a lot of these philosophical

1:05:12presovicitions actually were borrowing from late medieval nominalism, Aachen and Bial, especially Luther. Now there's elements understanding Calvinists that are in Calvinism and in other Calvinists that are more realist. They will go on the other side of that dialect that can be influenced more by platonic ideas. I'm aware of that. I'm just pointing out that for the argumentation relating to theological volunteerism, which is connected to divine simplicity that the Calvinist default to from Rome, absolute, divine simplicity. That will be connected to a nominalist conception of things not having natures. It's just whatever God wills at the moment, and he can will it to be the opposite. That's why there's debates in the middle ages about could God just will the Virgin Mary to go to hell? She's in heaven, but could God just say, I'll change my mind. I know I will hurt her to be in heaven. By the way, I will now that evil is good and good is evil. If you are a Archimist and nominalist, a radical volunteerist,

1:06:18you would say that. And why do they say that? Oh, wait a minute. Is this starting to sound a little like Islam, isn't it? Right. It's whatever Allah wills at this moment. You see the connection there? Why would Islam say that kind of stuff? Well, because Islam is a radical unitarian predestinarian view. Of a way to say so is Calvinism. You see Calvinism has verbal credence for the Trinity, verbal credence for the work of Christ, but it is completely departed from the first thousand years of Christianity's interpretation of the meaning of the work of Christ. So the first book I'm going to recommend to you, if you want to get deeper into this and Calvinists love their books, they love to dive into the books, read, read, read, make your notes, is this book, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological controversy. I'm not advocating everything that John McGuuckin says. I'm just pointing out that this is a book that really challenged

1:07:20my Western assumptions about what the incarnation is and what it means. So when I actually dove into reading Saint Cyril and actually reading what's in Ephesus, I started really weighted. This is no thing like Calvinism at all. Okay. When Cyril is arguing for Thayatokos, that the logos is the one subject of all the incarnate actions of Christ. There's no human subject. There's no human hypostasis. That's the teaching of Ephesus. When I realized that and then I saw in the decrees of Ephesus that Cyril's argument is on the basis of the real presence and I as a Calvinist was reading Rush Duny in Rush Duny says, we believe Ephesus. No, we don't. That is a lie. You don't believe Ephesus and it's not going to work for you to say, well, it's the thalible teachings. I mean, and I reject the decrees and everything that's in Ephesus, but I still believe Ephesus. No, you don't.

1:08:20You need to be consistent and say, Ephesus is the work of a bunch of apostates and pagans and supersers because the whole debate is over Thayatokos, mother of God. That's the rally in Crive Cyril to point out that the sole subject of all of the incarnate actions of Christ is the logos and the logos underwent no change when he assumes human nature. No substantial change. In the sense, yeah, he changed in the sense he'd assumed the nature, human nature, but he did not assume a human person and he didn't become a human person. He became fully man, but not a human person. That is the teaching of Ephesus. And guess what? How is it then that the real presence becomes such an argument of Ephesus? Well, I'm going to tell you, you can go read the two letters of Cyril to six senses. They're at the back of this book, but you can read it online too. Google two letters of Cyril to six senses and you will see that Cyril makes an argument that

1:09:24and yes, he believes in the essence, energy distinction. Go read Florausky's paper, Athanasius in the doctrine of creation. That shows you that Cyril believes in the essence, energy distinction. Cyril says that the divine logos who assumes human nature deifies that human nature by his divine energy and power because he's the son of God. Not a human man. Not a human person. He's a man. He's a human, but he's not a human person. Not a human subject. The only subject is the logos. You see. And so that human nature that he assumes he deifies it. Well, now wait a minute. How can he deify it if the divine nature is simple? Exactly. That's where the energies are crucial to Christology. The uncreated energies, the uncreated glory, power, knowledge, wisdom that the son of God possessed from all eternity. He deifies and raises that human nature that he's assumed so that it participates in

1:10:32in a real metaphysical participation. He's eternal glory. What does he say in John 17? The glory that I had with the Father before the foundation of the world. I've come to give that to you, followers. How do they get that? By virtue of being joined to his deified flesh. Deified flesh. Yes, when you read Ephesus, you're going to be shocked to find out that the teaching of Ephesus is that the Eucharist is the deified flesh of Jesus. Now, when I saw that, I had to say, well, either I'm going to have to go in the direction of the church fathers and admit as a Calvinist, I don't actually believe Ephesus. I don't actually believe Calcedon because guess who was the Linchpin of Orthodoxy at Calcedon? Every Calvinist, I believe in Calcedon. Who was the Linchpin of Orthodoxy at Calcedon? Oh, you thought it was Leo? No, no, no, no, no. It's not. It's Cyril. Leo's home is checked against Cyril. So that means that Calcedon's doctrine

1:11:42is judged on the basis of Cyril's deification doctrine from Ephesus. And this is so prevalent in Cyril that it is astounding that people don't understand and accept the deification of Christ's human nature and how it occurred. And you say, well, it's not a scripture. That's the meaning of the Transfiguration. The uncreated light and glory of God, 1 Timothy 6 says that God dwells in immortal light. That's the light shining out of what? The humanity that Christ assumed. The Transfiguration proves what I'm saying. And the Transfiguration is nothing more than the exact same thing that happens at Mount Sinai when Moses sees the Son of God. That's who Moses is talking to. Jesus says in John 5, that's who I was talking to, Moses. Okay, no one sees the Father.

1:12:44Well, if no one sees the Father, who are these the oftenies that these Old Testament saints are interacting with? The logos. Jesus, that's who? That's what Jesus says in John 5. How is that possible? It's possible because the church fathers at these Trinitarian and ecclesiological and Christological councils are not making stuff up. They breed the scriptures and they knew that this is what the scriptures are teaching. The essence, nature, person will energy affect doctrine, distinction doctrine, comes out of the text scriptures, what I'm trying to say. And when you read them, you will see that they're proving it from scripture. They're not siding a bunch of Aristotle. They're not siding a bunch of Plotinus. They're not siding a bunch of whoever played out. They might hear in there. But the majority of the argumentation, especially when you come to something like this, say, Maximus' little book, Disputations with Paris. This is the one of the key theological texts

1:13:47of the Sixth-Echeminical Council. The Sixth-Echeminical Council is where they got to the point of saying that given everything that we said in these previous councils, it's now necessary to talk about the distinction between nature, person will, and energy in the incarnate Christ and how the two natures that he has have their respective properties, faculties, and energies. But the logos, the eternal divine logos is the one person that possesses those two natures. And that the logos deifies the flesh that he assumed. And that's how the Eucharist, not some symbol merely, but how it becomes the DeFi flesh of Christ in the liturgy, via the priest, all the Church of other Cises. That's how you, as an individual,

1:14:53participate in uncreated grace. Why am I talking about uncreated grace? Because Calvinism defaults to a version of created grace. They don't have the disputes that later post-tridentine Roman Catholic theology has about created grace. But they default to it because the covenant of works doctrine is that in the garden, Adam could have merited eternal blessedness for his descendants had he kept the covenant of works in the garden. And so then Jesus has to come. And Jesus has to keep all the law to merit the covenant of works because by the time of Jesus, it's not just the command to Adam, it's the 10 commandments and the mosaic law. So Jesus has to keep all of that to merit the perfect righteousness, the perfect law keeper, and that merit to status that he attains through doing all the good works in his ministry

1:15:58in his life, right? Work, work, work, work, work, work, work. You've kept all of it. Right. Those are works in time and space, created realities, created grace, because what you get in your bank account is a creaturely status, you see. Because Christ fulfills in a creaturely way in time and space, these merits that are accredited to you, that's created grace. Now wait a minute, create a grace. Why is this a problem? Precisely because, as I said in John 17, Jesus says that he came to give us a real participation in the glory that he had with the Father before the foundation of the the glory of God is not a creature. Calvinists, do you believe in polytheism?

1:16:58Every Calvinist, I'm a crusader against idolatry. Okay. So your crusader against idolatry, do you think the glory of God is a creature? No, of course not. Well, didn't Jesus say that he came to give us a participation in the uncreated grace in glory of God? Yes. Okay. How is that? Well, participation just means that you're a creature who gets grace. Yeah, but what's the grace? Is it the life of the Holy Spirit himself? Is the life of the Holy Spirit a creature? Did Jesus's status, did Jesus's grace that he grants and communicates to the human nature that he assumes, is that a created thing? By Calvinist probably was a, man, maybe it is, or maybe it's not. Guess what? This debate's already been had. This is the debate between Barley and Gregory Polymos, which I recommend. You should read that. It's only 80 pages. You can get it at su and s u in ypress.com for 20 bucks, dialogue between Orthodox and a Barley, I might. And even though that's

1:18:00written as a kind of a debate with a basically a Roman Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic versus Gregory Polymos, you will read that and start to realize this actually applies to Calvinism too. Because Calvinism's doctrine of grace is necessarily affected by Calvinism's doctrine of divine simplicity too, you see. So when Barley, I'm says in that debate that there's not a participation in actual divinity. There's a created divinity that you participate in. St. Gregory Polymos says, oh, so you believe in a created God? That's probably the only thing you see. And why would you think that? Because he doesn't believe in a distinction between essence and energy. He doesn't believe in a real participation in the uncreated energies. So for us, for Orthodox, grace fundamentally is uncreated. It is a participation in the uncreated life, power, wisdom, operations, energies of God. It is not a participation in the divine essence.

1:19:01If you don't have the essence and energy distinction, there is no way to have this doctrine. And the New Testament clearly teaches a realist participation, a real metaphysical participation, not a merely nominalist legal status, but a real participation. Now Calvinist's gonna say, well, but wait a minute, wait a minute. We believe in sanctification and we believe the regeneration is really a new creation. It's the hardened heart being given a soft heart. It's the old man, the dead man being raised to life. Oh, wait a minute, though. How come the New Testament constantly joins that to water baptism? Right? Acts 2, Titus 3, washing regeneration, John 3. I know, I know, I know. That's all spiritual secret regeneration and the liturgical right only only refers to a symbol of the secret regeneration. I know.

1:20:08But why is it that the incarnation seems to join the uncreated to the created? Jesus' humanity is a created thing that he created. And then he joins himself to that humanity created from the Virgin Mary, from her womb. And he raises the deifies and empowers that. Did you read the end of John? It says that when he was resurrected, he could walk through walls. He ascended, right? His humanity is no longer in a passable state. It becomes impassable. How does his humanity become? Because it's deified. That's why Paul says that he will take our lowly body and raise it to be like his glorious body. How does he have a glorious body? Precisely because he communicated to that body, the uncreated glory that he had with the Father before the foundation of the world. So now when you read the New Testament, I know you don't believe it yet, Calvinist, but when you read

1:21:12the New Testament, you're going to start noticing all these places where this real participation is there. And that's going to start to cause some problems for a purely legal view of justification, of purely accredited bank account righteousness. Because when God speaks His word, as you guys say, is efficacious, right? When God speaks, He creates. But wait a minute. When God speaks that you're righteous, it doesn't actually make you so. That's where you now have to divide the legal status from the ontological reality. You can be a hypocrite. In fact, God actually declares everyone hypocrites and God lies because he says, you are all righteous because you're covered in the bank account righteousness of Jesus. But underneath is the filthy rats, you see. So there's this

1:22:14blanket Jesus, Jesus is a theoretical bank account righteousness that's given to you. It's just like a blinder. But really back underneath here is a bunch of filthy disgusting dirty rags even after you've regenerated your works, you're still filthy rags. Calvin, that's right. Now, so what does Jesus say about people who have a facade of righteousness, but are inward, dead man's bones? He says they're hypocrites. So on the one hand, you Calvin, to say anything God wills and says and speaks, it is a efficacious, it is done. God's word cannot be thwarted. He speaks and it occurs. But when He calls you righteous, it's not actually occurring. It doesn't actually occur. So merit is a created grace. Merit is a created status.

1:23:16And I would it to be fair, it does read a little bit different in the maseroidic text. Of course, we don't follow rabbis in determining our canon. We follow the church in determining the canon. So if you read the Septuagint, if you read the orthodox study Bible in Ezekiel 3, just giving you an example, Ezekiel 3, 14 to 15, maybe I should read it for you guys because I'm sure most of you guys won't be looking at the orthodox old testament. This is just an example. I'm just giving you an example. Okay, so don't freak out because I'm giving you an example. Ezekiel says, then the Holy Spirit moved me and raised me up. And I went forth under the impulse of my spirit and the hand of the Lord was upon me. Now this is not his regeneration. Okay, this is the Holy Spirit moving to him to

1:24:27prophesy. Right. And by the way, Calvinist will in a violation of actual exedetical principles, lift these kinds of texts out, these texts out, right, out of the context like is later on in his Ezekiel the dry bones as if that's a proof of how regeneration works when that's actually about bodily resurrection. And yes, there is the notion of the stony heart and a new heart. Those are analogies. Okay. The very guy who you're saying and using that analogy from is also enlightening you further in this text and saying that when the hand of the Lord came upon me, when God moved me, my spirit also moved. I also moved under my impulse. Under the impulse of my spirit, I also moved. That's just one example of a text about synergy. And the point is that at no point does a human being

1:25:32not have his natural will and energy. Because if he doesn't have that, then he doesn't have human nature. Because human nature is to possess those faculties and components. And I know you're going to say, well, but that is I mean, you can move towards God. I'm not saying that the human will just arbitrarily moves towards God, right? God sets up situations and gives us promptings. He gives us providential things that occur. So that in the mystery of grace, the human will synergizes always with the divine will. So because there is a distinction between nature and person and because the human nature is not lost, human beings have the ability to make choices, to will the good or the bad. And that means also to will God or not God. So even though the willing is still gracious,

1:26:38the grace does not replace or destroy or supplant the natural will and energy. Because in Christology, the model will always be the harmonious synergy between the two wills and the two natures and two energies in Christ. Christ is the model of Soteriology. And that's why synergy is the model for the sacraments and for the church as the theandric body of the Godman. The grace is not divorced from the sacraments and their ritual enactment. It can't be because you would be doing the very thing that Cyril attacks the stories for at Ephesus. Because if the grace is divorced from the sacraments, then the grace of Christ's humanity is divorced from his humanity. That's an historian argument for Christology and thus a historian ecclesiology to separate and

1:27:43divorce the grace from the sacrament and to separate and divorce the grace from the body of the church, the invisible church doctrine, which is a historian ecclesiology. And all you need to do is read the enathem of if you're really lazy, just read the enathem of Ephesus, just that. Because you will see that Cyril says the arguments of ecclesiology, what you're going to have to read two things. I'm sorry, you're going to have to read the enathemus, just a few of them. And then you're going to have to read the two letters to six senses where Cyril is saying what Ephesus teaches to six senses. And he's saying that the ecclesiological doctrine is the same principle as the sacramental doctrine. And I know you probably don't care what Ephesus says if you're a strict columnist. But my point is that I thought you did care about Christology. Wait, wait, I thought you did care about Trinity. Well, you realize that Trinity and Christology come out of these councils and these arguments in debate. They don't just pop out of the scriptures

1:28:44automatically. Okay. It took centuries of people mining the scriptures, which the scriptures are like a cave with jewels that you mine out and you can put the jewels into an ordered way of explaining it. But the scriptures themselves don't just pop out Trinity. Okay. No Protestant just goes to the scripture and says, I believe in Trinity because I read the scriptures. Okay. The scriptures don't say the word Trinity. They don't say the word. They don't say the canon. So you cannot get to Trinity apart from the historic testimony of the church. Now do the scriptures teach the Trinity? Absolutely. Okay. Not saying they don't teach the Trinity. But I'm saying that the theology and argumentation and the terminology and the distinctions that are necessary for Trinity, Christology, ecclesiology, anthropology, sacramentalogy, and by the way, ultimately eschatology.

1:29:46All come out of the things that I'm telling you from these short followers. And I'm sorry, you just can't divorce it from that. Now I know you a lot of you guys want to reinvent the wheel. But even your confessions, even your confessions still want to give creed, you still want to lay claim to Athanasius. And I see it to Ephesus to calcidon. And you want to lay claim to it because you realize that you can't get the Christology and the Trinity theology just from sitting in your prayer corner and reading your Bible. You're also going to have to go and look at the people whose theology is the Trinity theology at NICIA and Ephesus. I'm sure it's a constant of one because constant of one the second council, 381. That's the council that affirms the Trinity theology of the church. That's why you have to read the capitals. And when you read them, you're going to understand you're going to be humbled because you're going to

1:30:51realize I thought I knew way more than basil. I thought I knew what was going on with biblical theology because I read Calvin and I read his commentage. I read Luther. He's got a bunch of commenting. And you're not going to realize that no, no, they knew way better than you. You're going to realize that. And so you're going to be humbled as I was. This happened to me. I was humbled. I thought I know I know the stuff. They didn't know the doctrine of predestination. Now they knew Christology, which is the lens through which we actually should read predestination. You see. So as we get to the next point here, I hopefully you see the point I'm making. I understand that a lot of you are not going to, he's just talking for loss. He's just talking church, church, church, church, I'm not convinced. That's why I'm imploring you to look at these things. Right. So the key point, the key takeaway here is going to be this next point. So if you don't

1:31:54get anything, please get this. What about the death of Christ? And what are you talking about this recapitulation? Right. Because I was talking earlier about how Christ assumes universal human nature. There's an excellent article I want you to read. A summary article of this book. And it's by Professor Monterey, and you're going to have to type it in. Maybe Sam can put it in there later for you guys. It's not very long. It's called Jesus Christ universal person. And all he's doing, Professor Monterey is restating Saint Cyril's doctrine of Christ and Christology in that one essay. And you're going to see that crucial to trinitarian theology and the capitals is the real existence of universal and the real existence of universal human nature, which Christ assumed in his singular divine hypostasis. So Christ is one Christ. And the body

1:32:56that he has is one body. It's the man over there. Right. Jesus Christ, the logos, that man over there. But because he's a divine hypostasis, he's able to assume in that one assumption. Not just his own body, but also all human nature. And I know it because I used to wonder about this as a common sense. Why is everybody resurrected? I cannot. And even Augustin, in city of God, he speculates he can't figure out why wonders why all men would be resurrected when the reprobate have no connection to Christ. This is why it's because the recapitulation doctrine is directly connected to the capitalsian teaching, which all the other councils and fathers teach after that, by the way, that all men are resurrected on the basis of Christ assuming and raising human nature. Wait a minute. I thought you're not a universal. That's this going to sound like everybody's saved.

1:33:57I don't know. This is why the nature person distinction comes into play in anthropology as well. Because although Christ assumes universal human nature and raises it, he does not necessarily determinately save every single individual hypostasis. Thus, it is up to each individual hypostasis to enact and to actualize the potential of grace, to participate in Christ by grace with their will as well. Thus, baptismal regeneration is true because, in the case of adults, it requires the synergy of the human will. Doesn't mean that you repent as a merit. It doesn't mean faith is a merit. Faith and repentance are also gifts, but they are gifts that coincide with and synergize with

1:34:58your human will and energy and work. That's why Romans 4 doesn't quote Genesis 12. Because if Romans 4 is the point at which Abraham is regenerated and justified, Paul should have quoted Genesis 12, but he quotes Genesis 15. That alone shows that the Calvin is Scheme and model of reading Romans is faulty. That is why Paul in Colossians talks about the universal scope of Christ redemption. I remember as a Calvinist, why is this what's with all of this universal language? All this universal scope language? I mean, really Christ's salvific work saves the elect, sends them to heaven, gives them perseverance. That's it. But it affects the entire cosmos because Adam's sin affected the entire cosmos. It brought death

1:36:01to the king corruption, not just on his human descendants, but also upon the natural order as a whole. And likewise, Christ's resurrection salvifically transfigures the entire cosmos, but individual hypostasis still have the ability to will virtue or vice, good or evil. And thus the ability to be judged on the basis of their works, and yes, the works of the righteous are works of grace. We would agree with that. But it still never removes, as Paul says, I am a co-worker with God. It is God who is at will to work in me. And Paul says he also runs the race. He runs the race. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. And so there is no detracting from the glory of God to simply believe that God creates creatures who have the ability to will as secondary causes and agents in the world.

1:37:07Because that's how God created the world. If we're made in His image, and by the way, if you believe as a Calvinist that man in the garden could have merited salvation, then you also don't believe that it's actually impossible for a creature to merit salvation. Not that we as Orthodox believe that salvation is actually merit. It's not because Jesus deifies His human nature. He communicates His uncreated graces to His human nature. And the same graces that that human nature has, the He possesses to us, that's why participating in the Eucharist is participating in the blood. Did you ever think of that Calvinist? That the atonement is applied in the Eucharist? If the blood of Christ is our atonement, and if the Eucharist is the blood of Christ, then the Eucharist is also the application of the atonement. And so it's not merely a one at time, one time only event or act that is appropriated

1:38:10to you, applied to you, just at your point of regeneration and justification. We consistently interact with the blood of Christ by consistently partaking of His real flesh and blood in the Eucharist. So I'm just pointing out that you see then how two different paradigms are going to interpret the application of blood and body to the believer differently. The Calvinist is going to default to a spiritual, nostic interpretation. Oh yeah, body, blood, water, regeneration. Well, that's all a secret thing, divorced from the symbols, divorced from the rights, the rights merely signify the inward transformation. That's the Old Testament view. So the Old Testament

1:39:10view of the ceremonies and sacrifices is that they are symbols. And so you're literally saying, as a Calvinist, that Jesus came to bring the symbols that are symbols of Old Testament symbols. No, no, no. The reality has come in the incarnation, which fulfills the symbols. Okay, so you have the Old Testament view of sacraments for the New Testament sacraments. You see this. Thus you don't understand the implications of incarnation. And when you study the incarnation, as I'm saying, as I'm suggesting, you're going to start to notice that is the paradigm for satireology. Satireology is not a done in a vacuum. It doesn't just pop out of the scriptures, come down off the justification doctrine is self-evident. And then I will do my Christology, my triant theology down the road.

1:40:12Why do you think God's providence led the church to do Trinity and Christology first? Wouldn't God's providence have done the doctrine of justification first? Well, I did at St. Paul. Okay, but then it was lost, right? For 1500 years, to Luther read Alastair McGrath, Yostesha Day. So I hope you see the point here, right? And by the way, recapitulation in Orthodox theology, which is early early early early, it's in Paul. Paul talks about in collageants, Paul talks about in verse 15. You can read this in Irenaeus. He has a whole chapter on recapitulation. So point being, this is not some later mystical thing made up by church fathers. It's very, very early. Now, persevering, yes, we agree that that is something that also comes by grace. I don't

1:41:16merit the perseverance. I don't, I don't deserve any of the graces, even though I'm willing and I'm moving and I am doing things. Elizabeth and her husband were perfectly righteous before God. Still by grace. How does David say in all these some, well, I've kept your law. I have not sinned. Yes, I know it's a messianic prophecy, but it's still David praying at saying, I have not sinned. I have kept your law. How could he say that? Isn't that the essence of pride in the Calvinist view? And every Calvinist believes that salvation was exactly the same in the Old Testament as it is now, right? David wasn't saved by works and now we're saved by grace. No, it's always been grace. Any kind of Calvinist believes in the regulative principle of worship and the classic texts, you know, from Puritan writers and reform writers would be the, you know, the case of something

1:42:16like Nehdaven Abaihu where they offer strange fire and Leviticus and they're put the death for this inappropriate liturgical action or Azza carrying the ark and him reaching out to stabilize it, right? And he struck dead because he's not, he didn't have the authority to touch the ark. And so this from any Calvinist becomes exemplary of the notion of the regular principle of worship by which they mean we cannot do anything in worship that isn't expressly laid down in the written text of scripture. But isn't it odd that given that is the presupposition of every reformed Calvinist out there, whether they're Baptist or Presbyterian or whatever, that the New Testament doesn't lay down a specific liturgical service. I mean, clearly every Calvinist believes that we shouldn't do a one-to-one correspondence with the temple or the synagogue liturgy, right? Because doesn't there need to be some kind of Christian elements, right? I mean, there doesn't need to be the Lord's sufferer, this kind of

1:43:17stuff. So if there's not a clear pattern of worship that's laid down, a liturgical right, then Calvinism's own principles of the regular principle of worship doesn't even meet up to the expectations of scripture itself. Where is the liturgy in scripture? Is it just DIY, right? Make it up as you go. Did Paul go out in the Stalas churches and say, well, you know, good luck. Hopefully you guys can figure out some kind of at least, you know, partially reverent service. Try your best, good job. You know, have a prayer and have a meal. No, it was nothing like that. And there's not a single historian of liturgy from whether Roman Catholic, Luther, and Anglic and whatever, it doesn't matter, orthodox. The scholarly consensus on the history of the liturgy is that it was fundamentally coming out of the temple and synagogue services, and it was adapted by the apostles in the various seas that they set up out of that out of that temple synagogue model. But if we don't have those

1:44:22liturgies, we don't have the apostolic liturgical pattern in scripture. So how do you as a Calvinist not violate your own regular principle when you utilize examples like Nadeh Davenabahu or Azah, and you always point Calvinist typically make the point that these are minor infractions, right? We can't even do how dare you even offer strange fire to law, right? I've heard Calvinist preachers endlessly talk about this point. And this was something again that the reformers formulated in opposition to what Rome did, right? That's what we don't want. We don't want images. We don't want crucifixes. We don't want superstitions. We don't want the Eucharist and the Roman Catholic sense. So we're going to go back to the basics. And so implicit in this assumption is that

1:45:24the early church was low church home church basic. But there's already been countless scholars and people out there just Google right now the home churches of the first century and look up various liturgical scholars pointing out that the home churches were not low churches. They were basically estates converted into basilicas or into large churches. They had altars. They had curtains or things that blocked off the altar from those who might just sort of go up there and grab the bread and the wine or whatever, right? It's just a myth and it's a higher critical slash Protestant myth that the first century church was low church. It's just an assumption. There's no actual evidence that they bring forth. And in fact, when we go to the historical evidence of liturgists and people who are scholars of the history of liturgy, this kind of thing, liturgical theology, we find the opposite is the case. In fact, there's multiple examples,

1:46:26instances, historical cases, archaeological examples of churches, houses, things converted, that were clearly liturgical in practice. They had different areas sort of fenced off, right? Where not everybody can walk up on the altar, this kind of thing. Again, just look up the article that discusses this. It's made the rest of the around the last year and the early church, home churches, weren't low church, comma liturgy, and you'll get various websites and blogs that reprinted. I think it was a Catholic author that made this point, but it doesn't matter. The point still stands to disprove the Calvinist assumption that the first century was low church or was some sort of nascent, pure tanical type of church. In fact, with as a lot of indicators, even in the New Testament itself, that there are references to liturgical documents. In fact, a lot of scholars point out that in different epistles from Paul, Paul seems to be citing early creeds or early hymns in different

1:47:27sections. In the point there is to just illustrate that Paul's attitude wasn't one of a radical written only view. Does that mean that the scriptures aren't inspired, aren't inherent? Of course not, but it does not mean that they're the only rule of faith or the only authority in the life of the Christian. For example, Paul says to the Corinthians that the church at Corinth ought to excommunicate certain people doing wacky crazy things. He assumes that the church at Corinth has the authority and the ability to excommunicate people. What that means is that clearly Paul believes the church is that he established had a normative authority. Now Paul wasn't there himself to do the excommunicate. He tells them you should get those people out of your church for their more immorality, openly practicing immorality. We get the same things Jesus says to one of the churches in Asia, Mayer, and the apocalypse that the woman causing everybody to commit

1:48:28adultery that she should have been removed and kicked out of the church. She's tolerated in the church and that's something that leads to a threat of chastisement from Christ. So in other words, the whole point of that is to say that these are examples of normative authority. In the words that there is an assumption, there is explicitly the statement that in the church there are living people who have the authority to make decisions that are binding. The entirety of Protestantism is built on the notion of freedom of conscience. Nobody can tell me that my interpretation scripture is wrong. Nobody has any authority to bind me to their interpretation. I am well aware that many Calvinists will say, I have elders. We have the Presbyterian. There's a Presbyterian structure of government which is governance by elders. I know that Baptists and Presbyterians believe that they have elders, but I'm not saying that you don't have any conception of authority. I'm making a different point about that doesn't work with the Protestant

1:49:32Reformation doctrine of the freedom of conscience of the individual and the freedom of the conscience of the believer. The individual believer cannot be bound by any other man's interpretation. And yet every one of these creeds will say, every one of these confessions, Westminster confession, that although we don't hold councils to be infallible, they can be instructors, they can be guides, they can be helpful, but ultimately it comes down to the scriptures themselves. But that's begging the question. Everybody appeals to the scriptures themselves. Everybody says, well, my view is the scriptural view. So we're not talking about the individual's means to gaining certitude. That's an existential question. That's a question that's about epistemology. How do we know that our doctrine is true? Right? And everybody, whether you're Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Calvinist, ultimately everybody believes or thinks that it's in the final analysis, it's the Holy Spirit that gives us that individual certitude. This is a different type of question, a different

1:50:35category of question that we're talking about, which is in the public domain, in the history of the church. Is there a living normative authority that has the power or the ability or the assumption that they combined anybody to their decisions of excommunication or the interpretation of the scriptures, the church, the creeds, etc.? And I would say that these two things cannot be true at the same time. Right? I am well aware that every Calvinist thinks his interpretation is correct. But I'm making a different point about in the history of the church, if you think about texts, texts don't just have a self-evident life of their own. They're not just things that do on their own. They require people to read and interpret them. Now, do you think that Christ in establishing the church would leave it up to every single individual person to decide for themselves

1:51:36such that there would be no normative authority? I'm not talking about the individual coming to certitude. That's a different question. I'm talking about the structure of the ecclesia of the church. Does it make sense when you look at Acts 15, does it look like in Acts 15, the apostles are just saying, hey, everybody's got the right to their own private interpretation. Everybody's got the right to not have their conscience trampled upon. If you disagree with what we are teaching as apostles, that's up to you. Do they do that in Acts 15? No, they say it seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit and to the brethren that blah, blah, blah, blah is the case, right? And then they send out the letter to the churches to see that the church will accept this as well. So there is a notion of the church as a body, as a community, accepting these things. And that's something that we find in orthodoxy specifically that we think that eventually something is a true doctrine that a council or a synod or if a somebody is truly a saint, that eventually they're going

1:52:40to be accepted in the universal church as having that role, having that sainthood or these doctrines being the case. But what we don't see in the New Testament is any notion that there is no authority or that there's no hierarchy or that it's purely a decentralized bunch of republic elders. It's bishops, it's metropolitan, even if you read Titus, right? In Titus 1, Paul talks about setting up bishops in authoritative areas in those seas, you could say, that will become the idea of a metropolitan RSC. To Timothy, he says, that you alone have the authority in Ephesus to ordain men after you. He specifically points out that it's a giving of the Holy Spirit in the Langot of Hands. There is no Calvinist denomination or group that I've ever heard of that exists, that believes that the Holy Spirit is transmitted through the Langot of Hands in a succession back to the apostles. They'll say, well, we lay hands on the elders, but it's not a right. It's not a

1:53:45sacrament to do this, you see. But clearly in Paul's epistles, he sees it as a thing that really will transmit the Holy Spirit, he calls it a gift, and that's why he warns Timothy not to do it hastily. He says, don't lay hands on anybody too quickly, right? Again, compare that with what's in Titus 1. Compare the fact that when Paul goes out in his missionary journeys in the book of Acts, he finds people who had not yet been brought under the Episcopate. He finds people that were disciples of John only. And then, oh, you need to be better instructing and be further instructed, right? Apollo's mighty in the scriptures, but needed to be further instructed and brought under the Episcopate. And the Orthodox study Bible notes are really good on those passages in pointing out that these are great examples of bringing people under the Episcopate. So let's keep in mind that what I wanted to focus on here was not just the Christology of the Transitarian stuff we talked about that last time. I believe that the problems in these

1:54:47domains are just as serious, just as devastating to the Calvinist position as the other doctrines, which ultimately I think these kind of flow from the erroneous theological Transitarian doctrines in a different way than Rome does, but they're really just kind of like deviations of the Augustinian presubesitions that they had coming out of the Roman Catholic church. Now I'm not talking about Augustin being anything like a Presbyterian elder. The irony, of course, is that Augustin believed in episode succession. Augustin believed in the real presence. He believed in angels and relics and all of these things that are Catholic, Roman Catholic, so-called ideas to the mind of a Calvinist. But if you see me put comments, ignore them. They're not related to you. I just wanted to describe you. So go ahead. I just want you to let it know. Yeah, no problem. So back to this regular to principle worship thing. It's just crucial, I think, to understand not just that the regular to principle worship is a

1:55:51problem. And if that's a problem, that's a huge blow to the TR, truly reformed Presbyterian Puritian Calvinist, West American fashion ethos, because the regular to principle is fundamental to the Westminsterian fashion. The church that I attended when I was a Calvinist was a pretty hard core. We actually held to the full Westminster larger, smaller, Catechism and the WCF. We did our Catechism classes on the basis of the larger Catechism. So I know that position very well. And it's just always kind of struck me. And I would have debates with my pastro over this, pointing out, like, let's take, for example, the Sabbath. Calvin had this attitude that the Sabbath should be adhered to and that it's necessary to, in certain ways, perhaps even have public laws that reflect the Sabbath on the Lord's Day Sunday. Now, this eventually actually becomes a dispute amongst various Puritans as to in what degree we

1:56:54carry over the Sabbath sanctions from Mosaic law to the New Testament. Right. And so in the history of Puritanism and Calvinism, this is a whole other separate kind of line of debate. And what we find is that my past was just given an example. He had said, well, my position is that anybody who doesn't believe that the penal sanctions carry over for the Sabbath laws should be excommunicated. And if it was a theocracy, they should be put to death. So he actually believed in a full-on reconstruction as pure tenet, pure tentacle attitude that the the penal sanctions of the Sabbath also carried over. Now, I already was that he had this weird argument that if you name it so the argument was then, well, how do we decide which groups are actually heterodox? Would we excommunicate and would we condemn Lutherans, Anglicans, every Christian group that didn't do this? I said, what if there was an anti-Trinitarian group that followed

1:58:00the Sabbath? Would they be okay? But we're going to damn or condemn or even put the death. Lutherans, you know, Anglicans who, and I kid you not, his his argument was that yes, we will put to death the Lutherans and the Anglicans. Right. Even if they're Trinitarian because they don't follow the Sabbath. And I'm like, well, I mean, isn't the first commandment? You should have no other gods, right? So isn't heterodoxy a little higher up on the totem pole than violating the Sabbath? I understand that violating the Sabbath to use is also a penal, you know, death penalty offense. But all of that is just to illustrate that the unworkable nature of Calvinism is evident when it comes to the ename disputes that occur within Calvinism. And that example is no, that's not some loan example. The origins of, for example, the reconstructionists, they all have the same splits and divisions over these enane, almost totally irrelevant, mosaic law debates. For example,

1:59:06Bonson disagrees with Rustini. Rustini disagrees with Gary North over whether the, you know, ceremonial laws about purification carryover, dietary laws, right? Now I understand not every Calvinist group is reconstructed. But my point is that there's problems when it comes to on the one hand, the traditional Puritan Calvinist idea of theocracy is supposed to have a regular principle that doesn't just apply to the worship service. It has to apply to the society too. This is why, of course, everybody in modern society, right? They mock the Puritans, the Puritans, the worst thing ever. And I think the Puritans were crazy. They were insane. But they were faithful to the Calvinistic ethos that you're supposed to, it is kind of a theocracy, right? I mean, God is the king. You don't have a monarch, right? The government is more like a republic in the Calvinist view. But but the problem is evident that when we say that we we're going to have a theocracy or a

2:00:12regular principle that doesn't just apply to the church, it also applies to the society, I would call all the Calvinists out there, especially reform Baptist out and say, isn't that the classic Calvinist position? I mean, that's the Westminster Confessant position. The London Baptist Confession is basically a copy and paste of the Westminster Confession. And it cuts out the parts that it doesn't like, right? Again, illustrating the absurdity of this whole ethos that I mean, I could just you know, James White has his little group that cuts out the things he doesn't like. He's still reformed and Protestant, even though historically these groups killed each other over these issues. There is no reformation tradition that is some unified group. I mean, they literally killed each other. Now, today's Protestants and Evangelicals don't want to talk about that. That's that's kind of rough, right? But that's the reality of how these disputes were viewed back, you know, in England when you were having these Presbyterian Anglican debates. What about Erasianism? Erasianism is a huge debate at the time of the Westminster Confession and one of the

2:01:17things that set the Westminster Confession people off against the Anglicans was what is the role of church and state? Now, in the Orthodox tradition, you already had this notion of symphonia, it was kind of already in a way you could say resolved in the sense that the Byzantine ethos was the two-headed eagle church and state working in in symphonia and you see this exemplified in the ecumenical councils and the relationship between the bishops and the patriarchs and emperor. And no, I don't believe that the Orthodox position is Erasian. I think that's a mischaracterization. But what I'm getting at is that in the Calvinist and in history of these two groups, there is not a classic Calvinism. You have, is it Zwingli? It was Zwingli, I think, that wanted certain groups to be killed that opposed him. Luther said Zwinglians should be drowned, right? Anabaptists should be drowned. Let's not forget the Anabaptists because the Anabaptists are not some other thing. They're also

2:02:22children of the Reformation. They also come out of these same groups and I know Calvinists are well actually some Calvinists do end up Anabaptists. In fact, one of the Calvinists that early on influenced me helped get me into Calvinism was Paul Washer. Paul Washer nowadays, at least the last time I had any interaction with him, says he is an Anabaptist. He is not at all interested in or any part of a Reformation tradition or a Presbyterian or even a reformed Baptist tradition. He went with, according to his terminology, the blackout view. So, is Calvinism the five points of Calvinism? Is it Presbyterianism? Is it Theocracy? Is it a Puritan society that adheres to the regular principle of worship also in terms of Sabbath laws? Do you see how insane and just all over the place these debates are? Now, I'm not saying that the Orthodox Church or the history of the Church in the first thousand years is immune to or excluded from controversies and debates

2:03:30and whatnot. But we do not see this type of a problem unless you want to make analogues to the the Maasallians or the Marcianites or the Nostics or Aryans or various heterodox groups. You can find parallels in those groups to what we find in Calvinism. I think the Maasallians were one of the first groups to say, for example, the sacraments are either purely spiritual or symbolic. They don't actually become what they signify or impart the grace that they intend to signify. Right? And that's again a revolution and a point of battle between Luther and Calvin. Is it going to be concept santiation or is it going to be Calvin's spiritual presence of Christ, whatever that is? Right? And even amongst Calvinists, there's debates. Right? I was a part of the debates in this, I'm not 15, 20 years ago, known as the Auburn Avenue Controversy. Right? And this is all about, oh, wait a minute, we've read the scriptures. We think there actually is a case

2:04:30for a paid, a paido communion. I think I still have light hearts book over here on that. Yeah. So, you know, very prominent people within Calvinism, people in the Doug Wilson circles, the Jim Jordan circles, Peter Lighthart, daddy, why was I excommunicated? Lightheart's little book on paido communion. Anyway, all of that is just to say that I think that it's not that I'm saying that Calvinists have a problem of division, all the pros and all is a problem division, and potentially every church can have the problem of division. But if there's not a normative authority, the problem gets magnified infinitely. Right? It's the 10 times 50, 100 times more. And why is it that Lightheart, Jim Jordan, etc., have to reinvent the wheel? If Calvinism has the goods, why does each generation

2:05:30of Calvinists have to re-investigate every doctrine? Oh, wait a minute, it turns out there's a really good argument for paido communion. The Westminster Confession has been wrong for the last 400 years, right? And of course, yeah, within the Protestant Calvinist ethos, that's entirely possible. Right? The Westminster Confession is done and fallible. I don't have to follow the Westminster Confession, right? I can disagree with it. Again, falling back ultimately on my own freedom of conscience. And so to me, again, to bring it back to my personal existential setting, when I was having these discussions with my reform pastor when I was 19, and I'm reading through Calvin's institutes, and I'm asking him questions, and he says, we are going to, in my theocracy, we're going to allow a Jehovah's Witness if he keeps the Sabbath to be alive. But a Lutheran or an Anglican, who believes in the Trinity, who violates the Sabbath, should either be excommunicated from the society or stoned. Right? I mean, this is the insanity of the Gary North, the Russian,

2:06:37the reconstructionist world, right? And I would argue that against the Calvinists, I know a lot of Calvinists probably don't like those guys, but they're more consistent Calvinists than today's Westminster, you know, PCA or typical OPC person. Not because I don't think those people are sincere about the Presbyterianism, but the historic Westminster Confession is pretty strict. I mean, it's strict in terms of the regular principle of worship. It's strict about things like the Sabbath. Calvin, I've got a book of Calvin's sermons on the Sabbath. Right? So, so how is it that something can be worthy of death in 1500, 1600, 1700, 1700, whatever? Now, oh, it's audiophora now. Not a big deal now, not a big deal now. How is it that within one newly formed Doug Wilson Church, I can sit next to a person who does not commune his kids, but my family communes my, I commune my kids. And that's up to

2:07:45our decision to make. That's the logic of, for example, the newly created Doug Wilson denomination that Lightheart and Jim Jordan and people like that are a part of. So, these are not, again, I'm just trying to stress that I'm sure many Calvinists would say, well, we're not like that, you know, we were 500 years ago. Why is something 500 years ago worth dying for and killing people for? But now it's audiophora. Now it's still a lagoomina. Does that make any sense? So, what is the point of all that? What is the Calvinist gospel? What is the essence of this? Is there a boil down system of a Reformation tradition? Well, there's certainly not one Reformation church. So, is it the five solas? What about this Sabbath? What about the real presence? What about all of these, what about images? And so, again, to maybe to move this forward a little

2:08:47bit, I would say if you think about my point earlier on about liturgy, to contrast the lack of any New Testament evidence or statement about a pattern of worship. If you look at liturgists, Hugh Ibrue, for example, or the Wims and Anstall book on the history of the liturgy, you'll get a good point that's made that, no, actually we do have ancient liturgies. They're just not in the New Testament. They're not in the written text. And we do have ancient patterns of liturgy, for example, we can read Justin Martyr's explanation of how the Christians in 150 celebrated the the liturgy of the Eucharist, and he mentions the real presence. He mentions baptismal regeneration, for example. We can find similar patterns in St. Aarones and in 180ish, right? We can find the medicine of immortality passages in St. Ignatius, right? So, we do have attestation to the doctrine as well as

2:09:47early liturgies like the liturgy of St. Mark, which is dated very early. I don't know if he might know the exact date of when we have the earliest copy. I'm not a textual scholar, but reading textual scholars from various traditions tells me that it's pretty obvious if I read FF Bruce, if I read Lee McDonald, if I read Vinkenhausen and all these other people to talk about the formation of the Biblical text, for example, every one of them to a tea will mention the importance of the liturgy, the importance of the daily readings in the churches, right? For the determination of the canon. I'm not saying that was the only criterion, but it was part of the reasoning process and the decision process for what books go in the Bible. And when I was a Calvinist investigating, is it I did not go to Roman Catholic apologetics 101. I didn't run the Catholic answers. The first thing I did was buy all the Protestants that I knew of that I trusted as scholarly evangelical

2:10:49Protestants to look at this issue. Well, let's see what do the translators of the various Greek New Testament say, right? What do they talk about in their history of the canon and history of the textbooks? And I couldn't find any that left out or failed to mention that tradition, both oral, written, liturgical, hygeography, all of these things went into the canon. And even some of them were pretty explicit about the apostolic seas or the bishoprix that had apostolic succession. Clearly they would matter. They would have an important role. And we here at the sea of Alexandria have had this book here for many, many centuries. It goes way back. And we think that it was written by so and so, the apostle who knew so and so, you see. So there's an impossible, you cannot get an uptime machine and go back to autograffin. And what that means is that you can't avoid

2:11:55the gap where the church has to fulfill that gap role of transmitting texts faithfully. It's unavoidable. And I don't know of any scholars who are known reputable scholars on this topic, who deny that. So when I was a Protestant and that I found that to be the case, I didn't know what to do. And did I just run off to Rome? Now I went to all the Protestant pastors and seminary professors that I knew of. And I emailed them and we had lengthy discussions. I emailed John frame. I emailed even emailed Doug Jones and Doug Wilson back at the time, because I really wanted to somebody point me to the Protestant Calvinist treatments of this that helped me make sense of the canon scripture without not just the testimony of the church, but trusting in the church to pass on authentic texts. How do we know that? I don't believe this, but you hear these goofy conspiracy theories. A bunch of monks change the Bible. I don't believe that, but I don't believe that because

2:13:00I have a trust in the veracity of the text that the church transmits. You see. So the regular principle points us to the fact that there's not a pattern of worship, but we know for a fact in the church fathers in the writings of well-known liturgists that there are patterns of liturgy and worship that the apostles handed down that are just simply not in the New Testament. So we're immediately presented with a dilemma where all of the churches in the first, second and third century, fourth century, were they all idolatrous? Did they all just invent and go off into heresy right away? Did the gates of hell prevail against the church so quickly and so easily? And yet the same Calvinists who might say, yeah, there was a apostasy began in the first century, we'll also then turn around an appeal to the Council of Nicene. But I agree with Nassia's statement of the doctrine of the deity of Christ, blah, blah, blah. But of course then they

2:14:01reinterpret sections of the Nicino-Conscient of the Paulic Decree where it says one holy Catholic in the Apostolic Church. That actually means something totally different. That does not mean baptismal regeneration when it says one more than one faithful baptism, right? Well Paul says that, you know what I'm saying, like the word one holy Catholic Apostolic Church is reinterpreted to mean it in the Calvinist sense, right? Know what we find is that the body of doctrines that is common to the Apostolic deposit is actually common. It is actually unified. It is actually baptismal regeneration. It is actually the real presence. And if the church in the first, second, third century had already apostatized, then why in the world would any Calvinists trust these same apostate people to put the canon of the scriptures together? It just made no sense, right? And then the Calvinists is forced then to do this bait and switch game where on the one hand they didn't have the gospel. They were liars. They were heretics. They were apostates. Or they all

2:15:07have the gospel and let me go back and read into all of these texts and quotes Calvinism, which is just dishonest. And you notice when you see people like Anthony Rogers or Gavin Oralyn, when they do that, it's all just a bunch of quote mining, exact same what Roman Catholic Papus do, right? Let me take all these quotes out of context. Oh, look Peter first. Yeah, how does that mean Vatican one, right? Oh, faith alone. What does that mean? Soul of Fidey? What does it mean a faith working through love alone? You see. And as Perry showed in his discussion with Sam, the long refutation of Anthony Rogers, it's a quote mine without context and many of the quotes were actually bumbled. They were wrong. They were quotes from Pelagius, right? For example, so the quote mine process is not going to get the Calvinists out of this bind, right? Either the people at Nicaea had apostatized, lost the gospel or didn't have it, right? And you should adopt the Paul Washer and about this blackout view. Or there's a visible institution that

2:16:09has the gospel and it's baptismal regeneration. It's the Eucharist. It's all of these things that make up Orthodox Catholicism, I would say not Roman Catholicism, right? It's one of these. There's no such thing as this is where invisible church comes in, right? Now invisible church serves the function to allow a Calvinist to say, well, the church was there and it was kind of like a secret inner court group, but it was amongst all of these apostates and we never really know until judgment day, who the real authentic body of Christ there was. But now, wait a minute. So now, when we go back to the New Testament, are we going to interpret all the texts about the body of Christ, one Lord, one faith, one body? You are Christ's hands, his eyes, his feet, Paul says to the Corinthians, now all of that gets spiritualized. Now, what's the problem with spiritualizing all the body texts was Christ's body spiritual or did he have an actual body like like a human body?

2:17:14That's a ecclesiastical version of Nestorianism, right? To divorce the divine person of Christ from the body, not just his body, but the church, his body. So the church is the extension of the incarnation. It's also the Andric, it's also the Anthropic God Man, it's a God Man institution. So you cannot divorce the spiritual from the material and the physical and lo and behold, what does the Calvinists do to the sacraments? They are spiritual signs of an inter-transformation, but the Holy Spirit is not necessarily connected to the waters of baptism, divorce. The Eucharist is a spiritual symbol and it might have a spiritually detrimental effect if I take it in bad faith or if I, you know, I'm not reverencing the table as the Calvinists say, but it's not a real presence in a meaningful sense. Again, the Spirit is not essentially located in those elements per se in

2:18:16some miraculous way. Calvin would admit again a kind of spiritual presence, but who, what that actually is or who, what Calvinists can actually tell you, good luck with that. Have fun with reading 500 different debates and books from Calvinists on exactly what spiritual presence means. I have John Williams-Nevin's book over here trying to basically make it real presence. I've got a hundred other Calvinists saying, no, it's not that. It's not, it's a low church thing, right? You'll never know, right? It's an endless debate amongst the Calvinists themselves, just like now we can do Pedro Communion amongst the Calvinists themselves, right? We're having to reinvent the wheel. So if we don't have a pattern of worship, if we don't have these things, then doesn't it seem to that this is partly why the reformers would begin to say, well, if we're going to go back to the text, we're going to, we're going to do a humanist move towards getting back to the original languages, the original texts. What Bible is it the Orthodox Bible that includes the Deuteronical text,

2:19:22or is it the rabbinical list or what eventually becomes called the Maseretic Text? Now, everybody knows in the first three centuries, whenever this proto-Maseretic or the rise of this, what's called the Maseretic Text comes about, it's intentionally done to try as best as rabbis could to prevent Christians from using sources within their texts, right? I'm not trying to get into a debate about texts, that's not the point. But what is interesting is that the justification for the Protestant canon ultimately ended up going back to things like what we follow a Palestinian rabbinical tradition. But why? Do you think that Jesus gave the Palestinian Jewish authorities the right to determine the canon? Isn't it obvious that the only reason that the reformers were trying to go back to a Maseretic or proto-Maseretic Jewish canon is because that they had left out the big thing, the big elephant in the room, the church, right? I mean, isn't it, doesn't it stand the

2:20:26reason that the church would determine the church as canon, not people that did not believe the gospel? But that's exactly what Calvin's approach to the canon and to the Scriptures was. And yeah, I know he's going to say Jerome, Jerome, Jerome, right? Luther too. They're going to appeal to Jerome. I'm aware of that. But on what basis am I supposed to, as a Calvinist, think that Jerome was correct? I mean, Jerome's just another man, right? On what basis should I not go with Augustins especially given the high, high regard that Calvinists have for Augustin, right? But Santa Augustins canon is our canon. He has the Deuteronautical books, right? And he was very clear about that and including them in the canon. So Augustin got the Bible wrong, but he got the gospel right, but Augustin doesn't teach solofide, and he believes in baptism regeneration, and he believes that

2:21:27the grace that we get is actually an infused empowering grace, right? It's not a dispositional attitude of God changing his view towards you purely on the basis of legal imputation. And if you read Alistair McGrath's book, I mean, I'm kind of surprised that the Protestants aren't at least dealing with this. I mean, Alistair McGrath has pointed out for several years now that there isn't a Protestant solofide doctrine prior to Luther. Maybe that's why we see Anthony Rogers, Gavin Orland, these various people trying their best to quote mine. Now, I have a series of books over there from William Webster, from about 15 or 20 years ago that Calvinist pastor sent me over the years and oh, please read these, which I did, I read a significant amount and I have about six of Webster's books over there. I didn't read them all, I read about three or four of them. And what I noticed when I read that was, well, come and I have to go

2:22:32read the church fathers, right? Because I don't know if is this out of context, is it? And that's the problem with quote minds and why you can't just go and rely on some books series of quote minds. I've got Roman Catholic quote mine books over here. Let me give you an example. So this is an older text that was reprinted. It's well known in Roman and traditional Roman Catholic circles, the faith of the early fathers by Jurgens, right? Everybody in the SSPX for traditional Catholic circles will be familiar with this series. And if you read this, you might think, oh, actually, hey, they teach the papacy. They teach what else? The Filioquate, right? There's a whole section on Filioquate quotes. But the reality is that it's more complex than a series of quote, all that book is a series of quote minds, right? Supposed to be a handbook of quote minds to help Catholic apologists, right? But you start to realize, hey, wait a minute, that's actually an old text that relies on a lot of things that are admitted to be forgeries now. The Vatican admits are forgeries

2:23:36and I'm just using that as an example of how Calvinists, you guys know that Roman Catholics quote mine, right? I see a lot. I used to point this out and Calvinists often point out, hey, Roman Catholics, you're quote mining, you're quote mining. And then Calvinists will turn around to the exact same thing without giving the context of the explanation. And it's all as if the church fathers are teaching the Reformation doctrines. And it's just completely disingenuous. No, they're not. And while we agree that they can be fallible, they weren't stupid. They weren't like contradicting themselves from one paragraph to the next, right? So as if and one passes they're teaching solar grass, solar feed, and then they turn around and teaching baptismal regeneration and the real presses, and the necessity of works and fasting, so forth, right? So in other words, it's just a disingenuous project that is going to the passages seeking confirmation of their own presuppositions.

2:24:40And what it ought to be is you're going to have to spend some time if you really want to get into that stuff, the patristic period, you're going to have to dig into stuff and really see, well, wait a minute, are they actually saying what I think they're saying? For example, maybe it would be good to read the Catechetical lectures of St. Cyril Jerusalem. That was one of the first Eastern works that I read when I was a Roman Catholic. And then while I got to go and see, what does he actually say? Does he say the same thing as the Latin church fathers? Does he say the same thing that Protestants teach? Right? You're going to have to go into that and say, well, low in the hold, his Catechesis lines up with Orthodox theology. What about Athanasius? Maybe I need to read on the incarnation. Maybe I should go read Ad Gentiles. Right? Maybe I should read against the Arians. And you're going to have to see, well, what does he actually say? Maybe I should read his Festa letters, where he talks about the Eucharist. And he talks about the liturgical feasts. He talks about saints.

2:25:41So all of that to say, just kind of rehearsing in my journey when I was a Calvinist, the more I would look into these issues, the more it's every sort of thing that I had as a bulwark would just gradually kind of fall away, right? And just kept getting eaten away at. And I would keep going back to, well, maybe I should just go fall back on the regular differential. Maybe I should just fall back on social scripture. Maybe I should just fall back on, you know, there's church fathers books that I haven't read. Maybe they're going to, maybe there's Protestant doctrines in those books that I haven't got to yet, right? So eventually just sort of, all of these things fall away. And you, you, you come to realize that the fundamental problem here is not just incarnation and trinity that's wrong, but church is missing. The doctrine of the church is missing. I mean, I know they have a doctrine of the church, but it's a wrong doctrine of the church. And it's a doctrine of the church that adopts the invisible church doctrine to the extent that it destroys the,

2:26:44the, the ability of the church to have a visible historical witness with authority. And when you take that away from the church, you don't have a church. You have human institutions that have now been divested of the divine element. It's no longer a fey ontropic institution. It's a human institution trying to reform. And every generation then has to reinvent the wheel reform reform reform reform and if everything can be reformed, doesn't it stand to reason that it's obvious that this is what led to German higher criticism? I mean, if Luther can question the canon scripture because he questioned the authority of the church that put the canon together, then can't the next generation or two of German academics, Julius Bellhausen, etc. Why can't they say, well, I'm not sure I agree with Luther's canon. In fact, I don't, I'm not sure I agree with the Torah. I don't know that those

2:27:46books in the Old Testament were put together in the right way or maybe they're all made up. Maybe it's a five, fifty different authors, etc., etc., etc. You see. And so then you can deconstruct the text. You can deconstruct, if you've deconstructed the church in her tradition, you're not going to believe the text, you're not going to care about the Bible. The Bible will then be deconstructed. It's just a logical process is following through with the next logical step. So it doesn't matter whether it's Lutheranism or Calvinism. On this point, I think these are severely problematic. And then I would say lastly, the fundamental problem in Calvinism, which is connected to that divorcing of the spiritual from the physical, they're all ultimately incarnational mistakes in not understanding and having a correct doctrine of the Trinity and Incarnation. But they also then destroy the believers' full experience of God in the liturgy because they don't have a liturgy. They've tossed out all of the things that even undergarly and presuppose

2:28:49the scriptures. In our view, the scriptures are meant to be heard in the liturgical worship. That's a worship service book. It's not a private devotional. It's not just a text that's publicly read to make you feel bad. It's a document that's part of a liturgical life and cycle. And that was something that when I was a Calvinist, I'd never heard this. Liturgical cycle, what do you mean? We're actually replaying the life of Christ every year. And that's how you partake of and relive the life of Christ every year. I mean, doesn't that make sense? I mean, you would think the Christian Church's worship service would be? And if Christ became incarnate, if he took on human nature, and if the recapitulation doctrine as all the church fathers, especially in the East taught, is correct, clearly in the East. They clearly taught it, I'm saying. Then it stands to reason that matter itself in the universe is inherently good. And so God is not antithetical to or in a dialectic

2:29:53dialectic opposition to created things or matter or images or forms. How could he be? So then I started thinking, well, maybe the regular principle is wrong. Maybe God is not against images in a radical sense. And then you start to look at the Hebrew notion of liturgy and worship. They weren't actually iconoclastic. That was something that was a big kind of revelation to me in this journey was to realize that my assumption was that ancient Hebrew religion was iconoclastic. Against the idolatry you could say it was, but is idolatry essentially an image or is it something that's an interior disposition of the mind and the heart? Well, I started realizing, wait a minute, the temple has a lot of imagery. It's full of iconography, it has angels and so forth, the seraphim on the top of the Ark of the Covenant. You have multiple instances in the Old Testament of imagery. You have the serpent on a bronze

2:30:54pole in the wilderness, which is the type of Christ according to John 3. You have manifestations of the offenies, you have the Passover, you have the Jewish temple service, you have all these rituals, which are clearly in varying ways and degrees iconographic. In fact, when I realized when I read John Damascus on the images and I read St. Peter of St. Peter of St. Peter on the Holy Images, I realized, wait a minute, reality is iconographic. The Bible is iconographic. It's words that are symbols that refer to their images, that refer to or pick out various things and including the divine. So if the Bible can be written in a created image, a word, that picks out and refers to various divine things, God the Father, God the Son, divine energies, divine nature, etc., then clearly it can't inherently be a problem with images themselves, images implistered.

2:31:58There's another sense to what makes images problematic in the Ten Commandments, for example. Because clearly God's not going to contradict himself and tell them to create a temple and send the Holy Spirit to inspire a Bezzalieler who ever to help design all of this ornate artwork. And then you start to realize actually the Bible is full of imagery and liturgy, symbolic presentation, iconic graphic presentation. And then you start to think about, well, wait a minute, maybe I would learn something by looking at the way the New Testament, for example, uses the Greek word icon. Why does Paul, for example, call Christ the icon? Jesus is the icon of the Father. Jesus says, no man has seen the Father at any time. So when he's arguing with the Pharisees, he actually is making an icon argument to the Pharisees. He says, between John 5 to John 9, he makes this argument over and over. He says, who do you think Moses talked to? Who do you think Abraham talked to? Because remember, guys,

2:33:02we all agree no one can see or as ever seen God the Father. And John says it in John 1, no one has beheld the Father, but we have beheld and touched with our very hands his son. Who is in the bosom of the Father? So Jesus makes this point that I am the face of God. I am the image and icon of God the Father. And that's what enrages the Pharisees. When you read John 5 to 9, you realize that. Now you understand why they're so enraged. It's not just that he's claiming to be divine. He's also saying, I am the image. I am the form of God that came to Isaiah, the glory of God that came to Ezekiel because I am the image and icon of God the Father. And in Orthodox theology, we would say he's the only icon of God the Father. You can't have, we're not supposed to have images of God the Father in terms of depicting the hypostasis of the Father. There can be certain terms, in other words, word F-A-T-H-R, right? That's an image that does pick out or refer to the Father,

2:34:06but it is not an hour theology and icon of the hypostasis of God the Father. Just like the Holy Spirit is not a dove and he's not tongues of fire. Those are energetic manifestation representations of the person of the Holy Spirit, but they're not direct depictions of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox theology. So we actually affirm that you cannot in a once in actually in a couple senses image God. You cannot image God the Father other than his son who is his direct impress and icon. And you can't image the Holy Spirit in any other way beyond his energetic manifestations dove tongues of fire and you can't image the divine essence. So we still affirm and uphold the idea that you cannot make images of the divine nature. In fact Paul says this in Acts 17, he says, do not think that the divine nature is likened to anything created temples, gold images of stone or whatever, right? The divine nature cannot be imaged. Well then how can we

2:35:11have the incarnation? How can we have? Because it's not the divine nature the Seven Council says that is picked out or imaged in the icons. It's the divine hypostasis of the Son. That's why you have to have a correct nature person will energy distinction in terms of your trinitarian theology, which then determines your Christology, which then determines your ecclesiology and your liturgy and your sacramentology and the iconography. Because for us all reality then becomes iconographic. Not in the same way. It's not all the same mode, right? Not everything is a Bible text. But in other sense for us all of reality is logo-centric. In a sense it is the maximum speaks of it as the one of the veils that the logos wears, the whole created order. So the created order finds its meaning in the logos himself. The only reason I'm saying all that is to stress that you have to understand

2:36:14that cosmic scope of Christ's incarnation and redemption to understand the purpose of the created order, which is triadic and ultimately crystallological and ultimately ecclesiological. Paul even says that the purpose of the universe is the church. So there's an ecclesiastical purpose to the entire universe. It's cosmic and scope. It's reference ultimately as Christ of course. But this shows us that not only is God not a conoclastic iconoclasm is actually in its root a platonic heresy. And if you read my endorse book he's really good on this. For example if there's Calvinists or people that are interested in kind of getting the basis of what I'm talking about in terms of the philosophy and the history of this. There's a great chapter in the visiting theology by my endorse on monks and humanists. And you might think why is a Calvinist do I care about this? Well, let me add there's two chapters actually. The chapter on the iconoclasm crisis. And then

2:37:15the succeeding chapter monks and humanists. The reason that's so important is because he explains the platonic presubesitions and foundations of all iconoclasm. And Calvinism's iconoclasm ends up being not just a denial of the incarnation, but I divesting of the sacraments and of the church of her supernatural power and origin as a visible historic institution and as having normative authority. And thus what you are left with is a tendency towards a movement towards a nominalistic view of the church and a story in view of ecclesiology in the church and a non supernatural church. So it's a step in the direction of the rational. And I would just simply make this last point. And again, I don't think the invisible church argument that they will use actually works because again when Paul writes to the the church of deficits when he writes the church of Corinth and he calls them the body, he is writing to a visible community and calling them

2:38:17the body. He is not secretly writing to an internally secretly only known elect. He's writing to that visible community, right? It's not written just to the elect. It's hey, the whole church, you keep this collective visible body over here that's having these liturgical meetings. That's the church. It's not written secretly to only the elect. But you notice the move that the strict Calvin assesses to do, right? And all of these ecclesiological texts is he has to shift it and make it only about the invisible church. So they have this dichotomy, this division between the visible society, the church, which is a giant failure, which is full of divisions and schisms and scams and everybody hates everybody and it's splitting every day. And then over here you've got the invisible secret group amongst all of them somehow. But I was just again, point out, no, Paul doesn't call the invisible church the body because the visible church at Corinth the body. I mean, is it the invisible church that celebrates the Eucharist? I mean, clearly in the letter to the Corinthians,

2:39:19Paul is talking about the silver in the Eucharist. Is it the invisible church that excommunicates people? Of course not. But Paul is telling the church in Corinth to excommunicate people, again, presupposing that there's a normative authority there that has the ability to bind people to those kinds of decisions. So the Orthodox Church does still, I'm just as an example of this, does still excommunicate people. We do still do the readings of the Anathomus on the Sunday Orthodox well, in certain churches where perhaps the Bishop is present, not in every single Orthodox Church, but typically that's part of the service, depending on where you are. And it may sound weird, but I would just, I would actually turn this around and say the fact that the Orthodox Church has icons and the fact that the Orthodox Church has tradition and the fact that the Orthodox Church still has the notion of normative authority and does an Anathomus service themselves are proof that the Orthodox Church is the true Church. I'll end with that. All righty then. Okay folks,

2:40:24I guess Jay, you're open for Q&A? Sure. All right. So folks, you can ask questions. Make sure it's related to the topic, right? So I just want to make this clear because I don't want people to misunderstand. Obviously Jay's Orthodox for a reason, he believes, is the true Church. I don't want anyone else to get offended those comments because everyone, and I'm not saying this Jay, but everyone believes their Church is the true Apostolic Church. You guys just got to be able to handle that and accept that. This is it. The Church is our enschism and until there's unity, that's how it's going to be. I don't want you to take anything personally. Just learn and focus and study, because there's one person who's saying that there are shots at the Catholic Church. But folks, this is it. The churches are enschism. There is not unity. And obviously one group thinks the others fall on a way. Please, we're mature enough to agree to disagree. Learn from what this man just said. He said some phenomenal stuff. At least we can agree Calvinism is not biblical or

2:41:28historical. And now if you have questions directed to Jay, he's the man who's going to answer not me. Well, let me just make one last statement that would be relevant to a lot of what I talked about. So if people are interested in getting a little deeper on this, there's a couple good books that are pretty accessible. The Williams and Anstall book Orthodox worship, living continuity with the synagogue and the temple in terms of the liturgy is a good place to start with this. There's Hugh Wibru's book, The Orthodox Liturgy, which gets into the history of the Byzantine divine liturgy. And there's even Roman Catholic books that are actually pretty good on detailing the history of the Latin right or the Western right. And one of the classics in this regard, which is very insightful. Again, everybody knows I'm not Roman Catholic. But just in terms of understanding the Western liturgy, there is a good book by a Catholic father, Meager, and it's called The First Mass. How Christ said The First Mass, which is actually pretty good. I mean, there's not really anything in there that a Orthodox person would disagree with. And then just one more,

2:42:32I mentioned John Damascus has a really good book on the divine images. And that one's very philosophically focused. But one that's a little more theologically focused is Saint Theodore, the Studeids' little book on the holy images. And this, this, and John Damascus's books, they kind of become the the locus, they become the text of the Seven Council, which for a Calvinist, most Calvinists, one of their top issues is going to be icons and images. So that's why I really wanted to focus on that element of things today to kind of get to the point of it's going to, it would be difficult to have a debate with a Calvinist immediately going to the point of images because part of our approach to liturgy and then images is going to be through that kind of side route of tradition and liturgy. So I wanted to talk about tradition and liturgy and then kind of bring it to the point of that's why we would have a certain structure about how we view images and icons and how for us,

2:43:36they have to theologically be accurate because they teach our theology. Right. So in other words, we can't have, for example, certain Roman Catholic icons because they teach doctrines that we don't accept about the Trinity. So there's, there was famous Moscow councils about, they're called the icon councils of Moscow where they explained that there's certain Roman Catholic icons that Orthodox can accept. So I'm just pointing out that there's a reason for this, that it's not just the traditions on man, like there's actual reasons why we do things the certain way in the Orthodox Church. I thought I had good impersonations. You blow me out of the water. But first question is very serious and deep and profound. Jay, show us your toes. Yeah, I guess somebody could tell I had okay, here you go. Sirius questions, though, but I didn't know you're going to do that. Can you explain the Orthodox approach of freewill and predestination? Most Protestants, especially Calvinists,

2:44:38set these to an opposition to one another. Yeah, I think if you were to read a good Orthodox systematic theology like John Damascus is on the Orthodox faith, you'll notice that he has six sections on divine providence, divine foreknowledge, divine omniscience, etc. And we just simply don't think that these things are in a necessary tension. So you could say that the Orthodox view is a kind of compatibleism. That doesn't mean that like God's half of it and I'm the other half or anything like that. It's not an equality of power, but there is a convergence or a synergy that occurs. And ultimately, we would usually refer back to things like Christology and how the two natures in Christ operate in synergy, how we, according to St. Paul, are co-workers with Christ, how we are in sinner gay with Christ in terms of his power at work in us. We cooperate with God. Those are analogies and models to help us understand that it's not an either or. And that's very important because a lot of what you'll notice in the Reformation and the Calvinist tradition

2:45:42is setting up either or or you leave and believe in grace or free will. You either believe in faith or works. You either believe in Rome or the Bible, right? And a lot of the traditional, a lot of these things are false either or is from our vantage point where it's like no, it's actually both in it. Jay, Calvinist believe the son is Otto Theos and therefore nominolous and explain nominolous for those who may not know. How does it connect to their belief of predestination? Well, so the son being Otto Theos in Calvin and in some of the Reformation theologians, I would say ends up being a result of having a certain view of divine simplicity. So because they don't have the very precise orthodox distinctions between nature, person, will, energy, what you have is different ways of dealing with this problem after the Augustinian

2:46:45dominance in the West and after certain Latin councils kind of promulgate and affirm Peter Longbards view of simplicity. It's called identity thesis in some writers and scholars. And so that leads to a certain notion that if we allowed for the father to have his self existence as his unique property, somehow this would lead to or entail subordination. So Calvin thinks that he has to attribute this to the Holy Spirit to ensure against Aryan critiques or semi-Aryan critiques or against any kind of subordinationism. But apparently he didn't realize that this would, by that logic, it would subordinate the Holy Spirit, right? I mean, it's the Holy Spirit Otto Theos too. But who actually in any theology thinks that the Holy Spirit has his existence of himself. I mean, everybody who at least understands the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father. So clearly he has his existence of the father. But again, yes, it's at a really real basic level. It's a denial

2:47:46of what St. Athanasius taught and what it what Nicaeate teaches. But the reason that they teach it, I think, is ultimately some form or variation on a neuronious conception of divine simplicity, starting our theology with the divine essence, the simplicity that supposedly that essence must have. Absolutely simple monad, right? Doing these approaches that don't begin with the person of the father in their order of theology. And that leads them to the Otto Theos idea that leads Calvin to potentially saying that. And thus, the theology becomes nominalist in certain respects. Not every Calvinist is anomalous. I would say when it comes to sacraments or when it comes to the doctrine of the church, Calvinism would be very much nominalist because the names and the terms that are given to the sacraments to grace, they're not actually signifying realities, they're signifying things that are symbols, for example, so that Calvinist doctrine of the sacraments could very easily be called

2:48:49nominalist. But in other ways, many Calvinists are not nominalists. They would in fact be the opposite extreme. They would be realists. Some of the Calvinists were such extreme realists that they actually would try to defend their doctrine of predestination on the basis of platonic realism. So it's not always necessarily anomalous. I would say that in certain ways it's nominalist. The doctrine of justification, for example, is nominalist, right? The idea that imputed righteousness is a dispositional stance that God takes and changes on the basis of Christ, you know, meriting this theoretical bank account that's input into your account. And that just changes God's disposition. That is nominalist because it does not entail or is not on the basis of any actual metaphysical change in you. It's only on the basis of a dispositional change on the basis of Christ, meriting this created grace, all of which is ludicrous in terms of theology, because it's a denial of the fact that he's the second person to God, it doesn't merit grace.

2:49:50So that would be connected to the doctrine of predestination in some cases or in some people, for example, theological volunteerism, if you identified the divine will with the divine essence, then everything that God wills must necessarily be the case as much as the divine essence is the case. You see, so the necessity of what the divine essence is, if the divine will as identical to the divine essence means that whatever God wills, it is just as necessary as his essence. And some or form theologians actually have made arguments along those lines. One of those would be Stephen Charnock. He actually says in his existence of God, the existence of attributes of God, but he says, why don't we just use Platonism as a way to pre-predeestination? So depending upon which doctrine we're talking about, it would be nominalist and or realist at times. Jay, would you consider formally debating any prominent Calvinists? So any particular individuals

2:50:51you have in mind? Well, I think Perry pretty much kind of silenced Anthony Rogers. I think you kind of continued to kind of go after Anthony Rogers. I don't really see much point in debating Anthony Rogers trying to think of other Calvinists. James White has said many times that he doesn't have any desire or intention to debate any Orthodox people. He doesn't have the time for it. I don't really have any interest in debating with Gavin Orland. I can't really think of any, who are the other Calvinists that are out there? We tried, I think, a couple of years ago to reach out to Jeff Durbin. And he was like, oh, I'm too busy and I don't have time for you. So, I mean, I don't know who are the public Calvinists that are out there doing debates, other than Anthony Rogers and James White. Yeah, and I believe me, they won't last

2:51:51with you. So that's the same in effect. Let me see if there's any other relevant questions. This is again about predestination. So I don't know. It's saying question predestination is found four times in New Testament, two times in Ephesians and two times in Romans 8. Exegesis context is that those in the Christ church are predestined to the adoption and so is creation. So I guess the point being is, is the predestination, God predestining, the one you believe you'll be united to Christ? Is that what he's predestining? What is the predestination exactly? Because that's conforming the image of the Son in Christ, adoption, holiness, etc. Yeah, I think one thing that I always struggle with as a Calvinist was the same point I was making about the invisible, visible church was that Paul's letter to the Ephesians, for example, is written to the visible church at Ephesus. And so what I, the logic of my Calvinism always had me by necessity restricting the statement that you are the predestined in Ephesus,

2:52:56right, to the elect. But I could never reconcile that with the fact that Paul isn't writing that letter to only the elect. He's clearly writing that letter to the visible community and he's calling everybody in that visible community that's baptized the elect. And so it occurred to me that, oh, actually, the orthodox perception of this is better. It makes a lot more sense. It's more consistent because the orthodox view is viewing predestination through the lens of Christology. It's not starting with an individual or the notion of the decree, which doesn't make any sense from the order of the or the or the theology from the order of theology. I'm going to begin with the God's decree. I'm going to begin with presuppositions about what justification is. My theology should not start with satiriology. It should start with the Trinity and with Christology. That will then give me the other doctrines that are clearly very important. But all of the Protestant ethos really is, its root is the wrong order of theology. It's starting with the assumptions about

2:53:57justification, the assumptions about imputation, the assumptions about Romans 9. And then everything else is squeezed into that. That's the root of the problem that really was like a paradigm shift for me to where it's like, well, there is God's knowledge of individuals. But predestination is not primarily in Scripture looking at it through that lens. It's looking at it through the Christological lens. And I just simply could never make sense of because I could because I couldn't admit that Paul was writing those letters only to the elect. That just makes no sense. But that's what you kind of have to say if you're a consistent, you know, five point Calvinist, right? So anyway, that's what I would say. How would you respond to the Calvinist claim? The Orthodox tent have a lower view of the Bible than the ancient fathers. And I think you alluded to that with William Webster claiming they taught Soluscriptur and so forth. I don't think that's true at all. I mean, I think the Orthodox view has the same view as the church fathers. So for example, you'll often see Orthodox people say

2:54:59that we don't really have a problem assigning to Scripture a a primacy, a kind of primacy when it comes to, for example, if you look at the ecumenical councils or in theological writings that will be cited or used in the ecumenical councils, you'll notice that they kind of have tears that they'll appeal to. Typically, they will appeal to things like written Scripture first because that was seen to be one of the best attestations to the history of Christ's deposit, his app-site deposit. But that's not the only thing that they would cite. And so they would then cite things like tradition. They would then cite things like other church fathers. They would cite things like liturgical documents as well. So all of those things for us are varying types of authorities. Right? We don't have the either or dialectic of only the written Scripture is authoritative and infallible. Everything else is not authoritative and doesn't matter to me. I can pick and choose. Right? That's the either or of the Protestant view. In our view, there's even a bunch of Scripture

2:56:03degrees of importance and primacy. That does not mean that something that is not as important as the gospels is in error. That's again a false either or. Right? So in the liturgy, for example, when you go to the liturgy, you'll notice that you have readings and you'll usually hear Paul's epistles. Right? Then it will be the gospel. And it's not the deacon. It's typically that's the priest. I know sometimes I think an anti-Okin diocese, maybe a deacon can read the gospel. Typically speaking, the honor is given to the priest and the the gospels are what are held up. Right? And blessed. It's not Paul's epistles. Now does that mean Paul's epistles don't matter. They're fallible. No, it doesn't mean that. It's just that you can have a both and. You can have many goods amongst the good. And that's not in any kind of tension or dialectical problem. And so for the Orthodox, because it's holistic, there's not a tension between what the icons are teaching me,

2:57:03what the Scriptures teaching me, what the lives of the saints teach me, or what the Archimedical Councils and the Church Brothers teach me. There's a harmony. And I might have degrees of authority in the sense of is every church father infallible? No. Is it an ecumenical council infallible? Yes. Right. So an ecumenical council trumps an individual church father. But that does not mean that individual church fathers cannot accurately express Orthodox dogmas and at times express them infallibly. If my memory services me correctly, I've heard that in the writings of Calvin Luther, they quoted fathers to prove their view. I think this was the wrong question I'm sorry, brother. There was something with, but anyway, if that's right, how do they quote them? Yeah, this is a question, but there was one related to the story. And if you want to answer this, because they quoted Augustin supposedly and tried to support their views. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so Calvin does this quite a bit through the institutes, the final institutes were either 1556. He goes

2:58:04to great lengths to really try to demonstrate that what he's saying is not a departure. And if you know, what is it? 1536 or 3539, I don't remember, but so when I first became a Calvinist, I read the small original version. And then I think everybody knows over after next 20 years, Calvinist is a beefed this up right to be like 1500 pages. So when I was going to Boston seminary, I read the whole institutes from Covered Cut, like both volumes, right? And because I really wanted to know, well, does our position line up with Augustin? And so, I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Calvin is always misquoting or misrepresenting Augustin because there are places in Augustin that could lead to or do lead to a Calvinist view. So he's not always misquoting Augustin. For example, Augustin did believe in a 6th number of the elect. He did believe that it was on the basis of an unconditional decision known only to God. He did believe that the gifts of perseverance

2:59:09of the saints is a gift that is wholly unmerited. He did believe that the elect will all infallibly be brought to salvation. But he also believed things that even Calvin admits are wrong or should be rejected, like baptism regeneration, right? Or views of the Eucharist and relics that Calvin fell were superstitious. So there's both end. I mean, at times Calvin is correctly quoting Augustin, and at times I think he's mangling him and misusing him to try to to try to give the impression that there is some historical witness to what we're doing with Presbyterianism, but it's just if you read Augustin himself, it's just kind of absurd, really. I mean, there's there's so much in Augustin that supports an orthodox Catholic view. Obviously Roman Catholics would say a Roman Calibur too, but when it comes to bishops, when it comes to councils, when it comes to the Deuteroncannion, when it comes to the real Presence, when it comes to the Bachelor of Regeneration, when it comes to saints, holy days, I mean, all this is Augustin, right? He's a

3:00:11bishop, right? He's not a Presbyterian elder. I mean, that alone should tell you that there's a disconnect here. By the way, I don't know if this guy's a troublemaker. I just want to real quickly put him this place. David Franco, put a lid on a dude. Don't selectively cite passages like Revelation 19, 10 and 22, 8, tonight, where that one particle angel did not allow John to worship him because the context clear there, David. John mistakenly due to the presence of the angel was offering him worship due to God. How do I know? Because angel said worship God. But then you ignore Joshua 7, verse 6 and 1 Chronicles 29, 20 where there in Joshua 7, 6, Joshua and the elders fell prostrate before the ark of the covenant with God's expressive approval and blessing. And 1 Chronicles 29, 20 says that the Israelites bowed down in worship to Jehovah the God and the

3:01:15King David with God's approval. Put a lid on it before I do block.com and send you packing on your merry way. Sorry. Yeah, I think the mistake there and I had the same mistake when I was a Calvinist was to think that it's the bodily action itself that is the manifestation of idolatry. Idolatry is not primarily a bodily action. It's an interior disposition to revere or review or think of or worship anything that's created as if it is the creator. That would be idolatry ascribing to the divinity created properties. That's idolatry. So it's not primarily a bodily action of doing this. Jacob bows before Pharaoh and God had no problem with this because Pharaoh was in God's providence, the divinely appointed authority at that time. So Jacob shows him the difference and shows him the correct difference to his authority. It doesn't mean that Jacob's is like, oh Jacob's secret is I worship you Pharaoh. I worship you Pharaoh. No, he's just showing

3:02:18a difference to authority. Now here you have a question. It has become popular among Calvinists, essentially introduced two persons in Christ when speaking of his death. What false presuppositions lead to this historian type of thinking? The reduction of person in nature, fundamentally, which is really what I was trying to drive home earlier when I kept saying that there's a continual kind of reductionist move to not understand the distinction between nature, person will and energy and God and Christ and man etc. So as John Damascus says on the Orthodox faith, most heresies, many heresies all arise from the failure to distinguish nature in person. So while it's true to say that in the incarnation two natures were joined, it is the person that is the means of that joining. It is the person who has those natures. So person can be reduced to two natures. It is a divine person who assumes the human nature. The divine person

3:03:21of the sun has a divine nature, but person in nature are not identical in a strict reduction of sense. And that's really the root of misunderstanding what's going on in the incarnation and thinking that natures are acting and doing. And so there's two natures coming together and that makes the person Jesus. No, no, the divine person of the sun eternally exists from all eternity as the second person of the Godhead and what he assumes is a fully human nature, but not a human person. So that's the root of that mistake in Calvinism. And just to be clear, I want to understand, I condemn the story of the sun. It's a hairstyles blasphemy. And once I examine the evidence regarding the Ascension Church, and if I can see that the language clearly, clearly, an historian, and I'm not saying in front of everyone, to Tickle ears, God forbid. I pray that my love for Jesus is greater than praise of men. Once I see the evidence, and if the evidence is

3:04:22clear that the Ascension Church teaches an Ascensionism, it's going to break my heart, but I have no choice but to be faithful to the Lord and leave. So I'm going to see where the evidence leads. I already affirm the title Theotokos. Mary is the Godbearer. So I condemn the story of the Ascensionism. It is a hairstyles blasphemy. I'm just waiting for certain sources to be made available to me. Once I study it, and if it's clear, it's going to break my heart because I love my people, but I have to love Jesus Christ more. And I'm not trying to offend people or Tickle ears, I have to be devoted to the Lord. So we'll see. It's a scary journey, but we're going to see where it's going to take me. Anyway, let's see if there's another question. Let me see. Because to my shock, I was told that there was an historian who said that there are formation basically are affirming the teaching of the Ascension Church on. Anyway, we'll see. I don't know the book on all that. I'd highly recommend this book. Yes, I got to get that book. I got to get that book. I'm going to have to get it down. God, I'm mercy on me. I pray the Lord

3:05:26mercy on me. Stuff I'm going through right now. I never. Intergenic procession. Perry says Revelation 3 and 9. I never noticed this as a tag. Yeah, because Jesus says I will make those of the synagogue, Satan come and bow down before you. So it's Jesus promoting idolatry by telling people the bow down. Well, I really don't see it. I never know. I'm sorry. I didn't mean on trip. I really do not see any other questions. So if you want to make some final comments and where they can find, I mean, everybody knows where to find you man. By the way, you're not just an expert on philosophy and apologetics. You're an also expert on the powers that be behind the scenes and the Luciferian, Satanic influence and movies. So people want to also see that because you're an expert in those areas about masonry and its infiltration. Give them all the places where they can find you discussing those points. I don't know if I would say I'm an expert. I think that I enjoy these topics. I think I'm fluent in the topics, but I would not call myself an expert.

3:06:29But I did study the topic of geopolitics and whatnot to a degree in grad school and propaganda. So I do know about those topics. But I mean, most of that stuff is also covered on various videos on my YouTube channel. I host the fourth hour about once a week of a famous host who you can't name on YouTube. You can probably guess who that is. And so in those installments, I usually cover these topics as well, just kind of lecturing from the writings of elite philosophers and social theorists, sociologists, Bertrand Russell, Jacques Attele, Brzezinski, Kissinger type people. So yeah, I do lecture from those books as well at times. Excellent. So they can go to your YouTube channel. Do you have any websites? My website is jsonalsus.com and it's a hub of all of that stuff as well. Articles I've written and that kind of stuff have a shop where you can get my books on Hollywood. And then I have a rock fin channel, which is where it's a little more of a little more of a free speech-based platform as opposed to YouTube. So if you if people want

3:07:34that kind of stuff, you can go over to rock fin.