00:03:47.080Let's go ahead and jump into our topic for today.
00:03:49.560The reason why I asked you on the show is because you retweeted an announcement for
00:03:55.860a conference that we're going to be holding with Right Response Ministries.
00:03:58.820It's going to be next year, May 5th through the 7th in Georgetown, Texas, that's Central
00:04:02.760Texas, with Dr. Joseph Boot, Dr. Gary DeMar, and Dr. James White, and myself, and we are
00:04:09.720focusing exclusively the subject matter for this conference on theonomy and post-millennialism,
00:04:15.600and there's been a lot of positive response to this conference, and of course there's been a
00:04:20.400lot of negative response, both from Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists, but you insightfully
00:04:25.960nailed down a correlation that a lot of the guys who aren't excited about a conference that focuses
00:04:32.900on post-millennialism and theonomy also, um, I'm sure it's unrelated, uh, but also happened to be
00:04:39.160really, uh, infatuated with a guy named Thomas Aquinas. Help us out with that.
00:04:45.700I meant to go back and reread that tweet before I came on today and I didn't. Could you, do you
00:04:49.500have it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me, um, let me see. Um, I, I copy and pasted it. So if you give me
00:04:58.680about 15 seconds i should be able to find here here we go not even good not even 15 seconds here
00:05:04.400we go um why the talk lately about thomas aquinas it's because theonomy and post-millennialism are
00:05:10.820rooted in the authority of the bible to govern all of man's activities aquinas held a very different
00:05:17.720view that has deeply influenced western theological thought the flashpoint put down
00:05:24.140Aquinas and learn about Cornelius Van Til. Okay, yeah, good. Thanks. Appreciate that, Joel.
00:05:32.420Yeah, you know, theonomy and postmillennialism both hinge to a very large degree on your view
00:05:41.420of the scripture. And your view of the scripture hinges very heavily on your epistemology and your
00:05:51.100understanding of logic and reason and their relationship. You know, in Van Til, his apologetic
00:06:00.280is about what is the ultimate basis of our authority, what authorizes our belief, and
00:06:11.860You're absolutely right. It comes down to our hermeneutic. It comes down to our epistemology.
00:06:16.180How do we know what we know? And, and it really comes down, I think, to the sufficiency of
00:06:20.840scripture because the idea of Aquinas is, although there are some good things and helpful things from
00:06:26.400Aquinas, it's important that we remember that he was thoroughly Roman Catholic. He puts a large
00:06:31.840emphasis on tradition as an equal stream in terms of authority to the scripture. So we, as Protestants,
00:06:38.540we value church history. A lot of Protestants have lost their way because they don't see church
00:06:43.100history as an authority at all. When we affirm Sola Scriptura, we are not saying the Scripture
00:06:47.780is the only authority. We're saying the Scripture is the highest authority and the only infallible
00:06:52.240authority. We know there are other authorities because Scripture itself tells us that there
00:06:56.700are other authorities, but Scripture alone is the highest authority and the only infallible
00:07:01.080authority. So, church tradition, church history is an authority. It's a great authority, but it's
00:07:06.020subservient to the Scripture. It errs. Church history errs. It's not an infallible authority,
00:07:11.260and it is not an equal stream of authority to the Bible.
00:07:15.000And Aquinas, you know, as a Roman Catholic,
00:07:17.680the early Roman Catholic puts a massive emphasis on church tradition
00:07:22.420and the oral tradition of the Roman Catholic Church.
00:07:26.320But in addition to that, Aquinas, when it came to his doctrine of God
00:07:30.060and understanding theology proper and the nature of God
00:07:32.780and the essence of God, the attributes of God,
00:07:34.860all these things, Aquinas relied heavily,
00:07:37.360not just on church tradition, but on a specific set of metaphysics from my understanding that
00:07:44.520were derived from Plato and Aristotle. And so the issue is these things can be helpful,
00:07:51.740but when we start getting into the weeds of saying, you can't know God from the scripture
00:07:57.200alone, the scripture in and of itself is not sufficient for knowing the Trinity or not
00:08:03.340sufficient for knowing God. You must have the scripture plus tradition, the scripture plus
00:08:11.600Plato, the scripture plus Aristotle, the scripture plus Aquinas. And that mindset of saying it must
00:08:22.460be the scripture plus this other thing, I think is even though talking about Aquinas and doctrine
00:08:28.260of God seems unrelated to post-millennialism and theonomy. The principle undergirding all of it
00:08:35.060is ultimately, I think, a subtle attack against Sola Scriptura. And if we hold a Sola Scriptura,
00:08:43.380then we believe that proper Trinitarian doctrine is possible by the grace of God and the illumination
00:08:51.180of the Holy Spirit apart from Aquinas. And we also, if we hold a Sola Scriptura, we see that
00:08:57.300Well, we have a hopeful eschatology and a view that we are called to disciple the nations and that all people, including the civil magistrate, is subject to the lordship of Christ and should legislate, not according to some John Lockean natural law, but according to divine law.
00:09:17.240We don't just submit to natural law, although I'm okay with natural law insofar if we're saying natural law is synonymous with the moral law of God, which I believe it is.
00:09:27.340I believe natural law in its proper definition would include all 10 of the commandments.
00:09:32.040But this idea of we need this extra thing, whether it's John Locke on the theonomy and post-millennial side, or whether it's Aquinas on the doctrine of God side, we're saying scripture plus something.
00:09:43.560And what we're doing in that, rejecting theonomy, rejecting postmillennialism, saying we need natural law, this extra thing.
00:09:51.240We're pretending as though God didn't write a book, but he did.
00:10:05.060Let me take another swing at that question of, you know, why am I saying that postmillennialism and theonomy have the same root and that it has to do with our view of Scripture and how Van Til's view of Scripture is different than Aquinas?
00:10:22.400And so what I'll do there to start is the relationship between theonomy and postmillennialism.
00:10:30.600That's kind of the first step in the thinking.
00:10:32.720Then we can talk about Aquinas and Van Til.
00:10:35.060You know, Lorraine Bettner wrote a good book back in the mid-1900s called Millennialism, and he surveys the different sort of schools of thought around postmillennialism.
00:10:48.760There were, you know, sort of roughly, I guess, three categories.
00:10:54.360There was the view of folks like Jonathan Edwards, who were very optimistic, and they saw the progress of the gospel in the earth, and they thought, hey, this is happening.
00:11:05.580I think Edwards was quoted as saying, you know, hey, within 100 years, most of the world could be Christian.
00:11:11.160And he saw the progress of the gospel, the fruit of it, and so forth.
00:11:16.180A second category would be somebody like Benjamin Warfield, B.B. Warfield at Princeton Theological Seminary, who believed that the gospel of Jesus Christ was the most reasonable or the most rational form of belief, and therefore that it would triumph because of that.
00:11:33.560That would be sort of the motive force that would produce a post-millennial outcome in the world.
00:11:43.520And both of those two schools are without going and doing a hermeneutic and looking at the scriptures, right?
00:11:49.000What do the prophets and the Psalms say and what's our covenant theology and so forth and all that?
00:16:47.020It's the sexual Leviticus 18, the sexuality laws of Leviticus 18.0.56
00:16:52.140In addition to that, what Rushney would say was in the case of Sodom that that their perversion and homosexuality, sodomy came out of another sin, namely idleness, that they were idle.0.82
00:17:04.080You know, it talks about how they were arrogant and proud and prosperous, but in that prosperity0.76
00:17:08.660that they became idle, that they began to coast rather than being productive and producing
00:17:14.100and working and exercising Christ-like dominion.
00:17:17.700And in their idleness, it gave birth to all kinds of perversion.
00:17:24.740He's judging them for a lack of generosity.
00:17:27.840He's judging them also for various kinds of perversion.
00:17:32.400And we see that very clearly in terms of sodomy. That's one of the chief things that God judges them for. So he doesn't just judge them for, for instance, he doesn't just judge them for murder. It's not just like Nineveh, the violence of our hands, the king specifies.
00:17:48.800It's not just Genesis 9, right? Which is a lot of folks for their for their civil polity or their political theology. They want to jump entirely off of Genesis 9 and they won't include anything from the old covenant. Whereas Leviticus 18, God tells the Israelites, don't do these things that I've just given you here from Mount Sinai as part of the old covenant. Don't do those because those are the reasons that I'm judging Canaan that you're about to go in and destroy and so forth.
00:18:17.600Um, and so out of, out of God's law, out of the, the, the scriptures, we get this picture
00:18:25.520of how God governs, uh, the nations, how he governs the course of history.
00:18:32.220And, uh, you know, Gary North wrote a lot of good on this and, and some other theonomic
00:18:37.740authors as well, but, but where I'm driving towards there, Joel is a third category of,
00:18:43.080postmillennialism, right? I mentioned Edwards and Warfield. The third category, North called it
00:18:49.380covenantal postmillennialism, covenantal in the jumping off that Vantilian idea that all men and
00:18:56.180all nations are either covenant breakers or covenant keepers, and that God will bless
00:19:00.920covenant obedience, right? That all men are in God's law is an implicit covenant with all men
00:19:07.980and with all nations. And so, all men are either covenant keepers, covenant breakers, all nations,
00:19:13.080and that God will bless obedience, and he will curse disobedience, right? So, this comes along
00:19:18.280as a covenantal sort of understructure that supports, and God says, here's how, yes,
00:19:25.080post-millennialism, yes, the wonderful promises of the Psalms and the prophets that we see of the
00:19:32.120unfolding of God's people discipling the nations, but covenantally, here's part of how that's going
00:19:37.480to unfold. God blesses obedience, curses disobedience, and the disobedient become
00:19:43.700disenfranchised over time, according to God's law, and the righteous come into greater prosperity
00:19:51.300and greater authority and so forth. So, I would call that kind of a third category, and that's
00:19:56.860where theonomy and post-millennialism meet, I think, is in this idea of blessing and cursing
00:20:07.300and that God's covenant law that we get to read out of the scriptures rules over all men,
00:20:14.320all nations, all institutions. And so theonomy and post-millennialism very tightly linked at the hip
00:20:24.400in that regard. Without theonomy, without the view of scripture that the theonomists held,
00:20:30.100and that pretty much Van Til held as well, you're back to like a B.B. Warfield or a Jonathan Edwards
00:20:37.960kind of general optimism, but no information about how God actually is governing the nations
00:20:44.880and how history itself is going to covenantally unfold. So, that's kind of the first piece of that
00:20:53.000tweet was the the linkage between theonomy and and post-millennialism the the the second part of it
00:20:59.880is how is that view that that was just roughly articulated how does that differ from aquinas's
00:21:09.080view right his his view of the scripture and his view of the world um and i i could i could perhaps
00:21:17.560maybe jump in now to that part of it a little bit. Yeah, okay. So, with Aquinas, maybe a good
00:21:24.800place to start with him is his view of the scriptures. Right up front in his best-known
00:21:31.640work, you know, you can find PDFs of this online. You don't even have to go to a library. You can
00:21:37.140look up Summa Theologica PDF, and in his, you know, first question, kind of seminally for the
00:21:44.520whole work. In his first question, the question is, do we still need the scriptures? And that's
00:21:52.560a little bit of a strange question for a Christian philosopher and theologian to be asking. I think
00:21:58.560we'll get to in a minute, it tells you a little bit about what was going on in Europe. And at that
00:22:04.320time, there was a Greek revival taking place, tremendous optimism about man and his reason and
00:22:10.840so forth, the Greek works having been rediscovered in the 9 and 10 hundreds. But he asked that
00:22:17.240question, do we still need the scriptures? And his answer is, yes, we do still need the scriptures
00:22:24.400for salvation and for the mysteries related to salvation. And so, if you think about it,
00:22:32.180he, he, he kind of, well, he says, but for everything other than salvation, let me say
00:22:40.220it this way, two concentric circles. One, the first concentric circle is, is life on earth,
00:22:45.540right? It's, it's academics, it's government. It's all the stuff that we do as human beings
00:22:51.580on the earth is the inner concentric circle. And for that, man's senses and, and God given
00:22:59.240reason are sufficient, right? Because, hey, we've got Romans 1, and man can discover the truth of
00:23:06.920how to do life on earth using his senses and his God-given reason. Now, the second concentric
00:23:14.860circle outside of man's five senses and reason is the mysteries of salvation, right? And so,
00:23:21.640to be saved, to be a saved person, I need the scripture to illuminate to me things that are
00:23:29.700beyond reason, beyond the capability of reason. So, for instance, I can't reason, my reason can't
00:23:36.960grasp or comprehend how Jesus could have two natures, be both God and man and they not be
00:23:42.540mixed, or that God is three persons and he's one God. My reason can't grasp that. So, I need the
00:23:49.660scripture to tell me the things that are going to be by faith rather than by reason. And so,
00:23:55.460I need that faith for salvation. So, that's where Aquinas is coming from in terms of scripture.
00:24:02.220He does not delineate between the believer and the unbeliever in terms of how they reason,
00:24:10.980right, in terms of how they operate. For him, man was man, generic man. And again,0.56
00:24:17.240And he's jumping off of kind of that Greek view of the world, where my reason is my great gift, and that's my great ability.
00:24:26.700He didn't think of man as either covenant breaker or covenant keeper.
00:24:30.760He didn't think about man as suppressing the truth of God, whereas the believer wants to glorify God.
00:24:37.480If I can interject for just a thing, he's not affirming what the scripture says about man's reason and the ways that it is tarnished and affected by the curse of sin.
00:24:47.240So he's looking at man as though Genesis 3 never happened.
00:24:52.000So that's the first problem is he doesn't, he's thinking that man's intellect and his
00:24:56.960conscience and his reason are unaffected by sin, that man is in this neutral state.
00:25:03.840So he thinks it's simply a matter of the intellect rather than seeing what Romans 1 teaches
00:25:09.260plainly, which is that man's fundamental problem is not intellectual, but rather moral, that
00:25:14.420man doesn't want to submit to God. And therefore, man will do whatever it takes to do logical
00:25:20.880gymnastics in order to come up with a reason for not submitting to God. So it's not that
00:25:25.100what we often think is that we think, you know, man can't reason to God, therefore he rebels.
00:25:34.000God has somehow failed to provide enough evidence for himself. And therefore, man cannot see God.
00:25:41.260And therefore, because man doesn't know God, he rebels against God.
00:25:44.980But Romans 1 teaches precisely the opposite, is that God has plainly revealed himself by
00:28:27.160Every good work. So it's not just the good work of accepting Jesus into your heart. It's not just
00:28:33.220the good work of faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. It's the good work of ruling righteously,
00:28:39.080the good work of parenting righteously, the good work of righteous vocation and righteous markets,
00:28:45.060which I would say are free markets, you know, and that, that, that God actually has in his word,
00:28:51.000his, that's the question is, is when we talk about the sufficiency of scripture, the, the,
00:28:54.980the question that's begged is, is sufficient for what? And Aquinas, I think he would, he would say
00:29:01.140it's sufficient for really just heavenly, spiritual, ethereal, you know, things, but not
00:29:07.000sufficient for life. It's sufficient for godliness, but not life and godliness. The scripture says
00:29:13.020life in god and you know bonds him i say life that's a that's a all-encompassing tent like if
00:29:19.160scripture is sufficient for life it's not just sufficient for eternal life and faith but but
00:29:24.920human life here on earth in such a way that it glorifies god and lends towards human flourishing
00:29:29.780that's a that's a big tent yeah and and uh i agree and and aquinas um i don't i'm not trying
00:29:37.500to use this word in a derogatory way, but he genuflects back to scripture repeatedly, right?
00:29:43.260Because he believes that scripture says true good things. But it's interesting that in his view,
00:29:55.420I think in his structure and in his system of thought, and you see this a lot with people who
00:29:59.900are Aquinas, you know, Thomas-oriented type people today, for them, Scripture has a derived
00:30:09.060authority or Scripture lacks actual authority in history. Scripture says some true things,
00:30:18.920but it derives for them from the natural law. In other words, if something in Scripture is true,
00:30:24.960It's true because it roots back to the natural law.
00:30:30.860And again, his government of history, you know, in terms of authority in history for ethics, for government, for academics, those two concentric circles is is not just his epistemology, but it's where he vests authority.
00:30:49.220It is the five senses and human reason are vested with authority for ethics. They're vested with authority for academics. They're vested with authority for civil government. And scripture is only for the mysteries that are beyond reason.
00:31:09.180And so, then if you stop and think about, well, where does that leave my academics? Where does that leave my view of civil government? Well, you know, we might get some interesting ideas out of scripture, but there's nothing there that's really going to help us authoritatively.
00:31:26.520in history, temporally speaking, authority is vested in the five senses and human reason,
00:31:33.520and that that is God's intent, right? That that's what they're saying is that that's God's
00:31:39.060intent for humanity. And again, they don't differentiate, you know, or quantist in between
00:31:44.800believer and unbeliever, that that is the intent is for civil government and academics to all be
00:31:50.800done that way. And, you know, there's massive implications for that. I call it the Greek
00:31:58.840revival from 1000 to 1300 AD, what was going on, you know, the train, that train was already moving
00:32:05.100when Aquinas came along, he sort of entered into a situation where this optimistic view of man
00:32:13.660had already been bubbling and percolating and kindling for a couple of hundred years.
00:32:19.400The universities began to be founded in Europe around 1100, right? And as they came into being,
00:32:27.740this concentric circle idea was already fairly well established and percolating.0.95
00:32:34.640And that's the view that was really enshrined amazingly by Christians0.70
00:32:40.060from the inception of our Western universities. And so, you know, we look at the Renaissance and
00:32:46.560the Enlightenment as like this veering away from the Christianity of the earlier centuries.
00:32:54.300But that epistemologically speaking, in terms of, you know, the authority of Scripture or its lack
00:32:59.660of authority, that train left the station back during the Greek Revival. And the Renaissance
00:33:04.560and the Enlightenment were just the flowering of that view of the world, right? Because it left
00:33:11.300the door wide open for unbelieving thought. Nobody was really surprised in the late 1600s
00:33:18.360when John Locke was formulating views of political theory and civil government that didn't start with
00:33:23.600the authority of God and then the scriptures. He may have genuflected to God. I know he did
00:33:30.300from reading it. But practically speaking, his system of thought vests authority in man. And
00:33:37.260that's where the five senses in human reason ends is now man is the authority and God is in the
00:33:44.620dark. Right. And with that, speaking of John Locke and natural law, you said a lot of great things,
00:33:49.420but for our listeners, I just want to back up for a moment. This gets to the heart of Cornelius
00:33:54.360Van Til. And you see this in the way that, you know, that Bonson further took the thoughts of
00:33:58.740Van Til and applied it to apologetics. So some of our listeners may be familiar with like classical
00:34:03.980apologetics versus presuppositional apologetics, you know, or evidential apologetics. So, you know,
00:34:09.540like when you think of evidential apologetics, you could think of what's Craig, William Lane Craig,
00:34:16.280you know, would be a guy that a lot of people would recognize. He recently did a debate with
00:34:20.880James White over Molinism, you know, or even like classical apologetics. You might think of R.C.
00:34:25.280Sproul. And this is, you know, who was a big fan of Thomas Aquinas, by the way, you know,
00:34:29.360and that's not a coincidence that he's R.C. Sproul. I loved R.C. Sproul. A lot of his stuff
00:34:35.140is fantastic. I think his apologetics is one of his weak points. I think that he's wrong about
00:34:39.860that. He debated, I believe, Greg Bonson over which method of apologetics was more biblically
00:34:45.520faithful and right. Greg Bonson arguing for presuppositional apologetics and Sproul arguing
00:34:51.220for classical apologetics. And I think the reason Sproul landed there is because of Aquinas and
00:34:55.620because of Sproul's background with a lot of education in the realm of philosophy. Certainly
00:35:01.320he studied theology, but philosophy was what he really, what he focused on in his undergrad. And
00:35:08.460that kind of set the tone that was really influential for Sproul in his shaping and
00:35:12.520formation was philosophy. And then later adding on to that, some of the deep theology.
00:35:16.960So my point is to say, when we talk about presuppositional apologetics, classical or
00:35:21.880evidential apologetics, a presuppositionalist can make an argument from logic. They can make
00:35:28.860an argument even from evidential means. What makes them presuppositional is, so if I'm making
00:35:37.000a logical argument as I'm doing the work of an apologist, what I'm going to do ultimately is
00:35:44.060I'm going to say, I'm making this logical argument. The reason why I think that this carries water
00:35:48.380is because you are a logical being. And I know that you're a logical being because the Bible
00:35:53.520told me so. The Bible tells me so. So what I'm doing is I'm appealing to man's logic,
00:35:59.240but the bottom of it is not logic, but Bible. Not logic, but Bible. And so we can appeal to
00:36:07.460other authorities because again, Sola Scriptura doesn't say the Bible is the only authority.
00:36:10.960it's the highest authority, it's the final authority, it's the bottom. And so we can use
00:36:17.900some of these other appealing to logic, appealing to these kinds of things, but on the basis,
00:36:23.060always tying it back into, and I do this, and I did that, and I said this, and I said that,
00:36:28.140appealing to an authority, a real authority, albeit a lesser authority, but I can do this
00:36:33.900and know this because the Bible tells me so. But what you're saying with like John Locke,
00:36:39.180for instance, in natural law, or Aquinas, is what they're doing is, yes, to the untrained eye,
00:36:46.360if you look at some of these writings, you're going to say, look, they're using scripture.
00:36:50.120John, Joel, they're using scripture. Yeah, but only certain parts of scripture. They're only
00:36:56.180using certain parts of scripture, the concentric circles that you're talking about. They're only
00:37:00.080using a certain part of scripture when it comes to ethics and civil governments and why. That's
00:37:07.080what you have to get down to so that you say, well, scripture is the authority. Yeah, but why
00:37:10.600only some of scripture? And that's the answer to that question is, so what's the determining factor?
00:37:16.320What's the highest? Scripture is an authority in the mind of John Locke, in the mind of Thomas
00:37:21.600Aquinas. But what is the determining factor for which portions of scripture apply and which
00:37:26.960portions don't? The higher authority than scripture, which is man's reason. See, what
00:37:32.760they're doing is they're putting man's logic on the bottom and scripture is being supported by
00:37:37.620man's reason. So the fundamental foundational authority is not scripture, but man. Man is the
00:37:44.260sum of all things. And because arguing from man, we then get to determine from the scripture what's
00:37:50.220useful and what's not, what's applicable and what's not. So even though we're using scripture,
00:37:54.600and so it looks like we're saying scripture is the authority, the difference is this, it's subtle,
00:37:59.620But no, you're not saying scripture is the authority.
00:38:02.560You're saying scripture is an authority and a lesser authority, but the paramount authority
00:38:13.480That is the metric, the authority that determines the winnowing fork that determines which scripture
00:38:21.740makes the cut and which scripture doesn't.
00:38:24.520Whereas the presuppositional guy, the Vantillion guy, the Greg Bonson guy, if you just consistently apply that hermeneutic and that epistemology throughout every realm of life, from the way we read the scripture to the way that we argue for the faith and apologetics and defend the faith to markets, to civil government, to ethics, to all these different things, to parenting, to family, to education, academics, all those things.
00:38:51.320if you just do that across the board, then one of the things you're left with in the simplest terms
00:38:56.500to try not to confuse our listeners is one of the things you're left with is sola scriptura.
00:39:02.440I guess I could say it this way. A true commitment to sola scriptura necessarily concludes in a
00:39:08.740commitment to tota scriptura. And what I mean is that if you really hold to sola scriptura,
00:39:14.500that the Bible is the highest authority and the only infallible authority, then what you end up
00:39:19.600with, with a true commitment to Sola Scriptura, is you end up with the whole Bible, and not just
00:39:25.380pieces of it. Tota Scriptura. Sola Scriptura is a minimizing principle. It makes sure that we don't
00:39:31.060get anything beyond the Bible. Tota Scriptura is a maximizing principle that makes sure that we get
00:39:36.700the whole Bible, the whole counsel of God. Not just the red letters, you know, but recognizing
00:39:42.780that all of Scripture is God-breathed. All of it is Christ speaking. Leviticus is Christ speaking.
00:39:49.600And I think that total scriptura naturally flows from sola scriptura.
00:39:55.440If you really believe that the Bible is the bottom, it's the foundational authority, that
00:40:00.180nothing is propping that up, that authority of the scripture props up every other lesser
00:40:06.420If you really believe that, that it's the bottom, then you're left with having to, and
00:40:10.980certainly there's I's to dot and T's to cross.
00:40:14.040It doesn't mean it's simple or easy, but you're left with the obligation.
00:40:18.720if if sola scriptura you're left with the obligation of i've got to do something with
00:40:23.000the whole bible i can't just do something with part of it total scriptura would you agree with
00:40:27.760that john i do agree with that joel i was sitting there as you were talking thinking of a word
00:40:34.640for sufficient you mentioned earlier the sufficiency of scripture you mentioned the
00:40:40.380scripture from first timothy that talks about it equipping man for every good work um the the
00:40:47.820the sufficiency of scripture is the crux of the debate there between, and Van Til said
00:40:58.140that the Bible is authoritative about everything of which it speaks, and it speaks about everything,
00:41:05.120was one of his ways of putting that. And sometimes people say in response, well,
00:41:10.660what color should my tie be? Or, you know, how do I put together this toy? Or, you know, whatever.
00:41:16.480And that's not his point. His point is that the ethics of everything that is encountered in the human experience, in the human life, all of the ethics of life, the Bible addresses, and it addresses them authoritatively.
00:41:33.120And, you know, Van Til, that view is not in any way degrading to the natural law. You said you believe and I believe Romans 1, God reveals himself. It's amazing. He says what can be revealed has been revealed.
00:41:50.120It's sort of the language there in Romans 1. It's very comprehensive, right? And we know that we are marred by sin and that our ability to comprehend the fullness and the depth of that revelation and the creation is limited by our sin.
00:42:08.780But we don't in any way need to degrade the natural revelation, but we need to be careful that we don't, the authority of the law and creation as a standalone entity is unquestioned.
00:42:24.460Instead, it is the ability of man, fallen man, believer or unbeliever, but certainly an unbeliever, to be able to encounter God's revelation in the creation and do justice based on it, right?
00:42:41.320When he is wanting to suppress that knowledge and live his life in such a way as to justify his rebellion against God.
00:42:51.860And so, into that picture comes the scripture where God in His wisdom and in His providence
00:43:00.180says, I gave you my law once, now I'm going to give you my revelation of myself again
00:49:09.920all men non-christian men are without an excuse when it comes to commandment number one two three
00:49:15.680and four um that that's what paul's saying that they have no excuse with because there's a god
00:49:21.580in heaven who has revealed himself sufficiently so so when man worships the creation the created
00:49:28.140things rather than the creator itself that's not uh that's not love for neighbor that's not the
00:49:32.880second table of the law commandments five through ten no it's not yeah that's commandments one
00:49:37.160through four. That's the first table of the law. Love the Lord your God with all your heart,
00:49:41.200with all your soul, and with all your mind. And we could say that's a breach of the first
00:49:46.060commandment. Idolatry is a breach of the second commandment because you're worshiping created
00:49:49.720things, which are visible things rather than the invisible God. It's also a breach of the
00:49:54.080third commandment. It is to take God's name in vain. It's to attribute deity to a created thing
00:50:01.480that is not God. It's to trivialize the name of God. And I would also argue that even the Sabbath,
00:50:06.600the fourth commandment, is built into natural revelation, Romans 1. There are pagans who would
00:50:11.680agree that if you're in agriculture, you do well to work the land for six years and rest it on the
00:50:16.200seventh. Why? Because God has built a one in seven principle into the fabric of creation itself. And
00:50:22.520we believe that the Sabbath is not removed by Jesus, who is Lord of the Sabbath, but rather
00:50:26.420renewed by Jesus from the last day to the first by virtue of his resurrection. And so my point is,
00:50:32.240Romans 1 gives us the first table of the law. It's not quite this simple, but for the sake of
00:50:36.600a generalization, Romans 1, natural revelation, God revealing himself by creation outside of man
00:50:44.400gives us the first table of the law, how to love the Lord our God, commandments one through four.
00:50:49.020Romans 2, natural law in the way that John Locke would use the phrase natural law,
00:50:55.160revelation inside the conscience of man gives us the second table of the law, commandments five
00:51:00.020through 10, how to love our neighbor as ourself. Romans 1 plus Romans 2 gives us moral law,
00:51:06.420divine law, the full Decalogue. And all of this, Romans 1 and 2, is talking about pagans,
00:51:13.380not Christians, pagans, saying this is the standard for them. So yeah, I think we should0.95
00:51:20.360have Christian nations and Christian governments that publicly identify and pledge their allegiance
00:51:27.580to the Christian God, the triune God. We cannot have pluralism, which is just a euphemism for0.81
00:51:33.320polytheism, which is atheism. No, we cannot have public atheism as our pledge of allegiance as a
00:51:40.240nation. We must pledge our allegiance in the civil realm publicly to the triune God because
00:51:45.960he's revealed himself to all people, including non-believers. And this is his law for which he
00:51:52.720governs the world, not just the Christian church, but the whole world. And that seems like a
00:51:57.860thoroughly, clear, biblical argument. Anybody who's arguing a watered down, that's your
00:52:05.440foolproof scotch theonomy that Christians should be drinking. But then you get scotch watered down,0.93
00:52:12.220or you get a seven up in scotch, you know, like something poured into it, you know, and that's
00:52:16.740where you get John Locke and these guys. But to say that John Locke is the standard for robust
00:52:21.800reform theological thought is i i don't i just don't understand how we get there you know so i
00:52:28.040don't know do you have any comments or pushback or anything with that john yeah i don't have
00:52:33.160pushback but i thought of as you were talking psalm 103 verse 18 or 19 that that um you know
00:52:40.360god's thrown us in heaven and his kingdom rules over all um so it is right and good all men are
00:52:49.720commanded to obey the Lord, to obey his law. And that, I, you know, I would link the low view of
00:53:03.160the law and the low view of the scripture, in a sense, you called it kind of scotch and seven up,
00:53:09.680I think that's kind of, you know, in the history of the West, that's what we see is more and more
00:53:17.1807-Up going into the drink, right? As we've gone along, as we've gone along. And my argument and
00:53:23.160position is that the spout of 7-Up was set up back during the Greek revival, when this view
00:53:34.480of the scripture and this view of man's reason as autonomous and having authority, his five senses
00:53:45.360and reason that that view was set up and was inherited down the way. It was inherited by
00:53:53.620the reformers. I like to say that the reformers, they dealt with the optimistic view of man that
00:54:01.460came out of the Greek revival. They dealt with that optimistic view of man. It was rearing its
00:54:06.280head in Roman Catholic salvific theology and putting man as the primary actor and mover in
00:54:15.260his own salvation, sort of a works-based idea. And they dealt with and corrected very thoroughly
00:54:23.220and wonderfully the view of the optimism about fallen man in the Reformation
00:54:31.260uh salvifically right in terms of personal salvation they dealt with it but they they
00:54:39.120have not yet the church has not yet dealt with the implications of this optimistic view of man
00:54:47.140with respect to it respect where and to civil government um you know i like to say the
00:54:56.180discipling his church. In the first thousand years, we nailed down the doctrines of God.
00:55:06.180In the second thousand years, we nailed down the truths of grace and soteriology. And then who
00:55:12.340knows what will be in the third thousand years. But, you know, the Lord is teaching his people,
00:55:18.140And what we get to see from the last thousand years of history is the beauty and wonder of the doctrines of grace formulated in the Reformation.
00:55:28.400But we are today getting the fruit of view of academics and in our universities today, which are cultural thought leaders of great authority in our society and as well as in civil government.0.95
00:55:41.960Those are both places where Christians have been very quiet and progressively quiet over the last three or four hundred years.0.92
00:55:51.960years. And I think they have not to stand, apologetic does, to stand on the truth of1.00
00:56:05.060our academic disciplines, as well as our starting point for authority in the civil realm. And
00:56:17.000And it's not an arbitrary type fidelity to Scripture.
00:56:25.640You know, it's part of the beauty of his apology and all human thought with the God of the Bible.
00:56:32.320Apart from the God of the Bible as your initial premise for all human thought, nothing will make sense.0.67
00:56:40.540Nothing can ultimately make sense in terms of understanding what the world is like and why we're here and meaning, you know, people use words, unbelievers, they will say things and I'll ask them, well, you know, why do you believe that murder is wrong?0.79
00:56:59.220Why do you believe that rape is wrong? And so forth. And they'll say they'll give various reasons.
00:57:05.720You know, well, everybody knows that everybody. What are you, a Nazi? You know, some kind of weird guy.
00:57:09.780It's like, no, I'm not a weird guy. You just told me what you believed.
00:57:13.120And I'm asking why you believe it. And what Van Til's apologetic does is it peels that onion for the unbeliever all the way back to his initial basis of belief, his initial what what authorizes him to believe something.0.58
00:57:28.640And the unbeliever always will not have any ultimate basis for his own belief other than he thinks so.
00:57:38.320And we as Christians over the last thousand years have allowed ourselves to move into that way of thinking where we don't start with the God of the Bible and the truth of what the scriptures teach.0.94
00:57:54.160we allow ourselves instead to start with the Bible might be true and it might not be true.
00:58:00.500Van Til, I like, he used to say that you could take a Greek philosopher and he could stand there
00:58:05.980and be an eyewitness to the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Stand there and watch the
00:58:12.220whole thing. And then he rises from the dead and he sees him ascend into heaven. And the Christian
00:58:17.560turns to the Greek philosopher and says, see, I told you that he was the son of God. And this
00:58:22.880proves it. And the Greek philosopher would say, well, that's really interesting. That's a new
00:58:28.160human potentiality that I was unaware of, right? I didn't know that humans could, I didn't know
00:58:33.820that humans could rise from the dead. Maybe I can rise from the dead. But this business about
00:58:39.820Jesus being the son of God is absolute nonsense, right? And so, the idea that we're going to start
00:58:46.660our academics or our government or whatever with the idea that the God of Bible might or not might1.00
00:58:52.860not be true, there's always a door out of that room for the unbeliever, always, right? I don't1.00
00:58:58.040care if you stand there and witness the resurrection. So, if that's the basis of our
00:59:02.480authority, if we're coming from the direction that our senses, five senses and logic, like the Greeks
00:59:08.680and like Aquinas, if that's the basis of our authority to disciple the nations, we're in big
00:59:14.520trouble, right? Instead, Scripture itself teaches us that His Word is what is living and active,
00:59:21.240dividing soul and spirit, joint and marrow. You know, throughout the whole course of Scripture,
00:59:26.460it's that image of the sword. It is God's living and active word that comes out of Jesus's mouth,
00:59:33.140right? And that governs and that does His work. So, I think that you were alluding and describing
00:59:42.360the extent of God's law and that all men are under God's law, all Ten Commandments, right?
00:59:52.540But we've lost that over time as we've begun to think, maybe not in personal salvation,
01:00:00.160because we got that. We got that nailed down. But beyond that, whether, you know, academics,
01:00:05.540government, et cetera, culture, we've lost or we have learned to think like unbelievers in a very0.99
01:00:14.740large country. And one of the amazing things about Van Til, I remember reading his actual books for0.91
01:00:20.940the first time myself. I had read Rush Tooney's book about Van Til first. That was my introduction
01:00:27.080to him. But as I was reading Christian apologetics and his systematic theology, the thing that struck
01:00:32.920me. It was kind of like a surreal sort of a thing. It was a mind shift, and it felt really radical.
01:00:38.320It kept striking me that again and again and again, he just kept assuming that what God said
01:00:46.380in the Bible was actually true. And he kept rigorously reasoning from that basis to this
01:00:52.800area, to this area, to this area. And it really, I mean, it was a mental process. I felt like I was
01:00:59.160being deprogrammed uh as i was reading uh van till and and and and there was joy you know that
01:01:06.260began to come to me uh you know as i as i read more and more of it uh because it's beautiful
01:01:11.980it's wonderful christ really is the king of kings he is the lord of lords uh his throne is in heaven
01:01:17.840but his kingdom rules overall like it says in 103 amen amen brother um yeah people always say you
01:01:25.100know well jesus said my kingdom is not of this world and i would say yes and amen his kingdom
01:01:28.820is not of this world, but his kingdom is most certainly in this world. The way that he rules
01:01:35.060his kingdom is not the way that man, tyrannical man with his faulty reason and sin would rule the
01:01:43.860world. So Jesus, his kingdom is not of this world. It is of a different nature, but it is in this
01:01:50.020world. It is not a mere spiritual, ethereal, heavenly kingdom. Jesus, God so loved the world
01:01:57.420and the world is not going to literally dissolve like snow. God is redeeming and restoring all
01:02:03.060things in the beloved, in Christ Jesus. And he has set his holy one, his anointed one,
01:02:09.660he has set him on Zion, on Mount Zion. And the nations rage and they try to break the bonds
01:02:16.680apart. They try to achieve autonomy, but theonomy is inescapable. And the reality is that everyone
01:02:24.540is a theonomist. Everybody believes in theos, namos, law. The question is just which God?
01:02:31.840Is it the God of the Bible, his law? Or is it demos, man as God and their law? Or is it
01:02:38.720some other God? But there's always a God. Every culture, cultists, worship, every culture,
01:02:44.920every nation has a God. And that God has a standard of morality. And that morality is
01:02:51.160legislated through the laws of that nation. All legislation is moral. Neutrality is a myth. And so
01:02:57.720these are just, I think a lot of Christians are hopping on the post-millennial theonomic train
01:03:03.100right now, because I think the last two years in terms of God's providence has just opened a lot
01:03:10.740of eyes, including my own, to the inevitable, inescapable reality of post-millennialism and
01:03:18.820theonomy, that we're going to have to wrestle with these realities and do something about it.
01:03:25.380The whole idea of it's not whether, but which, that principle right there has been, I think,
01:03:32.860one of the clearest lessons over the last two years. It's like, well, I don't want Christendom,
01:03:37.720you know, I don't want Spanish crusades. And I've been telling people, Christendom on its worst day1.00
01:03:42.660can't come close to putting up the number of casualties that secular humanism has.
01:03:46.920we've been murdering a million children annually for the last half century in this nation i i i
01:03:53.780think it's i think it's time um to put the final nail in the coffin of secular humanism secular
01:03:59.760humanism um has uh has been horribly destructive um and so we look at world you know look at these
01:04:08.960uh these the anecdotical evidence of you know something that happened under constantine or
01:04:14.320something that happened you know like maybe strict sabbatarian laws with the puritans and
01:04:19.080you know or these you know like we don't want that do we it's like i don't know do do we want uh0.99
01:04:25.120do we want doctors cutting off uh the forearms of 15 year old girls to use it as a as a penis0.98
01:04:32.080do we want that yeah i mean it's just it's not whether but which there will be a god there will0.99
01:04:37.580be a law. And it's going to be moral. There is no neutrality. And so basically the Christian
01:04:47.620guy who's a theonomist is just saying, yeah, I think God's law is better. The last thing that
01:04:54.740I wanted to mention, because I thought it was really good what you said about just the first
01:04:58.920thousand years. Postmillennialism has helped me so much to just pan out and get a 30,000 foot view.
01:05:04.580So the first thousand years doctrine of God, and I would maybe even add to that, you know, a doctrine of the word and the doctrine of God, you know, inherent inerrancy of scripture and then theology proper and our view of the Trinity and the hypostatic union, like the things that you were talking about, how can God be three persons and one God, one in essence?
01:05:22.900And then the second member of the Trinity having two natures that are not severed or not divorced, but also no mixture.