Truth Unites - Answering Questions From My Patrons

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Here I answer 10 questions from my patrons. Become a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Hey everybody. This video is going to be a series of answers to questions that my patrons put to me. If you'd like to become a patron, this is one of the things I do regularly or start doing more regularly is basically field questions from them and then choose the ones that get the most traction and I think we'll have the broadest relevance and then answer these. This is just a way to maybe helpfully speak to some issues. In fact, let me put them all right up front. I'll mention and they're all in timestamps so you can skip to the ones that are of interest because I assume when people click on a YouTube video they don't want a bunch of extraneous stuff. So you could clip right to them. The first one is about penal substitutionary atonement. The second one is about how Protestants can treat people in the non-Protestant traditions

as Christians. Why we should think like that or if we should and people are asking about that. The third one is a basic summary of the gospel message. The fourth question is about parenting, parenting advice. And I'll put up more details about all these as I go. The fifth question is about how to support truth unites. That was a nice question. The sixth question is about seminary and when and whether and why to pursue further theological study. The seventh question is about idolatry in church history. How do we recognize that? What do we do about that? The eighth question is about my sermon prep routine each week. Number nine is about the debate on Soliscriptura, specifically how do we know the New Testament is infallible? And number 10 is basically,

how do we accept Nicaea 1, the Council of Nicaa, as authoritative if we don't accept it as infallible? Let me apologize to patrons who ask questions I didn't pick. I picked the ones that got the most likes on the page that I think, you know, they got the most traction, people seem the most interested. I don't have time to answer every single one. And I'm also sorry for when I'm brief in my answers. This is one of those things I'm sensitive to. I know what it's like if you're waiting in line for a long time.

It's kind of like you're at the doctor. You're waiting in line for a long time. And you're there finally, but the doctor's seen like 100 people right before you. So it's a perennial dynamic of you're expecting more attention and they're able to give you less and that kind of thing. And that is something I just have to apologize for just across the board. I have to ask for people's patience on this and I'll explain this. I've gotten to a point where I'm no longer responding to emails and Facebook messages and Twitter messages from people that I don't know who ask theological questions. I just can't do it.

I'm too busy. I wish that I could. I would like to in principle. I get so many. And I used to try to help people do that. I thought, well, this is my ministry. I want to help people. But I've just gotten to a point where I can't do it.

I am just too busy. I know what it's like to write someone an email and not get an answer. I know that's frustrating. I am trying to make good decisions for my own health and long term. And so that's a decision I've had to make. But that's why I'm doing this kind of thing, to do what I can do to address questions. So if you have a question, and I always respond to messages, from my patrons. So if you have a question, you really want to get in touch with me, you can become a patron.

I'm sorry that's the way I have to kind of limit it. But my family comes first, my local church comes after that, and then this is all out of the overflow, so I have to set some boundaries. Okay, but I hope this video will be of help to people on these questions. First one about, let me put up each of these questions as I go. I won't include the person's name because I didn't get permission to do that. But one of my patrons asks, what do you think of the recent trends of critiquing penal substitutionary atonement. Do you think they are valid? Where would you rate it on your theological triage scale? It's really trendy right now to criticize penal substitutionary atonement. This is a motif of the atonement that emphasizes Christ bearing the penalty for sin.

Oftentimes it emphasizes God's wrath being propitiated at the cross. My full answer to this is on my video on the atonement, which shouldn't be hard to find. But the big trend right now is to push against that or any other objective model of the atonement. That is a view of the atonement that views it primarily in reference to God, where the atoning death of Christ is primarily doing something with respect to God rather than with respect to us or Satan or evil. So you can read, if you know, Denny Weaver.

He's written a bunch of books in this vein. Mark Heim wrote a book called Saved from Sacrifice. Lots of these people are pushing against penal substitution and trying to advocate instead for like a Christus Victor view, that Christ is the conqueror over Satan and evil and powers through his death. You know, I went into all this in my video. My short answer to this is, I think penal substitutionary atonement is defensible. And when the poor expressions of it are stripped away and you get to a robust expression

of it, a responsible and careful expression of it, something like what you'd find in in J.I. Packers article, what did the Christ? accomplish the logic of penal substitution. G.I. Packer is very smart on this topic. And I talk about some of the other proponents of this. Actually, penal substitution is eminently defensible, logically, theologically, historically. But what I argue in that video is it's not the only thing that's happening in the

Atonement. The Atonement is multifaceted. And so these different motifs are not necessarily mutually exclusive. We can bring them into harmony with each other. It's like a many-faceted jewel. many different things are happening in the atonement that we can speak accurately of. So we don't need to pit them against each other. So that's what I go into more detail in that video about. But I think we need to defend the fact, I mean, the simple fact that Christ pays the penalty

of sin on the cross. I just think that that is very biblical. You know, Isaiah 53. I think it's historically defensible. The fact is that there are penalties, like death itself is a penal reality. Christ dies and in a substitutionary way. So I think the more interesting questions then will be kind of what does it mean exactly to say penal substitution and how does that relate to other motifs about the Atonement? That's what I try to do in that video. In terms of triage, the question asks about,

you know, where do you rank this? I would make a distinction between the core idea versus the precise mechanics of how you understand it. So the core idea that Christ pays the penalty for sin is, I would say, at the very near to the nerve center of the gospel message itself. You think of 1st Corinthians 3 and 4, 15, 3 to 4, for example, that the word Christ died for our sins. But I would say how you exactly construe that, legitimate Christians can disagree in good faith about that. So that's how I answer that question.

Again, my video on the Atonement goes into more detail, but hopefully that might give people a brief sense of how I think about that. and maybe that could be helpful to someone. Here's a question that was the most liked question out of them all. What appeal would you make to the Protestants that believe Roman Catholics and members of the Eastern Orthodox Church are not true Christians? There is another question. That was very popular as a question, so a lot of people wanted me to address that. So another question is similar.

It said, given our differences on the gospel, even when the equivocation and misunderstanding of terms is remediated, can you expand on your reasoning for why we should consider Roman Catholics, our brothers, sisters in Christ. Ecumenically, not in a I know who is and isn't elect position. Okay. So this is a tough question. Because on the one hand, my position, and I say this knowing that my answer will give offense to people in different directions. And you just, you know, when you have, what I think is important to do is to follow our conscience and do what we believe will build up the church and honor the truth and kind of let the chips fall. And you all know, I put out my thoughts on things, even when they're controversial, whether it's a cultural issue, or whether it's, you know, creation, and I always

try to follow my conscience. The way my conscience directs me on this is in a position that's somewhat balanced, and thus it could give offense to both, to people in multiple directions. On the one hand, I don't want to downplay the importance of the differences between Protestantism and the other non-Protestant traditions. They're really significant, and they go down to the roots of how we follow Jesus, you know, they touch upon the gospel. We're talking, you know, how are we made right before God? Well, that's, that's one of the issues where we have differences. They talk, they go down to questions of authority, you know, so if you think Sola Fidei, Sola Scriptura, the two central pillars of Protestantism, those things, you know, they're not out here on the fringes. They're really important.

I don't want to downplay these differences. That's not my intention. Also, when we speak of another church as a Christian church, we're not saying everyone within that church is personally Christian. We don't say that about Protestant churches. I say, oh, the Methodist church down the street is a legitimate church. But that doesn't mean that I might not meet someone from that church that needs to be evangelized if they don't actually know the gospel. Because there's all kinds of Protestant churches too where they haven't really even heard the gospel. So particularly in many places of the world, there may be circumstances where we feel we need to evangelize large quarters of different churches that we still speak of as they're not outside of Christianity.

We don't say it's a false church, but we recognize the gospel needs to be more clearly understood and proclaimed in this context. So I want to leave room for that as well. Because sometimes people hear me as saying, oh, okay, he's not saying it's outside of Christianity, therefore, you know, there's no problems and everything is good. and I've found that people often think in these all-or-nothing ways. But the reality is it's usually more complicated than that. So the way I've often put it is, using alliteration here,

the theology of the non-Protestant traditions, in my opinion, again, before God here, trying to be honest, it adds on to the gospel in certain ways. It obscures the gospel in certain ways, but it does not obliterate the gospel. add on and obscure yes obliterate no so you know if you require people to believe in the assumption of mary you're adding on to the gospel in my opinion if you advocate a theology of indulgences and temporal punishment and the treasury of merit and purgatory and so forth you're obscuring the gospel of the free grace of god in my opinion that's honestly what i believe without you know i i i really don't have any doubt about it. But the theology of these traditions does not make it impossible to be a Christian

or to know the gospel. Why do I say that? Let me mention five things. Number one, that's a historic Protestant view. I am not way off on this. Read Richard Hooker. He's a great one who would be a good example of a historic Protestant who thinks carefully about this, responsibly about this. And he's speaking about the ways we can recognize Roman Catholicism, for example, as a true church. or you could read Luther and Calvin. I document this in my video. One big argument for Protestantism. It's the one with a thumbnail that says one true church in the thumbnail.

I also document some of the same quotes at the end of my video responding to Cameron Bertuzi's conversion. I think it's in that one. I've done this a couple different places where I talk about quotes from Luther and Calvin, where they're saying, you know, I'll throw out a quote from each. Calvin says, and I've documented these in those videos, the Roman Catholic Church is not the one true church, but there are many true churches within her. And Luther has a couple statements that are amazing.

He said, we're not rejecting everything from the papacy that would make us reject Christianity itself. Their view was very nuanced. This is one of the things I love about Protestantism. They're not closing the door around Protestantism, locking it, throwing out the key. It's a renewal effort, but they're saying, you know, they're not downplaying the problems.

They spoke of the Roman Catholic hierarchy as incredibly corrupt. But they also said there's legitimate sheep of Christ over here who know Christ, who know the gospel. And because for Protestants, it's not about being in this or that institution. The church is wherever Christians are. The church is wherever Christ is in word and sacrament. So where people do respond to Christ, praise God. You know, there it is. And I love Protestantism for being able to do that. By the way, Luther and Calvin were so positive about the Eastern traditions like Eastern Orthodoxy. And that's one of their

whole appeals against. I go into this in that video. That's one of the things they, and Jordan Cooper and I talked about this when I did a dialogue with him. That's one of their great appeals against Roman Catholicism back in the 16th century. They're basically saying, you have no right to excommunicate all of these Eastern Orthodox Christians, because that was the reigning view from the medieval time, far more exclusivistic. So that's the first thing is I'm historically rooted in my recognition of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Oriental Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East as legitimate Christian churches with valid sacraments, among whom there are real Christians.

At a deeper place in my heart, and this is my second point, I can just say I just recognize true Christians there. I see spiritual fruit there. One of my arguments for Protestantism is that true spiritual fruit can be seen in multiple institutional expressions of the church. And so I talk about from Matthew 7, Matthew 12, 1 Corinthians 12, 3. There's one other important text I always go to. It'll come to me in a second.

But I talk about how I think we're responsible to recognize spiritual fruit. Oh, Mark 9. That's it. Oh, man, that one really weighs upon me. That's the whoever is not against you is for you passage. I preached on that two summers ago. I still think about it every week. It is just a powerful passage.

So when I see Catholic exorcists casting out demons to the glory of the Trinity, I want to be careful. I don't want to, you know, the fact is that I just believe Christ is responsive to faith. And so whatever there's true faith, Christ is at work. You know, there could be situations in a Protestant context to make this less about that, where the Protestants are really in a place where they have terrible theology, terrible theology. You know, but they have enough that where there's true faith, God still at work there. God is so gracious.

At least my third point, and that is, by the way, it's still in the second book about spiritual fruit, there's people I've met that I, in the non-Protestant traditions, that exhibit amazing godliness. And I would just be, I would feel as though it was the height of arrogance to reject them and say, no, that's just because they're not in this tradition or something. It's like, no, that's the whole instinct of Protestantism. You respond. whatever you see the Holy Spirit at work in line with the Gospel of Christ. And there are far better Christians than myself in those traditions.

Far better. The third point is what Francis Turriton spoke of as the heads of religion. What he basically said at one point in his institutes of Alecic theology, where this is a historic reformed theologian, he's basically talking about the sense in which we can call Roman Catholicism a true church. It's amazing despite the polemics of the time. They were very careful in the saying yes. And Turriton was basically saying, we have the same heads of religion.

We have the same. We believe in the Trinity. We believe in the incarnation. We believe in the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus, et cetera. It's just that they add on a bunch more to that. Now, the adding on is a problem, but we still, at the end of the day, have this common foundation. We believe, you know, and the way he put it is, there's sufficient food for salvation. The fourth thing I'd say is that with St. Augustine and with other Christians,

in the Pre-Reformation Church. Here's the appeal I'd make to many, if a Protestant is out there saying, no, no, no, no, no, you can't be a Christian if you don't believe in justification by faith alone, because justification by faith alone is the gospel. They don't believe in justification by faith alone, therefore they are not Christians. I would base, I could put my response bluntly, was St. Augustine a Christian? St. Augustine is not only not similar to a Protestant view of justification in important respects, he's actually the driving influence for the way the medieval direction goes toward defining the word justification as a process. Now, I'm not saying that Augustine's totally in line with like later Catholic views either, but I'm just saying, we've got to be so careful again.

So if you, in other words, the point is, if you start being too rigorous in your requirement of certain systematic categories, you're going to lop off a lot more than the contemporary non-Protestant churches, you're going to have to lop off a lot of the pre-Reformation church as well. That leads to the fifth point, and that's the doctrine of justification. Here, I would just refer people to my video on this, but briefly to say, I'm persuaded that our differences on justification are complicated. And they actually go back to complications and not problems or tensions, but just complexities within the New Testament itself. From James 2 to Romans 4, 1 through 5, we've got a prima facie contradiction. Now, it's not an ultimate contradiction, I don't think, but we can recognize there's a

tension there we need to work through. And the fact is that just as Protestants don't believe in an easy believism, our Roman Catholic friends don't believe in something that's quite identical to the Judaizers' error in Galatians. I know some Protestants think that. I don't think that's fair or charitable. I think what they are saying is that, you know, just one thing alone that makes them different is their belief in initial justification as on terms of sheer grace. And then it's now, I'm not saying that then, therefore, the differences we have about the process of justification from that point are insignificant. They're very significant.

But they're not believing in a pure works righteousness. And too many times Protestants don't really appreciate the complexities there. So those would be the five reasons why I'd say we don't want to downplay the differences. We need to argue and wrangle about the truth about these differences. but in the meantime, I believe we can recognize genuine brothers and sisters in Christ across the Protestant to non-Protestant divide. I probably, some people will be good with that. Many others will dislike it from multiple directions.

Some people will be offended that I'm even qualifying it that much, but others will say that it's too soft, but that's my honest opinion and it's a historic Protestant view. So hopefully that could be of use to someone. Okay, the third question here is such a fun one, and I appreciate my patron asking me this. This is such an edifying question, too. If someone were to ask you, what is the gospel message? How would you summarize it? Well, what I would say is, and this is why it is so wonderful to be able to try to simplify.

You know, one of the things I've been thinking about lately is how we can make things overly complicated, or that the complexity that we need in some occasions is not always needed in others, right? So, like, I'll have situations where on the one hand, I'm thinking about cultural dynamics and cultural apologetics, and I'm doing a study right now on despair as a characteristic of the modern West and how that bears upon how we share the gospel with our friends right now, and it gets really into the weeds. And then on the other hand, and this is why I'm glad I'm in ministry while I do theology, it keeps you grounded. I'll be doing a baptism interview and I'll ask someone, you know, tell me about your testimony and why you're interested in baptism and we'll get to talking and I'll

basically get to a point where I'll say, well, have you ever personally received Christ? Have you ever personally put your faith in Christ? What is your understanding of that? And they'll say, no, I haven't. And it'll get to a point where I have the wonderful privilege of being able to share Christ with someone and it will be so simple. It doesn't need to get into all the weeds of cultural analysis, you know. And I think it's healthy to be just, you know, it's almost like.

like those times where you, it's like you bring it down to the ABCs, and it's wonderful to be able to do that. So in that spirit, I think every Christian should be able to summarize the gospel, even though in my more technical work I talk about how, you know, we should talk differently to different people, just like Jesus did, and we need to contextualize the gospel and all of that at the end of the day. I think while the word Eugenelian gospel is used with different nuances in the New Testament, you can define it more narratively or more propositionally and so forth, and all of that's valid. I think one defensible approach is simply to go to 1st Corinthians 15, 3 to 4 and give a basic summary of the gospel in terms of Christ died for our sins.

So the way I like to summarize the gospel from that, if I'm in a pinch and I just have a few minutes with someone, is in four steps. God, man, excuse me, God's sin, Christ response. Again, this is so simple, but sometimes the simple is needed. God made us. There is a God. We sinned against him. So there's a problem in our relationship with God. Jesus Christ came into this world to fix that problem that happened through his death on the cross and his resurrection. And now we need to respond to it with faith and repentance. That's simple. I love talking about faith and repentance. I find that helps. I love talking about just those four bullets. Now, obviously so much is implicit in that in the process of real conversation you want to do.

draw so much more out. But if you're looking for an extremely simple summary, that's one way I encourage people to just be ready because you never know when you'll be on an elevator or you'll be on a bus and you only have 30 seconds to share the gospel with someone. So, and sometimes, as much as we contextualize it, sometimes you don't even know the person that well, so you just got to go and start, you know. So that's how I would summarize it briefly. This is a fun question number four about parenting. As a father of five, congrats. What are some of the biggest struggles you face in dealing with disciplining your kids, especially for seasons where parenting seems to be more difficult? And any suggestions for overcoming them? Any recommendations to dads on cultivating strong devotions

in the family? Yeah, I kind of chuckle with the part of when parenting seems to be more difficult because it seems like parenting is always difficult, you know. It's so much fun, but it's challenging. And we're in a season now with our eldest at 10 and our youngest at seven months where it's pretty exhausting with five. Our friends, I always talk on Marco Polo with a good friend of mine whose kids are in high school and he says, oh, it doesn't get less difficult. It just gets less physically exhausting. Now it's like psychologically exhausting.

It gets more complicated. You know, I think parenting is hard. I put parenting up there with preaching and a few other things in life that you realize you'll always be growing in. You'll never have arrived. It's complicated. It's a complicated and challenging calling. And man, we Esther and I talk about this every day.

One of the ways, so one of the things, a couple of encouragements. One is that just for parents to remember that what you're doing is so important. It's okay to admit that it's hard. It's okay to admit that it's exhausting and exasperating at times. Esther and I are always sending hilarious memes back and forth about parenting to each other through text. Just to kind of say like, okay, we're not the only ones who experience. this, you know, just the most hilarious things. But it's okay. But remembering that it's, that what you're doing is so important. What I say to Esther every day is, or what I say to her frequently is every day as a mom,

it's a stay-at-home mom, you are shaping souls for eternity. You really are. As a parent, you know, parenting, we shape our kids way more than their teachers or their youth leaders or anything. And when we're shaping these kids, they have eternal souls. You know, it's a cool thought. They'll be our equals in heaven one day. But when we invest in them, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, that's shaping them in a way that will reverberate on into eternity. So remembering how important it is helps. So let me give four suggestions of little tips I found that things that are helpful.

The first is find little ways to incorporate spiritual discipleship for your kids in the midst of life. Deuteronomy 4 and the Shema has that little phrase while you walk along the way. You know, it's talking about like in the midst of life, teach your kids things. So like a, the benefit of that is it's less overwhelming. You don't have to plan it into your schedule. It's just like in the middle. It's like, oh, I got to go to the grocery store. Let me take my eldest son.

We'll talk about what he's learning at school on the way. Oh, I've got to fold the laundry. Let me see if my daughter wants to help me. Sometimes she does. And then we can talk. A simple thing I've been doing lately is just on the way to school every day, tell them my favorite Bible verse. So simple.

But it's like, hey, we're in the car together anyway. You know, so it's not much more work. You just have to think of it and say the verse. And, you know, so it's like, I think just creativity and thoughtfulness and intentionality to build it in. That way it's not overwhelming to have, because it's exhausting in those seasons. That way it's not as overwhelming to have all these additional things you have to do, you just bake it into your daily schedule.

The second thing is to try to have healthy fun. Recently, I taught my kids how to play the Mario Brothers games, and it was nostalgic for me, you know, Mario 1, Mario 2, Mario 3, but it got addictive. Video games are so fun. And so then every day it was like, can we play video games? Can we play any? I thought, this is not healthy. We don't want them to always be thinking about that.

It became too much of a disruption. So we thought, okay, we're going to have to probably stop doing that, but we don't you know, that's going to be a hard thing to hear. So we thought, let's have a replacement. So we started coming up with the other games, and we started playing charades. And I never thought our kids would love it so much, but it's so fun, you know, where you, you know, oh my, you could all see my five-year-old getting up there impersonating. It is so cute.

But, you know, so we'll do, now they look forward to that every night. And there was an initial adjustment, but now it's like, oh, can we play charades? You know, where you like act out something and people try to guess. and it's so fun and they love it and it's so in other words just having fun together i think it's so important as a family there's a it's kind of corny but the old saying families that play together stay together it really is true that if you enjoy your family um that is so important that is not icing on the cake that really is important i'll come back to that in a second uh a third thing in the spirit of that is making up fun traditions for your family so we do like we make my my wife makes

a special breakfast on Sunday mornings because we want Sundays to feel special and fun. We also do different things about the week. Like we'll have breakfast food for dinner on Wednesday night. Friday night is a movie night. We try to make meals fun. We used to be more strict. See, our tendency as parents is maybe to be too strict at times. And so we've had to just continuously, relentlessly learn to lay off and chill out about a lot of stuff.

So with meals, a lot of what we do is we have two goals. put food in front of them and then have fun together while you talk. That's it. We don't try to make them eat things anymore. We've just gotten to a point where we say this just, there's a lot of thought and study that went into that. But I think it's really healthy for kids when they enjoy meal times. And so we provide the food for them, but we don't make them eat their vegetables

and that kind of thing at this point. We've kind of, after a lot of thought about that, we've decided we don't, we're not, that's not a hill to die on, to quote another book. And we just try to enjoy it. And that's the last thing I'll say is enjoy your kids. Kids are exhausting, aggravating at times. They can make you pull your hair out of your head, but they are also fun. Kids are fun.

Adults are not always fun. Some adults are fun, some adults are not fun, but kids are always fun. Kids are so much fun. It's so delight in them, you know? Here's the thing about that is kids can tell when you enjoy them. When we all experience being enjoyed as a form of love, If your pastor came to you and was like, well, I got to spend time with so-and-so because it's my job, so you wouldn't appreciate that.

But if they said, oh, I love getting to hang out with them, I like that person. We experience being enjoyed as a form of love. Our kids can feel it when we're happy to see them. And so that's, you know, I made a commitment. I'm never going to stop playing with my kids out of fatigue or say no because I'm tired. And so no matter how tired I am, when I get home, I try to just enjoy them. And that's hard. I mean, sometimes when you're tired, but I think if you really genuinely enjoy your kids and have fun with them, I think that actually is important.

That goes a long way toward building the kind of relationship where you're disciplining and disciplining will be received in the best possible way by them. At the end of the day, it's not as complicated. You know, think of the golden rule. How would you want to be parented? I don't know. Those are a few thoughts that might be helpful. Speaking of parents and kids, I got to go home soon and be with them. So I'm going to finish.

I'm going to answer one more question now. I'll answer the next six when I'm back in my office the next time I'm back in my office. I guess that won't affect you as you're watching. But if you're wondering why it'll look different next time I finish, that's why. Okay. Fifth question, I so appreciated someone asking about this. Other than subscription on Patreon, buying the books, or general engagement on your platforms, what could those of us who follow your content do to help you in making it and supporting it?

What a nice question. I am so grateful for people who are gracious to want to support. I would say three things. Number one is prayer. I'm not just saying that. I really believe prayer is the engine of ministry. Prayer is. Everything flows out of prayer.

Everything flows out of because it's the Lord who's at work. I really would ask for your prayers for me, for me to be wise and effective and, fresh in my walk with God, but also for wisdom, but also just for God to help the videos help people. You know, I really want it to be an upbuilding thing in a time of disintegration and destruction. So just pray for it. The second thing is, over the long run, just keep your eyes peeled. At some point, I'm kind of just wondering, should I make Truth Unites a bigger thing that's not just a YouTube channel. Should it become more?

I've already purchased a domain for a website, but I haven't really acted on that for the last two years. I've been too busy. I don't really have the bandwidth to like know, even think about how to do that yet. But I just know I feel a burden. I feel like what I'm trying to do at Truth Unites, namely be a voice of reconstruction and balance and theological education and triage and help and so forth and historical knowledge amidst a lot of the swirling anxieties and tumults that's out there right now. I feel like there's some value in that for people.

So I want to keep doing that. And I'm just kind of open-handed to the Lord about what does that look like? So you could just be alert about that and stay tuned. And let me know if you have thoughts about basically just how can I be effective at my mission, which is what I just said. So just stay tuned, I guess, on that, on how I should go about that. What else it should look like? And the third would just be, in the meantime, you know, becoming a patron is great.

all those things are great. Sharing about the videos is great. And just, I don't know, if there's somebody you think that would benefit from one of the videos, send it to that person. All that kind of stuff is helpful. But I don't feel as though I'm desperate for things because I feel like people are so gracious already. But I really do appreciate those things when you do them. So thank you, everybody who supports my stuff. Okay, I'm going to take a break now.

I'll be back. The next question, I'll put it up now. So it's, what would you recommend for someone interested? in further academic study of church history and theology, is seminary slash grad school worth it at this point, I'm your age, for someone who doesn't need it for ordination, are the specific non-Catholic schools that have strong church history departments? Well, there's great Catholic schools, too. I don't think you shouldn't go to a Catholic school necessarily. I think University of Notre Dame is one of the finest places in the world to study theology and history. I really do. I mean, it's just, it's unique.

There's no place quite like Notre Dame, but there's lots of places that are great. But I'll answer that question more fully when I get back. The short answer is going to be seminary is awesome. Grad school is awesome. I love formal education. I think there's a lot of value to it. So I'll answer that more when I get back. All right, I am back from putting my kids to bed and all is well at home and I'm back into my trying to catch up my own brain here. So I think I was talking about seminary, theological education, that kind of stuff. I don't remember exactly what the last thing I said was, but I think the main point that I just wanted to emphasize is that I think there's such value informal theological education. I've written a blog post once about whether pastors should pursue

PhDs. That has a lot of principles in that that could be relevant to this. I mean, it is tricky. Every circumstance is different. Obviously, not every Christian is supposed to go get a master's degree of any kind, certainly in theology. But I would say for people who have a real theological interest and aptitude and you want to push yourself and you want to learn, it's really something to consider. There's so many online options. Honestly, seminaries make it pretty easy on you if you're interested these days. They want to bring in students. I think that there are, you know, it's not necessarily as unattainable as you might think. You can do it part time and so forth. And there's just a lot of value. I think that right now a lot of education tends to be moving. The whole state of

higher education is in such flux right now and it's so vulnerable. One of the things I've often thought is I want Truth Unites to be supportive of local churches, but also even of seminaries and a supplement to other things, not never a replacement. I don't think it's healthy. I mean, I hope it's helpful to people who even if they're not going to seminary, but I'm saying I don't want someone to think, well, instead of going to seminary, I'll just, you know, watch YouTube videos or something. I want it to be a supplement and a stimulus and a help, but not a replacement for other things.

And I just think there's a huge value. you know, when we get most of our information online, as increasingly happens, there's so much distortion because of the algorithms and the sociology of that, but there's so much value in formal education, just the objectivity of that, the chance to learn from professors who actually know what they're talking about most of the time as opposed to, you know, YouTube, you never know, you never know what you might get. So, and the fact is education is just such a great investment. I rarely think will pursue formal education and then think, oh, that was a waste of time and resources. The fact is, even if nothing else, it changes you as a person.

It deepens you as a thinker. And those are always good values. So maybe one day I'll do a series of videos on my YouTube channel about different seminaries. Maybe like, you know, promoting or encouraging people to, hey, here's a great seminary in this part of the country or that kind of thing. I don't know if that'd be a fitting or not, but I would love to encourage people to consider formal theological education. I think there's great value in it, even if you're not pursuing ordination, even if you're not informal, you know, full-time ministry or something, just to learn the value is very great. And if you just look into different programs, again, maybe I'll do another video on which kind of places you could look into some time. Okay, here's the seventh question.

Another tough one, in the sense of difficult to answer and also we'll try to answer it. in a way that's true to Protestant convictions and my convictions without being disrespectful to our Roman Catholic friends. The question is, should Protestants say that Roman worship and piety, or at least large parts of it, even with the best intentions on the parts of the worshippers, are idolatrous or at the very least unlawful? And if the answer is yes, how could Protestants avoid the pessimistic conclusion that the visible church was seriously compromised for much of history between the apostolic era and the Reformation. Two preliminary remarks before I dive into it is the main answer. First, in the preamble to the question, it had talked about the Second Commandment and

traditional reformed views of the Second Commandment. One of the things I want to say is I do think that we can look back at early Protestant confessional documents and recognize that they were formed in a very polemical context. And so sometimes they are flavored and shaped by that. And so, And so, you know, I'll give an example, the identification of the papacy with the Antichrist. You know, that's in the Westminster Confession of Faith. But I would say I'm not persuaded of that, just on exegetical grounds, whether you're talking about the beast of revelation or the man of lawlessness in Second Thessalonians, too. I did a video on the end time stuff once.

You know, I don't, I'm not persuaded that's a good interpretation of the identity of the figure in those passages, but it's very common in historic Protestants to make that kind of identification. The man of lawlessness is the papacy or a particular pope. And so for many historical Protestants. So I think it's okay to recognize that our historic confessional standards were formed in a polemical context. And so some, for example, sometimes the extent to which concerns will be articulated about the Second Commandment is very strident, especially in the reformed tradition. Come back to that more and say more about that. The other kind of preliminary comment is just that the question references here for much of its history between the apostolic era and the

reformation. Well, we can clarify the time frame because for some issues, it's going to be different than for others. When I talked about icon veneration, you know, the debate is it in the sixth or the seventh century that it starts. And then I talked about how it's all the way to the mid-12th century where you've got fierce resistance in various pockets of the West. So what we call Germany and France, it's outlawed in many places until about 1150. I think it was in like 1140 that it became canon law in the West. But it was fiercely controversial reverberating on for hundreds of years, even after Nicaea too. So the point is, you know, if someone's thinking, oh, the whole church fell into idolatry from after the apostles to the Reformation. Well, on some of these points of concern about

idolatry, it's not going to actually be that long, you know, like in the Western church, it's just going to be a couple hundred years where icon veneration really came in. And there was concern about it at that time. You can find the iconoclasts like Claudius and others, even after an I see it too. So the point is, the time frame is not as long for all of the issues that might come up. But here's the main answer I would give. The sin of idolatry exists in greater and lesser degrees of seriousness based upon what specifically is on the table, based upon the level of intentionality that's at play, and in so many other factors. And this is true for all sin. Some people, have you ever heard someone say, well, all sin is the same in God's eyes? I've heard people say that before.

I think that statement sounds noble because it sounds like it's taking sin. really seriously. And it is true that even one sin is enough to contaminate us and make us guilty and make us need God's grace. But it's not true that all sin is the exact same. The Westminster Shorter Catechism has a statement about this. It says some sins in themselves and by reason of several aggravations are more heinous in the sight of God than others. And I think that's very biblical. You look at, you know, in the prophets, like Jeremiah 6 or no, Jeremiah 16 will have a passage where he's saying, your sins are even worse than your forefathers' sins. Jesus will speak of the weightier matters of the law.

You know, when he talks about straining out a gnat, he'll speak of greater punishment for some cities than for others. Ezekiel also has passages where says these sins are worse than those people's sins. The Old Testament law makes provision for different kinds of sin, such as unintentional sins versus high-handed sins. That's from Numbers 15. Of course, 1 John 5, 16, and 17 talks about sins. that lead to death versus other sins. By the way, the fact that we don't agree with how absolute

and technical is the distinction between a mortal sin and other sins like venial sin doesn't mean we can't recognize from 1 John 5 a valid distinction. We just don't think it's as technical and thorough as it's being employed. Same with the distinction between worship and veneration. The fact that we don't see this as like an all-encompassing technical distinction that can be so ambitiously employed, doesn't mean it's a meaningless distinction either. Anyway, so the point is, there's lots of different kinds of sin, and I would say it's the exact same thing with idolatry, which I see is at the root of all sin. And I've talked about that in one of my response videos about the icon veneration stuff, one of my responses to criticisms, I think it was my response to Jimmy Aiken and

Trent Horn. I talked about idolatry a lot. I quoted Martin Luther. I said, the first commandment is implicit in all the other commandments. No other sin happens unless you're putting something in the place of God and that kind of thing. So idolatry is a very pervasive kind of sin, but there's all different expressions and some are more heinous than others. I mean, you could think of it on a spectrum where like on the one side would be the worst expression of idolatry could be like bowing down to Satan or something like this where you're knowingly, you know, worshipping something evil. But there's all kinds of mild expressions of idolatry like on the extreme other side could be like turning to potato chips rather than prayer when you're sad.

You know, like you have an emotional problem. You should take it to the Lord. Instead, you turn to food as your comfort. And you may not even be realizing what you're doing. But you could say that there's a sense of idolatry in that and what you're doing is you're putting something in the place of God. You're turning to something when you should be turning to God. Now, obviously, these are massively different things.

And so I think what we can recognize is that various different. kinds of idolatry creep into various churches at various times with differing degrees and differing results. So I'm not troubled by the fact that we would think that there's a lot of idolatry throughout church history. I think that's how it's always been. I mean, just look at the Old Testament. It's just the continual battle, you know. Even when there are reform efforts from Hezekiah and Josiah and other good kings in Judah to remove the high places, they're not perfect. Even during the reform, it'll say like, but not all the high places were taken down. So idolatry is a perennial struggle for the people of God, and it creeps in, you know, to Protestant churches. We can look to something other

than God. We can become enamored with things other than the gospel. It happens over and over. And I think in church history, I would argue my honest perception is that there is a major change that happens in the fourth century with the conversion of constantine later theodosius you you have basically a massive change where now you've got this christian empire where sort of everybody's a christian and what that does is it brings a lot of good there's a lot of positives i don't hold to a fall of the church kind of idea but there's some negative tendencies and i think it's pretty undeniable that just kind of like you'd expect what happens you know a lot of these other pagan practices start to infiltrate into the church a little bit. So the short answer is, again, the complicated answer of trying to avoid an all-or-nothing

thinking. I don't think we want to say, oh, no, the church never struggles with idolatry. But I also don't think we need to say, oh, the church died and everyone became an idolatir. When I talk about this, I'm surprised at how much people seem to think of idolatry as this all-or-nothing thing. Like, you're either a Christian or you commit idolatry, but the people of God can struggle with idolatry. You know? So, yeah, it doesn't require a death of the church paradigm. So hopefully that answer could give people some wiggle room to say, okay, yeah, it's kind of complicated and there is idolatry, but there's also that doesn't negate the good work that God is doing all throughout church history, including right up to the Reformation. All right, hope that's helpful.

Question number eight, what does my weekly sermon preparation consist of for my ministry? I love the Alistair Begg quote. I just looked it up because I couldn't quite remember it. He said, think yourself empty, read yourself full, write yourself clear, pray yourself hot, let yourself go. That's good. It's like, you know, it kind of gets at the order. Brian Chappell wrote a great book called Christ-centered preaching. I've taken every single staff member here. I'm just taking our associate pastor through it right now.

We read it together every week. It's a really helpful book on preaching. He has an appendix in that book that lays out a similar, it's not as pithy as Alex Lesterbegg's quote, I think it's from Alastrobag. I've heard him say that, but it's a similar kind of time frame. It starts with study and then it ends with prayer. I think he actually starts with prayer as well, of course. But that's helpful. In my own preparation, I've found that it gets easier with time. So it used to take a lot longer. When you do it week after week, you kind of build these systems. Usually for me, I have three broad phases. The first is just read through the passage prayerfully

and just try to just see what stands out. I might even jot it out on a sheet. sheet of paper, just kind of see basic things that emerge. And then I start from there, I go into phase two, which is basically looking for an outline and for the main ideas. So from the Brian Chapel book, he talks about there's these terms of proposition, a fallen condition focus, all these terms that, without going into all the details, basically, you're trying to get the main idea of the sermon and then the applicational outline for the sermon. So you're trying to get kind of the, to explain a little bit, the fallen condition focus is a way of saying what aspect of fallen human nature was the text originally designed to touch the original hearers of?

And then, how will that bridge to a contemporary audience? It could be a sin. It could be a fear. In other words, what was the text designed to do for its original hearers? And then we want to ask, what does it do for contemporary hears? And then the proposition is basically that condensed down into a little pithy statement that contains both a truth and an application. what is true and what to do.

So like an example of a proposition could be, God is always faithful, so we should trust him. Really simple, but sometimes simple sermons are fine. So that'd be like a lot of my sermons come down to the faithfulness of God and the need for trust because that's so much in the scripture and it's so much of the Christian life. So anyway, that's phase two with an outline and the basic mechanics and building blocks, and then phase three is writing the sermon.

And usually it's the explanation comes first. and then my illustration and application come last, intro and conclusion come last. I put a lot of work into the structure of it. I work really hard on my sermons. I love preaching. The other thing I do is I have an application grid to make sure that I never forget to speak

to the non-Christian, to the children, and then I have different kinds of Christians in mind. So my application grid, it will force me to think about the hard-hearted and the soft-hearted. You can't preach every sermon as if you're preaching to hard-hearted people or also soft-hearted people.

crushed. You can't preach every sermon as if you're preaching to soft-hearted people or else the hard-hearted people will never be punctured with conviction. And then I think through different spheres of life. I think of marriages, vocation. I have a few others. I can't think about the top of my head. So anyway, the application grid, I don't hit every box in every sermon, though I do always try to hit non-Christians because you always want to preach with a sensitivity to non-Christians being present. But I hit most of them and I at least want to think about them for each sermon. So those are a few thoughts about my sermon prep. I could talk more about that sometime. All right, two more. Question number nine, on the back of the debate, I understand how the Old Testament is the infallible, inspired word of God, but how do we know the New Testament is? Great question. How do we know that it is not just good, sound writings by the apostles? And this question is in reference to the debate I had with Trent Horn. The person says Trent's, but quite a bit of effort showing that we don't have good evidence, so we cannot be sure about infallibility of the New Testament. So why? Why?

Why should we need evidence for the infallibility of the other sources? I know you gave scriptures for supporting scripture's infallibility, but how can we be sure that relates to the New Testament? Okay. So I would answer this question in two phases. First, I'd want to talk about scripture in general and what scripture is. Then I'd want to say, here's why we can think the New Testament is scripture. Okay? So for the first phase, I would just say, and this just reiterates what I went through in the debate,

and what the question already sort of assumes is that we have these statements about the Old Testament that are pretty powerful. 2 Timothy 316, God breathed, 2 Peter 121, Spirit carried. The Spirit carries the author, bears the author with the words of Scripture. Romans 3-2 and Matthew 195 and others speak about Scripture as the words of God or the speech of God. John 1035 says the Scripture cannot be broken. So we've got this background of this idea of biblical inspiration, where we call scripture the inspired Word of God, as opposed to other expressions of the Word of God. Real quick, here's how B.B. Warfield put this. I pulled this quote out just before this because I was thinking about it. He says, the Bible is the Word of God in such a sense that its words,

though written by men and bearing indelibly impressed upon them the marks of their human origin, were written nevertheless under such an influence of the Holy Ghost as to be also the words of God, the adequate expression of his mind and will. That's really a great way to put it. It's so modest when you think about it. It's just saying that when we speak of the scriptures, the inspired word of God, we're simply saying the words are from God. They're God's words. It's God speaking. And that's, you know, we agree with our Roman Catholic friends, for example, that that's unique. So when the Pope gives an ex-cathedra statement, that's not God speaking. That's not the inspired word of God. The words are not carried from the Holy Spirit like that.

similarly with councils and so forth. So then we say, okay, so we know that about the scripture in general. That's the scripture in general. Now, how do we know the New Testament? Well, the short answer is the New Testament authors themselves give us clues of that. One is that they will refer to other New Testament writings as scripture. So Paul will refer to the Gospel of Luke, and I think it's First Thessonians 5. I put this verse up in my video a few while back on this, as,

scripture and then Peter in 2. Peter 316 refers to Paul's writings as scripture. Now, if you think about that, given the length of the gospel of Luke and the number of Paul's letters, that's actually a sizable chunk of the New Testament that we now know, okay, the New Testament itself is calling, but the important point isn't settling all the boundaries, but just that you see an awareness already that is there, that these books are scripture. And so even if you don't have all the edges set yet, there's the idea. And Michael Kruger's work on this is helpful. He talks about he gives many reasons in his work on issues of canonization for why we have good grounds to think that the New Testament authors did have an awareness of their own divine authority, that they wrote with divine authority.

And there's good reasons for that. The other thing I would say is going out from the New Testament is that we do find Christians. regularly from the earliest of times calling New Testament books scripture. Maybe not as much as the Old Testament, but so what? Just the fact that they do that at all is significant. The dispute is about the fuzzy edges, but you don't have any doubt early on, even about the basic core, you know, the four gospels, Acts, Paul's letters, you know, the dispute is about revelation or Hebrews, sometimes, that kind of stuff.

So the fact is that it seems pretty clear that both within the New Testament and immediately there is a recognition, this is scripture, and scripture is called the inspired word of God. Which now, so then the only thing that's unsettled is the fuzzy boundaries. And that is the very thing that, and for that question of how do you know the boundaries of the canon? I would refer people to my debate, my first rebrand. in the debate where I address that. All right, final question. I'm going to be brief on this one. It says it would seem necessary to predicate infallibility to the teachings of Nicaa in order to

establish them as ecclesial boundary markers. How do we as Protestants maintain these teachings as ecclesial boundary markers without predicating infallibility to them, as it would seem infallibility would be necessary in order to use these teachings in that way? Well, here I'm going to underscore something that I have claimed and argued at great length elsewhere and just really want to keep sticking to my guns on, I do not accept the premise here that you have to have infallibility to have ecclesial boundary markers. I think that the vast majority of authorities in our world are fallible, and I think that the vast majority of boundary markers we have in the church are fallible. That's true for throughout the Old

Testament, you know, the judgments of the Sanhedron, there's a whole tractation. in the Mishnah about what you do with erroneous judgments and what kind of sacrifices you make. They didn't have this infallible guarantee, and yet they were binding and authoritative. If you're a Presbyterian minister, you have ecclesial boundary markers in the confessional standards of your denomination, the Westminster standards for most Presbyterians. Those are not infallible, but they are real boundary markers if you stop affirming them. So I don't think we do need infallibility to have valid authoritative ecclesial boundary markers. And I think if people just think about that, you know, yeah, because the word infallible doesn't mean true.

It means incapable of error, you know. So we want to restrict infallibility to God. God is the one who's infallible. He's the only one who's incapable of error. But then that's not the only thing that necessarily is going to be reasonably certain to be true. So I really don't see why you would have to have infallibility to have like authoritative boundary markers. And I would just say the infallible part comes from what Nicaea 1 is actually the valid expression of, namely the scripture's affirmation of the deity of the son of God, which is very strongly attested in scripture.

But Nicaa 1 as an articulation of that is not itself inherently incapable of error. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have authority or we can't use it as a doctrinal standard. So if the person who asked that is not satisfied with that answer, feel free to clarify in the comments, and I'll try to look out for the comments on this video. One bonus question. Someone said, does your family still have fun theological banter at gatherings? Yes, we have so much fun. My family's doing a get-together this summer, all the grandkids and my siblings and I.

So, yeah, we'll have a great time. I've talked about my family elsewhere. I have two older brothers, one older sister. They're all married with kids, and then my parents. And we're all pretty close, and we're kind of an ecumenical. family in the sense of we've got several Anglicans now. My other brother's Presbyterian, Presbyterian minister, and then I'm, of course, the lowly Baptist, the youngest in my family. So we have a lot of fun talking about theology, but other things too. We talk about all kinds

of stuff. If somebody asked in the questions about having my brother Eric back on, I've had him on three times, so let me know, I'd love to talk to him again. I love talking with Eric, but let me know what you think would be a good topic for us to discuss if you're interested in me doing that. All right, thanks for watching this. Hope this will was of interest to people. The last thing I'll say is just to again reiterate my thanks for my patrons for supporting my channel. That really does mean a lot. If you're a newer patron, I'll do this again, so be thinking of a good question. And I really appreciate people supporting my channel in that way. For those who want to support, it means a lot. I mean, I put a lot of work into my videos. I really

see it as a ministry that God's entrusted to me. I hope it blesses. Again, what I always say, I want it to be a reconstructive force in the midst of all the chaos out there. So I really hope it blesses people. If it's blessed you, and there's some way that the Holy Spirit leads you to give support to it, even if it's just commenting and sharing the videos and so forth. I really appreciate that. All right, thanks, everybody for watching. We'll see you next time.