We could put it this way, that subsequent revelation often makes explicit what is implicit in antecedent revelation. Or, for instance, we could say a text toward the end of the Bible pick up on earlier texts and make those earlier texts clearer as to their divine intent and all that they meant. I need to ask you a question. Is anybody still there? Yes, sir, brother. We're still here. OK. OK. Some lady just said she's recording us. So I just wanted to make sure. So I think that's very important when you're reading the Bible. I forgot the name of that book that I was introduced to when I was in seminary, with all the cross-references. Brian, do you remember that book? I think R.A. Torrey edited it. It goes through the Bible canonically. What's that? I said I'm not sure. I know Torrey, but I'm not sure of the book. Anyway, what it does is it has It starts with Genesis and it just has one, one, and then it puts tons of cross-references. And then it says verse two and tons of cross-references. And I used to use that many years ago. And then I put it down to, ah, whatever. And then I got back into the older guys and I'm going, wait a minute. One of the reasons why we like to read the Puritans and even Spurgeon is there, you know, like Spurgeon said, his blood is dibling. And so, you can use your cross-references to apply this very principle. Does my text in Ephesians 2.17, let's say, does it occur elsewhere in the Bible? And I picked that one because it does. It's Isaiah 59, I believe. And if you compare those two texts, I think it illumines not only the ancient text, but also the newer Pauline text, to see how he uses that text in a Jew-Gentile context. Anyway, I could keep going, but I'm not. Another principle of this, you've probably heard of this one as well, the analogy of Scripture. The third one is going to be the analogy of faith. And the reason why I'm separating these two, because technically speaking, they don't refer to the same thing. In my mind, used to be fuzzy on this. I'm sure none of you have fuzzy minds, but mine used to be fuzzy on this. Until I read the entries to each of these phrases, the analogy of scripture and the analogy of faith, analogia scripturae and analogia fidei, I read the entries in Richard Muller's dictionary of Latin and Greek theological terms. And in that dictionary, he defines the analogy of scripture as follows. The interpretation of unclear, difficult, or ambiguous passages of scripture by comparison with clear and unambiguous passages that refer to the same teaching or event. Now that's very important. So an example would be utilizing a passage in Matthew that seems, in our thinking, to be unclear, difficult, or ambiguous, or excuse me, that seems clear, to help us understand a passage dealing with the same subject in Mark that might seem unclear or vice versa. So this principle, as with the first one about the Holy Spirit, obviously presupposes the divine inspiration of Scripture. So the principle of the analogy of Scripture gained confessional status follows the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself. So the analogy of Scripture says this, because God's word is inspired, because Scripture is a product of divine inspiration, therefore I can go from one passage that's talking about Acts in an ambiguous manner, at least in my thinking, to another passage that's talking about the same thing that's clearer, so as to help me with the unclear text. That was a major Protestant principle. I think the next one, the analogy of faith, was even a bigger principle for the Protestants. And here's how Muller defines the analogy of faith. The use of a general sense of the meaning of scripture constructed from the clear or unambiguous places as the basis for interpreting unclear or ambiguous texts. As distinct from the more basic analogy of scripture, the analogy of faith presupposes a sense of the theological meaning of Scripture. And basically what he means there is that because the entirety of Scripture is the product of inspired prophets, and therefore the end result is an inspired document, ultimately it has one author. And so when that one author speaks in one place, That place that he speaks in is in the context of the entirety of his spoken or written word. So we can say this, the context of every text is all text when you're talking about the Bible. Now, this was very important at the Reformation and post-Reformation period, and it gave rise to our confession, and it was lost at the enlightenment And the reason why I think it was lost and at least obscured, if not lost, at the Enlightenment is because what happened at the Enlightenment was that the Bible became a product of man. The Old Testament was the history of the ancient Israelite religion. The New Testament was a brief history of the first century religion of those who followed Jesus. They became two books about ancient religious people. And since the Enlightenment had this naturalizing tendency, nature is a thing, an entity in and of itself. It's not dependent upon anything outside itself. It's its own mechanism. It doesn't have a ruler, you know, God. God was out of the picture. And so scripture became a collection of books by separate human authors who often said contradictory things. Now, the genius of the analogy of faith is predicated, of course, upon the doctrine of the divine inspiration of Scripture. And so what it says is, hold on, yes, there are a diversity of authors in the Old Testament and the New Testament, but ultimately, we should consider the author as one single, namely, capital A, God. Therefore, God says, Genesis 1 through Revelation 22, through human instruments, prophets in the Old Testament, apostles and apostolic men in the New Testament. But the Enlightenment made that impossible since they do not believe in divine providence. And once you deny divine providence, there's no such thing as an inspired text of Scripture. But the Protestants and the post-Reformation guys believed in the inspiration of Scripture, and I think we should as well. But what happened is it got confused. This whole analogy of Scripture and analogy of faith was misunderstood, even by well-intended Protestant theologians in the 20th and now in the 21st century. For instance, I can give you an example. Somebody used to be from the East Coast. I'm not sure if Walter Kaiser is even alive now, but he wrote many books that were very helpful for me. In one of his books, he says this while analyzing the principle of the analogy of faith. He says, our problem here is whether the analogy of faith is a hermeneutical tool that is open theological sesame for every passage of scripture. Now he proposes what he calls the analogy of antecedent scripture. What he means by that, if you can envision a timeline, a scriptural timeline from left to right, and go over about three quarters of the way from the left, so you're at some place in the New Testament, and you're trying to understand a New Testament text, let's say from the book of Acts, he says what the analogy of faith means, which he calls the analogy of antecedent scripture, is that if a text was written in 49 A.D., we can use any text written prior to 49 A.D. that the human author would have had at his disposal to help us understand what he's intending by what he writes. We cannot use anything from 50 A.D. onward because the human author would not have had access to that. So he says this, surely most interpreters will see the wisdom and good sense in limiting our theological observations to conclusions drawn from the text being exegeted, our text from AD 49, and from texts which precede it in time. In the conclusion to his discussion, he says, however, in no case must the later teaching be used exegetically or in any other way to unpack the meaning or to enhance the usability of the individual text, which is the object of our study. So I have contended for several years now that this is at worst, a denial of the historic understanding of the analogy of faith and at best, a very unhelpful and dangerous modification of the principle. And I can give you an example of this. According to this rule, the analogy of antecedent revelation, we cannot utilize anything in the Bible outside of Genesis 1 through 3 to help us interpret it. Unless somebody wants to argue Psalm 90 and the Book of Job were written before Genesis 1 through 3. because Moses wouldn't have had anything outside of Genesis 1-3 until he wrote Genesis 4 through the end of the book of Deuteronomy and anything else written after him. So we put it this way, since there's nothing in the Bible antecedent to Genesis 1-3, interpreters are left with no subsequent divine use, no subsequent divine explanation of how to understand those chapters. So this method ends up defeating itself I think, when we consider that Genesis, like all of the books of the Bible, was never intended to stand on its own. As well, the Bible itself comments on antecedent texts, helping its readers understand the divine intention of those texts. For instance, if I said God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created them male and female. And then I asked a question. Was Adam, by virtue of the fact that it was created in God's image, the first created son of God? Now, taking Kaiser's principle, we have to say, well, no, because the word son is not used in Genesis 1, 26. That's what I quoted. Matter of fact, it's not used, I think, until Genesis 4. However, if your blood is bibling, like Spurgeon and the Puritans, you'd say, hold on a minute. Wait on a second. Hold on a second. The genealogy in Luke chapter 3 ends with Adam, the son of God. So there we have a subsequent text that picks up something about Adam's relation to God. Namely, he was son, and since he was a creature, he must have been created as a son. So that would be an antecedent text, a text after, excuse me, a subsequent text, the text after Genesis that ends up shedding light on Genesis 126, but doesn't infuse new meaning. It doesn't make Adam a son of God when Luke's ink was still wet on the page, or however the ancient guys wrote. Your pastor probably knows more about that than I did, simply because Adam isn't called son of God until Luke 3.38, doesn't constitute Adam as son of God when Luke 3.38 was written. He was constituted as first created son of God at his creation. Even though Moses doesn't use the word, the concepts are there. It's a word concept fallacy. There's several actually texts that we can illustrate this. Here's another one. In Adam, all died, 1 Corinthians 15, 22. When did that become true? Well, that became true, not when Paul penned 1 Corinthians 15, 22. Most Christians, when they read that, they go, wow, that's the fall of the sin. And then if you say, well, where's the fall into sin recorded for us? Well, it's recorded for us in Genesis chapter three. But Genesis chapter three doesn't say in Adam all died. So there's actually theology embedded in the narrative of Genesis 3 that awaits its unpacking until further or subsequent revelation. By the way, is it okay for God, through Moses in this case, to present a narrative of the fall and not state all the theological details that are embedded within the Fall in the narrative itself. In other words, can a narrative be more theologically pregnant than the words used to narrate the thing narrated? And the answer is, of course. Romans 5 is another example. When you read Romans 5, 12 through 21, you know, the Adam-Christ contrast there. Paul's doing theology based on, I think, the narrative of the fall in Genesis 3, and probably other Old Testament passages as well. But Paul's doing theology. Paul's not creating theology. He might be using new terms, but the concepts embodied in the terms that Paul's using are come from a narrative way back in antecedent revelation. So God is certainly free to embed, or there might be a better word, to impregnate, there you go, narratives with more theology than the narrative itself states explicitly. I don't know how much your pastor has preached on the theology of the Exodus. But when you come to the New Testament, you have the New Testament writers using the Exodus as a paradigm or a typological paradigm for Christian salvation. Paul, for example, does that in Colossians 1, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance, there's the promised land, of the saints in light, he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his dear son. If you do an in-depth study of that, you'll find that Paul is relying upon an act of God in ancient Israel, Exodus 12, the narrative of the Exodus, and he's finding that there's elements of that that are actually pointing forward to full-blown Christian salvation, this side of the death and resurrection of Christ. Those are some examples of the analogy of faith that I think are very important for us to consider. I think this rule, the analogy of faith, is actually an inspired and infallible rule of faith. Excuse me. The inspired and infallible rule of faith is the whole of Scripture, so that the textual parts of Scripture must be understood in light of the textual theological whole. And when we interpret scripture this way, using the analogy of faith properly, this ensures that the theological forest is not lost for the individual textual trees. A textual tree would be, you know, Ephesians 2.17. He came and preached peace to you who are far off and to those who are near. Well, if your pastor is just, by the way, if you're preaching through Ephesians and you took a different view, I'm sorry. But if your pastor is preaching through Ephesians and he gets to verse 17, if you have the New American Standard, it has the Old Testament quotation in bold or italics or capitalized, I can't remember. But if you don't, you can't tell that Paul is actually citing in part from Isaiah 59. And when you're using this principle properly, The interpreter's gonna go, ah, look at this. Paul is retrieving an ancient text for a contemporary use. Let's go read that text in its context. Here's another weird principle I teach my students. Cognitive peripheral vision. That means that the human author, Paul, has a vision, peripheral vision, he can see wider than just the text he is specifically quoting in Ephesians 2.17. He can see wider, the wider Isianic context. So it bids readers to go back and read more than just Isaiah 59, whatever the verse is. Read the entire passage. Read the entire second section of Isaiah. Read the entire book of Isaiah. Matter of fact, read all the major pro—and the minor pro—and the entire Old Testament. You can just keep going with this. Paul knew more about the Isaiah text than just the text he quotes, and he wants us—he invites us to read it. So you can see how this works. It is like a hermeneutical circle, people call it. So it should keep us from doing theology like concordance style. You know, you get a concordance and your pastor says, this word and is used 7,229 times in the New Testament, therefore it must be important. Well, the word and is important, but not because it's used 7,200 and whatever many times. Doing word studies, some people do word studies as an end all to interpretation. And they count texts using the same words. and they draw conclusions from it. But I think the better thing is to weigh the importance of a text, not how many times a word from the text might be used in the Bible, because like the word and, it doesn't really affect the meaning of your text necessarily, simply because it's used 7,000 times. But if a phrase in your text, if you find that phrase, two, three, four words together, or an explicit clause that's used six times in the prophets. And it's used in your gospel passage. That's pretty important. Something's important about that. And the only way you get it is allowing the context of your text to be all text, the entirety of scripture. And this, the analogy of faith gained confessional status as well, The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself. And therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture, which is not manifold but one, it must be searched by other places that speak more clearly. An example I already gave is this. Is Adam a son of God by virtue of the fact that he's created by God, as recorded for us in Genesis 1.26? The answer is yes. But the answer is not necessarily yes, from the explicit words of Genesis 126. It's from the Bible's teaching about Adam's identity at creation, and we get sonship language all the way in a genealogy at the end of Luke chapter three. There's another one in Adam all die. There's a third one that's pretty obvious. but I can't remember it. But the point is this, these things in Adam Aldai, Adam, son of God, they're not constituted as new truths when they're written. They're old truths mined out of previous revelation. So the fourth and the final principle that I think has been lost is called scopus scripturae, or the scope of the scriptures. In our day, your pastor has probably used this term before, Christ-centered or Christocentric. People use those terms very often. But what does it mean? The Bible is Christ-centered. It sounds good. Anybody that wants to say, no, the Bible is Moses-centered, that doesn't sound very good. But Christ-centered, Christocentric, they sound good. But the older way of naming the concept these terms point to, the target or end to which the entirety of the Bible tends is encapsulated by this Latin phrase, scopus scripturae, the scope of the scriptures. This is also in our confession of faith. I won't read it, but it's in there. So, going back in history, both Reformation and post-Reformation Reformed theologians used this word scope in two ways. In a narrow sense, the scope of a given text or passage, its basic thrust. But it also had a wider sense, and this is the sense I'm talking about here, the target or the bullseye to which all of Scripture tends. second sense there that I want to give brief attention. Let me check the time here first. Okay, we're doing all right. So scope in this sense prefers to the center or the target or of the entire canonical revelation. It is that to which the entire Bible points. And whatever that is, it must condition our interpretation of any and every part of Scripture. So going back in church history, the covenant theologians, the federal theologians, a Latin word for covenant, of the 17th century, for them, the scope of Scripture was the glory of God in the redemptive work of the incarnate Son of God. Their view of the scope of Scripture was itself a conclusion from Scripture not a presupposition brought to it, and it conditioned all subsequent interpretation. That's very important. They didn't start with the scope of Scripture as the glory of God through the incarnate work of the Son of God in order to bring many sons to glory for the glory of the triune God. They concluded that. And they didn't conclude it by just reading the Bible once. Their method was to read the Bible a lot. And the more you read the Bible, you'll come to certain conclusions. The Bible exists because sin is, and God not only has a plan to remedy the problem of man's sin, but God has recorded that plan in the scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments, so that the crescendo of the Bible, in one sense, is the incarnation and sufferings and glory of our Lord. The Old Testament sets the world up for the coming of the Incarnate Mediator. The Gospels announce He's come. The Acts proclaim Him. The Epistles explain Him. You've heard all of these things probably before. And Ryan, if you haven't said this to your people, shame on you. I'm sure you have. So it was their reading of the Bible that formulated this principle. You know what? The bullseye of Scripture is the incarnate Son of God suffering and entering into glory in order that he might bring many sons to glory so that the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would be glorified in those sons. There's a helpful older writer, William Ames puts it this way, the Old and New Testaments are reducible to these two primary heads. The Old promises Christ to come, and the New testifies that he has come. Likewise, John Owen says Christ is the principle end of the whole of Scripture. He also says this principle is always to be retained. in our minds in reading of the scripture, namely, that the revelation and doctrine of the person of Christ and his office is the foundation whereon all other instructions of the prophets and apostles for the edification of the church are built and whereunto they are resolved. So our Lord Jesus Christ himself at large makes it manifest. And he references Luke 24. lay aside the consideration hereof, and the Scriptures are no such thing as they pretend unto, namely a revelation of the glory of God in the salvation of the church." So this older Christocentric interpretation of the Bible was a principle derived from the Bible itself. So there we have a hermeneutic that depends on the Bible to reveal it to us. The way I was taught hermeneutics was just general hermeneutics, principles of interpretation that apply to all types of literature. This notion, the Bible is to be interpreted like any other book, is almost a verbatim quote from a rationalizing, liberalizing, post-Enlightenment philosopher. But somehow, someway, it made it into evangelical, and I think even some, Reformed seminaries. So they viewed the Bible's authority as extending to how we interpret the Bible. You can't interpret the Bible properly unless you read the Bible first and you see within it God interpreting His own Word for his people at a later time that he had revealed at an earlier time. Typology is one of the things that comes to my mind. So in modern terms, we use, I don't know if you've heard of this before, we use terms like, my brain just lost, dumped everything, I gotta find it. Echoes and Intertextuality, that's the word I wanted. Intertextuality. Now, there's two ways to look at it. You can look at it generally speaking, or we might say universally speaking. If I write a series of love letters to my wife, even though I might write six letters, if she was here, she'd go, six letters, where are they? But if I did, they would be textually linked because I'm the only author of them. I would probably use terms and phrases and certainly concepts embodied by certain words that maybe only my wife would know the concepts because the word triggers her mind because of something we discussed in the past. But all six letters would be textually linked. When you bring that concept of intertextuality to the Bible, it takes on a whole new meaning. Remember I said the context of each text is the context of all texts. Intertextuality is assured to us, not by the diverse human authors. I think some of it is. And you can ask a question about what I meant by that later if you want. But it's assured to us by the single divine author. And that's the big thing. I think a lot of Bible interpreters have lost is that Scripture is the Word of God written, is the Word of God written. It's the Word of God written. And I accentuated God on purpose. So just to close, these guys saw this principle as deriving from how the Scripture reads, the way the words go, the way the authors pick up on previous authors statements and tease them out and apply them into new circumstances. And then by the time you get to the New Testament, when you see a motif like this, which you do in the gospel of Matthew, primarily, and the book of Acts, they'll say something like, this happened in order that what the prophet said would take place, you know, something like that. That motif is, I call it the, this is that motif, this Pentecost. is that which Joel said would happen. This is that. When you start seeing that kind of stuff, you're seeing intertextuality, you're seeing later revelation, making explicit what is implicit in antecedent revelation, and all those things that we're talking about, I think the Bible becomes a single book again. At least it has in my mind. That doesn't mean I have all the answers. So these guys saw the authority of Scripture extending to the interpretation of Scripture and the rules of interpretation. So where do we get at least some of our rules for interpreting the Bible? We get them from the Bible themselves. And this is one of the reasons why if you read all the way back in Augustine, St. Augustine is in Florida. Augustine was the great North African That's theologian. He'll say, when he deals with how to interpret the Bible, the first thing he says is, read it. And then he says stuff like, and after you've memorized large portions of it, I think he's one of the guys that would say, read Genesis, read the Psalms, read Isaiah, read the Gospel of John and Romans. It might not have been Augustine who did that, but one of the older guys that I read, in preparing for some lectures actually identified the most important books to read. And they said, after you get those memorized, you know, then read everything else and keep reading. The reason why they said that is because the more you read, the more you see connections and the more you see the scope. The Old Testament prepares us for the incarnation. The New Testament announces that he has come and explains the implications for the church this side of of Pentecost. So that's all I have. So I guess that means I give it back over to the pastor. Yeah. Thank you, brother. That was very, very helpful and very insightful. We've got some questions that some folks have sent, and I'm just going to ask you a few of these. We'll see how many we can get through. The first is, um, can you comment on how commonly held these principles are among evangelicals? The person said, I thought these principles were commonly held. So in other words, are these in our day among evangelicals not common? Um, what are your thoughts? Yeah. Uh, well, um, I think that I gave one example of a very well-known evangelical theologian that affected a generation and a half of seminarians because his textbooks were used in seminary. I know because they used it at the Master's Seminary. I used an illustration of a well-known American theologian that I think has infected a lot of people. Where I was trained, we used his book, one of his books, Toward an Exegetical Theology, and had this theory of the analogy of antecedent revelation. And it was taught like gospel to us. I remember with students at the Master's Seminary, late 80s, Dream Break, saying, yeah, if you're interpreting Isaiah, you've got to go to a Bible timeline and figure out what Isaiah might have been able to read in order to get in his mind properly. And so I think it's wider than we than we often think. The scope of Scripture, one, it might seem to be a no-brainer to us, and if it seems like a no-brainer to you, thank God for your pastor, because he's helped you think properly. But even recently, I heard a very, very, very well-known evangelical leader say that The Old Testament is Judeo-centric. And I can hear my friend Sam Waldron say, if the conclusion to the Old Testament is not Christianity, pray tell, what is it? When you read the New Testament, I just talked about the, this is that motif. That's what they're saying. This, what we're now experiencing in the incarnation, sufferings and glory of Jesus, is that which Moses and the prophet said would take place. You know, Paul in Acts 26, in front of Festus, I think, he said, you know, I've said nothing but what Moses and the prophet said would take place, that the Christ was to suffer and be raised on the third day. All that's in the Old Testament. So I think it might be, you know, nodded to, but when it all, when it flushes itself out in some people's theology, And the person that said that is a dispensationalist. So that, you know, that follows. I get it. But it just doesn't make sense that the Old Testament is Judeo-centric when the New Testament reads the Old Testament as a Christ-centered book. So, you know, I don't want to read too much into people's stuff, but I think a lot of people their gut tells them better than their spoken theology. For instance, some people who would say the Old Testament is Judeo-centric will read, will sing hymns based on psalms that talk about the Jerusalem temple and the house of God, and the author of the hymn Christianized them. I tweeted this recently, I have a Twitter account, and I said the conclusion to the Old Testament is what we call Christianity. And that's, it seems to be a no-brainer, but I don't think it always is because of various hermeneutical principles that people stick to. One of the hermeneutical principles that I think messes people up is that one about the authorial intent. We gotta get the author's intent. Now, what they mean by that quite often is the human author's intent. And so when you read a statement by Paul that he was in prison, you go get a dictionary on Christianity or whatever, and you read up about Roman prisons. And you can't know what Paul means by this passage unless you really get into the secondary literature about Roman prisons. Now, I know your pastor will confirm this, Do we have more textual evidence for the New Testament than Roman prisons in the first century? Yeah. Way more, right? A lot of our evidence for ancient history comes in little fragments in letters that are 500 to 800 years after the fact. And so trying to get into the author's mind means you get into the culture and the religious background and the social stuff. And I get that, but a good thing overdone gets undone. And when you overdo human authorial intent, getting into the mind of Paul, you get yourself off the text of the written word of God. That's why I always teach my students. I said, look, if you need background for Ephesians, go read Acts 19. That's your background. It's inspired background, because Acts 19 tells you how the Ephesian church was born. Paul came there and preached. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use other things. I think you can use other things, but they can also be abused. So I'm just rambling. That was helpful, brother. And you did a good impression of Dr. Sam Waldron there, too. That was well done. Very well done. The next question someone sent is this, they write this, I've heard there is a difference in the hermeneutics of covenant theologians and new covenant theologians. Can you briefly explain that difference? So maybe not so much the different, like what the two systems are, but just, is there a difference in their hermeneutic or their biblical interpretation approach? Yeah. That's a really good question. I'm gonna say no. In my reading, especially the more contemporary New Covenant guys, I think they're using a very similar hermeneutic, if not the same one I'm trying to use. I just don't think they apply it consistently. I'll give an example. It was in the Getting the Garden book. Getting Garden Light book, I call it the Garden Book. In the Garden Book, I showed that there are some New Covenant theologians that are now arguing that there's some sort of covenant between God and Adam. They won't call it a covenant of works, but at least one, if not two of them say, the reason is when you go read Hosea, it seems that Hosea 6-7 is referring back to a covenant between God and Adam. Now that's new. Because the older New Covenant guys, the ones in the 70s and 80s, they fought vehemently against that. But here they are applying a principle that the older New Covenant guys also had, the analogy of the faith. But they didn't apply it consistently. I think they have found hermeneutics on the main. It's just the consistent application of those. See, I would say not only does Hosea 6-7 indicate some sort of covenant between God and Adam way back in the garden, but so does Isaiah 25. And then when you go to Romans 5, with that in your mind, because it's already revealed that some sort of covenant is there, I think what the post-Reformation guys ended up calling the covenant of works becomes clear. So that's my answer there. I could be nasty and just say, oh, they're totally on a whole different universe when it comes to hermeneutics. I don't think they are. Just application. Yeah. No, that's, that's good. Another question. Um, can you explain, um, briefly what biblicism is and how that might get in the way of, uh, proper biblical interpretation? Yeah, that's a good question too, because that, that word, uh, as a fluid, uh, definition, you know, it's changed over time. I remember, uh, Fred, I almost said Fred Zaspel, not Fred Zaspel, Fred Sanders. I don't know where he said this. It could have been in an email to me or something. He said, you know, I used to use the word biblicist a lot because it had positive connotations. But now, depending on the context in which you use it, you could get your head lopped off, you know? Yeah, what it has come to mean is a pejorative thing. And that is a mindset that wants to use Bible words to describe Bible doctrines. And it sounds good and right. The problem with that is the reason why, one problem is, the reason why we have ancient creeds like the Nicene Creed is because the heretics were using Bible words to explain what they thought would be Bible doctrines. So the Orthodox guys said, look, we can't just fight with words, with Bible words, because they're going to use Bible words and we're going to use Bible words and it's a stalemate. We have to explain what we mean by those words. So that's why they started to import technical terminology in their doctrinal formulations to describe the concepts embodied which they viewed embodied in those biblical terms. Sometimes they used biblical terms, sometimes they didn't. Nature, essence, person, you know, those kind of things came into Trinitarian discussions and Christological discussions because the heretics were using the same words, or were using the same words, but they had different meanings to them. You know, like the person who says, I believe the New Testament. The New Testament is our church constitution. Well, a Jehovah's Witness could say the same thing. What does it mean though? No pastor is gonna get up and preach a sermon by just quoting Bible verses the whole time. That's a crude example of a biblicist. But it kind of comes out in other ways as well. For example, there seems to be a lack of an awareness of when reading the Bible that some propositions in Scripture condition our interpretation of other propositions of Scripture. I think this is best seen in the doctrine of God, for example. Most evangelicals and Reformed would agree that God doesn't have wings. But the Bible says he does. Psalm, is it Psalm 17 or Psalm 18? And fingers. The Bible says he does. It's one of the Psalms I just mentioned. So does God have a literal index finger that extends out of his palm next to a thumb and a middle finger and a ring finger and a pinky? Or does he have divine hands that might have more fingers or only one finger? And the wings, are they real? existing wings that move and have feathers? Nobody wants to say yes. And there's a reason for that, because we have an instinct in us, because we've read the Bible enough to know that, wait a minute, these have to be figures of speech. These have to be metaphors. It's one thing that stands for another. The divine finger most likely refers to the execution of divine power, the divine wing. mostly, most likely refers to something like a kind providence in preserving and protecting God's people. Well, we just allowed a certain group of texts, God is invisible, for instance, God is not a man, to trump these other texts that say God has a finger in wings, We don't have to say Trump, that's not a good way to put it. They qualify, they condition our interpretation of it. And a strict biblicist has difficulties often doing that. And I know because I used to be one, and when I started writing on these issues, I had friends, and I still have friends that still think that way. You can't prioritize certain texts over others. You can't make ontological assertions about divine being. You can't use those as an interpretive grid through which to understand these anthropomorphic texts or anthropopathic texts. And I think they're wrong. And I think that's another form of biblicism. There's another form of Biblicalism. It's the way, for instance, Wayne Grudem articulates his Doctrine of the Trinity. I'm picking on him, but I did the same thing. If I ever do a second version of my Better Than the Beginning, I'm going to change the way I argued for the Doctrine of the Trinity. But you just say, okay, there are texts that teach this, there are texts that teach this, there are texts that teach this, and then you draw a conclusion. And you can do it that way. I get it. There's a more, the scriptures reveal the Trinity to us in a more organic way. It's not so, you know, there isn't a passage you go to and say, here it is, the doctrine of the Trinity. You have these divine acts attributed to divine persons. And sometimes the same act is attributed to diverse persons. For instance, creation. Now, how do you, how do you, how do you understand the spirit hovering over the waters, that's weird. But you have to account for it. And the way you account for it, I don't think it's listing texts that say this, that, and the other, but it's putting things together systematically and carefully and more in a dynamic instead of a wooden list kind of a way. I'm definitely getting tired, so next question. No, that was great, brother. That was very, very helpful. And we'll stop with the questions here. And I just want to say thank you to you. And you can't, everyone's muted so that we could hear you, but we've got people smiling, head nods and all that. So there's plenty of feedback happening, even though you can't see it. So thank you. Thank you, brother, so much for being with us. Thank you for your work. And I'm going to actually ask fellow elder, my brother, Chad, to just close us in prayer and then maybe also just pray for you as well. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us. This was extremely edifying and I know we'll be talking about this for some time. So very helpful to us. Let's go ahead and pray. Dear Father, we just thank you for this time together. We just lift up Dr. Barcelos to you. We thank you for all that he does as a servant for you. And we just pray fruit from his efforts and labors. We just pray that you would bring fruit from this discussion this evening. We pray that it would be edifying to us and glorifying to you and that we would take this and build upon it in just glorifying you and how we worship you and how we read your word and how we understand you better. We thank you for your grace to us in Christ. We thank you for all that you do for us. And we just lift our church up to you and just pray that you would continue to bless and protect us in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Rich, thank you so much, brother. We appreciate it. Hey, thanks. Thanks for persevering with me. No, no, you did great. It was very clear and very helpful. Thank you so much. All right. We'll talk to you later. All right, brother. Thanks, Grace, folks. Have a great night.