Well, good. I almost said good morning. Good evening. Welcome to Wednesday night. This is the first kind of, I guess, week of a new lesson or a new class. As you can see, we're going to go through the Trinity Bible Church Statement of Faith. This is week one, Prolegomena. And my challenge for you over the next week is to use that word in a sentence every day. So that'll be your homework. What does Prolegomena mean? So what's Prolegomena mean, Eric? It means before words. First things. It's kind of introductory matters, right? It's a technical term. It means introductory matters. If you ever read a systematic theology or something like that, a lot of times the first chapter or two, they'll call it prolegomena. And I think it actually means to speak before. But so anyway. All right. So, um, tonight is going to be very interactive. Let me ask a lot of questions. We're going to start out with a really basic question. We're studying a Trinity Bible Church statement of faith. What is a statement of faith? The statement of faith is a summarized declaration of the shared theological beliefs of a body of believers. I was going to say a local body, but we have things like the Baptist Faith and Message, which is actually a statement of faith, and it's for an entire denomination, right? A very sophisticated statement of faith would be the Westminster Confession of Faith. It's probably, I think I mentioned this a little bit later, but it's like 10 times longer than ours. It's very detailed. And it's really a wonderful, wonderful work. So it's a declaration of shared theological beliefs. So we have this idea of theological belief. What is that? What is theology? What's that? It's belief about God. You're absolutely right. I mean, theos comes from the word God. Ology, you know, is study or word or understanding, kind of that sort of thing. But the world doesn't look at it that way. And so from the University of Indiana website, they say, theology, and think critically about what you're reading here, the systematic study of the divine has existed for many hundreds of years. Today, it is typically understood to involve the training of religious leaders within particular religious traditions, preparing them to adhere to and uphold clerical practices. training in a seminary, monastery, or other divinity school tends to emphasize personal faith and one's relationship to the divine. Okay? Now, keep this idea in your head, and then we're going to look at what they say about the idea of religious studies. In religious studies, you can throw in a however, these subjective influences Well, what was the subjective influences? It's theology. It's your religious beliefs that you encounter in your local church. Or if you're going to be, you know, clergy or something like that, it's what you study about actually practicing your quote unquote religion. So it says in religious studies, these subjective influences may be in the background of your work, but the emphasis and end result are more analytical and objective. Let's talk about that for a minute. What's the difference between subjective and objective? Sorry? That's a good way to put it. Objective, if I make an objective statement, if I say something to the effect of, the movie Rocky was filmed in Philadelphia, then that's telling you something about the movie. It's not telling you anything about me. But if I say, Rocky is the greatest movie of all time, or Rocky is really good because it has complex character development, different things like that. Now what is being communicated, I might be telling you a little bit of something about the movie, but what I'm doing is I'm giving you my opinion of the movie. I'm making a subjective statement, which actually reveals more about me than it does the actual movie. So in this case, these subjective influences, they're the opinions of those people sitting in the pews, as opposed to the analytical and objective ideas of the folks in the university. You following me there? So let's keep going. Scholars compare various religious practices and identities, consider their historical significance, and aim to understand beliefs in relation to each other. In religious studies, your base of inquiry is to examine these differences, here we go, without showing preference to one particular belief system. Now, why would they not want to show preference to one particular belief system? Because they're subjective. They're all the same. It's all a matter of opinion. You follow me there? So this is a predominant world view that we have. about the idea of theology and about religion in general. What they believe is, if there is such a thing as God, you can't truly know or have knowledge about God. Everything is just your opinion about Him. So based on the worldview contained in the previous slides, can a person have objective knowledge of God? No. predominant worldview today says theology is subjective a person cannot have objective knowledge of God so all religions are produced by a mixture of culture and personal commitment and the real science has to do with studying theology as a phenomenon of human behavior or society that is theology is subservient to psychology or sociology it's a matter of human behavior That make sense? This is the worldview we live in. And when you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you go to college and university, these are the presumptions. These are the people you're going to have to deal with. This is their worldview. This is what they believe. Yes, sir? Okay, yeah, that's a good point. Right. I'm sorry, who was that? Oh, Jesse Ventura. Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you go back to Marx, and Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses. And what he meant by that was, you know, life can be kind of difficult because of economic oppression, that sort of thing. the way people deal with it, by and large, is they go to church. And the problem, in his mind, with that is that it keeps you from being so ticked off or disgruntled with that economic oppression that you don't do anything about it. You just sit and kind of take it, so to speak. And what he wanted was people to go to war. to have a bloody, violent revolution. He actually wanted that. It's in the Communist Manifesto and his writings. So he and then after him, like Eric said, there was Freud. And now you have Richard Dawkins who goes around saying that it's a mental illness. You're either stupid or crazy or evil if you believe this stuff. And it's tantamount to child abuse to teach creation as opposed to evolution. So what's Christian world do you say? Well, we're going to have, I think it's four points here. And man, we could have a lot more. We could have a whole lot more. But I had to pare it down to something. Otherwise, we'd be here all night. Like I said, I think we have four. So number one is, through divine revelation, we may know God truly and personally. Any Bible verses come to mind that might help support such an assertion? I'll throw one out. How about Jeremiah 9? 23 through 24, it says, thus says the Lord, let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord. John 17, and this is eternal life. that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. So here we're talking about knowing God. We can have objective knowledge of God. Number two, God has made certain things about himself, such as his existence, power, creativity, and wisdom, known through the natural world without regard to time or location. We call this general or natural revelation. So we call it general because it's open to a general audience Call it natural because it's it's in nature. Okay So how about any? Passages you can think of that might support that Sorry Romans 1 verses 18 through 23. Yeah, that's kind of the go-to What Paul says there is that certain divine attributes and eternal power of God are revealed in the things that have been created but in that that knowledge is clearly perceived by human beings, but we, what, suppress it in unrighteousness. So you have put on display, you have perceived, then you have suppressed in unrighteousness, and then what's that fourth step? Without excuse, or without excuse. And so what happens is natural revelation or general revelation tells us a little bit about God, but it does not tell us about Christ. And so all it does, more or less, is convicts us of our sin. It makes us guilty. We also have Psalm 19, which is, I think, Psalm 19 and Romans 1 kind of remind me of one another. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. Assertion number three, aside from the nature and conscience, and I put conscience in there because earlier I had God makes himself known through human conscience as well. We get that out of Romans 2, the law being written on his heart. Aside from nature and conscience, God has made himself known through the prophets, the Bible, and his son. We call this special revelation. Now, I set this up on a T for you guys. What's a passage that just reminds you of? It's almost quoted. Hebrews 1, long ago at many times in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he spoke to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, for whom also he created the world. So you have these two different kinds of revelation. You have general revelation. You have special revelation. Special revelation is the Bible and Christ. So finally, number four, although we may know God truly, no human can ever fully comprehend him. We call this concept incomprehensibility. Any passages come to mind? Okay, let's go with Isaiah 55. My thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. And then also we have Romans 11. Oh, the depth of the riches and riches and wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid from him and through him and to him are all things." So it's the depths of his riches and knowledge of God. So this idea of incomprehensibility, we're going to really come face to face with it in the coming weeks. One of the things that I've noticed is that we as Christians, or I should say we as human beings, have no problem with talking about the incomprehensibility of God and how we can't know God exhaustively if we're talking about it in a general sense. But the moment the rubber meets the road and we're faced with a doctrine that we can't understand We tend to insist on understanding it. We insist on getting our minds around it. A couple of weeks, we're going to talk about the Trinity. Now, the Trinity is a very coherent doctrine. It's a very important doctrine. I love it. I can never get away from it. I don't want to get away from it. It's an amazing doctrine. There's so much that comes out of it. And it's very coherent and comprehensible. You can understand it. but you cannot fully understand it. OK, another one is called the hypostatic union. It's the idea that God is fully divine, that God is fully human. I'm sorry, Jesus is fully divine. Jesus is fully human. OK, but those two natures he has, he's one person, he has two natures and those two natures are distinct and not confused, but they are not they are not They're not separated. They're united. So it's a fascinating doctrine to study, but it's another one that's very, very crucial. And then next week, we'll probably talk about divine inspiration, which the Word of God is a product of a human author. It's fully a product of a divine author as well, both completely, completely. It's not 50-50. It's completely this, completely that. And so when we try to get our minds around these doctrines and describe them and explain them in ways that we can understand and comprehend, we end up with something called heresy. So we understand that where kind of the modern world says theology is subjective. A person cannot have objective knowledge of God. We say a person can and does have objective knowledge of God. All religions are produced by a mixture, or they would say it, but all religions are produced by a mixture of culture and personal commitment. And what the Christian would say is all false religions are produced by man. True religion is revealed by God. Don't lose that. Christianity is revealed by God. It is not the product of a human imagination. And third, the real science is what they would say has to do with studying theology as a phenomenon of human behavior in society. That is, theology is subservient to psychology and or sociology. What we would say is the real science has to do with recognizing God in nature and in scripture. What is the underlying issue? What is the key difference between the predominant modern worldview and the Christian worldview? And it's that Christianity is a revealed religion. It is not man-made. We can see that in Romans 1, 18, like Dominic mentioned, and then Hebrews 1, 1 and 2. Impacts. The declarations contained in our statement of faith are claims to objective truths and not merely matters of personal preference. They are either objectively true or they are not. That is so important to understand, that we're not talking about a matter of opinion. There are things that You or I may or may not agree on, as regard to the statement of faith, but if we disagree, at least one of us is wrong. And it's not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of getting to the reality. Does that make sense? Yeah. They are in principle statements summarizing divinely revealed truths, which are one, found in scripture, or the good and necessary consequences of scripture. And two, informed by the historical witness of the church. I would say tradition, but how many of y'all would have your head spinning around that right now if I talked about church tradition, right? No, so tradition is not a bad thing. It's a bad thing when you put a capital T in front of it. We have 2,000 years of history, both good and bad, that we can learn from. And it is to our peril if we ignore it. So the first place and the last place that we go is scripture. But in the middle, we look at what the giants of the faith of the last 2,000 years have said. And we don't have to agree with everything they said. I can't think of a single theologian where I agree with everything that they said. And when I say agree, again, I'm not talking about opinion. If I disagree with John Calvin or with Martin Luther or with D.A. Carson. Actually, D.A. Carson. I've never heard him say anything. Any of these guys, if I disagree with them, I can go to Scripture and I can explain to you exactly why I disagree with them. So again, it's not a matter of opinion. Any questions so far? No? OK. However, these declarations are not infallible. Theology is not infallible. And if they are found to be inaccurate based on Scripture or the good and necessary consequences of Scripture, they should and will be changed. As an elder of this church, I slash we are very confident in the statement of faith. But we do recognize that only scripture is infallible. A statement of faith, going back to what we talked about, the definition of what a statement of faith is, is a summarized version of scriptural truths. And anytime you summarize you're in danger of corrupting a little bit, or corrupting a lot. And so hopefully we haven't corrupted at all. What we've stated has a lot to do, it directly came, it's based on scripture, but we also learned from the Westminster Confession of Faith, the London Baptist Confession of 1689, and the New Hampshire Confession. I forget what year that was. So what we've tried to do is use scripture and historical witness. So why, I'm going to let you guys talk for a minute. I think I promised that early on and I didn't deliver on it. Why is it so important that we understand these theological beliefs as objectively true? Okay. Right. So, so what's wrong with that? What's wrong with it just being opinion? Because people go to country clubs all the time and hang out in the country club and they all have their different opinions. Okay. Great. Great. Okay. Yes, sir. Okay. Right. Okay. Right. Right. Okay. But the creator God of the universe, the triune creator God of the universe. Yes, sir? I think that's a good point is it makes it known what it is that we believe but where I'm going is is I've talked to a lot of people that said okay you've got your theology right but I've got Jesus okay and now What is the next question that you want to ask that person? Which Jesus? Tell me about Jesus. And the moment they make a statement about Jesus, guess what? They just made a theological statement. So going back, I think everybody hit various nails on the head. Good points. What I go to is something that there was a I think he was from South Carolina. I loved his accent. I just can never quite do it. You ever heard a guy with a really deep South Carolina accent speak in Greek and Latin? Oh, dude, it's hysterical. But anyway, brilliant man. His name's Douglas Kelly. He said something to the effect of, it does us no good if the God that we meet on Sunday morning is not the real, objective God of the Bible. Let me tell you about my wife. I love my wife. What do I love about my wife? She's very outdoorsy. She loves camping. She loves UFC. We watch it together all the time. These are things I love about my wife. Her Asian descent and blonde hair. I love everything about her. Now, I'm not describing my wife, am I? No. And so if we are describing a God that is not the God, creator God of the universe, then we don't have a relationship with that God of the universe. At least not the relationship with what we think we do. That's why doctrine, that's why theology is so important. It is the study of God. There is the relationship aspect which is I mean, people tend to fall off one of two sides of the fence, right? You can fall off the one side where, you know, I just want the facts, you know? Facts and no feeling, I shouldn't say feeling, no relationship, but that's a cold, dead faith, if you can even call it faith at all. On the other side, you have the The idea that it's all about emotion and love and it's all about relationship, and you don't need to have any facts Well, that's a blind faith if it's faith at all You have to have and we talk a lot about heart knowledge and head knowledge, but we can't have them both Neither one are optional They're both they're both required Yes, ma'am Yeah yeah and that's a that's a great point I can't remember if I included that in here or not so let me go and answer your question depends on what we're disagreeing on so she said what about people who we disagree with theologically okay it depends on what we disagree on and I I really don't like breaking doctrines into essentials and non-essentials I don't think there's a fine line where you say, these are okay to disagree with and these aren't okay. What I'll say is if someone calls themselves a Christian, but they are not Trinitarian, then they're in deep trouble. They don't need sanctification, they need evangelizing. They need to understand who the God of the Bible is, the fact that he's triune. If they don't believe in the deity of Christ, which is very much related. Now, someone can believe, there's a very common belief out there, maybe somebody in this room holds it, I'm not 100% sure, but can believe that you can go on sinning after you become a Christian, and just, you know, there's no effort, there's no, if you don't show any sign of sanctification or the Spirit working in your life, that's okay, because you're repenting of your disbelief. You're not repenting of your sin when you come to Christ. That's a very popular opinion that's out there, and I, it's, A person is not necessarily an unbeliever, if they believe that. But it's a very unhealthy, very, very unhealthy position to hold. Did you guys, I see a lot of looks of confusion. Do you guys understand what I'm talking about? Yes, sir. Another distinction that might help, rather than essential, non-essential, rather, all non-essentials are important, but there are non-essentials that you should Right, which is a Mormon. Right. Right. Absolutely. No, it's somewhere in between because you can't, did you guys hear that? Okay. You can't ever have mathematical certainty as it comes to a, you know, pretty much any theological position. But at the same time, kind of like Eric said, it's not like you just kind of blow it off and that you can't have any knowledge of it. And so the idea there is that you get into the word, you study scripture, and then alongside of that, you bring in what the Christian church has believed throughout the last 2,000 years. And based on that, at some point, you make a decision on, this is what I believe about the Lord's Supper. And so, one of the things that I learned very, very early on, I was blessed to hear him say this, it was Dan Doriani, I think was the professor. He said, where scripture is clear, we teach, preach, whatever, with boldness, increased boldness. Where it is not clear, we preach or teach or whatever with more humility. Now, that doesn't mean we're not humble when we're bold, Things like the Lord's Supper, there are wonderful Christians who have lined up on multiple sides of that issue, and it's something that, well, like Eric said, it's important, but it's not something that we should divide over. Now, 500 years ago, they did divide over it. They were ready to kill each other over it. Yes, sir? Right. Well, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, see, yeah. See, and that's something that we'll talk about when we get there. But our policy is we are essentially a believer's baptism church. However, we have respect for the theological position, the Reformed theological position of infant baptism. And so it's got a wonderful tradition. It is not heresy. And it is something that we disagree with. And we would like to see folks who practice or believe in infant baptism change. But if you were baptized as an infant in Reformed tradition, then we would accept that baptism because we don't want to divide over that. Lots of conscience is key and stuff like that. There is an objective reality, but the question is, because objectively there's a right answer, but the question is, how do you arrive at that right answer? A subjective question is an opinion, like one of you guys said. And so to say that, oh, yeah, yeah, do whatever you want to do, or it doesn't matter, that would be more of a subjective stance on that sort of thing. And what we're saying is that it is objectively there is a correct answer. We just struggle with understanding exactly what that correct answer is. Does that make sense? OK. Good. I like it. Yes, sir. which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least favorite word ever but go ahead which is my least Those things that are necessary for salvation, the Bible is clear. There's no doubt that those doctrines that we need to have in order to be saved, those things are clear. However, the agreement is molded. Having our own interpretations, our own vices, The reality of having perfect, certain interpretations of those unclear documents is fundamentally different. And so those are the ones where, of course, you need very important documents to discuss and debate and do all those things. And there is an objective reality that it points to. And your ideas of them are subjective. That doesn't change whether or not they're a good, correct answer. It's just a question of whether it's realistic to apply a perfect, certain answer to a given point. And if that's not possible, that's where we should end up in the first place. Right. Well said. Cool. Anybody else? All right. So why is it so important to get them right? Again, we don't want to be an error. We want to make sure that the God we meet on Sunday morning is the God of the Bible, the creator, triune creator of the universe. Why is it so important that we articulate what we believe in the first place? And I think this goes back to something that Steve said. We need to make sure that we make it known what we believe so that when folks come here, they have an idea of what they're getting into. I did kind of a quick tour of a handful of statements of faith in various churches in the area. And I'm going to tell you, there is some junk out there. And by calling it junk, I would use another word, but I'm a jerk. It's amazing. I am judging. I don't know if it's a sin or not. I just think it's a stone-cold fact. But it looks more like marketing material than anything to me, as opposed to a confession of what you really believe. And so if you're not willing to state that, if you're in a church and you're not willing to state that, what you really believe, then do you really believe it? So finding the right level of detail is challenging. Doing the Statement of Faith was one of the hardest things I've ever done in terms of participation, because you can word these things a million different ways. What do you add? What's too much? What's not enough? Did we nail it? Oh, no way. No way. The Westminster Confession of Faith. How many guys did Westminster in the writing of that thing? It took years, and there was a ton of those guys. They were a lot smarter than me and Ken. maybe not smarter than Mike, probably smarter than Philip. So the Westminster Confession of the Faith, it contains 35 sections, and it's probably, it's hard to tell, but it's about 10 times longer than our Statement of the Faith, and it's got a lot of detail in it. And we didn't want that because, honestly, people weren't going to read it. So this is what we'll hit next week. We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired. Now, does that read a little weird to you? Men divinely inspired instead of divinely inspired men? That's not a stylistic decision. This is the sort of thing that this sort of thing gets into. Divinely inspired men, who would be inspired in that case? be the man or the person. But what is actually inspired in the doctrine? It's not the person. It's not the author. It's the book. It's the work. It's the scroll. So if Paul was inspired as a person, that means that everything he ever wrote or said would be scripture, would be the word of God. But not everything that Paul wrote or said was scripture, so it was just 1st and 2nd Corinthians and Romans, etc. and so forth. So, I mean, you really got to watch your P's and Q's when you're doing this stuff. So anyway, we believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction, that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, truth without any mixture of error for its matter, that it reveals the principles by which God will judge us and therefore is and shall remain to the end of the world the true center of Christian union and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried. The complete Bible includes 66 books, 39 Old Testament, and 27 New Testament books. So this is what we'll hit next week. And we're probably going to break it into four basic categories of scripture, which is, he said perspicuity, I say clarity. Isn't clarity much more clear than perspicuity? Yes, pretentious is the word. Clarity, necessity, authority, and sufficiency. Those are the four magic words when it comes to scripture. We'll probably break it up in that way. Any other questions? Katrina, what do you have for me? You're good? Okay. All right. Anybody else? No? Marissa, do you have any questions? Do you have any answers? No? Okay. All right. Josh, do you mind closing us?