5. From Light Roast Calvinist to Dark Roast Reformed

Joshua Haymes: 2020 was the year I went from Light Roast Calvinist to Dark Roast Reformed. Now, what is Light Roast Calvinism, you ask? Great question. Fortunately, it'll be super easy to explain. Barely an inconvenience. Light Roast Calvinism is a term I made up to describe someone who subscribes to Calvinistic soteriology. Think Tulip or the Doctrines of Grace. and yet rejects the tradition and the theological system in which Calvinistic soteriology was grounded and developed. In other words, the doctrines of grace or tulip, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints, really represent just the tip of the iceberg. Light roast Calvinists such as myself, circa 2019, have contented themselves with just camping out on the very tip of our soteriological iceberg, sipping whiskey, smoking pipes, and debating the finer points of election, reprobation, and double predestination. all the while completely clueless to the fact that just below the surface of our Calvinistic iceberg lies the firm foundation of covenant theology and the historic creeds and confessions of the Reformed faith. And so, to sum up, Light Roast Calvinism subscribes to the doctrines of grace, tulip, but, wittingly or unwittingly, rejects the broader theological framework and tradition of the Reformers. Now, in this Light Roast Calvinist category, we've currently got a lot of Johns on the scene. Think John MacArthur, John Piper, And it seems like there was at least one more John. John, uh… And his name is John Cena! All right, not sure about that last one, but definitely the other two, Light Roast Calvinists. Now, to be clear, I am very grateful for Light Roast Calvinists. I was one for many years, and I've benefited greatly from the teachings of men like John Piper. But in 2020, I came to realize that Calvinistic soteriology really is just the tip of the soteriological iceberg. And it is built upon miles and miles of beautiful, sturdy, historic theology and tradition, which leads me to the three Cs of Dark Roast Reformed. Calvinistic Soteriology, Creeds and Confessions, and Covenant Theology. So if you want to consider yourself dark roast Reformed, you got to be Calvinistic, Confessional, and Covenantal. And so in today's episode of the Reformation Red Pill podcast, we will be giving you a broad overview of the three C's of Reformed Theology. Think of it like a Reformed Theology 101 class. And for your benefit and so that you can continue your reformation journey on your own, we have linked a whole host of resources related to today's episode topic down in the description. These were the books, podcasts, and lectures that shaped us in our theological journey. We wanted to gather up those resources and put them all in one place just to make it easy for you. And hey, if you like the podcast and you want to support what we're doing, please go like the podcast, subscribe, share it with a friend, and go give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. It's free for you, and it helps us out more than you know. And if you really, really want to support the podcast, you can join our Reformation Red Pill Patreon. Turns out, producing high-quality media content is quite expensive. We have a whole slew of cultural reformation, New Christendom building content that we want to create. is just going to take a few dollars to do it. And by few, I mean probably thousands. So if you like this content and you want more of it, I encourage you to vote with your dollars. And now, without further ado, let's go ahead and jump on into this week's episode of the podcast. Welcome back to another episode of the Reformation Red Pill podcast. I am your host, Joshua Hames, and I am again joined with our co-host,

Brooks Potteiger: Brooks Potteger, a pastor of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, glad to be here.

Joshua Haymes: And we have the man himself back in the studio. Robert Murphy. The myth and the legend. Brown chicken, brown cow. That's the cheap guy version of sound effects there. I'm gonna add it myself. So for you out there, dear viewer, all of you who are even remotely interested in Reformed theology, this podcast, That's for you. Today, we will be doing something of an introduction to Reformed Theology. So in future episodes, we're going to be outlining and making a case for our particular brand of Reformed Theology, because Reformed Theology is kind of a big pond, and we have our own little niche in there. Our niche, if we want to get specific, is the Kuyperian, Postmill, Presuppositional, Theonomic, Covenant, Child, Communing, Straight Talking, Happy Warrior, Reform theology. Preach. Amen. Sunday. Amen. Here we go. Getting some church up in here. So, and if any of those things that I just mentioned interest you, or if you have no idea what that even means, just join us. Come along on the journey. It's gonna be fun. This podcast is for you. And even if you just like listening to two smart guys talk to another guy, Uh, this podcast is also for you. We'll, uh, we'll let you guys work out the math on that. So before we get into the recap of where we've been and kind of where we're going, that's a little bit of where we're going.

Brooks Potteiger: Brooks, if you want to take… Yeah, well, one of the reformational values is not binding the conscience. I don't know what video I'm looking at, but I'll guess this one. And so I just want to quickly revisit the last episode on modesty, because I think I may have inadvertently bound the conscience, and I certainly did not intend to, specifically with the yoga pants. Be clear, it is not a sin to wear yoga pants. I was not laying down a law. The whole point was, let's be thoughtful with what we put on. And so just to be clear, I was not saying godly. Yes, that ungodly. Yes, that clearly I was calling for discernment. And so conscience is unbound. Okay. That's good. Wisdom overall. That's good. Yeah.

Joshua Haymes: Wisdom, wisdom on how we dress. I love it. Yeah. That was a, that was a fun episode to go check it out. Yeah. I keep pointing to the wrong, you go check it out. All right, so two weeks ago, we covered it. So every other week, we do an Ask Pastor Brooks. That's what we did. We did a modesty episode last week. And so every two weeks, we're doing a content-based episode. So two weeks ago, we talked about the four tumors that have been slowly killing the gospel-centered movement. And we talked through those issues because that's where we came from. That's what we know, that's where we came from. And that's also where a lot of people who are interested in this podcast are currently. And so for us, it was upon discovering that much of our evangelicalism in America seems to be at odds with scripture and the theology and practice of the church throughout history. And that led us to take the Reformation red pill. So two weeks ago, we discussed some of the major problems in evangelicalism as we see them. And so this week we want to talk solutions. Yeah, talk solutions. So, uh, we believe that the church in America is in desperate need of reformation.

Robert Murphey: Both reforming where it's at now and rediscovery of the reformation that like, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. So many things have already been flushed out.

Brooks Potteiger: To claim our inheritance.

Joshua Haymes: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, so we believe that the solution to the problems that we talked about two weeks ago, antinomianism, narcissism, cultural Marxism, and toxic winsomeness, the solution is in fact reforming to the Word of God, and that's what the original Reformation was all about, and that's what we're due. It's 500 years ago, we're due for another

Robert Murphey: Fancy Latin phrase, ad fontes, back to the sources.

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah. And, and true to be truly progressive is almost always to go back to the ancient path. It's not to do something. Yeah, that's right.

Joshua Haymes: That's right. In other words, so we believe the only way forward is to look back first to Scripture, obviously, but not only to Scripture, we also look back to our forefathers, and not just our forefathers, but specifically to the tradition throughout church history.

Brooks Potteiger: And the reason we look to our fathers is because they were looking to the Scriptures. They were often far wiser than we were.

Robert Murphey: Yeah, follow me as I follow Christ.

Joshua Haymes: Exactly, exactly. So before we move on, a lot of people hear that, that we need to look back to tradition, and they think Roman. Yeah. Roman Catholic.

Robert Murphey: Tradition. All the way back to being Jewish. Yeah, I know. But I think that that word, even the word Catholic, if you go and you look it up in the dictionary, the first definition is universally derived from one source. So I, for one, you know, we all go to churches here where we have the word Catholic in the creed that we say every week. And, you know, you could always tell the visitors by the eyebrows hitting the ceiling. Yeah, wait a second. What? I thought this was a Protestant church.

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah, that was me at Sproul's church. 13 years ago, maybe. I can't believe that I just confessed I believe in the Catholic church.

Robert Murphey: And I just, I refuse to let the Romans own that word. Like they don't get to own the word universal. Like they can call themselves the universal Roman church, but I'm not gonna let them own that term.

Joshua Haymes: Okay, so where do we go? That's good because I think we need to make a case here for our viewer, people who are new viewer singular, maybe more than that. I think at this point, maybe more than that. So, but we need to make a case for our viewers Where in Scripture would you point them to to make a case that we should look to tradition? Because a lot of people think, well, we have the Word of God, why do we need to go to tradition? Doesn't the Bible talk negatively about tradition? So where would you guys go in Scripture for that?

Robert Murphey: Yeah. I think, you know, it's certainly a valid point that much of the time, especially in the mouth of Jesus, the word tradition is pejorative. It is negative that you nullify the word of God by your tradition, Pharisees. Like, he's definitely, you know, mad about that, but that there's also places where it is super importantly said positively. So I'm thinking of 2 Thessalonians 2.15, 3.6, hold fast to the traditions that have been passed on to you. Paul is already, you know, Thessalonians, those might be some of the first letters written and there's already like, this is what we do to have a safeguard against the flesh, against the world, against the devil. There are traditions that have been passed on and they are in the word of God, but that there's also a richness to community practices, best practices are talked about positively in Thessalonians.

Brooks Potteiger: And there were already confessions being formed that are part of Scripture, which we'll probably get to a little bit later. And it's just a false dichotomy or a false dilemma to say that the Protestant Reformation was against tradition and only to Scripture. It was against unscriptural tradition back to scriptural. Right. That's right.

Robert Murphey: That's right. And so the Catholic position, I'm sorry, this is the thing I've been all researching lately here, is that, I have a fancy Latin phrase, I didn't come up with this, I read this, is that they believe in sola ecclesia, They don't think that there's only the church, it's like they don't believe the church is the only thing that exists, but they believe that it holds the highest suit of card in its hand and that when the push comes to shove, who decides, it's the magisterium of the church. But we say sola scriptura, which does not mean we read the Bible and nothing else. That would be so low scripture. Right, yes, exactly. That we say instead, who gets to decide ultimately? When push comes to shove, when tradition, how do you evaluate tradition? How do you evaluate science? How do you evaluate anything? Ultimately, our ultimate allegiance is to the word of God.

Brooks Potteiger: Right, and we're even seeing this play out in real time in the capital C Catholic Church with these decisions to bless people in same-sex unions, where it is straight up, what is the teaching of the church that is authoritative going to be and then pushed out into the corners of all the Catholics.

Joshua Haymes: Our new Reformation that we're going to have today may come out of the Catholic Church again from a bunch of people. Yeah, absolutely. So we believe that the Reformed tradition is the most accurate and faithful understanding of biblical theology and Christian practice. That's what we're kind of saying, that they had it right whenever they were saying, we need to get back to Scripture. That's what the church needs. That's what the church needed back then. That's what it needs now. And so when we're talking about creeds and confessions and tradition, all that stuff, it's all subjected to ultimately to the Word of God. So today we want to give, like we said, an introduction to Reformed theology. This is kind of step one down the Reformation rabbit hole, as it were. Now, I framed this on a tweet recently as, I used coffee, and you can be a light roast Calvinist, or you can be medium roast or dark roast. And so I'm gonna explain that a little bit. And so basically, we're gonna talk today about the three Cs of Reformed theology, the three Cs of Reformed theology, Calvinistic soteriology, confessional, and covenantal. And with the confessions, we'll say creeds and confessions. So those are the three Cs. And the way I formulated out the distinction between the light, medium, and dark roast before was, Light roast being Calvinistic soteriology. That's what we kind of came from. That's the John MacArthur, John Piper. And very thankful for them.

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah. Like we said before. Even Mark Driscoll, Young Wrestlers from Reform.

Joshua Haymes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Calvinistic soteriology. They heard Tulip. They loved it. They dove in. That's great. That was me. Yeah. And so that's the light roast. Then we got medium. The way I put it before was medium roast is Calvinistic and confessional. and then dark roast is Calvinistic, confessional, covenantal. What I realized after talking with Robert and Pastor Brooks is that that doesn't really work, because if you are confessional as a Reformed Baptist, basically medium roast was Reformed Baptist, right? You're Calvinistic in your soteriology, and you have adopted the London Baptist confession of faith, and so you're Calvinistic and confessional, but The London Baptist is covenantal. They take it a different place than we do as Presbyterian, but it is covenant theology, and so it doesn't really make sense to have it. So really, it's light roast and then the medium and dark. Two brands of dark.

Brooks Potteiger: Two brands of dark roast. So that's how we're going to break it up today. We're going to talk through the three C's of Reformed theology, starting with

Joshua Haymes: The Light Roast, where we kind of came from, Calvinistic Soteriology. And for any viewers who are brand new to this world, we want to kind of lay out what is Calvinistic Soteriology. And then we like to steel man the opposing view. That's kind of what we want to do throughout the podcast. is to be as charitable as possible to people who hold the opposing view, so that we can make our biblical case that we believe this is true. That's why we've gone this direction, is we believe the Bible teaches it. So, first of all, what is Calvinistic soteriology?

Robert Murphey: So the idea about like, how did I get saved is that people, Calvin gets a bad rap. A lot of times people think, you know, Calvin and Hobbes is named after this one particular view of, of John Calvin that's popular, but not accurate is that we would say, you know, I got saved. I accepted the Lord. I went down and prayed the sinner's prayer and went to the altar call. I got saved. Why did I do that? is that, so this is the way Calvin talks, this is the way Ephesians chapter one talks, is to say that I did that because God put faith in my heart. I, you know, for by grace you are saved through faith and this not of yourselves. It was God implanted faith that caused me to do that. The crucial difference between me who follows after Christ and someone, person B who does not, is not rest in me ultimately and that I'm responsible for my salvation. That fancy word, soteriology.

Brooks Potteiger: Because you were dead in your trespasses. That's the whole thing. Just as Christ called Lazarus from the grave, he had to call each of us from the grave in order to even see him as Savior.

Joshua Haymes: I remember the first time, well, not the first time, but when it really dawned on me that that is the framework. I heard John Piper asking the question, when you get to heaven and you're standing before the throne of grace, if God were to ask you, why are you here? what is your answer? And for so many today, so many evangelicals today, it's, well, I asked Jesus into my heart. The first answer you give is I, is me. First word. And the way he put it was, if you say, in his John Piper way, if you say anything But your grace, that is why I am here in heaven with God. It is your grace alone, not because I had the smarts to make the right decision and ask Jesus into my heart. It is a gift of grace. That's whenever it was like, Yeah, that's the right answer. That's the right answer.

Robert Murphey: Do I give more glory to God or to me?

Brooks Potteiger: And that's the whole thing. Salvation is designed to get all the glory to God.

Joshua Haymes: That is the design of salvation. So a lot of people, whenever they hear Calvinist soteriology, the acronym comes into their mind, TULIP. And that's really great. Calvin lays out in his institutes, this basic formulation for what this they're called the doctrines of grace yeah it's really one thing you there's a lot of people who say i'm calminian you know like i right i i you know they just don't like limited atonement a lot of people just don't like that point calvinist you have the four-point calvinist it doesn't make sense right they they're a package deal i didn't realize that before but they really are a package deal and if you especially if you accept the t the total depravity yeah well

Robert Murphey: Let's just- Well, but what you just said, the being dead in your trespass, if you really genuinely believe that, that you weren't wooed and like persuaded and come along, like you're a corpse and that God comes and breathes life into your dead bones, Ezekiel style, and makes you alive.

Brooks Potteiger: Right. And it's interesting because even growing up so often you hear, but he stands at the door and knocks. Right. That was to the church. That's one of the seven letters to the churches. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about, a salvific.

Robert Murphey: Right. Yeah. That God is sovereign over it all, that you were going to go through, is that the total depravity, which may be better kind of set systemic, that the word total used to mean that in every aspect.

Brooks Potteiger: You're not as depraved as you could be. And that's why some people reject it. It's because they understand the caricature. That's not what's being communicated.

Joshua Haymes: And I think, no, there's some good, I see some good, I see beauty, I see good in people, so they're like total depravity doesn't make sense.

Robert Murphey: But the excuse then is to say my will, the most important one for the other side, the Arminian side, the non-Calvinist side, is to say your will is not, you can decide that you are screwed up in your habits, you're screwed up in your thinking, you're screwed up in your being conscious about right and wrong, but you're not screwed up in your ability to choose Jesus, you're not dead in your sin.

Joshua Haymes: It's the only thing that's not tainted.

Robert Murphey: Right, that one little sliver that just somehow squeaked through. And then there must be, you know, something, what's the sound of, I must have done something good in my childhood or youth, is that that idea that God looks ahead in the corridor of time and says, oh, well, you're gonna be awesome, so I'll choose you. That's opposed with the second one, unconditional election. That it's not about God foreseeing what you're going to be like and then responding. Who is this responding God that's like, I wonder what they'll do?

Joshua Haymes: Yeah. And if that's the case, why even pray for someone to be saved? Because God's sitting up there with his hands tied.

Brooks Potteiger: Well, I actually even read this today. This was one of the ways that it really landed for me. And it was J.A. Packer in maybe the introduction or chapter one to evangelism and the sovereignty of God. And he talks about how people argue about this very thing, but he said, I can prove to you that you believe that God is totally sovereign over salvation. And it's because you pray for people to be saved. And it's Packer where he goes, So on our feet, we can have our disagreements, but on our knees, we are agreed. Yes. That is classic. Right. Yes. Yeah.

Robert Murphey: And the people, you know, who would disagree on their, their knees are absolute heretics there. That, that was a big thing. 30 years ago, open theism came around and people like, God doesn't know the future. God is genuinely small and handicapped. Like that is so beyond the pain. That's real bad. That's real bad. That's real out there. So we've got unconditional election, and then… The one that people, yeah, get all upset about here is limited atonement. It's a very un-user-friendly name there. A particular redemption, you could say.

Joshua Haymes: Or definite atonement.

Robert Murphey: Definite atonement, yeah. The idea that God came to save people in particular, and that, for me, the part that really I found most persuasive was the no double jeopardy.

SPEAKER_02: Me too, that was the big one for me.

Robert Murphey: That your sins are punished either on you or on Jesus Christ and never both. That he died for all the sins of everyone everywhere and then some people still go to hell and pay for those sins again. Absolutely not. That's what convinced me.

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah, that one to me is the clearest. The way I've said it before is on the cross, Jesus wasn't crossing his fingers. Yes. Okay, I've done what I can. Now I really hope people take me up on this. He was dying to purchase his bride.

Robert Murphey: Right. And it really was, I forget, um, uh, Peale, I think was his name of a hundred years ago, some traveling evangelist who genuinely said that the Lord cast one vote for you, the devil cast one against you, and it's up to you to break the tie. Just like, what? That's not good. That's not good news. So give us, what is irresistible grace? So the idea that like, you're going, you know, you're going to be called, if you're one that God has died for, he's going to call you to summon you to himself to give you that faith, and you can't defeat the will of God.

Brooks Potteiger: It's John 6, 37. All that the Father gives me will come to me.

Robert Murphey: Right. Your sin is not strong enough to keep back the election of God.

Joshua Haymes: Man, that's one of the things in this that was a big aha moment for me too. When it was put very simply, when does regeneration happen? Does faith happen and then you are regenerated? Or does regeneration happen and then you have faith? Yeah. And I, and the way I always salute us. Yeah, exactly. Right. It's always, I've always been like, yeah, I put my faith in Christ and then I'm regenerated. Right. But then now I'm like, oh, it's the, it's the total opposite of that. If you really were dead, total depravity really are dead. God has to turn on the lights. God has to raise the dead. And then you see, and then you can see. So he regenerates you and then you get the gift of faith. Right. Yeah. And so, okay. So that's irresistible grace. It's God's elect will, be saved, like C.S. Lewis, even against their will, you know? Yeah, in some sense. In some sense, yeah. And then, all right, perseverance of the saints.

Robert Murphey: Is that by definition, the elect will make it to the end. Like, who are these people that God chose before the foundation of the world? He is going to all the ways that they need for, you know, all things to work for their good, for their salvation. God has orchestrated all of that for his redeemed people and we will make it to the end despite all the craziness of our sin and the world and the devil and the flesh.

Brooks Potteiger: Right, and again, all of this from first to last is by grace alone, and we're teaching through the Westminster Confession in our Sunday School right now, and we talked about perseverance of the saints and how, perhaps probably better said, preservation of the saints. Right, exactly. It's not because we white-knuckled it to the finish line, but it's because God's preserving grace will see us to the finish line. Yeah, about him. He who began the good work in you will be faithful to bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

Joshua Haymes: That's great. So that's Tulip. And then my favorite, uh, uh, so we have a habit. We want to steal man, the opposing side, but let me, uh, straw man first and talk about the Armenian Daisy. Oh, yes.

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah. It loves me. He loves me. He loves me.

Robert Murphey: Oh, man. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. Honestly, that's so bad. But I know Arminian people who they genuinely go through this enormous roller coaster of… It's not every other pedal, but I got baptized, but now I know so much more and I didn't really have enough… The faith that I have now, I didn't have then. I should get re-baptized. Baptize him again. Baptize him again, the 20th one, because…

Brooks Potteiger: I remember having a conversation with a friend when I was a teenager and he raised his hand during the altar call or whatever. And I'm like, man, you just got saved. He's like, you know, I just kind of do it every time just to make sure. Like it really is. I just, just to make sure it takes at some point. That's a sacrament at that point. It is. There's just no comfort. I mean, that's a terrible, terrible way to live.

Joshua Haymes: So let's steel man. Okay. Why, why do people reject Calvinistic soteriology?

Brooks Potteiger: And this is, I mean, I think we want to say it is understandable, humanly speaking, why this is hard to wrestle with. And there are biblical reasons that people reject this, and I think there are emotional reasons as well. But one of the biblical reasons, and we can look at 2 Peter 3.9, that people do it, is it says God is not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance and so just if you read that in a vacuum it it seems to be saying okay God God There's a possibility to be saved and God really hopes that everybody will repent, will be saved. So clearly he didn't definitely decide who's going to do that if it's kind of an open-ended situation like that. But something that's really important to understand here biblically, and Sproul, I'm indebted to him for really helping me understand this probably a decade ago when I was listening to renewing your mind, and the quarter really clicked for me. But there are different ways that the Bible talks about the will of God. There's first his sovereign or his decretive will, which is what he sovereignly wills to pass that will pass that cannot not pass. Isaiah 46, 9-10 is one of the clear statements of this. I am God, there is no other. I am God, there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish my purpose. And so that's the decretal or the decretive or the sovereign will of God, that which he decreed before the foundations of the world, that must, will, cannot not come to pass. But then there's also the perceptive will of God. And this is when we're talking about his commandments, the moral commandments that he wills that people do. So, thou shalt not murder. It is the will of God that you don't murder. Has a murder ever happened in the world? Ever. And so every day,

Joshua Haymes: It's his will being broken all the time every day, in some sense.

Robert Murphey: And that's what we're praying every time in the Lord's Prayer. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. There is a place where those two are the same, and that's coming. That's heaven, that's the future, but right now we've got these two in this life, and that's what we pray against every time we're praying the Lord's Prayer.

Brooks Potteiger: It's not a temptation. So that's the perceptive will, and then there's his affective will, and that's really his You could say his disposition or his emotional inclination.

Joshua Haymes: So Ezekiel 33… Which is a crude way of putting it, technically, but God lets us do that.

Brooks Potteiger: He gives us that language even in scripture. Right, Ezekiel 33, 11. He does not delight in the death of the wicked. And so it's not that this is… He decreed this, and he's getting hopped up on seeing people suffer. No, he does not delight in that. It is not his will to see that in the effective way.

Robert Murphey: I think Isaiah calls it his strange and peculiar one, is that this judgment on the reprobate is out of character, as it were.

Brooks Potteiger: And I think even in a human way, we can understand this as parents. It is not our will that our children ever feel pain. And yet we would be terrible parents to keep them from all pain. And so you see there is this one will, but there's this other will that's stronger than that.

Joshua Haymes: And so other, so those are the like kind of intellectual reasons and scriptural reasons you were kind of going to. And some other, before we get into the emotional reasons that people reject Calvinistic soteriology, the one I've heard oftentimes is whosoever. Like what about the whosoever versus? Yeah. And I remember having several discussions with people in my cage stage coming to this, you know? Yeah. And but there's this, this idea that like John 3, 16, whosoever believes in him, that means, look, it says whosoever believes in him, that means anyone can believe in him. But if you actually read the passage, it says that whosoever believes in him would have eternal life. So it doesn't say that anyone can believe in him. It says, whoever believes in him will have eternal life. So it's not saying, and anyone can believe in him. It's not a statement about ability. Right. That's exactly right. It's a cause and effect. Right. Whoever believes will receive eternal life.

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah. And you see this in Acts as well, as many as were appointed unto salvation. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Haymes: Right. And so are there any other textual places that people often go with you guys?

Robert Murphey: People go with the word all, you know what I mean? Like what you were just saying, the whoever, and like they've, you know, God desires that all men should be saved, 2 Timothy. And so I think you have to recognize, you know, money is the root of all evil, is that it can equally be all kinds, or even just the human way. Everyone knows that two plus two is equal to four. Well, I doubt a one-year-old could articulate that. This all is sort of the human way of speaking. The one that I remember is, I think it's just Mark 1, maybe Matthew 1, no, it has to be Mark 1, where it says, all Jerusalem went out to John to be baptized. Really?

SPEAKER_02: The crippled guy over there?

Robert Murphey: The guy who couldn't get off his mat to get into the pool to get the angel to heal him? He went out there? Not every single person. God desires that all kinds of men, all sorts of people, that the entire humanity would be saved.

Joshua Haymes: I think I first heard it from Doug Wilson, the categories of reading the scriptures woodenly versus naturally. And we were not meant to read them woodenly.

Brooks Potteiger: I am a door. That doesn't mean that you have to have a doorknob. Where is the keyhole? I think another one, which is a legitimate question, is 1 John 2.2. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And so what do we do with that? My understanding of that is Christ came to redeem the world. He is in the process of making all things new. This isn't all just going to burn and go to hell and we're going to escape to heaven. He is remaking, he is saving, he is redeeming the world, the new heavens.

Joshua Haymes: That passage is the one that lit the flame that made me post-melt. It was that, that's because as a Calvinist, I couldn't square that circle, right? Because if he died, he was the propitiation for the whole world. In what sense can that be true? I remember hearing the illustration there of like, all right, if we say all of the city went out to go see the fireworks show, but it was just your church, that would be false. Totally false. You would be insane to think that, but that's what we say as Calvinists when we say, oh, that means the elect. When it says all, it really just means the elect. It's like, no, that can't be right. That's clearly not what he means. And so you either have to water down the word all there, or you have to water down salvation to be, he just gave an opportunity for all. So you can't, I don't see how you can be a Calvinist and not be Post Mill with that verse.

Robert Murphey: I mean, I think one thing for me as a student of history, too, is to just look at the BC world. That one possibility is to say that what was counted as virtue, what did the word kindness and goodness and selflessness and all these things that we think of as virtues today, what did that mean in BC times? that when Julius Caesar dragged the peoples that he had conquered naked through the city of Rome and crucified them at the end of the road, he was considered to be a good and virtuous leader. And that the world that we see when we read the Old Testament is so savage, so barbaric, and that now you can travel to the other end of the planet. And in Japan, what people consider good and virtuous and selfless is closer to the biblical norms than anything BC sort of times. And I think that the re-imagining of the world, the definition of how even people who aren't saved live in a post-Jesus world. And so there is a certain sense in which the entire world, including the unsaved- Like the common grace got dialed up. Exactly. Oh, that's good.

Joshua Haymes: That's a good way to put it. Yeah. Okay, so let's stay on track here. Let's go with the emotional reasons, because we've laid out some scriptural reasons that people, their main hangups scripturally, but I think it's more, I think it starts with the emotional response and then it goes to scripture. Because for me, the way I understand the difference between those who reject Calvinistic soteriology and those who accept it, it's like, the ones who are accepting Calvinistic soteriology, you have to accept a lot of mystery, which is how on earth does my free will operate with a sovereign God? I experienced salvation as a real choice in time, but it didn't feel like a choice, but it was my choice, but it wasn't. And so we have to Keep some tension. We have to live with that tension. I think that the person who, they experience life, and they experience what they perceive to be free will, and that's their experience, so they have to outright reject the idea that God can be totally sovereign over everything. It's like they're not comfortable with it. And when they, it's like they, The Calvinist says, okay, yeah, I just say it's a mystery. I say God is sovereign over salvation, but I can't quite marry that with I have responsibility before God. But the other person, the Arminian, has to just say, well, We have free will, and I'm going to somehow twist all those scriptures to fit this. But this feels like we have less of the scripture twisting. We just accept both and hold the tension, if that makes sense. But a lot of people can't. They have these emotional reasons, a visceral reaction to God being stubborn.

Brooks Potteiger: I remember I did. Me too. When I was way back, first getting on this journey, I remember my brother was maybe a year or two ahead of me. And I was listening to Sproul and some other guys, and I was trying to wrestle with God's sovereignty. And I remember saying to my brother, I am doing this right here. I'm choosing to put my hand up, my hand down. I made that choice. And I remember him just saying, just keep humble, keep searching, keep praying, and God will bring

Robert Murphey: And if you've read, like, C.S. Lewis's space trilogy, Paralandra there, the green lady is just marveling. She is just freaking out of like, how could Mel L. Dill have had this idea to create somebody alongside him who is exercising? And like, we don't want to deny that at all. That as image bearers, we have dignity and worth and a will and are making decisions, and God lets us suffer the consequences of our very real—and the benefits of our very real decisions that we make. And yet, He is God, this is His world, as, you know, Kuyper, we mentioned, not one rogue molecule. I find it relatively easy to live with that tension because I can't even conceive of the first part, that he knows where every molecule is and where it's going and where it's been and where it will go.

Joshua Haymes: What does eternity mean? Can we even put that in our mind?

Brooks Potteiger: I think too, the order you get, even though I can't on a whiteboard give you a calculus explanation of how it works, it really is the best, has the most explanatory power for the life I've actually lived. Where I know that I've made decisions. I know that I've made very bad decisions. And when I zoom out now, I see God's providence over it all.

Joshua Haymes: I'll never forget. So my experience in coming to Calvinistic Soteriology was this wrestling for about a year with God. I remember saying, I could never serve a God who chooses some and not others. That's not fair, all that kind of stuff. I was going through that, and then I remember I had to just step back from it. I read Bob Goff, Love Does, and I was like, I just need to love people and just get my head out of the clouds and just obey Christ. And then I came back to it and it was so sweet. But I was sitting, I remember I got to disciple some guys in college when I had graduated college, some students, and one guy was going through that same thing. And I will never forget, as a quick anecdote to illustrate God's sovereignty and salvation or God's sovereign hand over all this, is we were sitting down, we were texting, and he had been absent from our college ministry for a few weeks. So I followed up, hey, what's going on? And he's like, I'm struggling with Calvinism, with election. I really am like struggling with God about it, and I don't know what to do. I said, hey, let's meet up and talk about it. I've been there. So I texted him, hey, where do you want to meet up? And I chose the time, he chose the place, we go. And I start giving him my experience with coming to this stuff and how I related to him and how sweet it was to me now knowing that God was sovereign over all things and writing this plan where I do make choices, but God is sovereign over all of it. And as I talked about it, in the middle of our conversation, and I'm kind of expressing the glory of God's sovereignty and salvation election, this older man comes up to the table and says, can I sit down? And I was like, Yeah, sure. And he's like, just for a minute. He goes, I heard overheard what you guys were talking about just now. And he said, my son, uh, we had, we adopted my son, my wife and I did. And he, it was horrible. He, uh, started selling drugs. He, we, we gave him everything and he, his decisions almost destroyed my entire family. And he went to prison today. He gets out of jail. And he's coming to see us. And he said, I have so much bitterness in my heart towards him. And I don't know what to do. And I hear you talking about God redeeming all things and being sovereign over that. And it's like, how could he be sovereign over this nightmare that I've had to live through and all this kind of stuff. And I don't know, I want to love him. I want to obey God and love him, but I don't know. It's like, I just, can you explain this to me and help? And I remember just, It was just this ah-ha moment. It was like a t-ball. I was like, yes, actually, what your son, what you're experiencing with your son was what we all have done to God. It was exactly that. He gave us everything, and we spat in his face, rejected him, lived for ourself, and yet he didn't give us what we deserve. He sent his son to die for us.

Robert Murphey: He gave his son what we deserve.

Joshua Haymes: That's right, he gave his son what we deserve. And he just started weeping and it was this incredible moment. And then he just had to leave. He said, thank you so much. And he left on his way. And I look over at my friend and his jaw is drawn. And he's like, he realized, you chose the place, I chose the time, but God put this whole thing together for that man. It was so incredible, but it was just… Providence. Yeah, exactly. We live in God's reality. And like you said, I think that I've observed, this does have the most explanatory power for all of reality.

Robert Murphey: And the most practical benefit. the most payoff for it to say that it matters what I do and God is in control. And I am not able to square that circle and to every jot and tittle, but that they are both true and they both give me so much life and joy.

Brooks Potteiger: After you push through the tension, if you do, is it just becomes the most comforting, you're saying it becomes the most comforting reality. So sweet. Spurgeon calls the doctrine of God's sovereignty, the pillow that the Christian lays his head on. Yeah, it really is.

Joshua Haymes: Yeah. So let's finish up this Calvinistic, this first C, with like, how is this practical? You know, we just talked about comfort. What else? How is Calvinistic soteriology practical to the life of the believer? Why is it so wonderful? Why is it good?

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah. Even in reading Kuyper, it is a life system. It's not just five points talking about a flower. It is putting God at the center of everything, acknowledging his sovereignty over everything, and acknowledging the power of his grace in your life constantly, and it is just the light by which you see everything. And it is the concrete foundation that you actually live on, knowing that you are secure in the grace of God. If he was not completely sovereign over your salvation, over your days, there would not be any security. But if he is, and he is, and he's good, and he's called you, then you can rest.

Robert Murphey: That's good. And I think there's just the revulsion that people want to like push away is that they, you know, worm theology that God is sovereign and I'm just a worm and I'm pitiful and I'm, you know, like this would, this would diminish human beings too much. And in fact, it's the opposite, is that the payoff is to say that God is in control and he has granted you more than you could possibly imagine in his son, in creation even, to just how much as image bearers we have dignity and worth and that our choices matter in the context of his whole universe. That if we're all that there is, if we're in charge, then how bad are we at running this universe? It's the worst, but if he's in charge and he lifts us up and gives us so much freedom and responsibility, it is so much more glorious than having man on the throne to have God on the throne.

Brooks Potteiger: And in seasons of great sorrow and suffering, to know none of it's wasted. We say this often, but when we get to the end and we look back, we will all say, I would not have changed a single second of that because that was the best story that could have ever been written. And for now, it takes so much faith. Right. Yeah.

Joshua Haymes: But then faith will be safe. Pastor Brooks mentioned Abraham Kuyper, the Stone Lectures, the lectures on Calvinism. Go ahead and pause this video and go watch the first lecture or listen to the first lecture. They're free on YouTube. You can get the book, too, of Abraham Kuyper's lectures on Calvinism. It is like the Tim and Eric Like, it is so good and should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in Reformed theology. It is excellent. And I think I'm going to do a series of videos on it because it's very important. So that's, and actually we're also going to put together resources for you, okay? So that'll be in the description. Click in the doobly-doo. Yeah, click down in the doobly-doo or up here on the dobbly-doo. So that's light roast. Now, that's kind of where we came from, was we just had that. And then, well, yeah, we just had the Calvinistic soteriology part. Phase one. Phase one. And then we realized, oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is way more to reform theology than just Calvinistic soteriology. And it was really in 2020 where that became real for me because I realized all these guys who just have the soteriology part, so many of them were falling victim to a lot of these the tumors that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. And I realized the guys who were not falling victim to this had the dark roast stuff, right? So we're not going to, we're actually, we X-ing the medium roast. We're doing the two different versions of dark roast because really I was during the madness of 2020 with COVID, Black Lives Matter and all that, I saw Okay, here's Doug Wilson. Oh, Toby Sumter. Oh, here's James White and Jeff Durbin and Votie Bauckham. These guys, what do they have that I don't? Because they were ready for this in a way that so many weren't. And that gets into some of this other stuff with the dark roast. And so we're going to go on to the second C, which is the creeds and confessions. The creeds and confessions.

Robert Murphey: They weren't reinventing Christianity. They weren't like discovering these Calvinist things and saying, how can I integrate that into my new church that we've just invented, how it's all done. They belonged to Christ Church, 2000 years old. And they knew where this fit into a larger system. It was not brand spanking new.

Joshua Haymes: And that reinventing the wheel thing, that was a huge dawning moment for me in 2020, was I realized that I'm reading all these books that really are trying to reinvent how church is even done.

Brooks Potteiger: Right. And I've used this metaphor before, but it helped me as I was discovering the confessions and the creeds and especially the Westminsterian stuff. I thought of non-denom world that I had been in almost like Ikea furniture, where it's kind of cool and it's useful and it's functional. But the problem is I can't give it to my great-grandson.

Robert Murphey: He can't inherit it because there isn't enough substance. I've tried putting it in a moving van and it doesn't survive.

Brooks Potteiger: It falls apart. And so initially it was cool and useful, the non-denom world, but I want something that's cut from oak, confessional oak that has hundreds of years of use and that I can give easily to my great-grandson.

Robert Murphey: That's great stuff that Boniface cut down. All right.

Joshua Haymes: So let's go ahead and define it. What, for people who are brand new, what is a creed and a confession? What are the creeds and confessions?

Robert Murphey: So creed just typically gets things that are older. Uh, the ones that as the church was, um, finding out like, okay, so we say Jesus is Lord and that he's actually God and flushing out Christology, Trinitarian theology, all these controversies when people like Jesus is the highest created being and all those things. First, couple hundred years, few hundred years of the church is there's the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.

Joshua Haymes: And these were all responses to heresy. Right.

Robert Murphey: Yeah. Yeah. We're going to define like, okay, so know that Jesus is God. The Holy Spirit is God. There aren't three gods. All of these things that were hashed out right at the beginning and that are foundational for like, what is Christianity?

Joshua Haymes: Yeah, summaries of Orthodox Christian teaching.

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah, a distillation of the most essential truths of the gospel. Again, even in 1 Corinthians 15, I delivered to you what was of first importance. And then he goes through just the basics of the death and resurrection and then the appearance of Christ.

Robert Murphey: Yeah, and it's as a story here is that Jesus Christ was born of a woman, you know, suffered. It's going through and it's the story of the Bible laid out clearly against the heretics and what we actually affirm. So that's creeds and what are the confessions? So again, then when there was this big tumultuous time of the Reformation is that, we mentioned earlier the word Catholic there, is that how many times these guys were saying like, we're here to get back to the essentials of the Catholic faith, the universal faith. What do Christians believe as opposed to these accretions, these extra layers of junk that have piled on here, accumulated over the last several hundred years in late medieval Catholicism. And so there was the Augsburg Confession with Luther, there was the Second Helvetic Confession, there was the Westminster Confession, London Baptist Confession, a bunch of different documents where they clarified this.

Joshua Haymes: And very simply, we use the term confession because that's what the Church confesses to be true. That's what we confess to be true. To say together. They are basically a summary of Christian teaching, often as a response to heresy, but it's a summary of Orthodox Christian teaching.

Robert Murphey: Which, again, like Pastor Brooks was saying, we find in the Bible, Stephen, before he's going to get stoned, goes through, here's the history of what happened, this is how we got to where we are. you know, Joshua 24 there, he's going to rehash, your father was a wandering Amorite, like going through and telling the story about what God has done to bring us to this place is a very biblical precedent for having these creedal confessional things.

Joshua Haymes: That's exactly right. You can't say, and that's the whole idea, is one, that all the creeds and confessions are subordinated to Scripture, right? But yeah, that's exactly, that's a really good point, that when someone says, what do you believe, or what does your church believe, you can't just start reading the Bible. Okay, we want everyone to be reading the Bible all the time, yes, but if you're trying to explain… 32 hours later, yeah. Yeah, you've gotten through a few chapters of Genesis, whatever. And so we need to be able to summarize clearly, concisely, and honestly, what does our church believe to be true? What do I, as an individual, believe to be true? And when I discovered the Westminster Confession of Faith, it was such a relief. Yeah. It was because I'm like, do I need to like write a thing, a document that says all the things that I think are true about the Bible? What am I missing to think of?

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, oh my goodness. And this really is an interesting time that we're living in because there's those like us and there's a whole army of people who are running and finding refuge in the confessions and the creeds. But then there's another side, too, of churches that are getting rid of their identifying statements. Like the church I grew up in, Bell Shulls Baptist Church, got rid of the Baptist. And that's happening in lots of places where we don't want the baggage that some people associate with that, so we're going to get rid of that. But we're saying we want more clarity on what do we believe.

Joshua Haymes: And more connection to the church throughout history. They've been thinking through it for centuries.

Robert Murphey: And how much are you a victim of your, you know, zeitgeist, the time that you live in, that's all in you. It's not like these people, you know, who say, no creed, but the Bible is how much they have creeds that they just don't articulate. There are so many things that are in them from how they were raised, living in this world, going to these schools, knowing these people, growing up in these families, that gets into you from the world.

Brooks Potteiger: The moment a pastor uses the word Trinity, he is necessarily confessional in some way because you won't find that word in the Bible. But that is a distillation of the Bible's teaching on the nature and persons of of God, on the Godhead. I think Carl Truman articulates this well, this false dichotomy where some will say there are confessional and there's non-confessional people, and that's not true. He says, and this is from The Creedal Imperative, so if this intrigues you, Carl Truman's book called The Creedal Imperative is helpful. He said, the Christian world is not divided between those who have creeds and confessions and those who just have the Bible. It is actually divided between those who have creeds and confessions and write them down in a public form, open to public scrutiny and correction, and those who have them but do not write them down. The reason is simple. Every church, and indeed every Christian, believes the Bible means something. And what it thinks the Bible means is its creed and confession, whether it chooses to write down its beliefs or not. And so what's interesting about those who would say, no creed but the Bible, and again, they genuinely believe that, creeds and confessions keep us more biblical. because we actually can compare what our confession is. Everybody has confession. It's written down so we can actually make sure it is as opposed to it just kind of living in the air or just verse by verse.

Robert Murphey: Be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Subject your thoughts and as much as possible your unconscious thoughts to the Word of God and that we're gonna lay them out there and we're all assuming this, we all, is it true? Can you find it in the Bible? And we're gonna subject all of our thoughts to the Word of God by laying them out there and publicly talking about them and not just like, we all know that like, if you just make a decision down in the front, then you're saved and it doesn't matter how you live the rest of your life. all of a sudden you say that out loud and it sounds ludicrously unbiblical. And that's why the people who fail to articulate what they believe are able to sometimes hide behind like, we don't have any creed, we don't believe it, it's just the Bible.

Joshua Haymes: Well, let's, well, actually let's get into the steel man then. Yeah. So, uh, before we make our full on make the case for the confessions and creeds, we've already started, but before we get all the way into it, what, uh, why are people opposed to creeds and confessions?

Brooks Potteiger: Well, I think they would see them as divisive. If I'm going to say my confession, but you don't agree with that, well, then we're dividing the body of Christ. I think part of it too, and this would have been my reason, is because we don't realize how allergic we are to authority over us. And so it's not like I grew up and I had the argument for creating confessions, then I said, no, I think the non-denom way. I just, it was de facto. That confessions and church authority was bad. And Brooks with his Bible and coffee and Instagram post about it, where true revelation would come. Because I am a product of this radical individualism. I'm with an allergy towards authority.

Robert Murphey: And I think a lot of people have bought the lie that, I think, I can't remember the exact quote, but to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant, as some Catholic guy said that. And I think it was Newman. But anyway, the idea that- From Seinfeld? Wow. Is that the history of the church is that it was Catholic for 1500 years, then the Protestants came along and they started this whole new thing. And like that view of history is completely erroneous, is that if you look at any of the debates that Luther had with the Romans in his day, and that Calvin had with the papists in a generation later, they're always saying, look at Irenaeus.

Brooks Potteiger: Look at Augustine, look at all of these… And the Sola Scriptura guys are the ones who are writing all the confessions. Yes, right, yes.

Robert Murphey: That they said, this is what the historic church has always proclaimed, and that that's what we're calling you back to. And that there is no need to be afraid of history. Have there been heretics who've done crazy things in the past? Sure. But that we could look back at what God has been doing through his bride for the last 2000 years, there's no need to say, God, you know, Jesus, 30 years later, it all fell apart. 1,500 years after that, it booted up again. And somebody turned the computer that had been off on. It's like, that's Mormonism. That's crazy talk. That's cultish. And that God has always had a people that he has been guiding in truth more and more and more.

Brooks Potteiger: Luther was not trying to start something new. He wanted to reform the church. Right, exactly.

Joshua Haymes: So that's good. We, we're not going really deep. We're not totally steel manning. We're just trying to give a charitable, a charitable steel man, right? Where we're saying there are good reasons that people have had in the past.

Robert Murphey: You'll end up Catholic.

Joshua Haymes: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, I had, I got some feedback of like, oh, that wasn't a full steel man. It's like, okay, well we don't, we only have so much time. Yeah. So, but why we already dabbled a little bit, but why are the confessions important, good and necessary?

Robert Murphey: I mean, there's just a propensity in the human heart to re-enthrone ourselves, to put, to go with the winds of, you know, whatever craziness is blowing around at the time and to just get sucked up into that. And that the wisdom of the accumulated wisdom of the fathers and brothers before us who have thought through these things, instead of trying to rely solely on yourself, and can I defeat every argument that comes along today and think up and recognize all my blind spots today, is that no, God does not expect us to reinvent the church in our generation, every generation. It's exhausting.

Brooks Potteiger: It was exhausting. Right. And it's humbling. It's recognizing that you are part of church history and the goal of the body of Christ throughout history is to mature. And the way that we mature is not by burning all the libraries since we were born. Right. By reading them. And this is a point that Anthony Esslin made in a book called Out of the Ashes, which is phenomenal. But he makes the point, like, if we would just go up in the attic and there's a trove there full of treasures from church history that you don't have to write, you don't have to make. So much hard work has already been done. So much excavation and polishing and building has been done. open the lid and just start pulling them out and then reuse them again. There's just this rich inheritance that men gave their lives for that the Westminster Divines over a decade and I think over a thousand meetings hashed out the standards. You think there's some usefulness about that? Of course.

Robert Murphey: And particularly with Westminster, that they're coming at the end of that time period of having got to see what Luther did, what Calvin did, what all of the Bullinger and all these guys, that they're really packaging up the fruit of the Reformation that we so much cherish. They're putting it in a very, very polished form.

Brooks Potteiger: And one of the joys of reading the confession is to see their proof texts. It really turns scriptural lights on and connections that you never would have made yourself, but then you realize, okay, I'm reading this about the atonement and then I never really saw how that fit into there. But yeah, it really just adds more dimension to your story.

Joshua Haymes: Well, it's the idea too, that we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Why would we, we're at the top of this incredible line throughout church history of men who have, are fathers who have done all this work. And we're like, I'll just get down from here and I'll build my own new tower that I can get up on. Sandcastle. Yeah, my own little sandcastle that'll just get knocked over next year. Right. It's like, why? I really think it's like we're despising our fathers. To just walk away from all this wealth of knowledge and everything.

Robert Murphey: And it's funny you mentioned the term fathers there is that I think all of us here as fathers then to say like it seems really pathetic to hand my sandcastle to my children and to say build your life on this. That's good. Is that as you then start to say, what, how do I get you started in Bible reading? How do I get you started in understanding what is the big picture? What are we talking about? How do you read the Bible? Is that these, this soil has been tilled and that when we come to approach our children of what are we passing on, that it is, you have the historic Christian faith. That covenant succession to our next generation is so crucial for having historic Christian perspective that we're giving them the one universal Catholic faith to our children.

Joshua Haymes: we didn't, we don't have time to get all the way into it, but even going along with the confessions, the catechisms and that kind of gets to what you're talking about too, is like, what are we passing down? Madison and I are with, with Cal, even though he's only one and a half, but we're already starting, you know, there's little kids, God made me, we're trying to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism just week by week, trying to plug through it. But it's, it's, it's such a relief to be, to just go through that and say, if I memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism, off the top of my head, I can answer every basic question about the Christian faith. That is… And four years ago, I didn't know what a catechism was, I just thought it meant something Catholic, but now I'm just like, what? I don't remember where I learned this. I think this is true. but so you guys can fact check me on it, but that the there's going to be a retraction. Yeah, I know the next episode one week later, but that the Puritans, if you could be put under church discipline for not catechizing your children, if they couldn't answer the catechism questions, you could be put under church discipline for failing to do your primary duty as a father, which is disciple the next generation. And whenever I heard that when I raise up your in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Whenever I learned that, how serious they took discipling the next generations and how they had this incredible tool of the catechism and the confessions, I was just blown away by that. And I was like, I mean, that's why we've lost our culture.

Brooks Potteiger: Calvin straight up said, if we do not catechize our children, we cannot expect them to learn the faith. It's really simple. Exactly.

Joshua Haymes: We wonder why our culture is decaying. It's because when's the last time you ever even heard of somebody being put under church discipline for failing to disciple their children? Right. Never, never have I even heard of that. And it's like that, if we had that kind of commitment to discipling, and it was an expectation from the elders to the church. I'm not saying we need to put everyone under church discipline. You can't say the catechism questions, but Maybe. Maybe in 50 years that needs to be a thing.

Robert Murphey: The objections that I hear to infant baptism, where people get so bent out of shape, is they're like, what magical thing is this going to do to just sprinkle your kid here? That doesn't then guarantee that they're going to grow up to be a Christian. And we never, no one has ever said that we have some, you know, magic sprinkle ritual that we do disconnected from raising them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, knowing his word, knowing the summary of his word, that's what we're talking about here with the confession, is that that is biblical parenting. That is what, you know, baptism, infant baptism, is step one in raising your kid as God says. That really is super important to not divorce it from how we speak, how we sing, family worship, all the things that are your parental responsibility. No, we would say absolutely no to divorcing the ritual from the life. Yeah, that just makes no sense.

Joshua Haymes: So we have covered a lot with the creeds and confessions. That's a good intro for people who are new to this world. Let's move on to the second aspect of Dark Roast, Dark Roast Reformed, and that is covenant theology. Let me get down to there.

Robert Murphey: So that's covenant theology. Yeah, and I think that we've already started talking about that here with our view of biblical parenting and things. The idea that our God is a God who promises, that from the earliest pages of Scripture… Yeah, what is a covenant?

Joshua Haymes: I'll just say that.

Robert Murphey: This is a famous thing that's very, very hard to define, but like… Solemn promise administered over life and death with blood. There's all kinds of particular ways that you could try it. But I think for a person coming in at the beginning is that a uber promise here is really a fine way to get started.

Joshua Haymes: Uber promise. Covenant theology, the theology of uber promise.

Robert Murphey: Uber promises. But the idea that God decided in, you know, why did he send his son is that he had elected people before the foundation of the world in the eternal covenant. to come and save who he would save, that that would be how they would work as a trinity. And then there is a good world, made good, and some people call it the covenant of life, covenant of works, that Adam was given, you know, why would just failing to eat this one tree then warrant eternal life? Here is that God very sweetly, you know, made this promissory arrangement about how they would have life in the garden. we broke it, we live in sin, we have a sinful nature now, and that… The key, I think the key part there is to say, if you expect for Christ's righteousness to count towards you, then you have to say like, and also I have inherited from Adam, the sinful, that you're all this, all the biblical language of being in, in Adam, in Christ.

Joshua Haymes: The doctrine of the federal headship of Adam and the federal headship of Christ. That was a big thing for me. Cause I used to talk about original sin as a, Well, yeah, I believe that we have original sin, but I kind of obfuscated it by saying, but you know you've sinned, so whether you believe in original sin or not, we've all sinned, you know you've sinned, so you've taken the fruit yourself. But then I realized it's so important to understand that we inherit that sin nature, the federal headship, because if you didn't inherit that sin nature, how do you inherit salvation from the obedience of Christ? You inherit it the guilt from Adam, from one man.

Robert Murphey: Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15. These passages are crucial.

Joshua Haymes: Let me give a framework. With covenant theology, it's basically at its core, it's a hermeneutical principle. It's a hermeneutical, which is an interpretive framework. How to read. To explain the Bible. To explain the Bible. And what salvation is.

Brooks Potteiger: Exactly. God is saving a covenant people, a people that he's made a promise with for himself.

Joshua Haymes: Right, right. And covenant theology very simply is, at the most simple level, is three covenants. The covenant of redemption, which you were talking about before the foundation of the world. By the blood of the eternal covenant. Exactly. God, the Father, God, Son covenanting to rescue sinners from And the Holy Spirit to apply it. And the Holy Spirit, yes, yes. No vanity, no vanity. Yeah, that's right. And then you've got what you already mentioned, the covenant of works. Other people call it the covenant of life, where God says, do this and live, do this and you'll die. Right. And it was… Within Adam's power. Exactly, to obey, yeah. Right. And then, so that's the one covenant, and then you've got the covenant of grace, which After they took the fruit, this covenant of grace was given to… Right there in the garden. Right at the very beginning that said, this is the new arrangement. The way I relate to you, your only hope really is grace, because you deserve death.

Robert Murphey: Right. And that your works, Adam, are thorns and you're going to go back to being dust. Your work doesn't cut it anymore. The seed of the woman will crush the seed of the serpent, and that that is the only hope that we have right there from Genesis 3.15 onward.

Joshua Haymes: Redemptive history is playing out the covenant of grace.

Brooks Potteiger: Right, and this is one of the important parts about covenant theology is it understands the entirety of Scripture as one grand narrative arc of salvation. Yeah, whole Bible theology. Right, right, like that there isn't All the promises of God are yes and amen in Christ for his covenant people, which is the church now, as opposed to dispensationalism. So if we say, okay, covenant theology is here, what's the other side?

Robert Murphey: What's it dislodging in an American Christian's life?

Brooks Potteiger: Right, because we breathe dispensational air almost 95%. You don't want to be left behind.

Joshua Haymes: So what is dispensationalism? We talked about covenant theology as a hermeneutic, a way of interpreting the entire story of scripture.

Brooks Potteiger: And the way of understanding how we apply the Old Testament to ourselves as Christians.

Joshua Haymes: Actually, before we go on to dispensationalism, real quick, because people hear the covenant of grace is the narrative of redemption history, but then they go, yeah, but Paul seems to talk about the old covenant, and that seems like it's bad or different than the new covenant.

Robert Murphey: And you already mentioned that, so it's not hard to understand, because they are going… People are, by nature, wanting to go back to a covenant of works, is that, like you said, Adam was capable of doing it in the garden. We are now incapable And you would be a fool to come back and say, I'm going to work my salvation. That is the old covenant that we by nature want to come back to and say, I want to be under, I want to be judged by my works, which Adam was capable, but we are not capable of that.

Joshua Haymes: Well, but people will point to, uh, Paul talking about the old covenant in the Mosaic sense. And so they'll say, so that's confusing because it's like, wait, is that the old covenant? I thought this was all one covenant. And that's where people get confused.

Brooks Potteiger: I think that the key thing to understand there is we really need to go back to the Abrahamic covenant and the Abrahamic covenant, the covenant that God made with Abraham, that all the nations would be blessed. through him really is the overarching covenant that spans from Abraham all the way to her.

Robert Murphey: We just had Christmas readings in church and how many times Mary and Zechariah and Elizabeth are all saying God is now fulfilling what he promised to Abraham, that the nations would be saved as nations and that they don't have to become Jews to be saved.

Joshua Haymes: And so we admit, we confess that there is a distinction between the time before Christ, the covenants leading up to Christ.

Brooks Potteiger: Right, so then there's the Mosaic Covenant, and then the Davidic Covenant, and then the New Covenant. But these aren't different disconnected dispensations. It's all under the covenant of grace, all under the Abrahamic larger covenant. Then the story is playing out in different times along the way. Don't go back to the sacrificial system that God instituted for the nation of Israel in the Old Testament. which they had to do because Christ hadn't come yet. And so these are the shadows and the foreshadowing of what Christ would ultimately fulfill. But once Christ came and was the final, behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world to tell us die, it is finished. The sacrificial system is dealt with, is completed, is fulfilled. Don't go back to that now because the new covenant, the full understanding, the full expression, the final expression of the promise that the Lord made to Abraham. has come now, and I think Galatians 3 is perhaps one of the clearest places where, I mean, there's a lot of places we could go, but Galatians 3, seven through eight says, know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. The scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, and you shall all nations be blessed. And so Paul is telling the Judaizers and the church at Galatia that the scriptures preached the gospel to Abraham, which is significant. So this is one cohesive story of God saving a covenant people.

Robert Murphey: So to answer your question, then, is to say that in the time of 50 AD, when the author of Hebrews can look and say, the temple is still standing and you're Christians, is that to say to go back to that, it has been… The new has come and that is now old. But this is… to go rewind a thousand years, the temple is being built in Jerusalem by Solomon and such like that. This is the God-given system that is grace-based still, that it is not about you can earn your salvation in the Old Testament. That's what I was taught growing up.

Joshua Haymes: In the Old Testament, they had to obey the law, that's how they were saved. And in the New Testament, we have the grace of Christ.

Brooks Potteiger: Genesis 15, Abraham believed God.

Robert Murphey: Who is the number, exactly, the number one place that Paul and James and so many biblical New Testament authors point to for our comparison of who we should say is our spiritual father as Gentiles, is Abraham here. That this is the model of faith, not the model of obedience, perfect, you know, fulfillment of the covenant of works, and that he did everything just right and he had some separate system. That what Pastor Brooks just read here is that he had the same faith. Read Hebrews 11. It's only Old Testament people being quoted, described there, by faith, by faith, by faith, by faith.

Joshua Haymes: It's grace that God came to Abraham, gave him faith. It was always grace, faith through every iteration of the covenant of grace playing out through history, God's grace, and then faith. And same with Sinai. Right? God rescues his people. Grace. It's like, that's a pre, um, that's a pre-salvation, a pre-Christ image of God rescuing his people out of Egypt and then giving the law.

Brooks Potteiger: But something that, that people need to understand here is faith is expressed through action. So it's not disconnected from law keeping. It's not just thinking and believing. Because if Israel would have believed God, they would have obeyed God. Then they wouldn't have been saved by their obedience. They would have been saved by their faith that was expressed through

Robert Murphey: What is true faith is faith that seeks to obey. And so there's not a dichotomy there.

Joshua Haymes: So that's the summary, very, very light summary of covenant theology as it relates to covenants. We're going to go into, real quick, juxtaposing that to dispensationalism.

Brooks Potteiger: Let's do that. I don't think we need to do a deep dive here, but it is helpful because I would say most of us came from this background and didn't even know there was another option. But it's the idea. Covenant theology is a hermeneutic. It's a way of understanding the grand narrative of Scripture. Dispensationalism is a hermeneutic that sees the nation of Israel as distinct from the church and where God still has a distinct plan of salvation for Israel that has yet to be realized. That includes the establishment of an actual physical kingdom again for the nation of Israel. Now, to be fair, salvation will still be through Jesus, but there is a distinction between the nation of Israel and the church. what John MacArthur is going to hold to. He'll call himself a leaky dispensationalist. I think that's because he believes there are a lot of holes. Savage! But he'll say, he even says, I put a quote here, when a covenant theologian tells me that all the promises that were made for Israel in the Old Testament about a coming king and a coming kingdom, when a covenant theologian says that that means the church, My question for them is, show me in the Old Testament where we're told that that actually means the church. I'm really surprised that John MacArthur makes that argument because it seems very easily dealt with. That's not how prophecy works. Once it's fulfilled, you then realize that the light flashes backwards. That was talking about Christ. This is the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, where he calls them slow of heart to believe all that the prophets and all that the Psalms and all that Moses said. It wasn't actually talking about me.

Joshua Haymes: I would love to hear him respond to that.

Brooks Potteiger: I would love to hear him respond to that, because that's what Christ said. He's coming to proclaim the good news of the kingdom. Luke 4, the kingdom is amongst you. The book of Acts, the gospel is often connected to the gospel of the kingdom. It's now being realized. The king has come. The kingdom is being ushered in now.

Joshua Haymes: And so there's also the pejorative way of describing this I've seen from people who were dispensationalists. They accuse us of what they call replacement theology. And I was talking with you about this the other night, how it's like, that's kind of a negative way to put it. But depending on what you mean by it, I could say yes. That's exactly right. It's not replacement, it's fulfillment. And it's taken seriously. We're told in Romans that we are grafted in to that same root of Jesse.

Brooks Potteiger: Romans 4.16, Therefore the promise comes by faith, so that it may rest on grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham's offspring, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all.

Robert Murphey: Us Gentiles say, Abraham is my spiritual father.

Joshua Haymes: Exactly. We are now all part of the same body. And so in that way, if you mean the church has replaced Israel, you say, that's a weird way to put it.

Robert Murphey: Especially because like, when did the church start? You're looking at Acts chapter two, 3,000 people repent and believe. all Jews.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Robert Murphey: Like, what is this replacement that is going on there?

Joshua Haymes: It's like, I was replaced with Jews. Well, and I think it fails to see, it fails to answer correctly the question, when did the church begin, Adam? Right. Yeah. Like that's when it began. Like God with his people. Right. You know it by grace. I will save you. Yeah. Exactly.

Robert Murphey: Yeah. Your fig leaves suck. I'm going to make you some real leather.

Brooks Potteiger: Some leather pants. How this this really where the rubber meets the road here and we probably won't go off on this tangent but how do we understand our children? This is where it really matters. There is a massive identity crisis in the country right now. And I would argue it's because the covenant head of home has failed often to give a covenant identity to their children, saying, God, you are God's child and you have covenant responsibilities.

Robert Murphey: And that, and then I think this comes back to where we started is about when we talked about Calvinistic soteriology is that I think a lot of times Presbyterian type people were very surprised for young restless reform types to take this in and then to not go all the way and to say, so you're saying that God decides who gets to be saved. and he's in control of who are the elect and that this is ultimately foundationally in God as you read in the scriptures. And Driscoll and everyone else is over there nodding their head and saying yes. And then you just want to follow up with like, and how many times does he say, I will be a God to you and to your children after you? is that that is then the dividing line, I think, between a lot of people in this camp, is to say, I do agree that salvation is entirely of God, but that they fail to appropriate those promises that God says, I will be a God to you and to your children after you. It is not in the idea that we're populating hell, that Christians have children, is that this is… Yes, they have to make it their own. Yes, they have to grow up in faith and have age-appropriate repentance and confession and articulation of their faith as they are able, but that doesn't then say that we say by birth they're unsaved. that if it is God's to give to whom he will, and he has said, I will give it to you and to your children after you, we should take him at his word.

Joshua Haymes: Well, there's the, I mean, so yeah, let's, this is the distinction in the dark roast. We'll kind of wrap up here with the distinction between the Reformed Baptist dark roast and the Presbyterian side of the dark roast, which in our denomination, allows for both, which I love that. And I think that's what I love about that is that it recognizes where we are in time, that the walls of Jerusalem are besieged right now.

Robert Murphey: If you're going to wait until your kids are nine or 13 or five or whatever, until you have them articulate enough faith that they're going to pass that you're willing to get them baptized, great. Come on.

Joshua Haymes: Let's fight. Let's fight. Let's fight and build. Not each other. Yes, exactly. When I was just talking about one of my best friends in the world, we have gone separate directions on the baptism issue, and he's gone Reformed Baptist, and I've gone Paedo-Baptist, and we are so, like, last night, we were saying, man, I'm so thankful that we can worship and serve at the same church.

Brooks Potteiger: Pass the bread to one another. We are one body.

Joshua Haymes: But we also both said, I get why it's, in the past, it's been a dividing factor. In fact, it's, and we also said that probably in 100, 150 years, it probably should be again. And that can be good. And that doesn't mean that we hate each other or anything like that, but it means that we have strong beliefs about where children, are children included in the covenant by nature of natural generation or not. And it gets into, and this'll be helpful for a lot of Reformed Baptists, we have a category for someone who is a part of the covenant, but is not regenerate. So you can be a Christian, In name. By birth. Yeah. But not regenerate. Yeah, we just don't know.

Brooks Potteiger: That's what I would want to say. It's not that you're not regenerate. We don't make a judgment. We just agree with what God has said. That is his working in his time.

Joshua Haymes: It's John 3. It's a mystery.

Brooks Potteiger: Regeneration is… And it's nice to have the confession. Because you go to, I think it's chapter 28.6 about how we understand the timing of these things with baptism.

Joshua Haymes: And they do a good job of articulating that. And it's funny. So I was, I would have been reformed Baptist. I, the slide in was to, Ooh, confessions. This makes sense. Oh, totally. I'm looking at the, the 1689, all this kind of stuff. And then I get introduced to like two solid arguments for baptizing my baby. And I was like, Oh, Am I about to be a Presbyterian?

Brooks Potteiger: And I got to baptize them.

Joshua Haymes: Yeah, that's right. And so I think you guys talk about the men of Issachar, men who understood the times. We're in the times right now where it's, if you are confessional and you're Calvinistic and you're covenantal, let's link arms, let's go to work building, defending and expanding the kingdom of God. Amen. And then once we've fought off the orcs, gotta have the Lord of the Rings reference, at least one, at least one, you know, deep is done.

Brooks Potteiger: We'll go back to Lothlorien and work it out.

Joshua Haymes: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so, but for now, me and Daniel Morgan can worship together and break bread at the same church. And, uh, and what in future episodes, we're really going to dive into, uh, that distinction in baptism and try to give that steel, man, maybe we'll have James White on to give us, no, that would be too scary. Um, but, uh, but yeah, we're gonna, we'll go through the baptism question right now. I'll give, I'll give a tiny little teaser into it for why I transitioned, because that's the distinction in the dark roast reform for us is the, whether or not we get our babies wet. And for me, it came down to the question became, uh, where is the burden of proof lie? So for me, I thought the burden of proof lies on the Pato Baptist who wants to baptize their baby. Because I don't see this in the New Testament.

Robert Murphey: Yeah, where is it happening in the New Testament?

Joshua Haymes: Yeah, I don't see it. Show it to me in the New Testament. That's what I constantly understood. But then, whenever I realized that, wait, okay, why is the burden of proof there when, in the Old Covenant, children were included? That was the nature of… It's not about the question of baptism, that's the wrong question. It's the question of whether or not children are included. Covenant inclusion. Covenant inclusion. And so for me, when I realized in the Old Covenant, children were included, now are we saying that now in the New Covenant, children are now excluded? And there was a category in the Old Covenant, Romans 8, for they were Israel, but not true Israel by faith. So there was Israel, a part of the covenant, but were not true Israel by faith. And I was like, Oh, so maybe there's Christians who are, who, who apostatize. There's a category now for Christians who apostatize who were not true Christians of the faith. We know they were not of us because they went out from us, those kinds of things. But when I realized the burden of proof lies on the person who's saying there's a change from the old covenant administration of the, uh, um, circumcision, circumcision, what is that? The sign of the covenant. Yeah, sign of the covenant being circumcision. And then in the new covenant, that being baptism, the person who's saying that that changed, that's the person where the burden of proof is on.

Robert Murphey: To come back to Acts 2, all of you repent and believe, and this is the promises for you and for your children after you, he says. And then, oh, but by the way, there's this new difference now that has just started, just hot off the presses, just tweeted that your kids are not included. And imagine,

Joshua Haymes: When the change of what would be even a smaller deal, which was the circumcision not being mandatory anymore, when that changed, how much ink was spilled over explaining that and reinforcing that? Half the New Testament. But, I mean, if, you know, Apollos is holding his not Apollos, let's give a Jewish name because he would have been Jewish on Pentecost, you know, if this man is holding his baby and all of a sudden he finds out, hey, by the way, little Peter, little Solomon is not included now. I mean, would they, oh yeah, that makes sense.

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah, no, I mean, that's J.C. Ryle's point is there would have been nothing more scandalous to a Jewish father to say that your child is not included.

Joshua Haymes: And the fact that it's not mentioned At all. Right. In explicit terms, the change from that to the old covenant to the new covenant.

Brooks Potteiger: And you don't want arguments of silence to be your bread and butter, but that's a big one.

Joshua Haymes: Well, the argument of silence to me became, well, now who has the burden of proof? Is it the person who is claiming there's been a change or the person who's claiming that it's the same?

Brooks Potteiger: Yeah, well, but what I'm saying is that that is a massive silence. Epic silence.

Robert Murphey: And again, that idea that the New Testament only has pictures of adult baptism, we would quibble and say the Philippian jailer's family, Acts chapter 2.

Joshua Haymes: It's not clear either way.

Robert Murphey: It's not clear that way. But then, the same thing, we can explain that today, is that when the gospel goes into some new area that there have been no believers, it's all convert baptism. That is what happens when the same situation that happened in the New Testament happens now.

Brooks Potteiger: We simply don't have a second generation example.

Joshua Haymes: In the New Testament, yeah. And so, alright, that's a teaser for the baptism episode. That's gonna be fun. We'll probably do a series, even, I'm gonna get some interviews with people and get other Reformed Baptists on here, like maybe I can get Joel Webbin out here to… Yeah, that'd be fun. Not even debate, I actually just want to get them to lay it out for our audience, because there's a ton of our people, maybe even most of my audience on Twitter is going to be Reformed Baptists. All right, so let's finish up this episode. We've gone long just for you, but I know you guys are eating it up. They're on like three times speed at this point. Yeah, like, let's wrap it up, boys. So the reason we've gone through all this, again, is because we believe that the cure for our cultural rot is reformation of the word of God. And we've seen how men who adhere to this, they were able to withstand the onslaught of the tumors we talked about before. This armor of God worked. Yeah, that's right, right. And so let's sum it up with the three Cs we talked about. Calvinistic soteriology, God is sovereign over salvation. We've got to get back to that. We've got to get back to that as a church. The creeds and confessions, we need guardrails. We need guardrails.

Robert Murphey: And we don't need to reinvent the church.

Joshua Haymes: And we don't need to reinvent the church. We need to be connected to history. We need to be connected to our past and not despise our fathers. And then lastly, we need to understand our Bibles. That's what covenant theology is. It's understanding how to read and interpret our Bibles in light of the grand narrative of salvation.

Brooks Potteiger: And that all the promises of God are yes and amen. Including to our children. Right. Come on, guys. One of my desires is to take an axe to the dam that has clogged up the Old Testament promises.

Robert Murphey: The other 71% of the Bible.

Joshua Haymes: Right, just let that flow down. And again, when we do little tit-for-tat jokes kind of like that, we love our Reformed Baptist brothers, and there are really good arguments. I mean, James White is probably the smartest guy I've seen. He's solid with his arguments. And so there's good arguments for both sides, and we'll get into those in the future episodes. But until then, we hope this has been a blessing to you. And our charge for you is that you would go build, defend, and expand the kingdom of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.