From Reformed to Lutheran

So this talk is actually going to be, we're kind of taking a break from the Solus talk to now talk about reformed and Lutheran theology. I was asked to basically give a summary of my transition from reformed to Lutheran. So we're going to talk about some Lutheran reformed differences. Now, I'm going to give you a little bit of my bio, my story. Some of you who know me and know where I come from, probably know some of this, but I was a part of the reformed tradition before I became a confessional Lutheran. It was my desire initially to become a reformed pastor or and pursue my PhD within the field of reformed theology specifically. And when I was in college studying theology, as I know there are many theology students here as well, as I was studying reformed theology, I came to some very different conclusions and ended up within Lutheran Church. So that's why I'm here today. So I'm going to give you a little bit of my story and some of the theological reasons why I made the moves that I did. So I'm just going to go back to my upbringing. I was raised in a Christian home and my parents were very faithful in church. They were new converts to Christianity in college and got married not too long after college, but I was raised in a home of very active churchgoers. My father was an elder and we had home Bible studies at our home regularly and did all sorts of other church things. When I was in high school, my parents were part of a reformed church plant and that was a plant in something called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, the EPC. So it was one of the more confessional kind of reformed church bodies within the U.S. That means that through high school, out of my experience, you know, with church was in a reformed context. I went to a Christian high school and our Bible teacher was a very adamant Calvinist and was a bit obnoxious about it honestly, but as well, what Calvinist doesn't. And after I finished high school, you know, I knew that I wanted to go into ministry of some kind. So it was my desire to find a program in theological education. I didn't know that I wanted to go into academics at that time. I wasn't sure. I thought about missions or I just knew I needed, I wanted to be in some kind of ministry. It was very clear that there was a call of God on my life in that direction. So when I went to college, I was looking for a Christian college. I went to one in Massachusetts that I was basically kicked out of. That's a fun story. But I went to a college in the Boston area in Massachusetts and the U.S. and at this particular college, our Bible program was quite theologically liberal, which I didn't realize at the time, which was not in a court of the actual school's own statements of faith. So it was a bit surprising when I went there. Sometimes I can be a bit loud about my opinions about things. Not that I think that these things are just opinions. Basically, after a series of disagreements with my Bible professor over a number of things, he basically said, "You can't be in the LG program here. You are just going to cause too much of an issue." So I said, "Oh, well. I'll go somewhere else." So I left and I ended up attending a college that was more consistent with my own convictions, really what I wanted to do. And that was a school called Geneva College, a named after Geneva Switzerland, where Calvin was, sounds very reformed, even in the name there. And Geneva College was part of a group, and still is, part of a group called the RPCNA, the Reform Presbyterian Church of North America. The RPCNA comes from the Scottish Covenenters, and the Scottish Covenenters were a very strict group of reformed thinkers. The Covenenters are most well-known for their approach to worship. They hold to a very strong stance on the regulative principle of worship. Now, if you've never heard of the regulative principle of worship, it's essentially this idea that you find in reforms theology that all worship is to be directly governed by scripture. And what I mean by that, because that doesn't sound bad by itself, what I mean by that is they believe that essentially all of the elements of a worship service have to have some kind of divine command in order to be present in the service. And the way that this was taken by the Scottish Presbyterians was, well, there is no new testament command to use instruments in worship. And so there's no instrumentation in the worship service, and they do not sing uninspired songs, which means they only sing songs. So exclusive salmadee is a kind of uniqueness to them. And honestly, I actually learned to really appreciate it in many ways. I was never convinced doctrinally by their arguments, even while it was reformed. But there was a, I think, a beauty to, well, first of all, there's a beauty to hearing the singing when you were at a congregation where people knew how to sing well, which was the congregation right near campus. It was beautiful, and they had these four-part harmonies, and it was incredible until I visited another one of their churches that wasn't quite the same, but musical instruments hide a bit if a congregation doesn't know how to sing well. So but nonetheless, it was, there was something really powerful about people who had grown up in those churches and like they had all of the songs memorized. I mean, they knew all of them and could apply them at like any time, which was really neat. And I think there's probably a bit that we could learn from that as well. So that's just to give you an idea of how reformed they were, you know? It's kind of like the most reformed of the reformed. So while I was there, it was my goal to, I was doing a degree in, you know, biblical studies, and it was my goal to go off to seminary after that in a reformed context. Now I'm going to set some of the context of what was going on in the church at that time. Now I don't know, I don't know how much this affected the church here. I can only tell you about the experience in the U.S. here, but there was a very popular movement known as the New Calvinism. If I say that, is that something that was known here as well? Okay, this did have an impact here. Well, the New Calvinism was a movement of a number of Calvinist authors, speakers that became very popular at this time for the millennial generation of which I am one. And this, the New Calvinism was very popular probably from like 2004 to 2010 was kind of its height and things started to really kind of fall apart. Well, maybe not totally fall apart until about 2016. A lot of things changed at least in the United States at that time. But just to give you an idea of what was going on with the New Calvinism is actually what that is. I think it's important here to get some of the background. So essentially the New Calvinism was a movement among a lot of younger people to delve deep into theology. And a lot of the kind of evangelicalism that's a lot of us in my generation experienced was very shallow theologically. I didn't really have a lot of answers. And there were a lot of people that were very passionate about the Bible and knew the Bible well and very passionate about evangelism. But as a culture became increasingly hostile to Christianity. And you know, we were going off to college and being challenged. A lot of us felt like we needed something much more rooted than what we had. Something that had more answers, something that we could really dive a lot deeper in in our understanding of scripture. So the New Calvinism became an answer to that. It was a move with an evangelicalism away from more of a experientially based Christianity tour one that was more doctrinally focused. And I think that Calvinism did very well, especially for young men at that time, because it was very black and white. And I think a lot of us when we're young, especially young men, not exclusively, but tend to be very black and white in their thinking. And I certainly was at that time and it was helpful because in a world of uncertainty, when you're in a world that is steeped in post-modernity, you don't have answers to a lot of questions. You see people raising questions and nobody seems to know what is true or what's not true or does it really matter what's true or is anything true or you know what's right and wrong and are no clear answers to these questions. A very black and white theology that gave you very specific answers filled in need that was there. And so a lot of people started just kind of diving headfirst into reforms or Calvinistic theology. Well, this movement was at the time seeing as something that was going to change the church forever. It's a lot of people spoke. Time magazine named this one of the movements changing the world. It was named on that list of like 10 or something. I forget the exact number on the list that it was. Movements that were changing the world. And so this was something that was being seen not just in the church, but within the broader culture was you're going to have a bunch of these very adamant Calvinists going out into the world and maybe changing culture in some pretty significant ways in the Western world. And that just didn't happen. And I think looking back now, you know, about about 20 years after the start of this thing, and you look at a lot of the major leaders of that movement. Now some of them stayed faithful, but more than one were caught in serious scandals. Some of those scandals involving the possibly like hiring a hitman to kill somebody and apostasy. And if you know the Mark Driscoll story, his is the most famous probably because there's a whole podcast about it. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, which just abuses of power in narcissism. And a lot of things that would not be considered pastoral faithfulness to put the best light on things. Just a lot of the leaders failed. And I think that shows you something about the movement itself. That this was not a sustainable movement. It really was just a fad. And a lot of us really thought it wasn't going to be. And we've seen fads all throughout, I don't know, at least my life in the church. There was a time when everybody was into what was called the emergent church for quite a long time before that. So it's when I was in high school in my youth group. It was Rob Bell and Brian McLaren. I don't know if any of you know those names, but in your the right age to know these guys. But big names at the time, but it was a fad. It died out. Nobody knows who these people are anymore. They have no influence at all. And then the New Calvinism became popier than it died out. It seems like we have this Christianity that just goes in fads, just like culture does, which is very unhealthy. It's not healthy for culture, but it's really not healthy for the church to then just echo that. So what a lot of people ended up doing that were part of that movement was seeking to find something more rooted than just the five points of Calvinism, which was kind of the essence of that theology. And these popular pastors, because a lot of times the faith was really more in the teacher that they really liked, which is very unhealthy. Don't do that with me if you watch my videos, okay? I just try to be very, honestly, try to be very careful about that because it's a danger. And I often get people asking me for pastoral advice that I don't know. And look, I appreciate the people appreciate the material that I produce. And I think it's wonderful that it's blessing people. There's a reason I do it. But I always tell people the same thing, which is talk to your pastor. I am not your pastor. I do I am the guy who talks on YouTube. And if you want to watch my videos, that's awesome. But but I'm not your pastor, unless you come to Ithaca, New York, then maybe I will be, but no, otherwise, I am not. So, but I think there's a danger in a lot of these movements that it is just the following of an individual kind of celebrity figure at the head. So ultimately, that isn't sustainable. So what a lot of people who were in that movement ended up doing was moving then towards some other kind of position, theologically. And the I think the benefit for my own campus and where I was at was that while I was involved in the new Calvinism kind of movement. And I've heard that flame was here before at this event. Some of you who are here. Okay. And flame was a big part of the new Calvinism. He, I knew my wife and I used to listen to his music in college. It's funny as that is. It was very like Calvinistic, if you listen to his old music. And one day he followed me on Twitter. I'm like, what? Why? Why? Why is this like rapper that I listened to following me on Twitter? And it, you know, obviously you've heard his story. And he became a Lutheran as well. But he's kind of another example of one of the people in that movement that came out of that towards something else. But the, I think the good thing for where I was at was my environment was more confessionally reformed. So it was a movement or it was a environment that wasn't, I guess, as much just a movement as it was a tradition. And the confessionally reforms, they have their own view of worship, they have their own view of what the church is supposed to be. They have their own confessions of faith. There is a strong history that you are tied to when you are part of the reformed tradition in its fullest sense. And I think what a lot of people who moved from the new Calvinism to a more confessional tradition recognized was that the new Calvinism really was not Calvinism or reformed at all. It really was just, I don't know, we call kind of pop evangelicalism that kind of grabbed onto a few things from that tradition, but it really wasn't rooted at all. So what then is confessional reformed position? So I've outlined the new Calvinism kind of where I came from. What does it mean to be confessionally reformed? And to be confessionally reformed is more than just a whole to the five points of Calvinism. So maybe just to take a step back, if you don't know what the five points of Calvinism are, the five points of Calvinism are a summary of the reformed doctrine of predestination. And oftentimes, when you think of Calvinism or reformed theology, that is identified particularly with the doctrine of predestination. That's usually what people think of. There's a lot more to reformed theology than predestination. It's not like that's the only thing they talk about. When you went to one of the new Calvinist churches, they preach on predestination like every week. When you go to like a normal reformed church, you'll hear it when the text talks about it, but it's not like that's their focus all the time, honestly. So what are the five points to briefly summarize what they are? They come from the Synod of Dort, which was dealing with a controversy with the group called the remonstrance, who argued against the teachings of, well, the teachings of John Calvin are somewhat debated on some of these issues, but at least the second generation of the reformed theodore Beza and some others. And in this debate, basically, there were five points that were summarized in response to this group called the remonstrance that summarized the reformed doctrine of predestination, because that was a specific controversy happening at the time. So to define Calvinism by the five points of Calvinism is almost like taking Lutheranism and just grabbing up to one of the controversies we had and a response to one of those controversies and saying, that's Lutheranism, which is odd, you know, it's almost like if you took the formula of Concord and you just grabbed on to say the article dealing with the two natures of Christ and how they relate to one another. And we're like, well, these are all the points of Lutheranism. It's kind of like what you're doing with Calvinism. It's not really fair. It's their true things in terms of defining the tradition, but not entirely yet. But the five points are a total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints, often summarized by tulip. To briefly summarize what that means, total depravity means that we are so sinful that we cannot come to faith on our own. The Holy Spirit does that. We agree with that, by the way, unconditional election, which is that of those people who are fallen in sin, got unconditionally, elects those who are saved unto salvation. Lutherans also agree with that until you get to the second part of the definition of that, which is and along with that unconditionally electing those unto salvation, God also chooses to pass over and not elect others. That's going to be a point of divergence here. Limited atonement is going to be the biggest point of disagreement here. And limited atonement is the notion that Jesus's death was only for some, not for all. Then you have irresistible grace, which is that God's grace is given in an irresistible manner. In other words, if God wants you to be saved, you will be no matter what, you can't resist saving grace. And then the p is perseverance of the saints, which is often summarized on a popular level as once saved always saved, but that's not quite the best way to phrase the position. But essentially, it is the idea that those who are regenerated, those who are saved will never depart from the faith. Okay, that's the essence of the reform persist position on predestination. So along with that, though, the confessionally reformed have, as I said, a broader theology than that. On the one hand, they have confessional documents like we do. There are, it's a little different than Lutherans, though, because Lutherans have one set of confessions, which is found in the book of Concord. Now, there's a difference certainly between some Lutherans who hold two a couple books in the formula versus, or the book of Concord versus the entirety. So I know that Danish church historically held to the, you know, small catechism in the Augsburg confession, officially as documents, whereas, you know, in Germany, you had the entire book of Concord, which included the formula of Concord, the small cold articles, the large catechism, power and primacy of the Pope. But even within those maybe two divergent traditions, you're still, it's the same essentially set of documents. It's just kind of how many of them do you officially adopt or not. Within the reformed world, you have two totally different traditions that develop. You've got kind of the presbyterians, and the presbyterians are in, you know, England and Scotland. And through that develops what's called the Westminster Confession of Faith. And you've got the Westminster larger catechism and shorter catechism, like just like we have with the small and large catacism, and then you have the Dutch reform tradition, which has what's called the Three Forms of Unity, and they develop their own reformed confessions. So they are a confessional tradition. It's different in that there aren't a clear set of confessions for everybody. The other difference is that within many reformed churches, those confessions are subject to change. So the Westminster Confession, as it was adapted in the United States, the missing certain articles that were originally written. Some of this was because the Westminster Confession was dealing with certain political situations in England, but some of it is doctrinal issues. So, for example, the Westminster Confession of Faith has an article in its original writing, 1640s, when this is written, 1646. 1648 is the large catacism. And there's a specific article that calls the Pope the Antichrist, and that's usually taken out. I know what's sad, huh? Well, we still have that in our confessions. Well, at least if you hold to the entire book of concord, it's in the power and primacy of the Pope. So, another question, but we should have replaced that with Jerome, I think, there instead of the Pope. Okay, take that out of context. Take that too seriously. It's a joke, referencing what I said earlier if you weren't here. Okay, so the Westminster Confession is subject to change to some extent. It's also different in that pastors who are in reformed churches often don't actually have to subscribe to the entirety of their confessions. You can make exceptions to certain points. And at least among confessional Lutheran churches, that doesn't work. We don't do things the same way. So I think that's important, because that is actually part of the reason why I was drawn to the Lutheran tradition was we were a little more kind of okay being who we are and not feeling like we don't have a lot of doctrinal looseness, I guess, within confessional Lutheranism, which I understand can be seen as a negative thing and kind of a rigidity, but I see it as a positive thing. Now, you can be rigid and nasty about it, of course, which isn't a positive thing, but the having strong doctrinal stances I think certainly is. The other thing that you find in the confessional reformed world is that there is a strong idea of worship and the nature of worship. Like I said, regularity of principle. This means that the reformed churches really have a doctrine of worship that really is probably as essential to their identity as the five points of Calvinism. If you, I don't know, if you go to a church that's like one of the new Calvinism churches that has the kind of, I don't know, a mega church type of environment, it's probably not really a reformed church because they're not really following what is really one of the central ideas of what reformed theology is, which is a very particular way of viewing worship. There is a kind of liturgical worship in reformed churches historically, but very, very stripped down compared to what a liturgical tradition would be within the Lutheran church. Along with that, the reformed do have very strong ecclesiology. They have a very strong doctrine of the church and how it's supposed to function. Now, when I say it's strong, that sounds maybe kind of strange because the reform don't all agree on how the church is supposed to function or be organized. But the one thing they can all agree on is that whatever it is, it's explicitly with the social commands and nothing else. So, Presbyterians, and some people don't realize this, Presbyterians aren't just Presbyterian because they think that the Presbyterian form of church government is good or works better. They think it is the only way that the church can possibly function. And it is God ordained, and if you don't structure your church this way, you are essentially sinning because you're not structuring your church the way God ordained it. So, they're very strict on this. So, the congregationalists in Old New England, where they weren't Presbyterians, but they were reformed. So, they were very adamant about their congregationalism being the only way that the church can possibly be structured. Okay, then we have Covenant theology. Covenant theology is really central to the development of reform thought. Covenant theology is a way to understand the connection between the Old and New Testaments to structure the biblical narrative. Covenant theology basically says this. There's kind of a primary category that God uses to work with as people throughout history, and that is the category of covenants. Read the Bible, we all know there are covenants all over the place, right? God makes a covenant with Abraham, with Moses, New Covenant. I mean, clearly covenants an important idea. But what the reform do is divide all of scripture into what they call two covenants, which are a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. The covenant of works is a covenant where God says that he will bless your, he'll give some kind of reward based on some kind of condition being fulfilled. So, this is what happens in the garden of Eden for the reformed. So, in the garden of Eden, God establishes a covenant with Adam, and God says basically he sets conditions, you know, don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, be obedient, and if you do that, I will give you eternal life. So, before the fall, Adam could merit eternal life. We're talking prefall, which is important, not postfall. And then, after Adam falls, God establishes what's called the covenant of grace, and in this covenant of grace, it doesn't have that same kind of conditionality. In other words, it's an unconditional covenant that God makes with his people, that he is going to save them. Ultimately, though, for the reform, the covenant of grace is really in its strict sense only for the elect. But we have to parse that out a little bit more to get to some of the specifics there. So, this then leads to some debates about the covenant with Moses, because we've got the law. There certainly sound like conditions in the law is a major debate in the reformed world, because you've got two options. One is it's another kind of iteration of the covenant of works, being given again, where there is a kind of kind of conditionality, or there are those who say it's part of the covenant of grace. When you start saying that the mosaic law is part of the covenant of grace, you start bringing in all sorts of conditions into the covenant of grace. It's a total confusion of law and gospel, or ends up that way. So, those who have a more of a law gospel distinction in the reformed world are very adamant that that's a covenant of works. Those who really confuse law and gospel tend to say that it's a covenant of grace. And some of those who say it's a covenant of grace, start to also bring in conditionality into the covenant God made with Abraham. There are certain conditions Abraham had to fulfill, and I think it just messes up the entire biblical narrative in the way that the New Testament deals with all this stuff. People often ask me the question, "Okay, from a Lutheran perspective, what do you do with covenant theology? Do you throw it out? Is there a way to adapt it?" And the way that I usually respond to that is this. If we're going to have any kind of overarching categories to understand the Old Testament, covenant isn't a bad one because there are covenants all over the place. But I think that the more central categories are the law and the gospel, and covenants are really a way in which the law and the gospel are delivered to the people, if that makes sense. So, when I look at something like the mosaic law, I don't have to say that a covenant of grace or that a covenant of works, I say, "Well, let's look at the mosaic law." Well, there are certainly laws that are given conditions, that are given pretty serious curses. Like, if you break God's law, you're going to go eat your own children. Deuteronomy 28, pretty harsh. I don't really see how you can be like, "Oh, this is a covenant of grace." This is gracious. Like, it's pretty harsh law. Like, the law, the harsh, harshest law. So, when you look at things like that, I say, "Well, that's law, and that's law, and it's fullness." But then you look at the sacrificial system, you look at Moses' roles, the kind of redeemer. I say, "That's gospel." So, I don't think we have to make all these confusing categories. I think it's much simpler to say, "Is it law or gospel?" And Abrahamic promise, "It's gospel." Mosaic covenant? Well, it's law and gospel. It's got both. And I think that is a bit of a less complicated framework. Covenant theology can get extremely complicated when you try to parse out certain things like the mosaic law. Okay, from there, then, this is my description of what is the Reformed world, what is Reformed theology, what am I talking about here? But now I'm going to talk about what led me away from that toward the Lutheran tradition. So, the initial, the first thing I want to talk about is limited atonement. This notion that Jesus only died for the elect. This is the kind of hardest pill to swallow within Reformed theology and for good reason. Because there are many passages in Scripture that use universal language in reference to the death of Christ. There are passages that use universal language in reference to God's plan of salvation. And there are passages that speak about those who fall away from faith as if they already have been bought by the work of Christ. They've been redeemed by Christ. So, those three sets of passages generally make, I think, a limited atonement case very difficult from Scripture. Why do Calvinists believe in it? Well, the Calvinistic system is a very consistent system. It's very logical. All the pieces fit together very well. And I think the pieces fit together much better than they do within a Lutheran theological system. If you're talking about logical consistency. The problem is logical consistency is not always biblical consistency. What I don't mean is that Lutheran theology is illogical or contradictory. I don't think it is. But what it does mean is that There has to be an understanding that the truths of God are far above us, right? The truths of God are not things that we can completely grasp. And I don't think that we should want them to be. We have to have room for mystery in our theology somewhere. That's the beauty of theology. It's not the beauty of worship that we have a God who is transcendent. He is above us. He is greater than us. There are things that have not been revealed to us that we can't understand. Now, how does this consistency work itself out? Well, if you think about the basic system of the five points of Calvinism, essentially, God elects one particular group onto salvation before the foundation of the world. He says, "These people are going to be mine. I'm going to choose them. And then I'm going to choose to leave the others in their sin and condemn them forever." Well, you've got one group of people that God has elected. Well, now God has to bring about his plan of redemption. How is he going to bring the elect unto salvation? He's going to do that by sending Jesus to die for those people. Well, then how is the death of Jesus going to be applied? Well, God is going to send the Holy Spirit to apply that salvation to those people, the elect. And then perseverance is this idea that God gives the gift of perseverance in the faith to those people, the elect. So all of redemption, all of salvation is really focused on this one particular group, the elect. And the rest of humanity, which, for the majority of Calvinists, is the majority of humanity, but some post-millennial Calvinists would argue otherwise, there is no saving grace. They can talk about a common grace for the non-elect, which is God gives you some general kindnesses in the world, but not any salvific or saving grace. They're different groups of Calvinists, too, they're really extreme ones, who do make your argument that, in fact, God has only eternal hatred for the reprobate, and they would say that God actually specifically gives them good gifts like the rain and the sunshine, because Jesus mentions these things, God gives these even to the wicked. They would say that He gives those things to the wicked, specifically, so that He can make them more guilty and more angry so He can punish them more. Most Calvinists don't talk that way, to be clear. But you do run into groups that are very highly emphasize the lack of love God has for the non-elect. Within this broader system, though, there is this existential question that I really wrestled with internally, which you talked to Flame, you talked about the same thing, it's very common among Calvinists, which is this question, how do I know that Jesus died for me? I know Jesus died, you know, here are a lot of Calvinists preaching, we'll say Jesus died for sinners. Not a lot of Jesus died for you, Jesus died for the elect, Jesus died for the church, Jesus died for sinners. Okay, that's great, but how do I know that that's me? It's kind of the inevitable question that the Calvinist has to ask. Well, how do I know Jesus died for me? Well, if I'm elect, because if I'm elect, Jesus died for me. Well, how do I know if I'm elect? The next logical question, right? If I have faith, all who have faith are elect. Well, okay, that sounds great, except, you know, as we talked about the Solofide talk, if you were here for that, sometimes our faith is pretty weak. Sometimes our faith is kind of full of doubts, and you may ask, well, how do I know my faith is real faith? This becomes especially difficult when you look at people that you know who were part of the faith and who then walked away from the faith. You may know somebody who walked away from Christ and died apart from Christ, and you may look at that person and say, well, it sure seemed like they had faith. And if I look at my faith, it doesn't look as strong as that person's faith looked, but apparently their faith was never real because they walked away. So there's this very strong distinction between true faith and false faith in Calvinism. So the question of faith ultimately becomes, well, how do I know if my faith is actual faith versus just some kind of false faith that looks like faith that's not faith? Well, how do you know your faith is genuine by your works? Now you're looking at your works, okay? Well, maybe I know I do some good things sometimes. I've seen some nice things I've done for people, but I also know how sinful my motives are. Like, how do I know that that work was genuinely good? Because, you know, maybe part of me was doing it for the wrong reasons. Or I could look at say my Mormon neighbor who probably externally has done a lot more good for people than I have. Well, apparently their works aren't really good works because they don't really have faith because they don't really have an orthodox view of Christ. And again, I'm left questioning, how do I know my works are genuine? Well, here's where you get the ultimate answer. How do I know that my works are really good works by my affections? This is Jonathan Edwards' answer. Religious affections is a very famous book of his. So then it's ultimately, okay, so my salvation is dependent on the death of Christ, but I have to know that Jesus died for me. How do I know that Jesus died for me by my faith? How do I know about my faith by my works? How do I know about my works but by my affections? So you end up logically coming to a place where my assurance is found in my affections. Do I love God enough? Do I truly love God? And you end up with this like, you know, naval gazing as they say, right? Just looking at yourself, my motives, right? Am I, am I sinning too much? Am I, do I really love God? Did I do that out of your pure motive or did I do that out of a bad motive? How do I know the difference? What if my faith isn't real? And you're just constantly in this spiral of just examining yourself all the time to see if you're really a Christian. And at least to complete another despair, I know a lot of people that came to these conclusions that left the faith altogether and they credited this as they're leaving the faith was like, I couldn't do it. What am I supposed to do? I just feel terrible myself and if I'm not elect and I'm not electing God doesn't want me anyway. So whatever, like what am I going to do about it? And not that Calvinists want you to come to those conclusions, but it's a reality I've seen people come to those conclusions on more than one occasion. Well, what is the argument from the text that the Calvinists use? Is there a strong verse that says like Jesus died only for the elect? Well, the majority of things that they're going to point to are passages like, you know, Jesus dying for, you know, John 10, Jesus died for the sheep, right? I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays his life down for the sheep. Well, who are the sheep? They're the ones that believe he didn't live lay his life down for the sake of the goats, the unbelievers, but for the sheep. So they're going to point to those passages. They're going to point to passages where there is a connection between the death of Christ in the church. He dies for the church and they're basically going to say, look, in these passages, Jesus dies specifically with an intent and that is the intent to save his sheep or his church, which means he therefore didn't die for anybody else. I just say that doesn't really follow when those texts. I don't, as a Lutheran pastor, I would be totally fine saying Jesus died for his sheep, Jesus died for the church, and I don't think I or my congregants would hear that and think, oh, that therefore he must not have died for this or that person. I just don't think that logically follows. There's more to that and some of the textual argument, but I think the textual argument is extremely weak. I think it's very, very weak. And I think it really does come down to a question of logical consistency within the system more than it does anything else. Okay, and there's a lot more I could say about this. I've been hours of talks on going through each of these texts unlimited attunements, but I can't go through all of those. So I'm going to go through just a couple more of these issues that led me away from the reforms church. And the next one is the sacraments. So with the reform tradition. The reforms look at the sacraments and kind of want to say the sacraments do something. They're not just symbols, but at the same time their theology of election doesn't really allow them to. So they come up with a system that starts with Calvin that really develops much more explicitly after Calvin. You can even see actually a little bit of the roots of this even in Zwingli. And that is the reform make this division and the division is from Augustin, but he doesn't use it in the way that they do. This is the division between the sign and the thing signified. And so when we're talking about say baptism, baptism is a sign. The water is a sign. By the way, language of sign is used in the Augsburg confession, by the way, it's something wrong with the language of sign. Sign does not always mean empty symbol and it certainly didn't for Augustin. Lutherans tended to shy away from language of sign after Calvin because of the way that he used it. But the sign is the water, it's the water that's applied, it's the triune formula that's placed over you in baptism, the thing signified is regeneration. For Lutherans, the sign and the signified always go together. What that means is if you are baptized, the grace of God is there, the promise is there for you, the Holy Spirit is there, you can resist that, but the objective validity of the sacrament is always there, the objective grace of God is always there. When you hear the word of God proclaimed, the Holy Spirit is always attached to the word of God. He always works through the word. You can resist his work through the word, but he is always there. When the sacrament of the altar is celebrated, the body and blood of Christ are always there. They're always there in the hand of the pastor and in the mouth of the one who receives. In the reformed tradition, because the grace of God is so tied to the elect, and not. to all people, that means that when you're talking something like baptism, the grace of God can be there in baptism for the elect, but it cannot be there for the non-elect. So you divorce the sign in the thing signified. So what you say is, well the non-elect received the sign, the outward sign, but they don't receive the thing itself. So you can receive baptism, but I can actually do nothing positive for you. And not just because you've resisted it, but because God never attended anything positive. In fact, some of the reformed actually say that the unbeliever receiving baptism is a sign of judgment, and it condemns you more. And then the sacrament of the altar would be the same way, and the word of God. So the reformed tend to say that the word of God hardens the hearts of the reprobate, and not just because they're resisting it, but because God intends for that to be the result of it. What this means is that when you're looking at the sacraments from a foreign perspective, there is no assurance in them, right? There's no comfort in them. There's no universality in them. And they'll say, well, there's universality because you receive the sign, it's the universal sign, and there's a universal offer of the gospel that's there. But in reality, the spirit is actually doing nothing positive in those things, unless you are elect. And even if you're elect, there's a thing especially with baptism. I mean, the Westminster Confession comes up with this completely untenable position, which is, they want to say that baptism does something, but only the elect are actually regenerates, but they know what's the other problem too, which is when God converts you, it's an irresistible act. And when you look at people who are baptized, like infants who are baptized, what if a family baptizes an infant, that infant isn't raised in the faith, and they have no signs of being a Christian and then they're converted later in life? Well, we would just say, okay, you receive the grace of regeneration and you know, you projected it, or you know, was not nourished by the means of grace because you were in a non-Christian family and those things weren't present. And then God, you know, brings you back to the grace of your baptism at some point. Well, they've a hard time with that with this idea of irresistible grace. So even for the elect, they start to say, the Westminster Confession says this, that the grace of God is tied to regeneration for the elect, specifically we're talking here, but not necessarily at the moment of administration, which means that even if you're elect, you could have been baptized and nothing happened, you convert it, you know, 45 years old and the spirit regenerates you spontaneously, but the Westminster kind of wants to say that still relate to your baptism somehow, so it's still the grace of baptism, but not necessarily tied to the actual time when you were baptized. So it becomes, you know, a little bit I think difficult to sustain. But the main issue here is I think the pastoral one, which is what I struggled with, and that is the, well, you've taken away another objective thing. The Atonement, if it's not necessarily for me, if I'm not elect, I can't cling to that. I look to the sacraments and I look to the sacraments and say, well, it could be for me, or it could be condemning me. And in my own transition into the Lutheran Church was largely wrestling with these two issues, because when I read Luther on the sacraments and a strange story about how I ended up reading Luther and then C.F.W. Walter, I actually was given C.F.W. Walter's proper distinction between law and gospel by a reformed Baptist, who said to me, "This book is really good, but ignore what he says about the sacraments." I didn't ignore what he said about the sacraments. And, you know, I read some of those lectures and I was pointed to Luther's Galatians commentary, which is the most comforting, beautiful, you know, theological work I've ever written. I mean, it's incredible. And life-changing for me, that in Luther's on the freedom of the Christian, or totally life-changing books. Reading through those, and then reading Walter, and seeing how much Luther and Walter talked about the sacraments, I was like, well, maybe I should actually start to take these guys seriously. There's so much else that's good here. Maybe there's a reason. And reformed people love Luther, but they only like the bondage of the will, and they misread the bondage of the will. And when you start reading beyond that, you start to see that the way that they understand Luther is not really a fair reading of Luther. So I started reading all of those things. And along with that, I started reading the Church Fathers a lot. So when I was in my theology classes in undergrad, you know, I had my friends were all theology majors too. And so we were all taking a lot of the same classes, and you got your paper writing at the end of class, and whatever class it was in. And, you know, my friends would be like, you know, say, I took a class on Daniel, for example, right? So my friends like, I'm going to do something about how the Puritans read this passage in Daniel. And I remember I wrote a, I actually quoted Jerome in this one. I think about it. I actually did. No, I did a comparison between John Chrysostom and Jerome's reading of the prophecies of Daniel. And I said, Chrysostom's was better, by the way. So don't worry. I'm not going back on what I said earlier. But just like, for whatever reason, when it came to those topics, I was so much more enriched, I felt, by the Church Fathers, and I was by like the Puritan authors, everybody else's reading. And I think it's because there just wasn't joy in the Puritans. They took the Word of God very seriously, which is commendable, but there's not a lot of joy. And I know some people try to say the Puritans were theologians of joy. And I just don't buy it. But I'm sorry. I know you can use the word joy, but you don't feel, you know, you don't feel joy. And then you read like Luther on Galatians, and you just feel this like, I don't know, delight in the gospel that I feel like I didn't have. Because I liked the gospel theoretically, but it was always this doubt, you know, of like, but what if? And I read the Fathers, they don't talk like that. And then I read Luther, and they don't talk like that. And all of them are reading the text of scripture in a very different way. So all of that got me to really rethink all of these things. So it really was, I guess, existential issue or a pastoral issue, you know, an issue of how can I actually live a Christian life that is joyful? How can I live a Christian life where I'm not just afraid of breaking the law all the time and defending God because I know I have a sinner. But being able to just like kind of be free, not free to sin, but just free to like not be paranoid all the time about what's going on in my heart. I had a very Luther kind of experience, I guess you could say. And that's what when I read Luther, I'm like, oh man, this guy speaks to me like he gets me. And, you know, people just say Luther had, you know, psychological issues. And that was his problem or whatever. And I don't know, maybe he did. But at the same time, I read Luther. And I'm like, if Luther, like just logically, if he's, if he was like, if the medieval Roman Catholic church was logical about what it believed, how could you not come to the conclusion Luther came to? I think it's the only logical way to deal with your understanding of mortal sin and God's righteousness and the nature of good works. How could you not live in just constant despair? Because at any moment, if you do the wrong thing, you could be damned to hell immediately and suffer forever. Like, it's a big deal. Luther took it seriously. I think others weren't taking it seriously enough. But I kind of feel the same way about the reformed world is the logical conclusion of the limited-atomic idea that does end in a similar place. Okay. Two other things here. One is ecclesiology. I just want to touch on this very briefly. The structure of the church. This is something I wrestled with that I know people coming out of the reformed world never talk about this one. It doesn't seem to play a large role and a lot of people move away from the reformed church, but it was very significant for me. And that is the way that the church is structured. Because the way that I was taught in the reformed church was that the Presbyterian form of church government was not only a good form of church government, but it was the only way that the church could be structured. And a very pretty well-known reformed Presbyterian theologian, that's a guess-taught course that I was in. When I was in college, I was talking about the doctrine of the church from the Westminster Confession. It was very, very adamant about the nature of the Presbyterian church. And I asked him a question about this, like, does the church have to be, or is it, is it, the question was, is it sinful if the church organized itself in another way? Not just like, is it wise? And he said, he was very adamant that, yes, it is sinful for the church to organize itself in any other way. Now, when I heard this, I'm writing my theology papers reading the church fathers. Man, an Episcopate shows up in the middle of the second century and nobody questions it. And that's just how the church functions forever until the Reformation. So the question was, was more than a, do we need to have an Episcopate? That's a different question. But it was, is it sinful to have an Episcopate? Because, on the one hand, you're saying, maybe you're saying, like, okay, there are different ways to govern the church, is how it has been governed. It's a very different question to say, the entire church has been structured in a way that is definitively sinful for its entire existence until the Formation of Presbyterianism. And we've got, you know, Ignatius knows John the Apostle. And he's telling everybody, listen to your bishops. So, you know, it develops really early. I just, If the Apostle John was a very strict Presbyterian, he would have taught his students to be very strict Presbyterians. Ignatius, make sure there's a Presbyterian form of church government at every church. And if there isn't, set him right. He didn't do that obviously. The church took on different forms. And I think there were reasons for the Episcopal form of church government in developing the way it did. But this idea that it was sinful, I just couldn't square with how God would lead the church. So that was a major question for me. And that one wasn't so much existential as it was just logical of, how do I view the history of the church? Do I view the history of the church as basically kind of falling into sinful apostasy immediately after the death of John and then, you know, John Calvin and then John Knox or whoever coming back to, you know, restore it? I just, I can't buy that view of church history. And, you know, I guess some Lutherans maybe take that approach they shouldn't, but. So that was the last theological issue I wanted to mention, but just to close here, I want to say, what is it ultimately that keeps me Lutheran? I'm very passionate about Lutheranism. That's what I devote my life to. And I, when I encountered all these, this growth of new Calvinism, and I became a Lutheran. When I became a Lutheran, it was a lot of hard work to find anything that existed in terms of Lutheran resources. They just weren't there. I had to look really hard for them. And I wasn't living in an area where there were just a bunch of Lutherans everywhere. They just weren't. They didn't have a large presence on the East Coast. They still don't. They did it at one time, but it's been a long time in the East Coast of the US. And that was what motivated me to start the things I'm doing was like we need people who are Lutherans who are going to be putting themselves in positions where they can reach beyond the borders of a Lutheran church to bring other people in because we have this beautiful truth and we. A lot of Lutheran churches and Lutheran communities have kind of kept to themselves and stayed faithful, but haven't shown the riches of that tradition maybe beyond the tradition itself. So it's always been my goal to do that and to bring people in by spreading the great truths of the Lutheran church. So what is it that keeps me Lutheran? Why am I here? Why do I care so much? Why have I not decided to follow the most recent trend and go become a Latin mass traditionalist Roman Catholic until Pope Francis makes that impossible and then they all find something else to do. Ultimately, it's this. It's Jesus. It's the centrality of Christ. There is no other tradition in Christianity that so focuses on Jesus. I mean, I'll tell you every time like listening to Lutheran preaching and then of course being a Lutheran preacher myself and going back to a service or a wedding somewhere with a friend that's a church that's not Lutheran in just hearing preaching from a non-Lutheran pulpit. You know, I don't care if it's performed or Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Anglican or whatever. Nobody preaches Christ as centrally as Lutherans do. And it's like if I hear maybe some of you experience this, if you're in a Lutheran church every week and you go somewhere else and you just feel everything that pastor said was pretty consistent with the Bible and it was good, but something's missing. It's Christ, the centrality of Christ. And so it's that that Christo centrality which I'm going to be talking about in my talk on so it's Christos that really is the beauty of the Lutheran tradition. It's not just because we have a cool history or just because I like our liturgy. I love our liturgy. But ultimately the most important thing is the centeredness on Jesus that you get in everything. Because the bond that the soul needs is Christ for you, right? And it's that for you that's so essential. And Calvinism, I got a lot of Christ, but not Christ for you, each of you individually. All right. Well, I know I'm out of time and I wanted to have questions here, but I think unfortunately I ran through my time with this talk. So I am happy to be here and answer any questions that you have afterwards. So I'll stick around for a little bit. But thank you for all being here.