When was the last time that you got excited about theology?Maybe it was last night as you discussed the ins and outs of Calvinism versus Arminianism with friends in your dorm at Bible college.
Or maybe it was this past weekend in an adult Sunday school class where you discussed how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all relate to one another, three persons in one God. Or maybe you've never really felt all that excited about theology.
Maybe for you, theology has negative connotations, that it's boring, or too abstract, or too divisive.Well, wherever you land, I think this episode is for you.
Today I'm speaking with Kevin DeYoung on the importance of theology for all Christians, why it matters for our everyday lives, and why it's worth the effort to dig in, even if it sometimes feels a bit unfamiliar.
Kevin serves as Senior Pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte.
He's the author of many different books, including a brand new one from Crossway called Daily Doctrine, A One-Year Guide to Systematic Theology.Let's get started. Well, Kevin, thanks so much for joining me today on the Crossway Podcast.
Great to be with you.So today we're going to talk a lot about theology, about the things that we believe about God and that have been revealed to us through Scripture.
And I have a number of questions for you about various doctrines and what you think about some of them.But I wonder, before we get into the doctrines themselves,
What would you say to the person listening right now who, they would have to say that they have maybe a little bit of a negative view towards theology when they hear that word, maybe from their own experience in a church or with someone that they've known.
What comes to mind is abstract and technical and complex and not practical, and maybe worst of all, divisive.Those are the kinds of words that come to their minds.
So how would you respond to someone who's got that initial reaction to a conversation about theology?
Here's the analogy I often use.If you're married, you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, you want to know as much as you can about that person.
So if I were to tell you how much I love my wife, Tricia, and that she was amazing, and you said, tell me more about her, And I said, she just makes me feel so special.Oh, that's really great.What is she like?
And I quickly ran out of things to say about her.You would wonder how much of a relationship I really have with her.And if my wife said, can we go on a long walk?I want to talk about things.I said, I'm not really interested in knowing what you think.
I don't really care what you have to share about yourself with me.No thanks.I already know enough."We would all say, that's not a very good husband.You don't love her as you should.Of course, if I love my wife, I want to listen to her.
I want her self-revelation.I want her to tell me what she thinks, what she's like, And if I have a meaningful relationship with her, I can give facts.Now, of course, that relationship cannot be reduced to mere facts.
I can't just say, here are 10 truths about Tricia, and therefore, if you know these truths, then you really know her and have a relationship.
But you can't find her, you can't have a relationship unless you know some of those things, some of those truths.So I would say to the person, I understand that the person may be intimidated.Sometimes just maybe you didn't like school.
You didn't like reading this stuff.And good, serious Christians can find theology overwhelming, intimidating.Is this going to be a bunch of terms I don't know?Sometimes that's the fault of the teacher.
Sometimes it's the fault of the student who needs to patiently try to learn.And then there are the people, as you said, Matt, who've maybe had bad experiences.
The theology people they knew looked like big heads and small hearts, or they were the most crotchety people in the church and were very divisive.I would just say, don't let the abuse of a thing define the thing itself.
For sure, God does not call everyone to be a theologian in the same way, and yet all of us are theologians.Sproul, lots of people have said that already, because we believe things about God.That's theology.
We tell people what we think about this God.That's theology.So if you're going to have a theology, why not have the best one you can have and try to learn as much about God as you can?
Yeah, that's so helpful.So yeah, let's get into some of the questions that then are personal questions for you and how you think about various doctrines.
So the first one I have is just what's a doctrine that you would say has been on your mind lately?Maybe something recently that you've just been considering, mulling over, thinking about, maybe you're preparing to teach on it.
Is there one particular doctrine that you would say stands out in that regard?
A couple things come to mind.
One would probably not be surprising just knowing the controversies that are out there, but I certainly have thought a lot more in the last three, four years about the establishment principle versus the voluntary principle of church government.
That means Are churches to be established and in some way maintained by the state so that the church, maybe the state furnishes the church, or it protects the doctrine of the church, or the state is able to call synods and councils of the church?
What is that relationship?I think for probably most people, at least I'm thinking in America, until very recently, it was easy to say, well, yeah, obviously that's wrong. That's not the way we do church.
The voluntary principle, what it sounds like, is church is not established by the state, but is a voluntary association.Now, it doesn't mean that we create the church.It's a gift from God, and Christ is the head of the church.
But it's the opposite of the establishment principle. So I've assigned in my ecclesiology and sacraments class, ever since I've taught it, James Bannerman.He was a 19th century Scottish Presbyterian.I wrote a blurb on the back of The Banner of Truth.
I love that book.But being a 19th century Presbyterian, Bannerman defends quite vigorously the establishment principle.
Which is probably stretching for your students today.
Yeah, and I want them to read the whole book so they can really get this one man's thought.
And if you're a Presbyterian, it's just one of the classic texts on how to think about the church with Presbyterian theology, but I do want them to wrestle with this.
And with a lot of the conversations going on in our own context, it's certainly something that I've given more thought to than I think even five or ten years ago might have quickly said, well, we obviously don't believe that, and here's a few reasons why.
So that's led me to read much more deeply and more widely and understand why did Presbyterians in America, for example, amend the Westminster Confession when they formed the Presbyterian Church.
That's a pretty big deal to change your confessional standards, and it had to do with this issue.So that's one theological issue I've been thinking a lot about. I also gravitate toward the attributes of God.
I don't know if that's—I don't want to say that's my thing.For a number of years, when I would speak at Together for the Gospel, that's what I would think in.That was my slot.That was the main category.Yeah, and Kevin is the doctrine guy.
So I did one on the doctrine of Scripture, but then several times on one of the attributes of God, and then this last year at the Quorum Deo Pastors Conference, similarly, but now with the person of Christ, I did impeccability.
So that doctrine has been something I've given a lot of thought to over the last few years.The impeccability of Christ states that not only did Christ not sin, we all agree on that, the Bible's crystal clear on that, but he was unable to sin.
And that's been the mainstream position in the church and among Reformed theologians.But there has been a significant minority that has at time disagreed with that.
And the reason why it's important, someone just asked me actually in line at church a couple of weeks ago, they said, I was listening to the talk you gave in the spring.Why did you talk on that?Maybe it's interesting, but
How is that helping pastors?It's kind of a hypothetical question that isn't actually even relevant in a certain sense, right?He didn't sin, and so why does it matter to know that he couldn't have sinned?
Yes, it ties in with how we understand temptation.So the reason that good people like Charles Hodge, who's one of my theological heroes, Hodge differed on the doctrine of impeccability.
He thought in order for temptation to be truly real, that Christ had to have been able to sin.
William Shedd, who is somewhat of a contemporary of Hodge, gave a very robust defense of impeccability, explaining that he has this line, just because an army can be attacked doesn't mean it can be conquered.
So yes, Christ did suffer real temptation.We have to be absolutely clear on that, as the Bible is. but you can face real temptation without there being a possibility that you could have given into it.
And in fact, Christ's temptation was not less because he was unable to sin.It was more in that he never once gave into that sin.
You and I are tempted, and there's a little bit of a release valve, and we give into the temptation, and we sin, and then it mounts again.
And it's also an important doctrine, and the reason I started thinking more about it a few years ago is because it ties into a lot of the discussion about same-sex attraction and issues of sexuality.Are those temptations in themselves sinful?
And I think for a time, some of us—and I wasn't even as careful as I should have been 10 years ago—well, maybe it's disordered, maybe it's sinful, not sinful.We realize that's really the Roman Catholic doctrine of concupiscence.
that says those inner desires can be disordered but not sinful, where Reformed theology has consistently disagreed with the Catholic doctrine of concupiscence and, as the Westminster Confession says, all the motions thereof, even those unbidden feelings that we have.
So sometimes people have said, well, Christ, he was tempted in every way as we are, so Jesus got up— And without sin.And without sin, but they'll say, so he must have, he had lustful thoughts.
He would have gone to the beach and he would have started having lustful thoughts over women.Real careful.Christ's temptation, Owen says, was the outer, the external invitation to sin, like the devil in the wilderness.
It was not the internal compulsion arising from a sinful nature.
He had no inclination to sin.
So all of this, the doctrine of impeccability, touches on a lot of important issues that really have pretty immediate pastoral implications in how we think about some of the hot topics around us.
Yeah, that's so interesting how even doctrines that relate to God himself, God the Trinity, the different persons of the Trinity, can ultimately have a very practical pastoral implication for our lives as Christians.
Another question for you, what would be a doctrine right now, today, that you would say confuses you?
Well, surely, Matt, there are no doctrines that confuse me.So I'll fall back on a couple of things.
One, Turretin, who I quote a lot from in the book, I looked in the index, and I think I quote from Turretin and Calvin quite a bit more than anyone else.
Turretin said that the two most difficult doctrines are the doctrine of the Trinity, the three persons, one God, and then the hypostatic union, the person of Christ, so one person and two natures. Those are the most intellectually difficult.
the eternal generation.How do you explain that the Son is eternally generated from the Father?But it's not a moment in time, because it's eternal.It's not physical.So there's lots of these doctrines.
You can do better saying what you don't mean to say than what it is.So those doctrines have always been hard to explain.They're not irrational, but they're super rational.They're beyond our ability.They're not intuitive.Yeah.
And they just, the analogies don't work.Don't use the water, ice, vapor analogy.Don't use the apple, the peel, the corn, the seed.So you have to use technical language and your mind starts turning on them.
And you just have lots of questions you can't quite answer.
Then I think one over the years for me that has just exegetically bounced back and forth is how to understand the New Testament view of the law, because there are really negative things that Paul seems to say about the law.
that it leads you into sin and the law is done and an old covenant.And then he says, well, the law is good if you use it lawfully.And how do we understand then the abiding place of the Ten Commandments?
And even though I've been Reformed my whole life, I think there was a time a number of years ago that I might've veered a little bit, well, maybe the Reformed folks do a little too much to emphasize the law, maybe that's not there.
But I've definitely swung back and disagree with some really good Baptist exegetes and scholars who would see the law a little differently.
I do firmly believe in Calvin's third use of the law, so the use of the law to convict us of sin, to be a standard of righteousness in the world, and the perfect rule of righteousness for the Christian.
And it's that third use that I think Christians have often neglected.And I've been helped in writing the book on the Ten Commandments and just studying these things to really see the important place of the law in the Christian life.
So this raises a good question that I think many Christians will struggle with, and it's just the question of maybe theological ambiguity in Scripture.
Would this be an example, the doctrine of how the law relates to our lives as Christians and some of the technical understanding of how we should think about it?
Would you say that it's possible that there are doctrines that Scripture is intentionally not maybe as comprehensive, not as clear as we would want it to be?Obviously, we believe in the
clarity of Scripture and the sufficiency of Scripture for our salvation, for the Gospel, and for living lives that please God.
But are there doctrines that you would say Scripture leaves a little bit less fully fleshed out for us, and so we might need to hold those with an open hand?
A couple of thoughts there.One, the purpose of theology often is to give us the time-tested categories and terms that allow us to hold multiple truths at the same time. So sometimes when people say, I don't, there's a bad kind of biblicism.
I know some people use the term, just mean rigorously Bible.I want everything tested against the Bible, and I'm 1000% for that.
But there's an unhealthy kind of biblicism that doesn't have patience to deal with the categories from the past, whether they come from Reformed theologians or Aquinas or the Scholastics or the early church.
Those theologians are not inerrant, only the Scriptures are.And yet, so often, they've given us the kind of—okay, how do I say, for example, with the Trinity, there's one God, the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God.
The Father's not, the Son is not, the Spirit's not the Father.Those seven statements.You can prove all of those seven statements clearly from Scripture.Okay? how are all of those things true at the same time?
That's when you say, well, I think we're gonna need the doctrine of taxes, we're gonna need inseparable operations, we're gonna need this language which develops of person and essence, so you need a lot of that language.
I think it's the same thing with the law you bring up.I know that some people will disagree with the typical
threefold division of the law into the judicial law, which passed away with Israel but still has principles for us, and the ceremonial law, which is fulfilled in the priestly work of Christ, and then the abiding moral law.
People will say, look, the Bible never says, here ye, here ye, here are the three divisions of the law, which of course it doesn't.
Yet I think those divisions develop, and they develop as early as the early church, and certainly you see shades of it in Aquinas, to help us say, okay, how do we make sense that it seems like in the New Testament you don't have to obey the law and you do have to obey the law?
And I think those are getting distinctions that I think can be argued and found in the Mosaic Covenant itself.But the other way of answering your question
With some different doctrines, yes, I think there are some doctrines we have to be honest to say, God didn't mean to tell us everything we might want to know about this subject.And I don't just mean how to change the oil in your car.
Obviously, that's anachronistic.Or sometimes people want to look to the Bible for the maker's diet, and the Bible was not written to give you a diet.So don't ask questions that the Bible doesn't mean to give.
But a little closer to home, so church polity.I think the Bible does tell us things about church polity.
It's possible to have a poorly organized church.
Yes, and to disobey.It's not a free-for-all.It's not just what kind of event, whatever you want.
And yet, even the really divine-right Presbyterians would say, there are some things here that are going to be left to contextual, circumstantial considerations.
And to use the example I did earlier about some of the church-state stuff, I think we have to admit
that, though there are some principles we can rightly glean for what kind of government would be most effective, I think we have to be honest that the New Testament, viewing the Church as the Israel in exile, the Israel in Babylon, not the Israel in the Promised Land with David and Solomon as king,
that the New Testament doesn't mean to give us a blueprint for, this is what the civil government ought to look like.
And so I think we have to allow for flexibility, and we can get into trouble when we expect the Bible to answer questions it doesn't mean to answer.
Yeah.All right, so what's a doctrine that you have struggled to embrace at some point in your life?
So whether that was a kind of an emotional struggle or even a theologically driven struggle, but that you now have come to embrace and see is really important.
Certainly, though I grew up in a Reformed church and learned the Heidelberg Catechism, and I remember my pastor preaching a sermon on TULIP, and I went to college knowing that Calvin was a good guy.
With all of that in my background, and I've told this story before, but I remember when I was a freshman in one of my theology or Bible classes that I did not understand Calvinism.I remember being in high school as a senior.
I was in a public school, we were talking about Calvin, And because it's in West and a public school and a public school.
I mean, it's Grand Rapids in the night in the 90s and it's a Western Civ class and you just like, okay, you can kind of use one of the important figures.
Yeah, and there's lots of people that have Calvin in their background in a place like that in the 90s and But even there, nobody liked predestination.
And so I said, famously, I said, what Calvin meant by predestination is just that God looks into the future, he sees who will choose him, and then he chooses us.And everyone was convinced.I had defended Calvinism with Arminianism.
They were satisfied.Yes, that was actually 100% Arminianism.
And then, when I was a freshman in college, we had to write a paper on the problem of evil.Why do professors give freshmen the problem of evil?And I remember thinking, I don't know why this has stumped theologians for so long.
I mean, you got free will.Simple as that.
God gave free will.Again, a good Arminian.
A good Arminian answer.People sometimes have an existential objection to those doctrines.I don't think mine was existential, but I just missed it.
And so it was when I started reading Calvin for myself that I realized, oh boy, I did not understand this. One at a more visceral level, also in college, and it's often when we're young that we really wrestle with these.
So I went to one of the RCA schools, Hope College, had a great time there, but it was a more mainline school.I mean, I had—most of my religion professors were quite liberal. they were proponents of the Jesus Seminar and the documentary Hypothesis.
And one of the most conservative Bible teachers we had was an egalitarian, charismatic woman who was at least, I believe, Paul wrote the epistles.
She at least liked the Bible.
Yeah, on Jesus.So it was unnerving to my faith, in particular to the things about the Scriptures. I remember wrestling for at least a summer, just thinking, God, if you could just, if you could give me 2 Timothy 3.16.
If I can get to 2 Timothy 3.16, all scripture is breathed out by God.It's open up.I can trust the Bible. And I wish I could say there was just one particular breakthrough, but there wasn't.It was a number of things.
One of the things was learning, well, Kevin, that's doing things like Rene Descartes.I think therefore I'm just going to empty my mind and you just, I'm going to build the foundation to get here.
Start with one obvious truth.Yes.
And then to conclude that the Bible is true rather than starting with this.And so reading some Van Til helped me in that. But it was a whole number of things that I had to wrestle with.And also, I remember having a very good Catholic friend.
She told me one time, this is like a great put-down compliment, Kevin, you're going to be Catholic someday.I'm not.I said, why?She said, you're too smart not to be. That's a good way to put it.I'm still not Catholic.But she was a sincere believer.
She really knew some of it.So it wasn't that I found any of the particular arguments convincing.Yeah, it wasn't one thing.No, but it was just, I had adopted unwittingly a sense of, I know I'm right because I really believe these things.
And I could look around and see a lot of people really weren't serious about their faith.Okay, here's someone who's also serious about her faith and believes these things and believes different things.
So it just, it didn't hit me on an intellectual level.It hit me on a kind of a gut level.Okay, I can't be convinced I'm right because I just, I'm really intense about it.
Yeah, or smarter than anyone else.Yeah, yeah, right.Yeah.What's been a doctrine that's been particularly helpful to you in your fight against sin over the years?
I've come back to—this is Piper in Future Grace.Piper wouldn't use the language of beatific vision, I don't think, but it's Matthew 5-8, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
That's been the single most important verse and insight with that particular sin.I think sometimes we wonder, what does that even mean?Yeah, and I think I take a both and.
I think it's both to see God in the last day, that sort of beatific vision, to be on the path of holiness, but I also think it means to know God now, to see him with not completely unveiled face, but to be transformed as we stare into his likeness in the face of Christ, that to know Christ more,
helps us fight sin.It's not just a trickle-down effect and you just—sanctification is just getting used to your justification.But it is true.You need to fight sin—this is very Piperian insight, but—in Edwards and Chalmers, expulsive affection.
We need more than just a no, we need a better.You can't just fight sin to say, don't do that thing.So, blessed are the pure in heart, they shall see God.God is for my pleasure.God is for, we are wired to want to see beautiful things.
And it's the fight of faith to believe that impure, that image, wrong person, wrong place, wrong way, Maybe it gives a momentary flicker of beauty.And I could just say, don't do it.And well, it's bad.I'm going to do it.
But so often it's like, well, if I look, I would like it, but I shouldn't do it because it's bad.
Yeah.We try to deny the reality that there is joy in a sense in that.
And it's not enough to say, I'll like it, but it's bad to say, and there's something much better. And actually, it's Satan presents the bait and hides the hook in the end.It won't be good for me.
So to know God more, to really focus and marvel on—it is harder to go and sin when you have been contemplating the mysteries of the Trinity or the wonders of the person of Christ, or you've been thinking and chewing and savoring his attributes, to really know God better.
brings to mind that famous Lewis quote, the child who doesn't understand the difference between making mud pies and a holiday at the sea.But keeping the holiday at the sea in mind has so much power in our lives.
What's a doctrine that you would say now, looking back, you were too focused on 20 years ago?You maybe overestimate its importance, or you were just too stuck on it, perhaps.
But now, today, you would say, you know, it's important, it's good, it's true, but we don't need to be quite as focused on it.Or maybe you don't need to be quite as focused on it as you once were.
thought about that before.I'm not sure what specific doctrine I would name.Hopefully all those doctrines are important.I will say when I go back and read things, for example, the first book I really had published was Why We're Not Emergent.
And I'll go back and read some sermons.So I had, that book came out in, I forget, 08 or 09.And last year I preached the revelation, and I had preached the revelation almost 20 years ago.It was like 2006.
And so I went back and I would look at those sermons and it would, thankfully, 98% of my exegetical conclusions were still the same.
Well, some cringe moments.No major exegetical cringe moments.But sometimes I would read and think, wow, I really went to town on that application.
And I was just like, oh, I was reading Rob Bell, I was reading Brian McClure, and I was focused on immersion.And it might have been appropriate in that time.So it was both maybe good to think, yeah, every sermon speaks to a particular moment.
And then there was a little cringe of, hmm, I'm not sure I needed to go all the way over in that direction. So I don't know if there's a doctrine I'd say, well, I sure don't think we should pay attention to Calvinism anymore.I would say this.
I had to learn early in ministry that it wasn't enough to just have the right doctrine, meaning
I think I had an implicit assumption that the most doctrinal people were going to be the most helpful people in ministry, and the most, you know, the theological nerds were the people like me.
They wanted to just get around and read Calvin's Institutes, they wanted to get in all this stuff. that automatically those were probably going to be the best elders, the best church leaders, the best Bible study leaders.
And it took five or six years of ministry to realize, nope, I want that, and that is not a one-to-one correlation. There are some people who get in that in a prideful way, or I use the analogy, it's like you give to a toddler an Apache helicopter.
They have all this doctrine.
It's an amazing machine.Yeah, but you're going to go and destroy a village that you shouldn't have because you don't have the requisite heart.
So, yeah, it's helped me want to realize these are really important, and it is a massive tank or helicopter, and you need the requisite maturity to try to fly that thing well.
Because doctrine in the hands of an immature Christian can hurt people.
really hurt people.It can be divisive.And I went through, like a lot of people, some of the stagecage Calvinism.I don't think I meant to, but I certainly did.
I mean, I can remember in college talking to people in my campus ministry group and, you know, kind of setting them up and telling them about predestination.And then they would say, well, if God just chooses, then He must not be fair.
And I'd say, you know, that's a good question.You know, that question came up in Romans 9.Let's turn there, who are you to talk back to God?And it would be, oh, it's you.
You're just waiting the whole time for that question.
Yeah, I just set them up, and I hopefully wasn't that cruel about it.But you understand, to be patient with people and to understand that, especially in those doctrines, there's an existential angst that makes it difficult.
So maybe in a roundabout way to answer your question, if I think in particular about the doctrines of grace, I don't think they're any less important.I think we should talk about them more, not less.
But I would hope that I've gained more of a sense of patience and understanding that to talk to them with people, that the people in the audience are not just, or congregation or Sunday school class, are not just hearing, huh,
I have some intellectual objections, you answer the intellectual objections, therefore I accept.
But I've realized after years of pastoral ministry, you know, they're sitting there thinking, but my son is 25 and he walked away from the Lord, and this sounds to me like he has no chance to be saved because he might be a reprobate.
Well, there's an answer to that.Actually, he does have a chance because God can break through his hard heart.But understand those personal hurts and pains that people always bring to doctrine.
Okay, maybe last few questions here.This would be a little bit more, maybe, machine gun style.
So this is kind of fun, where I'm going to say a doctrinal word, a very technical-sounding theological word that maybe some people won't even have ever heard before.
I'd love to have you try to explain them as succinctly as possible, like you're talking to a five-year-old.Really, like I'm talking to a five-year-old?We'll say five to ten.Somewhere in this young... I have a five-year-old and a ten-year-old.
Okay, let's say ten.Okay, let's go for my ten.I can do a little bit more.A little bit more.The five-year-old, I might just say... I was going to say, I should have thought that you have almost every age available for this exercise.
If my five-year-old asks about inseparable operations, I'd be very impressed.
Okay, I got my ten-year-old.I got him.Okay, so the first word, aseity.
Aseity means that God is completely independent.He doesn't depend on anyone or anything.He doesn't need anyone to make him happy.He doesn't need anyone to exist.He doesn't need to ask anyone's opinion or counsel on anything.
you see it there in Genesis 1-1, in the beginning, God.That God was there before anything else was there.He is God all by himself before anything else, perfectly happy to be God.
And so he creates the world, not because he was lacking anything, but because he loves to share his glory with his creatures.
Well done.Okay, a little harder.Perichoresis.
I'm thinking my 10-year-old would really be interested in perichoresis.We do not want to explain perichoresis as the cosmic dance.
All right, but I'm just going to assume my 10-year-old was not tracking.
People might not know the reference there, but... Yeah, well, and a lot of good people have said that, and well, we got the word, English word, choreography comes in that, and it's like the three persons of the Trinity who are waltzing... Doing tango or something.
...together.That's too much social Trinitarianism.So,
Here's what I would say, knowing that explaining these doctrines, always there's lots of safeguards, but a 10-year-old, I'm just trying to get some concept, that the three persons of the Trinity occupy the same space.They occupy the same
I probably wouldn't use that word with my 10-year-old, but the same kind of spiritual space.Another way to think of it maybe is like circulation, like the same life, the same blood in a way is circulating through them.That is to say,
You don't have the Father without the Son and the Holy Spirit.You don't have the Spirit without the Father and the Son.You don't have the Son without the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Though we may relate to one person of the Trinity in a special way and in a unique way at certain times, and they don't all do the exact same thing in time, yet we never have one person of the Trinity.
You can't just have a relationship with Jesus.
Yeah, we never have one person of the Trinity without having all three persons.
of the Trinity.Would you say it's accurate to say that the members of the Trinity need each other?
I would not say it that way.Hesitant to use the language of need with the three persons, because that would be that they're deficient, or the need might suggest that the Trinity could exist in some other way besides the Trinity.
Like a deficient version of it.
Yeah, a deficient version of the Trinity, that they're substance and accidents.But I think what we would say, is all three mutually indwell and delight in and enjoy each other and are never absent from one another?
It's probably an absurd question.It's almost maybe akin to what would a circular square look like?The Trinity, by definition, is the three persons, and so there's no way in which they could exist apart from one another.Right.Yeah.
Okay, another one that you've actually thrown this term out, but it's probably another term that can be very foreign to a lot of Christians, although perhaps in recent years we've had more conversation about it, and that's eternal generation.
A lot of the conversation started to pick up when, in 2016, the Trinity debates and trying to understand what can we say about one person of the Trinity that we do not say about one or the other two Persons of the Trinity.
So what makes them distinct?
That's right.How do we distinguish among the three Persons of the Trinity, which is a very good question to ask.And some of the theology from lots of people we love and respect, and I think a lot of this
I learned more in it, and a lot of it, I think, got tweaked and corrected.
The conversation maybe even broadly moved forward through those debates, would you say?
Yeah, I think it was, on the whole, really good.We came out with a better idea, and I think now most people who are writing and thinking about this will explain this better.
So rather than saying that, oh, what we can say about the father is that he has authority, and the son is that he submits to the father, that's what distinguishes the father from the son.
Now, just setting aside there, certainly in time the Son submits to the Father, and there is... And we see Jesus using that kind of language.Yes, and there's a difference between in time and in eternity, but even in eternity there's an order.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit must be reflected in time that you would never have the Son sending the Father or the Spirit pouring out the Son.There is an order, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which shows itself in time.
But coming back to eternal generation is one of the ways we distinguish.So they're personal properties.
A property is something that is proper, like an attribute, and personal meaning what attributes or what properties are to one person but not to another, so that the Father is of none.He is unbegotten.
the Son is begotten, and then that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.That's how we understand it in the Western tradition.So the Son's eternal generation means that He is begotten, but it's not a begottenness in time.
See, the Council of Nicaea with Arianism was not really debating whether He was the only begotten Son. Arius even says this, he was the only begotten son of the father, monogenes.
They use that term, and I know there's debates on how we want to translate that, but certainly the idea of being only begotten.The question was whether he was begotten in time, because Arius said there was when he was not,
There was a time when he was not.
Yeah, and Arius might not even use the word time.He might say, okay, even somehow before our human understanding of time, just there was some moment, some epoch that he wasn't and then he was.
So the eternal generation, because when we think of generation, we just think physical and in time.
When you have a child- There's gotta be a moment of that happening.
Yeah, so eternal generation is telling us that the son comes from the father, that's the word he's generated, from the father.But lest we think, oh, so like, did the father marry?She had a baby and then he existed?
Yeah, is the same thing as the virgin birth?
The birth, no.Or did this happen some moment in time or before history began that then the father said, okay, now you exist?No.So the word eternal tells us It is always existing, and some theologians say even always continuing.
It is the Father generating the—and giving, communicating is the word—communicating His essence to the Son.So that to be truly a son means you have to have a father, and if you are a father, you have generated offspring.
And to be offspring means you have been generated by a parent.So it's trying to describe the language of sonship and fatherhood, but to make sure that we don't understand it in a physical or a temporal way.
Yeah, so tricky.This is where we start to feel like our minds are reaching the limits of what we can comprehend,
Yeah, we start saying, well, it's not physical, and it's not temporal, it's eternal.
Which those two qualities happen to be universally relevant for any father-son relationship.Yes, how we understand it.Yeah, it's so hard.
Okay, one last question, and this is one we've talked a lot about Calvinism, so I figure I have to ask about the extra Calvinisticum, which has to be one of the funnest sounding doctrines.It is.
Maybe depends on where you fall on the theological spectrum, but the extra Calvinisticum.
Who wouldn't—if you're going to have Calvin, wouldn't you want some extra Calvinisticum?I actually debated at the pastors' conference last year.
I was going to do my talk on the extra Calvinisticum, and I asked some friends, and they're probably wiser than I. They said, eh. First, impeccability is probably enough.
This is your first pastors conference.Yeah.
So the extra calvinisticum, so am I talking to my 10-year-old still?
Well, we've kind of lost the 10-year-old.We've lost the 10-year-old.I think the 10-year-old is playing Switch or something now at this point.
But here, this is, it really would be hard to explain to a 10-year-old, but it is exactly the sort of question a 10-year-old would ask, meaning this.Here's how I was gonna start my talk, and maybe I'll give this talk some other time.
If your 10-year-old says, where is Jesus?How do you answer that question?You say, Jesus is in your heart.True. Jesus is everywhere, in a sense true.Jesus is in heaven, also true.
So the extra Calvinisticum is trying to explain that the divine nature, though inseparably joined to the human nature, is never completely contained by the human nature.So the extra means outside of, beyond the bounds of the human nature.
So that Jesus is in heaven.He ascended.He's physically in heaven.He's physically, okay, now where is heaven?
Some place out there, you can't just get in a plane and fly there.But we would say Jesus's physical body is somewhere. is somewhere, the place that we call heaven, he ascended into there.
And this is, again, I'm not talking to a 10-year-old anymore, but this is a huge disagreement between Reformed and Lutherans, because Lutherans at the Lord's Supper believe in what's called the ubiquity of the body, that the body of Christ can be everywhere.
That's why they believe that, you know, the body of the blood of Christ are in, with, and under these elements.
Yeah, it's sometimes called consubstantiation, different from transubstantiation, but con, with. And Reformed theologians always said, that's a contradiction.A human body cannot have the property of ubiquity.
Human bodies, by definition, are localized.So this was a big difference between Reformed and Luther, and then how we understand the communication of properties, the communication of idioms, it's sometimes called.
What can we say about one nature and the other?And that was a difference.
And it also got to a difference on how Lutherans and Reformed think about reason and rationality, because Lutherans might say to Reform, look, you are too bound by reason and your logical deduction, so what? if it's an impossibility.
It happened, and you believe it.And Reformed theologians have said, no, we are called to believe things we can't fully explain, but we're not called to believe that triangles have four sides.We're not called to believe that two plus two is five.
Human bodies do not have the property of ubiquity.So this one question, where is Jesus right now?
actually has tentacles into a lot of other doctrines that are not easily solved and really do set some theological traditions in some different trajectories.So that the extra Calvinisticum, it was called that by its opponents.
You mentioned the extra, what's the Calvinisticum?
So Calvin taught this clearly, and Lutheran said this idea, which is spelled out very clearly in the Heidelberg Catechism of all places, They said, that's the extra Calvinisticum.This is just a doctrine that was taught by Calvin.
Like Stephen Wellum says in his Christology book, you could call it the extra Catholicum.That is, it's a Catholic doctrine.It goes back to the Church Fathers.
It's not just Calvin.It has been an important way of understanding the two natures, that the divine nature, when joined with the human nature,
was not circumscribed, was not bound just to—though it was bound, there was a true union there—it was not limited to that one.So that, in a way, you say, did the Son of God leave heaven when he came to earth.
Now, we sing lots of Christmas songs that he did, and again, there's a way to understand that, but actually- In his divine nature, he's omnipresent.He didn't.
And we don't want to say the divine nature somehow left, well, now the Trinity is blown apart, or that they had to do without the divine nature for a while.No, without the divine nature leaving heaven, took to himself a human nature.
So these questions about the, it didn't want a localized, that something had left and was now absent in heaven.So the extra Calvinisticum was the term given by the Lutherans to describe what they saw as just a doctrine of Calvin, but
what I would argue is a doctrine from the early Church in the Middle Ages, to say that in the union of the human, the divine nature does not cease to maintain its properties of divinity, and one of those is that it is not
contained in that union with the human nature.It's extra.It continues to have an existence outside of that.
Yeah.So two thumbs up for the extra Calvinistic approach from Kevin.For it.All right.One last final question for you, Kevin.
As you look at the church today, the evangelical church in America today and around the world, when you think about all the doctrines that we hold dear as Christians, and you've just written this book, which is
sort of a systematic theology, but organized in these short chapters that can be read each day.
Really a kind of a unique resource, I think, in that regard, digging into some of the same things we've been talking about today, but in very bite-sized chunks.
As you think about the full spectrum of Christian theology, what would you say is a doctrine that is uniquely relevant today, that Christians listening, either whether they've spent a long time studying theology or never really picked up a theological book like this,
that they would do well to maybe take some time to read about and to think about because of the day in which we live.
The most immediate and obvious answer is all the doctrines connected to anthropology.You can see in the history of the church, there are different eras, sometimes even different centuries.
In the early church, fourth century, they're wrestling with the doctrine of the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea in Constantinople, which spills over to 431 in Chalcedon, and the doctrine of the two natures.
So you have Trinitarian theology, Christology, and lots of other doctrines in the Middle Ages.
But you can just see more clearly, even the Reformation, a lot about justification, its relationship to sanctification, and the sacraments, the doctrine of the Church.
You might say in the 20th century, there's the doctrine of inerrancy in the Scriptures, and So you can trace through lots of different epochs where certain doctrines get better, get refined, get clarified, and get more firmly established.
So Christians have been thinking about anthropology—and I just mean the doctrine of man—they've been thinking about doctrine of sin and image of God since the beginning.
It's not like Calvin didn't have whole sections on anthropology.
No, all of these people have anthropology.But there's no doubt, when you think about what are the most pressing kinds of questions people are asking today, and it's even different from 25 years ago when I was in
college, where it might be, well, like I said, can you trust the Bible?Can you trust the miracles?Is the Bible an error?And those will always be relevant questions.
You know, a lot of today, I think, on college campus is not just, well, is the Bible true, but is God even good? And what is a woman?What do I do with these feelings of sexuality?How do I understand my friend who is same-sex attraction?Is that okay?
Is it good?Is it a gift?Is it like a disability?Is it sin?These are questions of
Because it can be easy to hear those questions.I think, well, those are pastoral questions.So those are questions related to sin.
But I think as you take a look at them and what's underneath them, you start to realize there are real issues related to just what it means to be human.
Yeah, what does it mean to be human?And what does it mean that God created us?I mean, the two fundamental realities in our creation as human beings is one, in the image of God, and two, he made us male and female.That's right there in Genesis 1.
And most people would be happy to camp out on image of God.There's a lot to learn from that. What about that He made us male and female?
Maybe the second most important thing about us is that you're either a male or a female, and that has everything to do with how you follow Christ and how you relate to other people and how you relate to the world.
So certainly anthropology, the questions that people are asking, whether it's about homosexuality or abortion.I mean, just recently, a professor was talking about, well, ensoulment, and maybe the soul doesn't come into the body until some time later.
Well, no, we don't have souls that enter bodies.We are ensouled bodies, and we're embodied souls from the very beginning.And I like how somebody tweeted out there, if you think that ensoulment
your soul comes into your body sometime later, you are going to have heretical Christology.You can't have orthodox Christology and believe that, well, maybe the soul comes at the quickening or sometime later.
So that gets into Christology and anthropology.What I hope people will pick up from this whole conversation and this last question is You may want to avoid theology, but theology will not avoid you.It has a claim on you.
And anything worth arguing about is in some way a theological issue.
And I was going to say, after anthropology, the thing that I want Christians in our age to really, what they need to think about is just the precision that systematic theology forces on us.
We're not going to have meaningful, helpful conversations if people aren't willing to be precise, to use words carefully, to realize that these things likely aren't going to be solved on Twitter or be helped on Twitter.Once in a while they are.
Usually they're not.Because you have to move beyond hot takes.You have to move beyond, well, that person hates the people that hate me, so he must be right about something.Or if I nuance this, then I'm not sufficiently manly in this area.
No, we need to use definitions, careful words, precision.
Well, thanks for modeling that for us in this conversation and in your new book.It is such a helpful, precise, and yet accessible, understandable resource for us as we try to dig into what we believe.Thanks, Kevin.Thanks.
That was Kevin DeYoung on theology and the Christian life.For more, be sure to check out his new book with Crossway, Daily Doctrine, a one-year guide to systematic theology.
Pick up a print copy of the book for 30% off or get the e-book or audio book for 50% off directly from Crossway by visiting crossway.org slash plus.
And if you liked this interview, check out another conversation I had with Matthew Barrett entitled, The Doctrine on Which the Church Stands or Falls.To listen, click the link in the show notes or search for the episode wherever you listen.
For more audio content like this, subscribe to The Crossway Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player.If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a friend and leaving us a review.
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