In this thought-provoking episode, we navigate the complexities surrounding the historical evolution of Christian doctrine with Dr. Leighton Flowers. Unpack the layers of Augustine’s influence and the ongoing dialogue about free will versus divine determinism. This episode offers insights into the fractious debate among contemporary theologians and how Dr. Wilson’s work brings new light to these age-old questions. Tune in to grasp how these debates shape modern-day theological perspectives.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Baba Neart Live. I’m the pastor of Denver Bible Church. Dr. Leighton Flowers has been on this program previously. You can hear that at kgov.com slash Leighton. And I could give you his credentials, which perhaps we’ll do later, but audiences tend to zone out when you give a guest’s resume. So let me just say this. Right now on YouTube, Dr. Flowers is hosting the hottest internet channel for talking about God, Soteriology 101. Dr. Leighton Flowers, welcome back to Bob and Yart Live.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you, Bob. I appreciate it so much. It’s an honor to be here.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, there has been quite an uproar on the Internet over James White, who I debated years ago downtown Denver at the Brown Palace. James White versus an Oxford-educated theologian, Dr. Ken Wilson, and you’re right in the middle of it. So a week ago, we did talk about this on the air, but for those who missed that, can you describe what the dust-up is, and then I have a series of questions for you about it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Sure. Dr. Wilson was on our program, Soteriology 101, a couple of years ago. I guess it’s maybe 18 months ago or so. And we did an interview about the early church fathers and his particular dissertation, which is Augustine’s conversion from traditional free choice to non-free free will, which is another way of saying compatibilism.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. Go ahead. Not to interrupt, but you just said a mouthful for a radio audience. Augustine was converted from what to what? What?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, the name of his Oxford thesis is Augustine’s conversion from traditional free choice to non-free free will. And what he’s trying to say there in that title is that there was a conversion in Augustine’s teaching when he first converted from Manichaeanism to into Christianity. He began to defend free will. He adopted what the early church had adopted with regard to man’s responsibility in regard to the offer of the gospel. But over the course of his life, he had several different disputes, three major ones, the last of which was with the Pelagian controversy. And in that controversy, as often happens within debate, he was pushed to a further extreme than he had ever been before or the early church had ever been before. And that is to adopt a more deterministic way of salvation, which is more consistent with what we know as Calvinism today.
SPEAKER 03 :
So when Augustine went from free will to non-free free will, sounds like double talk to me. I’m just the talk show host.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, it’s another way of talking about what Calvinists call compatibilism, which is the concept and idea that man’s free will is somehow compatible with God’s determining what we will. In my estimation, it is doublespeak as well. It’s just not coherent in my estimation.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, there’s a Knox Theological Seminary in Florida. It was founded, I believe, by D. James Kennedy and his professor of New Testament, Dr. Samuel Lamerson. He and I had a 10-round written debate about these topics years ago. And in the first round, I asked him if he believed in free will, and he said yes. So I was so thrilled then. We did a radio interview before round two. And I asked him, well, a man who commits a crime, do you believe that he was free to not commit that crime? And he said, oh, absolutely not. No, he had no such freedom. Dr. Lamerson, you just said you believe in free will. Well, yes, he has free will, but he’s not free not to do what he does. He’s not even free not to desire what he desires or to think what he thinks. It’s all been decreed. That’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
What they’re ultimately saying is they’ve redefined free will instead of it meaning what we all think of when we think of free will, the ability to do otherwise. In other words, if I accepted the gospel, I could have rejected the gospel, or if I rejected the gospel, I could have accepted the gospel. That’s what we think of when we think free will. What the Calvinist has done, they’ve redefined it to mean doing what you want to do. And so if you do what you want, then that’s considered to be free, and thus you’re responsible for it. But the underlying presumption there is how do you want what you want? Well, your desires are decreed by God. In other words, God ultimately changes your nature to either make you want to receive the gospel or not. leaves your nature in the fallen condition, which he also decreed, by the way, to only reject the gospel. And so ultimately it’s just determinism kind of clouded with an affirmation of a semi-freedom of the will, but it’s not real freedom.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so really they’ve just punted from a free will to a free want, but like you just said, they believe that God has decreed their wants. And they could not, no person could want other than how they were decreed to want according to their theology. So compatibilist, also the term libertarian free will, to me these are like doubly redundant because your will is your ability to decide, and a free will is just sort of redundantly telling you what your will is, and to have libertarian free will That’s doubly redundant, and we only have to do that because people are not being forthright about what they actually believe.
SPEAKER 02 :
Even in the political world, you have this happen where the word liberal, for example, becomes a bad word, and it can’t get elected, so they change it to progressive or something of that nature. The same thing can happen in the theological world where a particular idea like determinism or something of that nature can become less popular. or denial of free will can become unpopular, and therefore you change the vernacular. And this is one of the reasons that Dr. Allen there at Southwestern says that Calvinists have the same vocabulary, but they have a very different dictionary. And they have defined some words very differently than what we typically think of them as, and sometimes it can get kind of confusing.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, so I’m writing that down, same vocabulary with a different dictionary. So the dispute then that arose between James White, who our audience knows of him real well, and Dr. Ken Wilson, he’s newer on the scene to our audience. How did James White become aware of Ken Wilson’s thesis?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, we asked him when he was on the program to possibly produce a kind of a layman’s summary of the thesis so that more people could have access to it because he knows seven languages and he uses all the languages here in the thesis. And so it’s impossible really to read through it unless you happen to know seven languages. And so we just asked him if he might consider producing a smaller volume, more of a summary for layman. And he did that within a few months, in fact.
SPEAKER 03 :
So that book, The Foundation of Augustinian Calvinism, that came after you interviewed Dr. Wilson?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we requested that he do that, and he was gracious enough to take his time and to publish that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow, thanks for doing that. That’s going to be a huge resource for the body of Christ to find out where this popular theology, where and how it originated.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and his thesis is really not brand new information. Obviously, he quotes from a lot of other scholars, Augustinian scholars, who say virtually the same thing with regard to the transition. I think what he’s bringing new to the table is that this transition didn’t happen earlier as some scholars used to think. It actually happened during the Pelagius controversy, because some people try to argue that it’s when he really began to study Romans that he transferred to this more compatibilistic, non-free-free will. But the truth is, it’s not actually until later in his life that he really changed over when he was beginning to debate Pelagius.
SPEAKER 03 :
I don’t recall at what point in his writing career Augustine wrote Confessions, and I read that decades ago. We recently took a quote from that and put it on our website at kgov.com slash Augustine or Augustine. And in there, he says, I mean, he admits to me it’s the biggest confession in confessions. He says whenever he finds a difficulty in the Bible, especially in Paul’s epistles, basically he says, I read them in light of Plato. I realized that whatever truth I had read in the Platonist, that’s what I find in the Bible. And then he goes on to emphasize a Platonic philosophical claim. So I don’t know, perhaps you do, Dr. Flowers, how early or late did Augustine write Confessions? But at least at that point, he was already looking to Greek philosophy for aid in interpreting the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Dr. Wilson suspects that he did not really transition his views until around 412, which would probably be after his writing of the Confessions. But still, he was a philosopher primarily. I mean, that’s not to say he didn’t do theological work. It’s just prior to becoming a Christian, he was in the philosophical world. He was influenced by, as you already mentioned, Neoplatonic views, Stoicism, and then Manichaeanism for a good 10 years of his life. And they are philosophically more deterministic. Obviously, there’s a lot of difference between even those three groups and very different than what we would know as Calvinism today. And so we’re not trying to say that he brought in all of the weird Gnostic perspectives. We’re just saying that the determinism within his philosophical training influenced how he interpreted Paul. And therefore, he introduced within the church for the very first time a more Calvinistic or compatibilistic view. reading of Romans 9 and other texts such as Ephesians 1 and the others that are hotly debated today.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow. So previously, more than a decade ago, we did a program. We’ve been on the air for 29 years, five days a week. We did a program based on the writings of Marston Forster, and they went through the first 300 years of the early church Christian writings. And they demonstrated, and we go through so many of the quotes on that program, and it’s right online at kgov.com slash 300, that the early Christian leaders believed that human beings had a functional will and could respond freely or not to God’s offer of salvation. And there was no such doctrine, nothing like irresistible grace, where God had to impose belief on someone. Right. When I listened to you and Dr. Ken Wilson in this dispute with James White, I was really excited to hear that really, for the most part, it’s the first four centuries where the church was teaching, clearly teaching with one voice, free will.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s correct. And it’s interesting you mentioned Marston and Forrester’s work. I have it sitting right here next to me, God’s Strategy in Human History, a great work. But the interesting thing about this is that you don’t have to even look to scholars like Forrester and Marston who agree with us theologically. You can actually look at Reformed scholars. There are quotes from, for example, Herman Bavinck, who was a well-known Reformed scholar who explicitly teaches that the early church was believed in the freedom of the will and that they believed that you could accept the proffered grace of God. That’s a quote there. They affirmed that you could accept or reject the proffered grace of God. And he even goes on to say the church’s teaching did not include a doctrine of absolute predestination. and irresistible grace. And I provide quotes from not only John Calvin, but from Lorraine Bettner and Sam Storms, who is a modern-day theologian who works with John Piper’s ministry, and others who are intellectually honest enough to admit what I think James White isn’t willing to admit, and that is the first time we see anything even remotely resembling irresistible grace or this total inability from birth concept, it’s found in Augustine’s work.
SPEAKER 03 :
That video that you produced, and what a great job you did narrating it also, about the dispute between James White and Ken Wilson, it has these quotes from these highly respected Reformed Church historians, and they, beyond any doubt, they confirm Ken Wilson’s thesis And Dr. James White, he’s just thrashing and desperate, but he’s just wrong, but he’s clinging to something that I think the information age is spelling the end of an argument for Calvinists. I think they will not be able to maintain any longer… that they have recovered church history, that the early church fathers were teaching what they teach. In fact, they were not. Augustine’s writings is what they emphasize in contradiction to the voice of the early church. So the argument isn’t really, and Dr. Flowers, I believe I heard you say this in your live broadcast, which, was that on Sunday or Saturday? You did a great…
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you. Yeah, we recorded Friday, and then it came up on Saturday, correct?
SPEAKER 03 :
But this does show that the Calvinists who argue that they’re the ones representing the teaching of the early church, that that is a false argument. That’s not valid.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s true. And I think what you have to emphasize is how much influence this one person, Augustine, had on the entire church. A lot of people have underestimated this. And so we’re not trying to say that Calvinists don’t go straight to the Scripture and don’t try to interpret the Scripture. We understand that there’s influence that has been brought into the church that gives credence to this interpretation versus the original, I think, understanding of the Scriptures. And even R.C. Sproul, who obviously is a well-known Calvinist, he said this. He says, it has been said that all of Western theology is a footnote to the work of Augustine. This is because no other writer, with the exception of the biblical authors, has had more influence on Christendom. When Martin Luther and John Calvin were accused of teaching new doctrine, they pointed to Augustine as an example of one who had taught the things they were teaching. Right. had a huge impact on the direction of Western Christianity.
SPEAKER 03 :
And when that accusation was leveled at them for their predestination, irresistible grace-type teachings, and they said, no, this isn’t a new teaching, and they point to Augustine, well, the same accusation then is leveled at Augustine in the 5th century AD. He’s the one who introduced the new teaching, and they’re just promoting the new teaching. not the original teaching on this topic.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s right. And a lot of people get confused in thinking that Martin Luther and John Calvin or Zwingli are the only ones who really reformed the church. And those are obviously the popular names, but there were others. Prior to Luther, there was men like, for example, Balthasar Hubmeier. who believed like you and I would with regard to soteriology. And he actually even went further than the reformers, believing in religious liberty, that we shouldn’t try to convince the atheist or the pagan with sword and fire, but with patience and prayer like Jesus does. Because Jesus wants their salvation. We should be patient with them. like Jesus is. And so there were people like this. And then after the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon, though he started very much more in the camp of Luther with regard to sociology, you see a development in Melanchthon’s work in his interpretation of Romans 9, which sounds a lot more like our interpretation of Romans 9 than the current Calvinist. And that’s why you see Lutherans kind of go in a different direction than a lot of the Calvinists are today. And so don’t mistake the Reformation as only being Calvinistic in its soteriology. I know we call that Reformed theology. But the truth is there were a lot of people involved in the reforming of the church that were not necessarily five-point Calvinists.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and there were practically wars going on between – The Calvinist type and the Arminian type reformers and entire communities and cities were on one side or the other of that dispute hundreds of years ago. Have you had Dr. Michael Brown on your program? We did.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, years ago we did have Dr. Brown on.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, yeah, he’s awesome. He’s been on this show, and I don’t know why this just occurred to me, but we were – We were presenting from Martin Luther’s writings his fierce anti-Semitism, his racism, which is absolutely horrific. And it’s, of course, a different topic, but it’s another reason I have to be disappointed in a man who should have been so great and continued so much that is false and even evil in the teachings of the Church. So could you tell me, do you know how James White found out about this? That part of the story I’m not aware of.
SPEAKER 02 :
According to his own testimony, he just talked about how people were tweeting so much about this new book that Wilson had put out, the smaller version of it, and that he got a copy of that smaller version and began to critique it publicly. And part of the problem with that was that in the preface of the book that he produced, Ken actually anticipated that if scholars wanted to critique this, that they should do so with the scholarly version, not the layman’s version, because it’s not produced for critique. It’s produced for information. And so that’s how it started. And he was complaining that it cost $100. And so Ken Wilson, out of his own pocket, because he doesn’t own the rights to the book, He bought it and sent it to James so that he could actually critique the scholarly work for himself. That’s kind of how the debate began.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, these university-published texts. We just interviewed a theologian trained at Cambridge, now at St. Andrews, Dr. Ryan Mullins. And yeah, and these books, they all cost $100 or so, and the authors get about $1 every time one is sold. So James Why accuses Ken Wilson of not being qualified. to discuss these issues. And that was really bizarre to hear. Can you share with us Ken Wilson’s credentials and this disagreement about whether scholars have actually done what Augustine asked them to do? He said, please read my works in order so folks can see how his ideas changed over time. And Ken Wilson has done that. So what’s with James White saying Ken Wilson is not qualified?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, this is what ad hominem attacks are. Ad hominem are a way to avoid actually answering the argument. Ad hominem means literally to the man. And so instead of talking about the argument that the person’s making, I can discredit the person that’s making the argument. And it’s really hard to do with a orthopedic hand surgeon who knows seven language who has an Oxford degree. But that doesn’t stop James White from trying, at least. I think he knows that’s not going to hold much water, which is one of the reasons I think he’s spent so many hours, I think 15 over the last month, hours trying to critique Ken Wilson’s work. And he does get some arguments in there, but he just doesn’t. He sprinkles it with a lot of ad hominem and rhetorical kinds of debate fallacies that you have to kind of weed through in order to find the factual arguments that he’s making or the biblical arguments that he’s making. And sometimes that’s difficult to kind of weed through directly. James is a little bit rough around the edges. I mean, he is an apologist and so he’s, he debates for a living. And so that can cause your, your, your skin to get a little tough possibly. And maybe, uh, he’d be a little bit more cantankerous than some of us like, but, um, or it could cause your skin to get a little thin too.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think we see both happening. Uh, The point you’re making is good, though, and it’s a danger for talk show hosts, too. And for 30 years, I’ve had to remember when I go home to see my wife and kids, okay, turn off the talk show mode. Don’t bring that home. But King David, he was a warrior. He killed people. He did it all the time. Started with Goliath, and then when he perceived he had a problem, he sure saw it backward. But He killed somebody because that’s what he was used to doing. And I think you’re making a very good point about James White. You debate everybody, you fight all the time, and it’s difficult to remember where the boundaries should be of polite, civil, respectful disagreement.
SPEAKER 02 :
He often accuses me of being imbalanced because I don’t debate other world religions. And I would just push back and just say, could it be that imbalance could also come from debating too much and not being involved in evangelism as my major livelihood, my career is as a director of evangelism for Texas Baptists. And so I don’t spend my livelihood or my work debating other Christians or other worldviews. I spend my livelihood debating. You know, sharing the gospel and doing evangelism. And that, I think, brings a proper balance to how we should address these issues.
SPEAKER 03 :
That is a weird one. So if you haven’t debated Zoroastrianism, you’re not qualified really to have what? A ministry? I don’t know.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s more of the ad hominem approach where I can focus on Leighton’s shortcomings versus Leighton’s arguments. And this is when we just push back and say, okay, if a more qualified person made the same argument, how would you answer it then? Because you’re avoiding the argument.
SPEAKER 03 :
I’m thrilled that you mentioned you have Morstan and Forster’s book there, God’s Strategy in Human History. I read that back before 1991 was our first radio broadcast, so back in the 80s. And they note in there, I’d love to read this quote from Oxford professor of historical theology, Alistair McGrath. And this is exactly what you have been teaching, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you have quoted this, but the pre-Augustinian theological tradition. So what Christian leaders and writers believed and taught before Augustine. The pre-Augustinian theological tradition is practically of one voice in asserting the freedom of the human will And Dr. Flowers, he’s an Augustinian sympathizer, Alistair McGrath, but he recognizes that Augustine taught something different than the Christian church did for the centuries before him.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Ken Wilson quotes over 80 scholars, none of which would consider themselves theologically necessarily in our camp. He purposely goes for scholars who are outside his tradition and outside his camp so that they can’t – in other words, you can’t blame it on bias. And James White has quoted how many scholars in support of what he’s saying? Zero. Zero. And how many scholars from the opposite camp?
SPEAKER 03 :
Zero. When you have testimony contrary to interest, that tends to be the most reliable testimony. No matter what discipline you’re in, if you’re evaluating scientific data or it’s a criminal case or historically or theologically, testimony contrary to interest is usually the most honest observation. And when you have a multitude of Calvinist-leaning, reformed theologians historians saying well you know what the early church didn’t teach what we teach That’s authoritative. And I think that even James White, I think, here’s a prediction, that James White will stop making this argument anew. I’m not saying he’ll do what we have called on him publicly to do, which is apologize to Dr. Wilson and retract his video, that very egregious video. That’s what he should do. And I’m not saying he will. I wish he would. I pray that he does. But I’m saying he’s not going to introduce this argument publicly. anew, afresh for the rest of his career. That’s my prediction.
SPEAKER 02 :
I can imagine if he gets into a live debate that he’s going to try to undermine the credentials of Dr. Wilson. I don’t think that he has any grounds to do that, and hopefully he’ll go that route.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, but my prediction is the bigger question. I don’t think he’s going to A fresh anew, like on a new day, a new argument, a new opponent. I don’t think he’s going to make this argument that the early church really agreed with the Calvinists. If you read between the lines and look at the tea leaves. I don’t think he’s going to continue that argument. Do you think he will? I know we’re just guessing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, he’s already on record saying that the epistle of Mothates to Diognetus was a monergist. I mean, he said, this is a second-century monergist. He said it really firmly right into the camera. Right, yes. And so he has already made that audacious claim going against all these other scholars that somehow Clement, because he speaks at the number of the lect, and somehow Mothates— which just means disciple in Greek. We don’t know who the name of the person is, but that early epistle, that he’s claiming both of them seem to have a more Calvinistic reading or belief simply because they refer to a couple of passages. Again, I think he’s reading them much like he misreads Paul, and he takes certain passages out of their context to make them say something they don’t. And of course, we go over this in several broadcasts there at our website.
SPEAKER 03 :
Dr. Leighton Flowers, your heart clearly is not just in debating theology, but in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. You were named the Director of Evangelism and Apologetics for Texas Baptist. That’s just awesome. So there are so many people who are not Baptists. People ask me, Bob— What denomination are you? We’re non-denominational for the most part. But I say, but we’re closest to Baptist for all the big denominations. But thank you. There are so many people who are not Baptist who greatly appreciate your work. It’s really awesome. There’s another book, I think a groundbreaking book, written by an assistant professor at Liberty University, Dr. Richard Holland. He’s an Arminian. His book is called God, Time, and the Incarnation. I just wanted to let you know about that book. You might be interested to interview Dr. Holland, but I think you will love him and love his work.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’m writing down that name right now. Thank you for the reference.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you’re welcome, Dr. Richard Holland. So the best way for listeners to keep in touch with your work, is it Soteriology 101?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, sir. That’s the best place to go for this information. Of course, if you’re interested more in my work in evangelism, texasbaptist.org, if you want to go there.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Leighton Flowers. What an honor to have you back on.
SPEAKER 02 :
My pleasure. God bless.
SPEAKER 03 :
So we are absolutely out of time. That was a great joy. Our website, kgov.com. You could click on the store and you will find Bible seminars on these very topics. And we teach verse by verse through so many of the books of the Bible. There’s so much there to enjoy. As always, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee. So this is Bob Enyart. May God bless you. Join Colorado Right to Life in the fight against abortion. Head over to CRTL.org to make a donation and abolish abortion in the state of Colorado.
