Podcast: Perichoresis, the Extra Calvinisticum, and Other Essential (Yet Neglected) Doctrines (Kevin DeYoung)

October 21, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Doctrines That Offer the Most Clarity, Confusion, and Existential Angst

In this episode, Kevin DeYoung talks 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.

Daily Doctrine

Daily Doctrine

Kevin DeYoung

To make systematic theology clear and accessible for the everyday Christian, this one-year guide breaks down important theological topics into daily readings. Each reading features concise and accessible writing and verses for meditation and application. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:19 - We’re All Theologians

Matt Tully
Kevin, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Kevin DeYoung
Great to be with you.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk a lot about theology, about the things that we believe about God 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 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 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, technical, complex, 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?

Kevin DeYoung
Here’s the analogy I often use. If you’re married or 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?” If 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.” And 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 ten 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 and you can’t have a relationship with her unless you know some of those things and some of those truths. So I would say to the person that I understand that the person may be intimidated. 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, 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 and 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?

04:52 - What Doctrine Has Been on Your Mind Lately?

Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s so helpful. Let’s get into some of the questions that are personal questions for you and how you think about various doctrines. The first one I have is 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, or maybe you’re preparing to teach on it. Is there one particular doctrine that you would say stands out in that regard?

Kevin DeYoung
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 or 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 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, obviously that’s wrong. That’s not the way we do church.” The voluntary principle is what it sounds like. It says that 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 nineteenth century Scottish Presbyterian. I wrote a blurb on the back of the Banner of Truth book. I love that book. But being a nineteenth century Presbyterian, Bannerman defends quite vigorously the establishment principle.

Matt Tully
Which is probably stretching for your students today.

Kevin DeYoung
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 that 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 Presbyterians in America, for example, amended 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 if I 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.

Matt Tully
That was the main category.

Kevin DeYoung
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 Coram 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 and the Bible is 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 times, 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 was that helping pastors?”

Matt Tully
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?

Kevin DeYoung
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. 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 as 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, there’s a little bit of a release valve and we give in to the temptation. 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 ten years ago, would say 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. As the Westminster Confession says, “all the motions thereof.” Even those unbidden feelings that we have. So sometimes people have said Christ was tempted in every way as we are, so—

Matt Tully
And yet without sin.

Kevin DeYoung
Without sin. Some will say, “So he must have had lustful thoughts. He would have gone to the beach and he would have started having lustful thoughts over women.” No, careful. Christ’s temptation, Owen says, was the outer, 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.

11:28 - What Doctrine Confuses You?

Matt Tully
That’s so interesting how even doctrines that relate to God himself—God, the Trinity, and 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?

Kevin DeYoung
Well, surely, Matt, there are no doctrines that confuse me. 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 being one person in two natures. Those are the most intellectually difficult. 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 are lots of these doctrines where you can do better by 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.

Matt Tully
They’re not intuitive.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, and the analogies don’t work. Don’t use the water, ice, vapor analogy. Don’t use the apple analogy: the peel, the core, 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 just exegetically, you bounce back and forth, it’s 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 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 that maybe that’s not there. But I’ve definitely swung back, and I 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 uses of the law are 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.

14:38 - Theological Ambiguity in Scripture

Matt Tully
This raises a good question that I think many Christians will struggle with, and it’s the question of 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 think about it, would you say that it’s possible that there are doctrines that Scripture is intentionally not 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?

Kevin DeYoung
A couple of thoughts there. One, often the purpose of theology is to give us the time-tested categories and terms that allow us to hold multiple truths at the same time. There’s a bad kind of biblicism. I know some people use the term “rigorously Bible” and say, “I want everything tested against the Bible.” And I’m 1,000 percent 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 category we need. For example, the Trinity. There’s one God. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the Father. Those seven statements. You can prove all of those seven statements clearly from Scripture. How are all of those things true at the same time? That’s when you say, “Well, I think we’re going to need the doctrine of taxis, we’re going to need inseparable operations, we’re going to 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, “The Bible never says, ‘Hear ye! Hear 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, “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 is with some different doctrines, yes. I think there are some doctrines we have to be honest and 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. 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, consider church polity. I think the Bible does tell us things about church polity.

Matt Tully
It’s possible to have a poorly organized church.

Kevin DeYoung
Yes, and to disobey. It’s not a free for all. It’s not just invent 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.

19:20 - What Doctrine Have You Struggled to Embrace?

Matt Tully
What’s a doctrine that you have struggled to embrace at some point in your life? So whether that was an emotional struggle or even a theologically driven struggle, but that you now have come to embrace and see is really important.

Kevin DeYoung
Certainly, though I grew up in a Reformed church, 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 at a public school. We were talking about Calvin—

Matt Tully
At a public school?

Kevin DeYoung
At a public school. I mean, it’s Grand Rapids in the 90s. It’s a Western Civ. class.

Matt Tully
He’s one of the important figures.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, and there’s lots of people that have Calvin in their background in a place like that in the 90s. 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.

Matt Tully
They were satisfied?

Kevin DeYoung
Yes. That is actually 100 percent 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.

Matt Tully
Again, a good Arminian.

Kevin DeYoung
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. At a more visceral level, and also in college, and it’s often when we’re young that we really wrestle with these. I went to one of the RCA schools, Hope College. Had a great time there, but it was a more mainstream school. 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 believed Paul wrote the—

Matt Tully
She believed Paul wrote the Bible.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. So it was unnerving to my faith, in particular the things about the Scriptures. I remember wrestling for at least a summer just thinking, God, 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”—if I could open it 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 am.” I’m just going to empty my mind and I’m going to build the foundation to get here.

Matt Tully
Start with one obvious truth that then can—

Kevin DeYoung
Yes, and then 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, and this is 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. And so it wasn’t that I found any of the particular arguments convincing.

Matt Tully
It wasn’t one thing.

Kevin DeYoung
No, but it was just that 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. Here’s somebody who’s also serious about her faith and believes these things and believes different things. So it didn’t hit me on an intellectual level; it hit me on a gut level. Okay, I can’t be convinced I’m right because I'm just really intense about it.

Matt Tully
Or smarter than anyone else.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. Right.

24:03 - What Doctrine Helps in Your Fight Against Sin?

Matt Tully
What’s been a doctrine that’s been particularly helpful to you in your fight against sin over the years?

Kevin DeYoung
I’ve come back to, and 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.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes we wonder, What does that even mean?

Kevin DeYoung
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 sanctification is just getting used to your justification. But it is true: you need to fight sin. This is a very Piperian insight—and Edwards and Chalmers’ Expulsive Affection. We need more than just a no; we need a better. You can’t just fight sin and say, “Don’t do that thing.” So, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” God is for my pleasure. We are wired to want to see beautiful things. And it’s the fight of faith to believe that impure image—wrong person, wrong place, wrong way—maybe gives a momentary flicker of beauty. And I could just say, “Don’t do it.”

Matt Tully
“It’s bad.”

Kevin DeYoung
“It’s bad.” But so often it’s like, Well, if I look, I would like it; but I shouldn’t do it because it’s bad.

Matt Tully
We try to deny the reality that there is joy, in a sense, in that.

Kevin DeYoung
And it’s not enough to say, “I like it, but it’s bad.” But to say, “And there’s something much better.” And actually it’s Satan who 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 him, 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.

26:52 - Have You Ever Overemphasized a Specific Doctrine?

Matt Tully
It brings to mind that famous Lewis quote, how 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 twenty years ago? You may have overestimated its importance or you were just too stuck on it, perhaps. But now, today, you would say 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.

Kevin DeYoung
I haven’t 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. That book came out in either 2008 or 2009. And last year I preached through Revelation. And I had preached through Revelation almost twenty years ago. It was like 2006. And so I went back and I would look at those sermons, and thankfully, 98 percent of my exegetical conclusions were still the same.

Matt Tully
No major cringe moments?

Kevin DeYoung
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. I was reading Rob Bell, I was reading Brian Mclaren, and it was focused on the Emergent church. 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, 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. The theological nerds—the people like me, who 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. While I want that, 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 of it’s like you give to a toddler an Apache helicopter. They have all this doctrine—

Matt Tully
It’s an amazing machine.

Kevin KeYoung:
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 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.

Matt Tully
Because doctrine, in the hands of an immature Christian, can hurt people.

Kevin DeYoung
It can really hurt people. It can be divisive. I went through, like a lot of people, some of the stage cage Calvinism. I don’t think I meant to, but I certainly did. I can remember in college talking to people in my campus ministry group and 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. That question came up in Romans 9. Let’s turn there. ‘Who are you to talk back to God?’” And there would be tears.

Matt Tully
You were just waiting the whole time for that question.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. I just set them up, and hopefully I 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 the people in the audience or congregation or Sunday school class are not just hearing and thinking, I have some intellectual objections. You answer the intellectual objections. Therefore, I accept. But I’ve realized after years of pastoral ministry that they’re sitting there thinking, But my son is twenty-five, 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 to understand those personal hurts and pains that people always bring to doctrine.

32:15 - Aseity

Matt Tully
Maybe a last few questions here. This will be maybe a little bit more machine gun style. So this will be fun. I’m going to say a doctrinal word—a very technical-sounding, theological word—that maybe some people have never heard before, and I’d love to have you try to explain them as succinctly as possible, like you’re talking to a five-year-old.

Kevin DeYoung
Really like I’m talking to a five-year-old?

Matt Tully
We’ll say five to ten. Somewhere in this young age range.

Kevin DeYoung
Because I have a five-year-old and a ten-year-old.

Matt Tully
Okay, let’s say ten.

Kevin DeYoung
Okay, let’s go for ten. I can do a little bit more with that. With the five-year-old, I might just say—

Matt Tully
I should have thought that you have almost every age available for this exercise.

Kevin DeYoung
If my five-year-old asks about inseparable operations, I’d be very impressed. Okay, I got my ten-year-old.

Matt Tully
So the first word: aseity.

Kevin DeYoung
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 . . . .” 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.

Matt Tully
Well done. This one’s a little harder: perichoresis.

Kevin DeYoung
I’m thinking my ten-year-old would really be interested in perichoresis. We do not want to explain perichoresis as the cosmic dance. So don’t do that. But I’m just going to assume my ten-year-old was not tracking.

Matt Tully
People might not know the reference there.

Kevin DeYoung
Well, and a lot of good people have said that. And well, we got the English word choreography from that, and it’s like the three persons of the Trinity who are waltzing together. That’s too much social Trinitarianism, so here’s what I would say, knowing that in explaining these doctrines there are always lots of safeguards. But with a ten-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 metaphysical (I probably wouldn’t use that word with my ten-year-old), same kind of spiritual space. Another way to think of it maybe is like circulation. 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—

Matt Tully
You can’t just have a relationship with Jesus.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. We never have one person of the Trinity without having all three persons of the Trinity.

Matt Tully
Would you say it’s accurate to say that the members of the Trinity need each other?

Kevin DeYoung
I would not say it that way. I’m 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.

Matt Tully
Like a deficient version.

Kevin DeYoung
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.

Matt Tully
It’s probably an absurd question, and it’s almost maybe akin to what would a circular square look like?

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah.

Matt Tully
The Trinity, by definition, is the three persons. And so there’s no way in which they could exist apart from one another.

Kevin DeYoung
Right.

36:29 - Eternal Generation

Matt Tully
Another one, and 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. That’s “eternal generation.”

Kevin DeYoung
A lot of the conversation started to pick up in 2016 with the Trinity debates, 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?

Matt Tully
What makes them distinct?

Kevin DeYoung
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 learned more in it and a lot of it I think got—

Matt Tully
Would you say that the conversation maybe even broadly moved forward through those debates?

Kevin DeYoung
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 what we can say about the Father is that he has authority, and the Son submits to the Father, and that’s what distinguishes the Father from the Son. Now, just setting aside there, certainly in time the Son submits to the Father.

Matt Tully
We see Jesus using that kind of language.

Kevin DeYoung
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 in 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, it’s one of the ways we distinguish their 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. The Council of Nicaea, in dealing 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 are debates on how we want to translate that, but there’s 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.

Matt Tully
There was a time when he was not.

Kevin DeYoung
And Arius might not even use the word time. He might have said even somehow before our human understanding of time, there just 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—

Matt Tully
There’s got to be a moment of that happening.

Kevin DeYoung
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 did the Father marry? She had a baby and then he existed?

Matt Tully
Is this the same thing as his virgin birth?

Kevin DeYoung
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 and giving and communicating his essence to the Son. So 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.

Matt Tully
So tricky. This is where we start to feel like our minds are reaching the limits of what we can comprehend.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. We start saying it’s not physical and it’s not temporal. It’s eternal.

Matt Tully
Those two qualities happen to be universally relevant for any father/son relationship that we understand.

Kevin DeYoung
Yes. How we understand it.

41:11 - Extra Calvinisticum

Matt Tully
It’s just so hard. Okay, one last one last question. 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 the funnest sounding doctrines. It maybe depends on where you fall on the theological spectrum, but the extra Calvinisticum.

Kevin DeYoung
If you’re going to have Calvin, wouldn’t you want some extra Calvinisticum? At the pastor’s 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, “Meh. Impeccability is probably enough.”

Matt Tully
This is your first pastor’s conference.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. So, the extra Calvinisticum. Am I talking to my ten-year-old?

Matt Tully
Well, we’ve kind of lost the ten-year-old.

Kevin DeYoung
We’ve lost the ten-year-old.

Matt Tully
The ten-year-old is playing Switch or something now at this point.

Kevin DeYoung
This really would be hard to explain to a ten-year-old, but it is exactly the sort of question a ten-year-old would ask. Here’s how I was going to start my talk, and maybe I’ll give this talk some other time. If your ten-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, it is never completely contained by the human nature. So the “extra” means outside of, beyond the bounds of the human nature. Jesus is in heaven. He ascended.

Matt Tully
He’s physically in heaven.

Kevin DeYoung
He’s physically—okay, where is heaven?

Matt Tully
Wherever heaven is.

Kevin DeYoung
Some place out there that you can’t just get in a plane and fly there.

Matt Tully
But we would say Jesus’s physical body is somewhere.

Kevin DeYoung
It’s somewhere in the place that we call heaven. He ascended into there. And this is, again, I’m not talking to a ten-year-old anymore, but this is a huge disagreement between Reformed and Lutherans, because the 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 the body and blood of Christ are “in, with, and under these elements.”

Matt Tully
Consubstantiation.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. It’s sometimes called consubstantiation. That’s different from transubstantiation, but “con,” “with.” 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 Lutheran—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 a Reformed person, “Look, you are too bound by reason and your logical deductions. 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. The extra Calvinisticum, and it was called that by its opponents.

Matt Tully
You’ve mentioned the “extra.” What’s the “Calvinisticum”?

Kevin DeYoung
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. 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 because 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—

Matt Tully
In his divine nature, he’s omnipresent.

Kevin DeYoung
He didn’t. And we don’t want to say the divine nature somehow left, and 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, he 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, 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.

Matt Tully
So two thumbs up for the extra Calvinisticum from Kevin.

Kevin DeYoung
Oh yeah. I’m for it.

47:26 - What Doctrine Is Uniquely Relevant Today?

Matt Tully
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, and 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. It’s really 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, 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?

Kevin DeYoung
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, like the fourth century where they’re wrestling with the doctrine of the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea in Constantinople, which spills over to 431 and Chalcedon and the doctrine of the two natures. So you have Trinitarian theology, Christology, and lots of other doctrines in the Middle Ages. And even in the Reformation it’s a lot about justification and its relationship to sanctification, the sacraments, the doctrine of the church. We might say in the twentieth century, there’s the doctrine of inerrancy and 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.

Matt Tully
It’s not like Calvin didn’t have whole sections on anthropology.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, 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 twenty-five years ago when I was in college, where it might be, like I said, Can you trust the Bible? Can you trust the miracles? Is the Bible inerrant? Those will always be relevant questions. A lot of today, I think, on college campuses is not just, Is the Bible true? but Is God even good? What is a woman? What do I do with these feelings of sexuality? How do I understand my friend who has 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 anthropology.

Matt Tully
It can be easy to hear those questions and 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.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean that God created us? 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, and there’s a lot to learn from that. But 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. Just recently, a professor was talking about ensoulment and maybe the soul doesn’t come into the body until sometime 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 your soul comes into your body sometime later, you are going to have heretical Christology.” You can’t have orthodox Christology and believe that 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 that after anthropology the thing that I want Christians in our age to really 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.

Matt Tully
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.

Kevin DeYoung
Thanks.

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