Podcast: The Forgotten Yet Foundational Doctrine of Aseity (Samuel Parkison)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How God’s Aseity Impacts Our View of God, His Grace, and Our Salvation

In this episode Dr. Samuel Parkison explains the doctrine of aseity and how God’s plentitude of life impacts the way we approach theology. Dr. Parkison unpacks how understanding aseity impacts not just our pursuit of theology, but our view of worship, God’s grace, the humanity of Christ, and our adoption.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• What Does Divine Aseity Actually Mean?
• The Danger of Rushing to Practical Application
• Why Is This Doctrine So Unknown?
• Is God Distant and Cold Towards Us?

00:35 - What Does Divine Aseity Actually Mean?

Matt Tully
Samuel Parkison is associate professor of theology at the Gulf Theological Seminary in the United Arab Emirates. He’s the author of several books, including The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God from Crossway. Samuel, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Samuel Parkison
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
This new book that you’ve written is about a doctrine that I think is probably pretty unfamiliar to most Christians. They maybe have never heard of the doctrine. Actually, when I typed it in my notes, my spell check didn’t recognize the word, and I had to change it a few times. And that that doctrine is the aseity of God. How would you summarize that in two paragraphs for someone who’s not familiar?

Samuel Parkison
It comes from Latin—

Matt Tully
As the best doctrines do.

Samuel Parkison
That’s right. The more unfamiliar doctrines typically tend to use Latin. A se just means of self in Latin, and so it’s the doctrine that says that God is of himself. That’s an unfamiliar doctrine with a description that still sounds unfamiliar.

Matt Tully
It still feels a little bit unclear. What does that even mean?

Samuel Parkison
A confusing doctrine with a confusing explanation. Basically, what that means is that God is not dependent on anyone or anything, because he has life in himself. Now, I give that longer definition because sometimes theologians will refer to the doctrine of God’s independence as if it’s a synonym of aseity. I don’t think it is. To say that God is independent means that he’s not dependent on anyone or anything. He’s not contingent. And that’s all true, and that’s part of aseity. But the problem with defining this perfection of God simply by describing God’s independence is that it still requires not God. It still requires that which is not God in order to make sense of the doctrine. And if we’re talking about God in himself, we need to have categories and descriptions that don’t require that which is not God in order to make it make sense.

Matt Tully
Independence is like a negative way of describing God’s relation to everything else. Whereas you’re saying that there’s also this positive side—God is life itself.

Samuel Parkison
Yes. That’s the way I would say it positively: God is independent because he is the plenitude of life. We use words like plenitude, profuse, abundance, super abundance. These are the kinds of words that theologians in the history of the church have loved to use because it gives you a picture not simply that God is separate from all else that exists but that he is brimming with life, you could say.

03:35 - The Danger of Rushing to Practical Application

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting to hear you describe this because I know my first reaction when I first encountered this doctrine, and probably that of many others, is that there is a sort of intuitive sense to it, as we think about the Christian conception of God and what we’ve been taught and how we talk about God. But as you press into the doctrine and really seek to understand what exactly it is saying and how it might affect how I’m thinking about God in all these other areas, you start to realize this is maybe even more than I’ve thought before. But before we get to that, I thought it was really interesting in the book that at the end of your introduction, you have an interesting appeal to the reader. You write, "Resist the temptation to put a utilitarian requirement on this doctrine, as if the time spent meditating on it is only worth the use it will be for your practical life." So, you’re kind of asking all of us to just take a minute and think and meditate on this idea, this doctrine about God, but not try to rush to application. That kind of cuts against a lot of the ways that I know I was brought up as a young person in theology classes at church or in a Bible study. So often we do want to get to that practical application. Why are you saying this, and why is that an important way for us to approach this doctrine?

Samuel Parkison
I’m glad you asked that question because this is something of a personal crusade of mine, to try to get Christians to resist the temptation of making theological contemplation a means to some other end. That is the assumption that you find very often. Before I transitioned into full-time academic ministry, I was a pastor for several years. It’s not uncommon for pastors (and I’ve experienced this not only at my church but other churches that I’ve preached at) for church members to come up before you preach (and I think they think that they’re encouraging me) and say, "Always remember, pastor, to give us the So what?of the sermon." And on one level I can understand that, but I don’t want us to think that theological contemplation, thinking about God, and meditating on God is only useful insofar as it can be used to some other lesser end. That’s to swap, I would say, the the means and the end. The first famous question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is, "What is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. If that’s true, and I think it is, then contemplating God and meditating on God is not a means to some other end; it is the ultimate end. It is the thing that will make heaven heaven—an enjoyment, a contemplative sight of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. It reminds me of this episode in the Gospels where Jesus is with Mary and Martha. Martha is busy doing things, she’s pursuing the active life. She’s got her hands, and she is frustrated that Mary is just sitting there at Jesus’s feet listening to him. And she wants for Mary to get up and actually help. And Jesus’s response is to say that Mary has chosen the better portion. And I think that that is right, and that contemplation of God—not as a means to an end, but as the end itself—has kind of fallen on hard times. So I’m not trying to pit practical Christian living against theological contemplation, but just elevate theological contemplation as a worthy exercise in and of itself. And one of the things that I mention in the book is that you will get all sorts of personal devotional benefits from doing that, but that’s not the reason why we do these things. The reason why we take time aside to simply think about God and the plenitude of his life is because God has made us for that purpose, and it will move us to worship. So if you really, really wanted to get the So what? of something like theological contemplation, it would be it is the lifeblood of worship. To think about God in this contemplative way is the lifeblood of worship.

Matt Tully
It will lead to transformation in our lives, but, ironically, the goal is not transformation first and foremost. It’s to know God.

Samuel Parkison
It’s communion. It’s to know God in this intimate way, and you can’t do that if you’re not thinking hard about God and how he has revealed himself to us.

Matt Tully
At one point in the book, you share a story about your eight-year-old son asking a theological question, as our young kids often do. They ask the best questions. Take us to that story.

Samuel Parkison
What I didn’t say in the book is that my wife had told me that my son had asked her a similar question at an earlier time, so I did have a category in my head for this question, but it came out of nowhere. We’re sitting there on the couch. I have no idea what we were talking about before or after, but out of nowhere he just said, "Dad, if God is eternal and if we have eternal life in Jesus, but God existed before us, does that mean that God is more eternal than us?" Which is a really good question. What does eternal life mean if it started at some point and God is eternal? And that was his follow up question: What does eternal even mean? If God is more eternal, what does eternal mean if God’s eternity means he existed before us?"

Matt Tully
God has an eternity that goes both back and forward, and ours is just going forward. So he’s trying to get at whether or not there is a difference there.

Samuel Parkison
Yeah. Is there a difference there? And I think the question behind the question is, What’s the relationship between God’s eternity and our eternity? Is God more eternal? And if so, what does that mean?

Matt Tully
I love how kids can just ask questions like that. What is it about those kinds of questions? What do you think is going on there?

Samuel Parkison
The meaning of the word philosophy—philo, love; sophia, wisdom—it’s the love of wisdom. This is the thing that modern professional philosophers are so bad at—it’s not simply out of a love for wisdom. My son, Jonah, asked the question because it’s a question that occurred to him and he wanted to know the answer to it. To kind of tie back to an earlier part of the conversation, one of the things that happens as we grow up is we become far more utilitarian and pragmatic, and that is a useless question, in one sense. It’s not a question that is serviceable. It’s not a question that you can just take and make it serviceable to some practical task of something that you’re doing in your day. It’s a question that you’re only going to ask it if you want to know the answer to it. And those are the only kinds of questions that kids ask.

Matt Tully
Yeah. That’s so true. Sometimes we wish they did ask slightly more practical questions. But instead, they’re just overflowing with questions that are just interesting.

Samuel Parkison
Yes. And the thing that I try to draw out in the book is that those deep questions about God and reality and metaphysics—those kinds of questions that you accidentally stumble into as a kid—are connected to all of the other questions. Like, Why do I always get hungry? I eat and then I get hungry again, and then I eat and then I get hungry again.

Matt Tully
Why do I need to sleep?

Samuel Parkison
Why do I need to sleep? Can I go outside and play with my friends? What are we having for lunch? All of the questions are interrelated to the deepest questions, because in God we live and move and have our being, and everything is connected in these deep and profound ways. And so sometimes those questions that can feel like a jarring, sharp turn in the conversation from kids can help us to wake us from our stupor. That’s why I found it such a useful question to be the hook, if you will, for this whole little book. It’s a very little book, just to be clear. You could probably read it in one sitting. But that’s the question that kind of ties the whole thing together. I found it very useful for that reason.

12:43 - Why Is This Doctrine So Unknown?

Matt Tully
Let’s keep digging into this doctrine of aseity. You would argue that this is a foundational doctrine for the Christian faith—this idea of God’s independence and God’s fullness of life in himself. And if that’s true, though, why is it a doctrine that so few of us have heard about? Why is this so under-understood in the church?

Samuel Parkison
I think one of the reasons is because, again, I don’t want to keep beating the same drum, but I do think it’s because we don’t really think about theology in an appropriate way. We think about theology in terms of how it can be useful for us. But if we pursue theology in the proper order, which I would say is to think about God and then all things in relation to God, not the reverse. We don’t come to God with our preconceived ideas or situations or problems and then seek to find a solution in God. But rather, we’re thinking about who God is first in himself and then all things in relation to God. So if that was more of an instinctual way of studying theology, I think that these kinds of doctrines would be more intuitive. I would say maybe they would be as intuitive for moderns as they were for pre-modern Christians. And I’m talking about the Reformation period and earlier. Because it’s the kind of doctrine that is suggested from the very beginning pages of Scripture. In the beginning, God created not God. If we’re thinking about theology in that way—of theology is about God and then all things in relation to God—then we would be asking questions like, What kind of being is a kind of being that creates everything out of nothing? The only kind of being that could do that is a being that has life in himself. He doesn’t get life from anyone else, and his life doesn’t diminish by creating anything else. The only kind of God that could have that kind of relationship to creation is an a se God—a God that has aseity, that has life in himself. So, I think that’s part of it. I think we try to tackle theology in the opposite way. We don’t think about God first. We think about God as a solution to our problems. We’re thinking about our questions, our realities first, and then we think about God.

Matt Tully
That is just so true to even our experience of life though, and even our experience or encounter with the gospel. So often that is how the Lord draws us to himself, through this awareness of our sin. And then we encounter doctrines that speak to those needs that we have. But I think I hear you saying that there are times, though, we need to step back from that kind of lived experience of our lives and of God himself and ask some of these deeper questions and explore these things. You mentioned Scripture. Maybe someone listening right now would be thinking, This is sounding pretty philosophical. This is sounding a little abstract. Where is this doctrine in Scripture? Where’s a verse that you can point me to on that front? How would you answer that question?

Samuel Parkison
There’s a handful. I would look at a trajectory of biblical revelation. I would go to creation first. That would be the first place I would go to. Who is this God that creates everything out of nothing and is not diminished by it? I would look to the contrast that God positively makes all throughout Scripture. In Psalm 50 Yahweh talks about how he doesn’t need the sacrifices of the people. He owns the cattle on a 1,000 hills. In other words, he’s not enriched by us in our worship at all. And then you see that kind of posture all throughout the Prophets as well. Isaiah has these passages where God is positively mocking the pagan nations and Israel (that is acting like a pagan nation), carrying around these gods. And he talks about how you take this tree and you cut it down, and then half of it you burn to keep yourself warm. And then the other half of it, you carry around and you worship. And so he’s mocking. He’s saying, You’re god that you’re expecting to save you, you have to carry around. He’s dependent on you. He’s altogether dependent on you. Look how special you are! God is drawing a contrast between those gods and himself as the God who doesn’t need to be carried around. He carries around. Everything exists according to his will. He’s sovereign over all. That would be the doctrine stated negatively. But then you see certain passages stated positively, like in Exodus 3, for example. This is a very classic passage where Moses is given Yahweh’s name. Yahweh, the the one who is I AM. And that is such an important passage because, first of all, you see the doctrine hinted at even by the fact that this encounter that Moses has with God, when the angel speaks to him from the burning bush, all of the elements are speaking to this reality. He’s drawn by the fact that there is a bush that is on fire, but it’s not consuming the bush itself. And so this flame, this fire burns without needing to consume anything to burn. No fire that we experience in this world functions like that. You need fuel for fire.

Matt Tully
And just for the listeners—that’s an explicit detail that Moses gives us in that account, that the bush is not consumed.

Samuel Parkison
Yes. And I think it’s suggestive of the fact that this is a God who lives without needing to consume fuel. This is a fire that burns without consuming fuel. So then as Moses is talking to him, Yahweh is sending him on this mission to go be the instrument that God is going to use to deliver his people from Egyptian slavery. And Moses says, "Who should I say sent me? Give me a name to give to these people." And when God gives him a name, he doesn’t give him a title or a name that relates him to anyone or anything else. If I’m trying to describe myself, I might say that I’m father or husband or professor or church member.

Matt Tully
We so quickly jump to those relative descriptors.

Samuel Parkison
Yes. And there is no relative descriptor to name God in himself. Even if I say I’m a human, that is the most basic thing that I could say about myself.

Matt Tully
It’s a category that you get to now slide into.

Samuel Parkison
Yes. It’s the most basic thing I could say about myself, but it still implies that I am defined in my relation to other things, like other humans. I fit into this broader category. It doesn’t work like that with God. God is a category all to himself. So, when he describes himself, all he can say is, "I AM." He names himself according to his property of existence. He’s the one who simply is. And that is going to be important for the whole of Scripture, that God is defined and God is named definitionally as the one who simply exists. In the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Hebrew text, which would’ve been the primary Bible that Jesus used when he walked this earth—that’s how they translate this whole interaction with Yahweh. It’s that he’s the one who exists in himself. So those would be the Old Testament passages. I’ll stop there and see what thoughts you had.

Matt Tully
That does lead into another question I had, which is passages in Scripture that maybe would seem to suggest something different than aseity for God or something more complex, perhaps, than how you’ve explained this doctrine. I just think of even the incarnation. How do we wrap our minds around the idea that on the one hand, God is completely independent, that he has no needs, he doesn’t get anything from us because he is the fountain of all things, and yet reconcile that with the idea of God in the flesh, needing his mother’s care and support initially, needing food? We see the Gospels emphasizing Christ’s dependence in so many different ways. So, how do we think about that as believers?

Samuel Parkison
It’s really important. I’ll simply say that all throughout the history of the church, it’s customary to talk about the two mysteries of the Christian faith. We say the two mysteries of the Christian faith because if you don’t affirm these mysteries, you’re not a Christian. It’s that central to the identity of Christianity. And the two mysteries are the mystery of the Trinity, three persons in one nature, and the second mystery is the mystery of Christ, two natures in one person. And both of those mysteries are interrelated and they come to us at the same time. We don’t know that God is triune until God shows up in a Trinitarian way, in the missions of the Son taking on human nature and the Holy Spirit being poured out at Pentecost. That’s how we learn that God is triune. So these two mysteries are deeply interwoven. And so to your question, Does the incarnation and Christ’s human nature imply a problem for this doctrinal affirmation of divine aseity? I would say no, as long as we understand the way that Scripture reveals the relationship between these two natures. The person that we see in the Gospels, that second person of the Trinity, is the one who is eternally begotten from the Father. He’s God. He is, as the Nicene creed says, "God from God, light from light, very God from very God begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made." We talked about creation—"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . . God said, ’Let there be light.’" He’s the "said."

Matt Tully
John helps us understand that Jesus is the "said."

Samuel Parkison
Yeah, he’s the "said." That "said" is a "who," and it’s that second person of the Trinity. He is eternally begotten from the Father. So, the one that we see lying in a manger is the eternally begotten one. He is God and he’s also human. He’s fully human. Everything that goes into being human is true for him. He’s got a will that is a human will that is subject to the law of God. He prays, and he suffers, and he learns obedience, as the author of Hebrews says. He changes, he grows, he dies. He has passions and he’s moved in all sorts of ways. And all of that is true. And it doesn’t take away from the fact that what it means for God to be God is for God to be of himself. He is a se. And the reason why these doctrines are relevant to talk about together is because our salvation is wrapped up in this whole thing. What the New Testament teaches us is that this God who is of himself, who has life in himself, that this divine life flows in a particular way. It flows as Father eternally generating, or eternally begetting, his Son, and the Father and the Son eternally breathing out their Spirit in love. That’s the way that the New Testament describes these things. One of the passages that’s really crucial in this book is John 5:26. This is after Jesus has healed a man on the Sabbath, and he’s elicited the ire of the Jews of his day for breaking the Sabbath, according to them. And so as he’s talking about his ministry and the right that he has to do these things from the Father, he grounds all of the realities that he is doing and that he’s going to do in the history of redemption, which includes judgment of all people and raising the dead, he grounds all of those activities in a theological reality. He says in John 5:26, "As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life." And what I always point out to people is if you put a period there, it would be altogether unremarkable. For Jesus to say, "As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life," that’s an unremarkable thing, because that’s true of everything. As the Father has aseity, as the Father has life in himself, he’s granted everything to have life.

Matt Tully
We could say that about ourselves.

Samuel Parkison
We must say that about ourselves. But that’s not what Jesus says. He says, "As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself." So if this whole little phrase of "in himself" is teaching us about the doctrine of divine aseity, Jesus is saying the Son has this doctrine of divine aseity. And the Son has this attribute of aseity from the Father. So, when we ask the question, When did the Father give the Son to have life in himself? The answer is whenever the Father had life in himself. Which there is no when. As the Father has divine aseity, so he has granted the Son also to have divine aseity. So, the Son has this attribute of life in himself, and he has this attribute of life in himself from the Father.

Matt Tully
And what’s striking to me is that the Son, Jesus, is saying this as a human on earth. And many of these people know that he was a boy and he was a baby at one point. And I guess that is the mystery of the incarnation.

Samuel Parkison
Yes. And what he’s saying there presupposes that his life exists beyond the bounds of his human flesh. That doctrine of divine aseity informing this doctrine that we call eternal generation—the fact that the Son is eternally begotten from the Father. Both of these doctrines are really important, and the reason why I say that it is the foundation for our salvation is it answers the question, How is it possible for the Son to give us eternal life? That’s the promise all throughout the Gospel of John. He says that he came to give life. In John 6 he says, "If you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you’re going to receive eternal life." So all throughout the Gospel, the invitation is for finite creatures to receive eternal life. And how is that possible? How is it possible for Jesus, as a human, to give eternal life? Well, it’s possible because what he gives is himself, and he’s the one who is eternally begotten from the Father. So, to come back full circle to answer my son’s question, the answer is yes, God is more eternal, if by more we mean God’s eternity is different than our eternity. God has life in himself. There is never a time that God was not God. It is more eternal in that sense. It’s more eternal in the sense that our eternal life has an analog relationship to God’s eternal life. It’s not exactly the same thing.

Matt Tully
But it’s still a creaturely eternal life. It’s a contingent eternal life.

Samuel Parkison
Yes. And that is the relationship between these things. The whole work of salvation is yes, justification; yes, penal substitution; yes, all of these forensic legal categories of we were guilty in the sight of God and Jesus provides the atonement for our sin. All of that is true. But the ultimate means to that is for us to be brought into full communion with God. And so the whole work of salvation is getting at this work of what God has by nature, what God is by nature; namely, life. We get to become, we get to experience, we get to participate in that by grace. So, what God is by nature, we are by grace; namely, life, eternal life. We are coming to share, we’re coming to have a be-graced participation in the eternal life that is the Son’s from the Father eternally. And that’s why we’re not really talking about salvation unless we talk about adoption. Galatians 4 is this really important passage: "In the fullness of time God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those who are under law, and he’s put the Spirit of the Son into our hearts crying ’Abba Father.’" So, we are adopted as sons and daughters into this inner loving life of God, so that we get to experience by grace what is the Son’s by nature.

30:36 - Is God Distant and Cold Towards Us?

Matt Tully
That’s beautiful. Samuel, as you think about the times that you’ve explained this—taught this to your students or in a Sunday school class at church or trying to preach this doctrine—what are some of the most common misunderstandings of God’s aseity that you’ve encountered that you would want to guard against as people hear you?

Samuel Parkison
That’s a good question, but it’s a hard question because, like you said, the biggest struggle with this doctrine is not necessarily that people have bad understandings about it; it’s that they don’t have a category for it at all. So I’ve not found a lot of resistance to this doctrine. I have found it is a really stimulating doctrine and that it makes sense of a lot of other doctrines. If there would be a misunderstanding, it would simply be the first thing that we talked about, that aseity can be synonymous with independence. And that would simply be only half of the doctrine. The problem is people talk about the doctrine in terms of only half of what it actually is.

Matt Tully
I could hear somebody hearing you explain this doctrine and maybe it is more of that negative, independence angle on it. And maybe their assumption from that would be that it implies that God is distant, that he is cold, or there’s a certain distance from us as creatures and him as the Creator. Is that something that we should sense in this doctrine?

Samuel Parkison
Thank you for saying that, because that is a really relevant thing. Sometimes people feel this way when you talk about God’s immutability, the fact that he’s unchanging, and, yes, his independence. He’s not contingent on us. He’s not related to us in the same way that we’re related to him. We are completely dependent on him.

Matt Tully
We talk so much about a personal relationship with God. And that is important. But when you start to think about God in these terms, we just get the sense that the way I think about God, the way that I am relating to God in this emotional or personal way, is not the way that he would be relating to me. It starts to maybe sometimes undercut some of the language even that we use about this relationship.

Samuel Parkison
Absolutely. And it does feel like that sometimes for my students. In fact, I’m teaching theology I this semester, and that means we cover a lot of these doctrines first. And it can be jarring for students. They may have grown up in the Christian faith thinking that personal relationship with God means that I relate to God in the same kind of push-pull, mutually impactful relationship that I have relationships with everybody else, where I’m affected by them and they are affected by me. And then you’re told, Hey, actually, God’s not dependent on you in any way whatsoever. God is not contingent upon you. His mood is not contingent upon you. He is the fullness of life in himself. He is divine blessedness.

Matt Tully
Sometimes the way we can even talk about things like personal devotions is this idea that God is waiting for you. He wants to meet with you. And if you don’t meet with him, we wouldn’t say it like this, but he’s going to be a little disappointed or you’re going to make him sad.

Samuel Parkison
Yes. Poor God. Don’t you pity him now? And that is a jarring experience. And what I tell students is I’m not trying to make God seem cold and distant from you, but it might be that you rethink the way that you think about God. And what it leads to is not necessarily a lack of warmth, but God needs to be bigger. You are a worshiper of God. There is a real relation and a real relationship that takes place, but it is the relationship between a creature and his Creator. So, it is a profoundly humbling thing to tell somebody, "God is not enriched by you whatsoever. God didn’t save you because he was lonely and he needed you. Heaven would be boring without you there. That’s not what’s going on. It’s not that God is enriched by you, and it’s not that God would be diminished if you didn’t exist. God is not benefited at all." These kinds of ways of describing are very humbling because they undermine our self-flattery. But what it leads to is the awareness that this is why it’s good news. It’s good news because it means that God cannot be put in our personal emotional debt. And so the grace that he gives us, which is unbelievably massive—we run out of words to describe how good God’s grace is towards us—and all of that grace is totally free. That’s what divine aseity means. It means that God is not compelled. He has no compulsion to pour his grace out on us and to incorporate us into his own infinitely self-happy life.

Matt Tully
It’s not as if we invest a penny into God and then therefore he’s just super generous and invests a million dollars into us in this kind of exchange.

Samuel Parkison
It’s not a quid pro quo. It’s not a I scratch your back, you scratch mine. God gets nothing out of this. God is not enriched by this at all. How can you enrich the one who is infinitely rich? How can you fulfill the one who is the fullness of life? You can’t. He’s infinitely full, and so his creating and redeeming and glorifying humanity and the cosmos is not benefiting him whatsoever. It’s just free, gratuitous, love poured down on us. We’re just pure recipients.

Matt Tully
And that maybe takes us full circle to where we started, where by not focusing on that application and just meditating on what this means for God and for how we think about him and think about ourselves, I think it naturally then leads ultimately to this posture of worship and awe and wonder as creatures as we encounter God a little bit more faithfully to who he truly is.

Samuel Parkison
I agree.

Matt Tully
Samuel, thank you so much for taking some time today to walk us through this doctrine—maybe an unfamiliar doctrine to many of us—helping us to maybe catch a vision for why it is such good news for us.

Samuel Parkison
Thank you. It was an honor to be on.

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