80-Minute Dividing Line

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. Hey, good morning, welcome to The Dividing Line. Don't bother picking up those phones, not taking phone calls today or Skype calls today or any of those things at whatever number was just announced.

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Have more than enough really probably for this program and the next program. I was even thinking about going long, but then

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I thought, well, we do have another program to do. I don't want to be rushed. But I have four audio clips queued up.

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I have seven webpages queued up. So I'm going to go for this hour and then we'll finish it all up on Thursday, I would imagine at that particular point in time.

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So let's dive into it. A lot of different topics. I wanted to start with a blog article that I was directed to this morning, a

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Roman Catholic blog article by none other than the Roman Catholic champion himself, Matthew Bellisario.

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And it is dated today and he says, Florida debate, James White versus Robert Price.

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I am hoping to be able to attend the debate between James White and Robert Price a couple of weeks. I always enjoy debates.

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I think this one may be interesting. It involves, and listen to this description, it involves James White, the Reformed in quotation marks for some reason,

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I'm not sure why, the Reformed Calvinist against his, quote, Protestant and, quote, Episcopal brother over the inerrancy of the scriptures,

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Mr. Bellisario. It is true that Robert Price attends an Episcopal church, but he calls himself a

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Christian atheist. He is an atheist. He does not believe Jesus existed. So to call him a

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Protestant in any sense is just further evidence of the utter absurdity of the mindset of many on the far side of the

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Tiber River that all Protestants, quote, unquote, are the same, fails to recognize meaningful differences.

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And I suppose that's what drives the 33 ,000 denominations silliness too, all due to solo scriptura.

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I wonder though, if maybe Steve Ray will pick up on this and there'll be now 34 ,000 denominations because we're going to throw the atheists in and blame that on solo scriptura too.

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I don't know. Anyway, this is quite interesting because you have two scholars who both claim to be of the

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Protestant pedigree. That's baloney. Where does he get this stuff?

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I mean, Price is an apostate. Hello. You know, I mean, would anyone on Rome side take us seriously if a

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Roman Catholic priest became an atheist? And then we said, well, you know, he's a good Roman Catholic.

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This demonstrates division amongst Roman Catholics. When I read this,

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I was just, I just don't understand the mindset, the ability to think this way.

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It's just amazing. It says, of course, we know that modernism has left no religious group untouched in this day and age.

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There are Catholic scholars who refuse to believe what the Catholic Church teaches officially about the inerrancy of the scriptures as well. Yeah.

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And the Pope keeps making them part of his inner circle for some odd strange reason. It will be interesting to see how

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White handles the historical claims that Price will surely bring forth the stanchiest claims of the Bible's full of contradictions and errors.

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Actually, Dr. Price's presentation is that history can't tell us enough to know whether even

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Jesus existed. The only thing history is sufficient enough to tell us is that there's no miracles in the past.

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It's called, well, you'll see in the debate. We'll get into that right now.

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The debate is in my neck of the woods about an hour or so up in Clearwater, Florida. And then he talks about it.

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And then he says this, I wonder if Turret and Fan will be in town for the debate. Maybe we can get a glimpse of the side monkey carrying

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Dr. White's luggage in tow. Look for the guy who'll be running for Dr. White's refreshments as needed.

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We may be able to get one of those grainy photos like that Loch Ness monster and then find out the identity of the mysterious

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Mr. Fan. I am just kidding. I just got a chuckle out of this guy, Turret and Fan.

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Wait, there he is. And there's a picture of a chimp dressed as a waiter carrying a bottle of wine someplace.

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And so I just wanted to mention, Mr. Balsario, you'll be welcome at the debates. I think you'd find it quite interesting.

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I would hope you'd ask yourself the question. I wonder why it is your apologists don't do these kinds of debates.

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But I hope you'll come up, because I would like to accept your apology when you do so, Mr. Balsario, because you have things mixed up, as is not unusual for you.

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I would be the one who would be honored to carry Turret and Fan's luggage. OK, your disrespect and your attempt at humor, totally unappreciated.

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And when we meet, I will gladly accept your apology.

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Next, some folks are claiming to have found Noah's Ark. Nothing new about that. I saw a whole movie about Noah's Ark many, many, many years ago.

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I remember going to a movie theater as a kid somewhere, as I recall, all about Noah's Ark.

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And now there's more pictures of Noah's Ark. I would love to see it happen. That would be fascinating.

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But Fox News is not my first source for, well, that's a better source than most others, but still not my first source for theological or biblical archaeology news or anything along that line.

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Then very quickly, Al Mohler had commented on this. This is actually an old blog article.

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But I did want to mention it since I hadn't heard about it before. There's a guy named Jeff Perlman who writes for ESPN.

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And he wrote a blog article back in February called I Want Tim Tebow to Fail. And the entire thing, if you read it, is nothing but I hate conservative

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Christians. Now, specifically, he says he seems to hate conservative Christians who believe in the pre -millennial perspective.

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But it's a well, here's here's what he says at the end. We need to stop embracing this dogmatic lunacy, the idea that, well, that Jesus is the savior.

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And outside of Jesus, you won't have forgiveness of your sins and punishment and judgment merely because it comes from the mouth of a supposed good guy jock.

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Now, by the way, I don't know why anyone would believe in the Christian faith merely because an athlete says something about it.

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That is pretty stupid. And any church that tries to use someone like that in such a way that you're not actually preaching the word, but just trying to get people to believe in a nice guy, that is pretty stupid.

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But that's not what he's talking about. That's not what Perlman is talking about here. He says if he's in an ad for focus on the family, if he believes homosexuality is sinful.

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Oh, no. You mean he believes the Bible and women are here to serve their men? And Jews and Muslims and agnostics and the rest of us are sinful.

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Mr. Perlman, all of us are sinful, period. End of discussion. Well, to hell with him.

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Well, Mr. Perlman, it is God who sends people to hell for their sins. And you and I are in the exact same boat there.

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And one of us has turned to him for mercy. And one of us seems to hate his offers of mercy. But this is the kind of stuff.

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Can you imagine if this man, can you imagine Tim Tebow as a Muslim? Can you imagine?

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Would this happen? Or would Perlman have been fired long ago for that one? I don't know.

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Most of you might be aware of the fact that recently, William Lane Craig has he posted an article last week, as I recall, attacking

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Calvinism on his website, ReasonableFaith .org. And I say attacking

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Calvinism because that's what it is. He has a perfect right to do that. And I'm not complaining that he has launched such an attack.

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I first heard about it when Steve Hayes wrote a very lengthy. Well, Steve Hayes, Steve Hayes, his grocery lists are at least 10 pages long.

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OK, that's just all there is to it. Whenever I run into Steve Hayes's articles in my RSS feed,

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I almost destroy the scroll button on my mouse because they are so huge.

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We appreciate Brother Hayes's contributions, but I think quite honestly, we can say that Steve Hayes has written more books than anyone else we've ever met.

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I think he's going for Origins record personally. Anyway, I heard about it when Steve Hayes wrote this big, long article responding to this.

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And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it because he did that. But it is an interesting summary of an attack upon Reformed theology that has one thing in that's at least

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William Lane Craig is consistent. There is not enough exegesis and biblical material in this to fill a thimble.

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And I'm reminded of someone who told me they're listening to William Lane Craig talking to some of his his followers at a conference recently, last year sometime.

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And one of the things he's heard him saying, this group of young men around him, was if you want to truly be a good apologist, you need to stop reading so much theology and read more philosophy.

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And so there you go. And Troy, our crazed nutcase from Canada, Troy just popped into the channel.

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And just so you all know, some of you have seen this fellow's web videos on YouTube.

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He's banned from the entire network that our chat channel is on, but he doesn't care. He doesn't worry about things like Romans 13 and, you know, the testimony that he's given to non -Christians by constantly breaking the rules and sneaking them.

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What he does, he comes in a channel, he just came in as Sally Jesse, which is sort of interesting when you think about it, a little bit appropriate there.

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But how can we help lead James White to Christ? One way would be for him to realize

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God of the Bible provides sufficient grace to all to be able to respond. He is the

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Savior of all men, especially those who believe, not Savior of all men, but still go to hell insufficient, for that would be an impotent

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God if he would not want to save someone from hell. That's what he just posted in channel. And once we kick him out, then he private messages that to people until we globally ban him from the entire network for a while.

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And then he changed his name and comes back in later on. This is Troy Brooks, and that's what

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Troy Brooks is all about. And isn't it absolutely amazing?

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Then, of course, Katie Bell went nuts and flooded the channel saying, kick him, kick him, kick him about 47 ,000 times, which should have earned her about a 10 -minute ban.

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But we'll work on that one later. OK, back to William Lane Craig. At least,

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OK, at least William Lane Craig and Troy both seem to really dislike

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Reformed theology. But I don't believe that William Lane Craig has ever snuck into channel under the nick

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Sally Jessie. Oh, my goodness. Anyway, there is nothing biblical in William Lane Craig's argumentation here.

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I mean, he makes some reference to some vague things, but exegesis, never going to see it happen.

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Never going to see it happen. He gives five five reasons here.

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Of course, he does the old making God the author of evil is just one of the problems, et cetera, et cetera.

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Universal divine causal determinism cannot offer a coherent interpretation of Scripture. Remember, this man's a

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Molinist. Remember, we've listened to him talking about how, you know, God, God has this middle knowledge of what free creatures will do.

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And in any given situation in any given universe. And and so he runs all these possible universes and finds the one with the maximum number of people that get saved.

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All this stuff. And there's just so many objections. But but then when he goes, well, does the Bible teach as well?

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You know, maybe we really we really can't know. But it gives us such wonderful theological insights that we should adopt it.

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Wow. I'm sorry, but it's a little bit difficult for me to to really buy into when someone like William Lane Craig, who so often avoids doing any type of meaningful exegesis, says that, well, you guys can't offer a coherent interpretation of Scripture.

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Dr. Craig's overriding philosophical construct is not scripturally derived at all.

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And you call that a coherent interpretation of Scripture? There are so many direct, clear statements of Scripture about God's sovereign working in time.

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And the Molinist goes, well, I believe that. In fact, he even says that at the beginning of this. He quotes from the Westminster Confession of Faith.

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God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.

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Yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established, he says.

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Now, this is precisely what the Molinist believes. No, it is not.

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That is, again, an amazing statement. That is not what the Westminster divines meant.

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The Westminster divines were not sitting around going, well, yes, you know, God. And God micromanages the physical elements of creation so that he can maneuver people to do the things he wants them to do.

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But you see, there are all sorts of people that God could never have saved. And God saw this in his middle knowledge.

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He knew who would never be saved. And he knew who he could save. And so he actualized the one world where he could save the maximum number of people.

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Everyone who could be saved, he's going to save, or at least going to try to save. But it's also their free will because it's based on middle knowledge.

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And somehow God has this amazing knowledge of what people who he has yet to decree to create would do in any given circumstance.

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And as I've pointed out, that means that my nature, who I am, is not determined by my creator.

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It is a fact of knowledge beyond God's creative decree. And that is not what the

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Westminster divines were saying in any way, shape or form. If that's what you're being told at Biola or at Talbot, you are being misled.

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But, you know, the neat thing is I find people who hear this stuff, but then they're assigned books to read.

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And they can tell by reading the books their professor isn't even in the realm of being right on what he's saying.

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And once they get out of that particular context, it's like, well, I've seen the light and so on and so forth.

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So anyway, he goes on to say universal cause of determinism cannot be rationally affirmed. Then again, he bases this assertion on the idea that, well, we have to sit here and we have to.

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You know, if I believe these things, it's only because I've been decreed to believe these things. And we get in this circle as if God's secret decree is even available for us to examine and to operate on.

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And it's not. We don't know. God doesn't give us that information. He gives us his prescriptive will.

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He tells us what's right and wrong. He changes our hearts to do what is right. And we do those things that are pleasing to him.

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And we don't sit around going, oh, I wonder what God has decreed to do. We're never told to do that. It's the caricatures just continue to fly fast and think universal divine determinism makes

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God the author of sin and precludes human responsibility. Well, how many times we heard that one? That's why you're never going to hear a debate with William Lane Craig on these subjects where he'd actually have to go to the biblical text and explain

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Genesis 50 and Isaiah 10 and Acts 4 and all the other texts that go along with it.

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You'll never hear it happen because he's a philosopher and not an exegete.

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Universal divine determinism nullifies human agency. Well, of course, what it nullifies is autonomy, not human agency.

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Universal divine determinism makes reality into a farce. Well, many people argue that it is

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Mullinism that turns reality into a farce because the whole emphasis of Mullinism is to try to say that everything's done by man's free will.

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But in reality, since God's middle knowledge cannot be falsified, what we're going to do is already a fixed reality by the very decision of God to actuate the one world in which we would only do these certain things.

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It is such an amazing gymnastic effort to get around the acceptance of God's sovereignty that it is very, very troubling.

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Well, I mention that because Dr. Craig was on Moody Radio on April 25th, so just a couple days ago, and one of the calls was very interesting.

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Jamin Hubner on the Real Apologetics blog caught this and had comments on it.

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I linked to it, I believe, yesterday morning in the Monday Miscellaneous section. But I wanted to play the call and make some comments on it.

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Okay, we need to turn up the computer so we can play this part.

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The question I have is, thanks for taking my call. When you're talking to someone about Scripture or the inerrancy of Scripture, someone might bring, well, what about the

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Koran or other holy books? I believe that they're false.

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But how do you, especially with the Koran and the popularity of Islam, how do you argue the fact that the inerrancy of Scripture versus the inerrancy of Scripture...

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...the inerrancy of Scripture to a non -believer? I think scriptural inerrancy is a

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Christian doctrine that someone comes to believe after becoming a Christian as part of his training in Christian doctrine and discipleship.

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In order to get someone through the door, through the gate, into eternal life, you don't need to convince them that Scripture is inerrant.

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All you have to do is convince them that Jesus was who He claimed to be, that He rose from the dead in authentication of those claims...

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...and that therefore you need to place your faith in Him and become a Christ follower. And what implications that has for your doctrine of Scripture can follow later on.

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In other words, my strategy of evangelism is to set the bar as low as possible to put as few hindrances in the path of the unbeliever to getting him to come to faith in Christ.

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So I don't argue about inerrancy with an unbeliever. I just argue that we have historically reliable documents to show things like the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and the transformation in the lives of the disciples and what that leads to.

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Now, I'm going to continue because it is interesting what comes after this, especially because he was mentioning the

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Koran and that's sort of my area there. But there you just heard why theology matters.

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The Molinus perspective, which rejects the sovereignty of God and salvation. It's not the

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Spirit of God that's going to effectively bring someone to salvation. We've got to try to convince people. They've got their free will, etc.,

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etc. There's no depravity of man. We're not talking about an enemy of God here.

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We're not talking about someone who is rejecting God and is dead in their sins.

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All that stuff, you can tell, is not even a part of this. What you're trying to do is put as few barriers in the way.

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And in the process, what ends up happening? All of a sudden, the very core elements of the gospel itself, and I preached on 1

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Corinthians 15 at PRBC on Sunday morning. And I made reference to the core elements of the gospel.

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What's this earliest proclamation? That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. That he was buried, that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

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Those core elements somehow become detached things from scripture.

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They have an existence unto themselves. And you can convince people of them by uninspired, non -inherent, not

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God -speaking documents. And once you get them to make some kind of an assent toward these certain propositions, then later down the road, what you want to try to do is to sort of slowly move them into believing in the authority, inspiration, and eventually inerrancy of the very documents from which they got their faith to begin with, allegedly.

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And is it overly shocking then that so many people who are brought into that very perspective, brought into the faith via that very means, that so many of them end up having real issues with biblical authority.

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Because they were introduced to the faith in such a way that they were given the autonomy to stand in judgment of God's truth.

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You're the one that makes the determination whether these things are true. It's up to you. You have the right to judge these things.

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You have the right to judge God. And you do not. This is not how the apostles preached the gospel.

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This is not how they presented the message. Even the core presentation.

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And this is something that, by the way, I need to give Dr. Craig kudos. In his 1999 debate with Robert Price, who

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I will be debating in less than two weeks, he did an excellent job.

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He can do this if he wants to. He did an excellent job in defending the continuity of the text in 1

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Corinthians 15. If you're not aware of this, Dr. Price, and this will be a part of my opening presentation, Dr.

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Price believes that 1 Corinthians 15 verses 3 through 11 is a later interpolation. Now, he doesn't believe

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Paul even wrote Corinthians, for that matter. He puts Corinthians into the second century. And even after it was written, this is a later idea inserted even at that point.

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And it's not contiguous to the rest of the text. Now, he admits there is no manuscript that does not have this, and that's the fatal flaw, as I will demonstrate in his argumentation.

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But Dr. Craig did an excellent job in demonstrating, even on internal criteria, that verses 3 through 11 are contiguous.

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They are consistent in the text. It has none of the signs of a later insertion. And he did an excellent job in identifying, for example, the fact that Ignatius makes reference to verses 8 and 9 in his epistle to the

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Romans. And so there is that early external attestation to the early dating of this material as well.

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So he did a great job. So I give him kudos for that in that debate from 1999.

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But when it comes to this stuff, when it comes to this area and his pet philosophy, it is so very, very clear that exegesis and the authority of Scripture does not have its proper place in his theology.

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And what he just said to this man was, I don't argue about that. And you can always tell a Craig -trained apologist, he will start off his presentation saying,

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I'm not going to treat the Bible as if it is the inspired word of God. I'm just going to treat it as if it is just a group of historical texts.

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Well, my friends, let me tell you something. And I've heard many people say this. I've heard a lot of other apologists begin their debates that way.

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You can tell this group when they start speaking by that very thing. And let me tell you something. You're not going to hear that from me a week from Friday, OK?

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But none of you were expecting to hear that anyways. But even beyond that, when they make that statement, what

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I'm saying to you is the divine truths of the gospel are revelatory truths.

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Even when Dr. Craig defends that section in 1 Corinthians 15, what does that text in 1

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Corinthians 15, 3 and following say? That Christ died for our sins. What? Kata graphos, according to the scriptures.

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Even the most primitive affirmation of the gospel outline says, according to the scriptures, over and over and over again.

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How can you separate that out? These divine truths are witnessed by a divine revelation.

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Even the Lord Jesus responded to Satan's attacks against him by saying what? Have you not read what the scriptures say?

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Has it not been written? And yet we somehow seem to think we know more.

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But then he goes on after setting the bar low. Well, I say set the bar at the point that the

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Holy Spirit sets it in the New Testament itself. Because if you trust the

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Holy Spirit to bring about regeneration, then you don't have to try to edit the gospel down to a lower level.

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Theology matters. Having said all that, we continue on. The question I have is... Oh, that's not what

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I wanted to do. Okay, so when I hit stop, it goes back. I have new sound software. It's great sound software.

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It's really, really good stuff. But what I needed was a pause rather than something else.

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Let's see here if I can find out pretty much where we were. Very good question. The documents of the

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New Testament were written down within the first generation after the events by people during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.

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The Koran is a book which was written in Saudi Arabia 600 years after the life of Jesus by a man who had no first -hand contact with information other than what was rumored in the

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Christian church. So which do you think is the more reliable historical document for the life of Jesus?

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The gospels or this book written 600 years later by this man in Arabia with no first -hand information?

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Well, to ask the question is to answer it. And, in fact, the Koran has demonstrably erroneous statements about Jesus.

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And the most egregious of these, Chris, is that it denies that Jesus was crucified. The Koran says they did not kill him.

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Neither did they crucify him. They only thought so. So this is ironic because the crucifixion of Jesus is the one historical fact that is universally acknowledged even by the most radical biblical critics.

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Even the critics in the Jesus seminar say that the crucifixion of Jesus is the one indisputable fact about Jesus of Nazareth.

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And, ironically, it is this fact that Muhammad chose to deny in the

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Koran, which I think just completely invalidates the Koran's claim to inerrancy and being inspired of God.

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Okay. Now, I agree with Vas Droy that, obviously, Surah 4, verse 157 is denial of the crucifixion, vitally important to the analysis of whether the

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Koran is true or false or anything along those lines. There's much more to it, though. But he was being brief.

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I think he gave a good example. It's one example amongst many examples. But I think I would have attempted to clear up at least something in regards to what

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I consider to be some confusion on Chris's part. And that is he seemed to be, when he talks about inerrancy, you need to be able to address the inspiration of a text and then deal with the inerrancy of the text.

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A lot of people confuse the terms. They confuse inerrancy with transmission over time.

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We even had someone in channel, even last night, that was going, well, you know, I don't know about this inerrancy stuff because there are so many

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English Bibles. As soon as you hear someone say that, you're talking to someone who's very confused.

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But there are a lot of people in that boat, unfortunately. And so I would have tried to have likewise demonstrated that the

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Koran makes direct reference to the New Testament text and tells us to believe the

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New Testament text and to judge by the things contained within the Injil.

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Now, modern Muslims go, well, the Injil is a book given to Jesus. We don't have it. Well, that's a modern reading.

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That's not a reading of the Koran that I think is accurate at all. You're assuming that Muhammad had knowledge that I don't think there's any reason to believe that he did.

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And we've discussed that type of thing in the past. So anyway, I wanted to get to that.

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And so I've still got a bunch of other stuff to get here to here. So let's press on so we can get as much done as we can.

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Another incredible example from The Berean Call, Dave Hunt and T .A. McMahon, they put out their last week,

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I believe, sometime they put out their newsletter. And one of the questions that was asked was,

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I think it is stunning that the most influential Christians the past 2 ,000 years have been Augustinians. Mentions Augustine, Aquinas, Edwards, Calvin, Luther, Warfield, MacArthur, Sproul, Spurgeon, Piper, Murray, Hodge, Whitfield, Tyndale, the

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Puritans, Jay Packers, Wingly Knocks, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then he says, furthermore, however, however, you understand

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Romans 9, why does Paul insert the following phrase right after he says that God has mercy on whom he wills and he hardens whom he wills?

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You will say to me then, why is he still find fault for who can resist his will? Could this be made any clearer, any more clear?

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Brothers, explain why Paul would say this if he weren't responding to the Arminian idea that God should give everyone a chance.

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Now, the response offered by Dave Hunt is, well, just let me read it.

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Regarding Romans 9, 19, we know that it is not wise to single out one verse apart from a full context.

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Well, of course. The issue of Jacob and Esau and their being loved or hated by God before their birth has occupied more than one discussion throughout history.

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If one confines the argument to portions of Romans 9, it does sound like God arbitrarily selects some for salvation, others for damnation.

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But Romans 9 does not occur in a vacuum. How many times we heard

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Dave Hunt, well, there are dozens and dozens of other, hundreds of other scriptures and immediately fleeing the text.

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God's foreknowledge, and listen, God's foreknowledge enters into the equation at this point. Some theologians say that it would be more accurate to translate the passage,

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Jacob have I chosen but Esau have I rejected. Specifically, in the case of Esau, the implication of rejected is a judgment based upon knowledge of his actions.

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God who declares the end for the beginning knew before they were born the course each child would take. Now, I just, once again, it is frustrating.

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And I understand why so many of my Reformed brethren can become very frustrated when reading something like this.

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But we have to, we have to respond to these things in an appropriate fashion.

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And we do not help in explaining it when we give vent to the frustration. And I experience frustration too.

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The more well -read a person is, the more frustrated I am at, you know, the situation.

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But think about Romans 9 for just a second. Romans 9 starts off emphasizing what?

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Well, before the twins had done anything good or bad, before they did anything.

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And how does Dave Hunt in, remember Dave Hunt, God loved the man, but he is a slave to his tradition.

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Slave to his tradition. I didn't queue it up, but I can almost quote it. James, I have no traditions from back in 2000 on KPXQ here in Phoenix.

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When I said, I said, Dave, that's your tradition speaking. James, I have no traditions.

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And he still believes that I'm sure. And as a result, his traditions enslave him.

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They become his ultimate authority. They become the word of God to him. He thinks his traditions are the word of God.

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And so here's a man who is so enslaved to his traditions that you can look at a text that specifically starts off saying, now

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I want you to understand, God did this so that his choice in election would stand.

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Not based upon what anyone has done. The twins had done nothing good or bad. It's not the man who wills or not the man who runs.

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It's God who, the whole text is beating the drum. It's not man, it's

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God. It's not man, it's God. Over and over again. But despite all of that,

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Dave Hunt and T .A. McMahon and whoever wrote this, it's foreknowledge, you see.

35:19

The implication of rejected is a judgment based upon knowledge of his actions. The text says the exact opposite of that.

35:27

The text in explicit, clear words says, no, I'm not talking about that.

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And yet Dave Hunt can say, well, that's what he's talking about. It is absolutely, positively amazing.

35:46

But that's what you have. That's what you have. All right. I've gotten through a number of my websites here.

35:55

Most of you know that yesterday morning, Focus on the Family, carried as its podcast, as its program all across the

36:06

United States, From Jihad to Jesus, Ergon Kanner. And some of you know, if you looked at the material that I posted yesterday,

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That over the weekend, I listened to a podcast that is posted by Ergon Kanner on iTunes.

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It is one of his debates. Now, it is not a debate, of course.

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It is an interview with a Oneness Pentecostal pastor. That is not a debate because there is no thesis statement.

36:49

There was no equal time. There is no moderation. There is no cross -examination.

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It's just an interview. But even at that, it was incredibly painful to listen to.

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Now, Ergon Kanner asks some interesting questions. And as far as interviews go, if you want to know what

37:11

Oneness Pentecostals believe, it would be useful along those lines. But it's not a debate because you don't have a response.

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If you're hoping to hear a Christian response to claims that the Oneness Pentecostal pastor is making, you're not going to get them from this podcast.

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As I was riding along, I honestly kept saying to myself, Well, hopefully there was a meaningful presentation of Oneness theology and a refutation of it in Kanner's class prior to the students hearing this, or at least afterwards.

37:48

I mean, let's hope that that happened. But then

37:53

I got to the end of the interview. At the end of the interview, a question is asked.

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Now, I'm going to be commenting on the fact that Dr. Kanner is talking out there.

38:09

He's not talking officially, but he is writing emails to people. He's writing emails. People are friends of mine.

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In fact, people I've known for a long time. And he has chosen as his methodology of defending himself, the slash and burn methodology.

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It is unfortunately the idea that he is not going to admit any of the many lies that have been documented that he has uttered over the years in regards to his own history.

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And he's going to attempt with the willful help of people like Pastor Guthrie and Peter Lumpkins and that ilk of people to make this a persecution issue.

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He's being persecuted. Poor Ergen Kanner, the convert from Islam, is being persecuted.

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Everyone's picking on him. And I'm the chief persecutor.

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And all I do is I just attack conservative Christians. He's even tried to connect his name with Norman Geisler and Brian Broderson.

39:14

So, in other words, try to get his Armenian friends to be defending him on these issues as well.

39:19

The fact that he came here at age three and not at age 15 is a documented fact.

39:31

The documents exist. So is there a different truth for Armenians and for Calvinists?

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How is my allegedly being a terrible, horrible, nasty person? He says, I've never produced anything positive.

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Not once. All I do is I get paid for attacking conservative Christians. That's all I do, folks.

39:52

So those of you who've read The God Who Justifies, The Forgotten Trinity, any of those books like that, any of you who've seen debates with Shabir Ali or Bart Ehrman or John Dominic Crossan or Marcus Borg or John Shelby Spong or all that stuff.

40:08

That must not have been me. I've not produced anything positive. All I do is attack conservative

40:15

Christians. That's what Ergin Kanner is telling people now. I guess once you start down the road of lying, then it gets easier to lie and to lie and to lie and to lie and deception just becomes what you live with.

40:25

It's a terrible thing to see. In attempting to explain this response that he gave,

40:35

Dr. Kanner has actually gotten to the point, and this is pure deception as far as I can tell.

40:44

The issue was raised to him, why, when you were asked a basic question about the relationship of the father and son, did you give an incoherent response?

40:53

You seem to have – and I'm going to play it here for you a second. I want you to hear it yourself.

40:58

Remember one thing that is consistent since back in 2006 when the debate was supposed to take place and all the rest of that stuff.

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One side has been public, one side has offered full documentation, and one side has tried to be private and offers no documentation at all.

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That's a fact. That's a fact. Remember even back when we tried to arrange the debate at Lynchburg, Dr.

41:24

Kanner said, let's make this private. And one of the first things I insisted was, no, it's not going to be private.

41:31

This is going to be public because it's going to be a public debate. And so if there are any issues, people need to know where the issues actually came from, so it's not a matter of he said, he said, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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We have documentation. We have legal documents. We have the emails. Ergin Kanner has nothing.

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That's just a fact. No one can argue that. No one can argue that at all.

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And so a question was asked of him, why did you answer like that?

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Dr. Kanner is actually now telling people, I wasn't answering anything. That didn't reflect anything about my beliefs.

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I was asking a question of somebody else in an attempt to understand what they believe.

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Really? Yeah, that's what I'm looking at the email right now. Signed by Ergin Kanner.

42:30

Is that the case? Well, let's listen to this portion from the interview with the

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Oneness Pentecostal pastor. Now, let me provide you, this is the very end. And of this point, no

42:46

Christian position has been presented. The key texts have not been presented. There was no discussion of John 1,

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John 17, Philippians chapter 2, all the texts that demonstrate the existence of the person as a divine person prior to the incarnation.

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Not there. Dr. Kanner had demonstrated an uncertainty as to how to even pronounce

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Nathaniel Irshan's name. Nathaniel Irshan and the

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United Pentecostal Church International. I have challenged the leading Oneness theologian,

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Dr. Bernard, to debate at the Irshan Graduate School in front of his own students.

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I debated Robert Sabin on this subject. But nothing from a

43:36

Christian perspective has actually been defended all up to this point. And then finally at the end, finally at the end, the associate pastor of the

43:47

Oneness Pentecostal minister asks a question. Now, what I've done is since Kanner repeated the question, this is the question asked by the

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Oneness Pentecostal of him. Since he repeated the question, I didn't go back and try to amplify, because there was no microphones in the room.

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But what I have done is when the pastor responds to Kanner at the end,

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I've selected that section and magnified it by 400%, so you can at least sort of hear what the guy is saying.

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That wasn't in the original clip that I posted. Well, it was there. You just couldn't hear anything, unless you blew it up yourself.

44:34

Here's Ergin Kanner, president of Liberty Theological Seminary, identifies himself as an apologist who debates on university campuses all across the

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United States and around the world, head of the global apologetics program at Liberty University, asked a basic question about the relationship of the father and the son.

44:57

Please make sure I restate your question correctly. You asked the question, if in fact there's always been a father, always been a son, and always been a

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Holy Spirit, and that they didn't have a beginning, they didn't have an end, that they are eternal, how is it that a father can have a son who is his same age, that both of them have had no beginning?

45:18

The sonship of Christ, this is an issue of progressionism in Scripture, and it's also the issue of the incarnation, that Jesus is part of the creation,

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Colossians, again, the citation of the plural. You also have the

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Holy Spirit, who has been eternal, the Spirit moving on the waters. But, his sonship comes in incarnation, that when

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Jesus is incarnate, God the Father sending the Son, it is that moment that the term carries with it, more than just a metaphor, now he is the

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Son of the Father. That's why Jesus says, I have not come to do my will, I've come to do the Father's will.

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He is the second person of the Trinity, and always has been. But in terms of when Jesus refers to himself as the

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Son, that's a messianic term. Both Son of God and Son of Man were messianic terms, the fulfillment of prophecy in the

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Old Testament. And to be fulfilled, the incarnation had to take place, God had to put on flesh.

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He didn't come to earth to be God, he was God before he left. We call it

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Son, any more than trying to understand the Trinity, explain the Trinity, to define the Trinity, is impossible.

46:32

However, we try to do the same with the text. We say, here you got God the Father, who is defined clearly as God the

46:40

Father. You have God the Son, who is defined clearly as God the Son. And you have God the

46:45

Holy Spirit, who is defined clearly as God the Holy Spirit. Either God becomes schizophrenic, again to take the metaphor, or we have a superman, or what we call modalism.

46:57

That is, he's God the Father, goes back in, comes out as the Son, goes back in, comes back as the Spirit. The problem is, you either have what we call the vacant heaven view, or you have a

47:07

God who is the incarnation of God, who is lying about himself and calling himself equal, when in fact he's just referring to his spirit part, but not his flesh.

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The Sonship has been eternal, but the metaphor itself becomes flesh. The incarnation didn't take place until Bethlehem.

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He didn't put on flesh until he put on flesh. But the

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Trinity existed. Sure, the Trinity existed. But he didn't put on flesh until he put on flesh.

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He didn't internally exist in flesh. And that's where the file ends.

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As I listened to that, it was absolutely painful for me. It was painful for me for a lot of reasons.

48:15

I wrote The Forgotten Trinity in the 1990s, and it's always been a joy to me when people have come up to me at various places where I've been speaking, and they've said,

48:27

I love the Trinity. Because if you've read the book, you know it starts off with that statement and explaining how rarely it is that I hear people say that, because people don't love the

48:37

Trinity because they don't understand it. And that's why I wrote the book, to try to give people a biblical understanding of what the doctrine of the

48:44

Trinity is. And I love to see students grounded in the truth and confident in their faith and excited.

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I think a knowledge of the Trinity is absolutely vital to proper worship, to prayer.

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And so to hear a man, now again, very few evangelicals could actually offer a meaningful answer to the question that Ergen Kanner was asked, and that's sad.

49:17

But it's true. The one area of the doctrine of the

49:23

Trinity that most evangelicals struggle with is the relationship of the three persons. And I've said many times that if you were to take evangelicals as a whole and give them a quiz this next

49:38

Sunday and ask them certain leading questions, such as, when Jesus said, I and the

49:43

Father are one, did he mean that he and the Father are one person? I'd say a frightfully high percentage of people would say yes.

49:52

John 10 .30 was quoted during the course of this. No rebuttal was offered. No one pointed out that in John 10 .30,

50:01

when Jesus said, I and the Father are one, the verb is plural, I and the Father, we are one, that there is no confounding, there is no confusion of the persons in the biblical text at all.

50:11

That was just allowed to be thrown out there and no response given. That's sort of the nature of that particular way of doing things.

50:19

But what you just heard did not explain anything to the Oneness folks.

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That's why I tried to amplify what the man said there at the end was, I don't have any idea what you just said.

50:31

And I don't think anybody does. There may have been some brave Liberty students sitting there going, yeah, yeah, makes sense to me.

50:41

But the fact of the matter is no one could understand that. That was a flood of incomprehensible drivel.

50:51

Dr. Cantor does not understand the relationship of the Father and the Son. I cannot begin to believe that a man who has spent any time talking with Muslims could not have a clear understanding of this question because it's a question the

51:06

Muslims ask. Now granted, maybe he wasn't prepared, doesn't matter.

51:14

If he is what he claims to be, not only this former Muslim who is now an expert on these things. And folks, if you don't think this matters, go look at Jason Smathers' blog and look at the picture that he has up there of Ergin Cantor lecturing to a room full of people.

51:30

And look at the people. Folks, they're all U .S. military personnel, U .S.

51:39

military personnel who believe that what this man is saying is solidly founded because he was this great former

51:47

Muslim who actually came to Ohio at age three, whose mother tongue is not

51:56

Arabic, it's Swedish. And there he stands, pretending to be an expert on these things.

52:07

Now at this point, I have criticized Ergin Cantor's ridiculous statements about Reformed theology.

52:12

The man's ignorant of the field, no question about it. Then I started being informed of the problems with his history as far as his claims about his own experiences.

52:22

And all the contradictions and the errors in regards to Islam. Then I listened to this, and I'm absolutely blown away by the response that he gave.

52:40

Now, I'm going to go back here, and I'm struggling a little bit because I have this brand new software.

52:46

It's beautiful software. It's the first time I've tried to use it on the air. It starts and stops great, but the problem is it always goes back to the beginning.

52:52

I'm trying to find a pause button somewhere. So this could be interesting. Hopefully, I can find it.

52:59

But I want to examine what he said. I'm going to have to go a few minutes long to do it, but I don't want to rush this. On Thursday, I want to play major portions of his story from Focus on the

53:09

Family. And that will probably take up the majority of that time.

53:17

Then we can take some phone calls and stuff like that. But it begins with a question.

53:23

How can the father and the son basically be the same age? By the way, people have said, how would you have responded to that?

53:31

All right, let me give you how to respond to that. If a one -nosed Pentecostal in that context asked me, how can the father and the son be the same age, my immediate response would have been, and of course,

53:42

I would not have gotten to this point without laying some foundation before this, but given that I could not do so, let's say this is just a caller who calls in.

53:52

No foundation has been laid. I only have a certain amount of time to respond. The first problem is the very form of the question assumes that this is a temporal relationship, and in fact, it is a human relationship.

54:04

You talk about someone being older than someone else. That's human language we're using here. When we talk about the father and the son, we're talking about relational terms that transcend time.

54:13

We're talking about the description of the relationship of the father and the son. We are not saying that there was a time when the father was not the father, before the son came into existence or anything else, and unlike one -nosed

54:25

Pentecostals, and this is something evidently Erick and Cantor does not understand, by the way, we do not believe the son is merely the human flesh in which the father dwells.

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We believe the son has eternally existed as God, as a person distinct from the father.

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He is described this way in John 1. He is described this way in John 17, when the son speaks of the time before his incarnation, where he shared the very glory of the father was in his presence, not merely as a thought, but as a divine person.

54:57

And Philippians 2 likewise describes that period before the incarnation, when the son did not give consideration to that equality he had with God the father.

55:08

And so the son has eternally existed as a divine person. It is not a matter of age, and if that relationship has eternally been, then all questions about who precedes who or who is the same age, eternity transcends all those things.

55:25

Father and son help us to differentiate between the divine persons. They tell us not only something in the incarnation, but they also tell us something about eternity past as well.

55:37

Now it seems to me that Dr. Cantor believes that sonship only has to do with the incarnation.

55:45

That's the first part of his response, but then later he says, oh, but the sonship is eternal. In what way? He says the metaphor became flesh.

55:51

I don't understand any of that. But let's take a listen to what he says here.

55:58

That Jesus is part of the sonship of Christ. This is an issue of progression, that both of them have had no beginning.

56:05

Okay, here we go. The sonship of Christ. This is an issue of progressionism in scripture. Ah, that's how you do it.

56:12

Let's see if this is going to work this way. Progressionism in scripture? Is he talking about progressive revelation?

56:22

I mean, I would agree that the doctrine of the Trinity is progressively revealed. I mean, the doctrine of the

56:27

Trinity is primarily revealed in the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit. So it's in the intertestamental period when it takes place.

56:35

But I'm not sure what progressionism in scripture means. And it's also the issue of the incarnation. It is the issue of the incarnation.

56:42

That's relevant. There are incarnational aspects. The Son, some of the

56:49

New Testament aspects in identifying with the Son, are connected with the incarnation, but also with the resurrection.

56:55

And so it's not just those things. You have to take all of it.

57:01

He is Son in eternity past. He is demonstrated to be the Son in the incarnation, demonstrated to be the

57:07

Son in the resurrection. All quite true. But I don't think that's where he's going. That Jesus is part of the creation.

57:15

Colossians. Again, the citation of the plural. I have no idea what that means.

57:24

Jesus is part in the creation. Colossians, the citation... Is it the plural pronouns in the

57:31

Old Testament? It can't be plural pronouns in Colossians. Jesus is part in the creation.

57:41

Yes, the Son is very much involved in the creation itself. All things are made through him.

57:47

So it's over Colossians. I guess the citation of the plural... The only thing

57:52

I can even begin to imagine that means is the plural pronouns in the Old Testament. That's the best

57:59

I can do there. If someone wants to suggest something else, please let me know and channel or something like that. You also have the

58:04

Holy Spirit who has been eternal. The Spirit moving on the waters. But... Okay, the

58:10

Spirit eternally exists as the Spirit and is seen active in creation. Okay.

58:17

His Sonship comes in incarnation. His Sonship comes in incarnation. Hopefully Bob Ross.

58:25

Bob Ross, and I'm not talking about the friendly painter with the afro. I'm talking about the Pilgrim Publications Bob Ross who just loves coming after me, loves attacking me.

58:34

I mean, he just loves coming after me. And the main reason was because I defended John MacArthur years ago against his charge of heresy.

58:42

Not that I agreed with what John MacArthur believed, who likewise saw the Sonship as incarnational at that time.

58:48

He changed his view. But he's real big on this. And so I'm wondering if he's going to write something about Ernie Cantor now.

58:57

If he's consistent, he will. Because there it sounds like he's saying Sonship is incarnational.

59:04

That when Jesus is incarnate, God the Father sending the Son, it is that moment that the term carries with it more than just a metaphor.

59:17

It is at that term. So is Sonship only metaphorical prior to the incarnation?

59:25

That sounds like what he's saying. That he's saying that Sonship is metaphorical prior to the incarnation, but then it becomes more than metaphorical, but real in the incarnation.

59:40

I think that's, again, if someone can help me do better at this,

59:47

I'm giving it my best shot. Now he is the Son of the Father. That's why Jesus says, I have not come to do my will,

59:54

I've come to do the Father's will. Notice he says, now he's the Son of the Father. So logically that would mean before he wasn't the

01:00:04

Son of the Father. So the Father wasn't the Father and the Son wasn't the Son at that point. So would he understand the use of Father in the

01:00:10

Old Testament primarily in a creative way? I would agree that Father is primarily used creatively as God is the creator in the

01:00:17

Old Testament. But is that what he's saying? He is the second person of the

01:00:23

Trinity and always has been. Okay, that again sounds like the incarnational position. That is, second person, yes, always has been the second person, but not the

01:00:33

Son. Sonship is only an incarnational term. But in terms of when

01:00:40

Jesus refers to himself as the Son, that's a Messianic term. Both Son of God and Son of Man were

01:00:46

Messianic terms, the fulfillment of prophecy in the Old Testament. And to be fulfilled, the incarnation had to take place.

01:00:53

God had to put on flesh. He didn't come to earth to be God. He was

01:00:58

God before he left. He didn't come to earth to be

01:01:05

God. Okay, he came to earth to be incarnate.

01:01:11

He's still God. We call it

01:01:16

Son, and he more than trying to understand the Trinity, explain the Trinity, to define the

01:01:21

Trinity, is impossible. Really? I've defined it many times.

01:01:30

Within the one true being that is God, there is eternally existed three co -equal and co -eternal persons,

01:01:38

Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Great books on the subject,

01:01:44

B .B. Warfield stuff, great. Pretty much every denomination I know of has a, at least used to, have a statement of faith that would go in depth on it.

01:01:56

What do you mean we can't define the Trinity? That's the whole point of defining it and making it the central doctrine of the faith, is that we can define the doctrine of the

01:02:04

Trinity. Does he mean we cannot comprehend it fully as finite human beings? Well, I can't comprehend the eternity of God.

01:02:11

So if I can't comprehend the most basic revelations of God's being, then obviously

01:02:16

I can't fully comprehend the highest revelation of God's being, but that's not what he said. However, we try to do the same with the text.

01:02:25

We say, here you got God the Father, who is defined clearly as God the Father. You have

01:02:30

God the Son, who is defined clearly as God the Son. And you have God the Holy Spirit, who is defined clearly as God the

01:02:37

Holy Spirit. I think what he's saying is that when we interpret the text of Scripture consistently, we see there are three divine persons who are distinguished from one another, and that's quite true.

01:02:52

That's very, very important. Either God becomes schizophrenic, again to take the metaphor, or...

01:02:59

I don't get that. What do you mean God becomes schizophrenic? So I guess what he's saying is if you're oneness, then

01:03:05

God's schizophrenic, but that's not even accurate. The accurate criticism of the oneness position is that their view of Jesus in his prayers, and this did come out earlier, though nobody commented on it.

01:03:20

In the prayers of Jesus, according to the oneness position, that's his flesh praying to his spirit.

01:03:28

So it's an internal conversation. It's not one divine person speaking to another.

01:03:33

It's a person who came into existence in Bethlehem speaking to a divine person, but all within one person.

01:03:41

So it's Jesus who becomes schizophrenic, because he's actually two persons. That's a valid criticism of most oneness understanding of the view of Jesus.

01:03:53

We have a superman, or what we call modalism. That is, he's God the Father, goes back in, comes out as the

01:03:59

Son, goes back in, comes back as the Spirit. No. In some forms of modalism, you have the

01:04:09

Father and the Son and the Spirit, but in the form of modalism of the guy he's talking to, if he'd maybe read some of David Bernard's works, or done something more than a

01:04:22

Wikipedia -level study of oneness theology, then he would know that they understand one divine person,

01:04:30

Father, the Son, came into a being in Bethlehem. He's a created being.

01:04:35

It's just the flesh. And so Jesus then is indwelt by the Father, and then after his resurrection, comes back as the

01:04:44

Spirit. That's the Father still. One person. And the Father and the Spirit would be that one divine person.

01:04:51

The Son is the human flesh. That's the general understanding of UPCI folks.

01:04:59

The problem is you either have what we call the vacant heaven view, or you have a

01:05:04

God who is a Son who is the incarnation of God, who is lying about himself and calling himself equal, when in fact he's just referring to a spirit part but not his flesh.

01:05:15

Okay, I don't understand that at all. A vacant heaven view? The pastor had already refuted that, where he had emphasized the continuing omnipresence of the

01:05:28

Father, even while incarnate, first of all. So I don't even know what that's all about. That section, again, was sort of the last gasp at the end of a,

01:05:41

I'm really not sure what I'm saying here, and I don't feel very comfortable about this situation. Then you can't really hear it, but here's the response from the fellow.

01:05:51

So what you're saying is the Sonship has not always been eternal.

01:05:57

The Sonship has been eternal, but the metaphor itself becomes flesh. What? The Sonship is eternal, but the metaphor for it becomes, a metaphor became flesh?

01:06:14

Again, I... The incarnation didn't take place until Bethlehem.

01:06:20

He didn't put on flesh until he put on flesh. So that's true, but how can the

01:06:27

Sonship be eternal then? Because the Sonship is the enfleshment, from his perspective, I guess.

01:06:34

Is all he's saying is the second person has eternally existed, but not his son? I think that's where he's going.

01:06:44

But the Trinity existed. Sure, the Trinity existed. But he didn't put on flesh until he put on flesh.

01:06:50

He didn't internally exist in flesh. So this poor guy is being expected to try to understand the

01:06:57

Trinity as not being the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because the Son doesn't become the Son until the enfleshment.

01:07:03

So evidently the Spirit is just first person, second person, Holy Spirit. Something like that. Put yourself in the oneness of Pentecostal's shoes for a moment.

01:07:14

Would any of this made any sense to you at all? There he said,

01:07:21

I just do not understand what you tried to explain. That's what he said. All right. I tried. And evidently, right as they cut everything off, he said, well,

01:07:30

I tried. I am certain beyond all question that there are folks at Liberty in the

01:07:48

Systematic Theology Department who can give an accurate, sound, systematic response to the relationship of the

01:07:58

Father and the Son. But one thing is painfully clear, it ain't Ergenkanner. So very quickly, to wrap this up, my friend wrote to Ergenkanner and asked him about these things.

01:08:18

His response, as I said, was to say that what we just listened to was not him trying to explain his position.

01:08:25

He was asking a question. Now, I'm sorry, but that's incoherent and it's untrue.

01:08:32

Words have meanings. And anybody who listens to that recording knows that's

01:08:38

Ergenkanner attempting to respond and to explain his own position. There's no question about that.

01:08:47

So instead of answering and simply saying, man,

01:08:52

I didn't expect to have to address that and yeah, it was pretty, yeah, that was rough.

01:09:02

Instead, it's all my fault. It's James White. In the middle of saying that, he says, he talks about White who makes his living trying to destroy other conservative

01:09:14

Christians. You actually let him convince you of something? He's terrible. He then adopts the position that, well, you know, the

01:09:26

Lord never answered his accusers. The Lord never answered his accusers.

01:09:32

Dr. Kanner, the Lord wasn't a liar. The Lord did not have a track record of exaggeration and lying.

01:09:44

You do. So please, sir, do not blaspheme the Lord by saying, well, the

01:09:51

Lord didn't respond to his accusers, so I'm not going to respond to mine. Sir, there is documented evidence, videotapes, audio recordings, legal documents that demonstrate you've been lying to the people of God from pulpits for years, over and over and over again.

01:10:11

Don't you dare try to hide behind the innocence of Jesus Christ to avoid the call to repent and to confess what you've done.

01:10:26

He says that the scripture tells us to shake the dust from the feet of such people. Notice what he's doing.

01:10:33

He's the persecuted man. What Jesus said was when someone will not accept your message, what message?

01:10:40

Christ's message, the message of the gospel. Is Ergin Kanner's lying about his background now the same thing as the gospel?

01:10:50

He worries about people getting infected by people like myself. And then he talks about me.

01:11:01

All I have is an Internet show. And I have no legitimate degrees. Evidently, Grand Canyon College and Fuller Theological Seminary are no longer even legitimate places to study anymore.

01:11:11

But he's talking about, of course, my Columbia Evangelical PhD and D .Min

01:11:17

in apologetics. And folks, here you have one of the greatest examples

01:11:24

I've ever seen of why those people who sit around and say you need to play the politics game, you need to have governmental approval of your degrees, have completely missed the boat.

01:11:37

I will put everything I've produced in the field of apologetics up against anything that Ergin Kanner has produced with his

01:11:48

South African PhD any day of the week. One of us can accurately describe and defend the doctrine of the

01:11:59

Trinity. One of us can debate people like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, Barry Lynn, Robert Price coming up,

01:12:09

Dan Barker, Shabbir Ali, recognizing he's not dead, Zulfiqar Ali Shah, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mitchell Pacwa.

01:12:26

I think the work that I've produced has reflected quite well on where I did my doctoral studies. Will Dr.

01:12:33

Kanner say that the answer he just gave to a rural, oneness Pentecostal pastor reflects well upon his legitimate degree?

01:12:42

What makes it legitimate, Dr. Kanner? If you get it and then collapse into incoherence when asked a basic question about the

01:12:52

Trinity, how legitimate is it? That's the question.

01:13:01

So he goes on to say that I attack other people incessantly and then here's

01:13:06

I think an indication of where he's going to try to go. He tries to associate himself.

01:13:16

He says I've attacked him for years, for years. He builds and does nothing.

01:13:29

He makes his living attempting to destroy men such as Norman Geisler, Brian Broderson and others including me.

01:13:35

So in other words, if you respond to someone like I respond to Norman Geisler in The Potter's Freedom and you do so respectfully, you do so with in -depth biblical exegesis, you do so by accurately representing what

01:13:49

Dr. Geisler said, that's the same thing as calling Ergon Kanner to repent for lying consistently through his teeth.

01:13:59

In the program that we'll listen to on Thursday that played across America on Focus on the Family, Dr.

01:14:06

Kanner says that when he was converted, his English was very bad. He had poor English at that time.

01:14:12

Now that we know he came here when he was three, think about that.

01:14:20

Folks, what's so reprehensible about this situation is that the man adds exaggerations and falsehoods to the very presentation of the gospel itself.

01:14:33

And if you can't see why that is something that needs to be repented of, then I can't be of any assistance to you.

01:14:43

I can't be an assistance to you. So this seemingly is going to be the perspective.

01:14:57

I'm persecuted. He's a mean man. Let's say everything he says about me was true.

01:15:03

Let's say all I do is sit around attacking people. Does any of that change the factual reality of the documentation that stands before Ergon Kanner demanding his answer?

01:15:16

Of course it wouldn't. But it does help you with your support base.

01:15:24

As I mentioned, about a week and a half ago now,

01:15:30

I was interviewed by the Lynchburg paper. This past weekend, I was interviewed by Christianity Today.

01:15:38

A number of secular media outlets are grabbing hold of this. I don't rejoice to see that, but it's inevitable.

01:15:47

Once this information became mainstream, and yeah, it primarily became mainstream through me, once it becomes mainstream, there's only a brief period of time before it's going to be picked up.

01:16:00

Will it be handled well? I don't know. I doubt it. But it does seem that the only response that Ergon Kanner has to offer is to attack anyone who raises the question.

01:16:15

It strikes me as desperation. It would be nice if there were people in leadership at Liberty that could come alongside and say,

01:16:25

Dr. Kanner, you need to be open in admitting these things. There needs to be a full revelation.

01:16:30

You need to give an entire timeline. When you moved here from Sweden, where you have lived since then, we know from the time of the divorce onward, they could not leave the

01:16:41

United States. So when he sits here and tells us he lived in Turkey, when?

01:16:46

When, Dr. Kanner? Demonstrate it. Document it. When did you live there? This is a story that just went out again on the nation's airwaves, and we'll take a look at that.

01:17:02

Now, I don't like spending time on this. I'm really sick and tired of it personally.

01:17:10

But once again, as I've said to some of the Muslims who've contacted me who have actually been thankful that there's someone who has some integrity out here that does not believe that simply because a

01:17:25

Muslim said it automatically has to be identified as a lie. I hope that, and folks, you've got to realize that there are so many doors that have already been slammed in my face.

01:17:40

All the Calvary Chapel doors have been slammed in my face almost. There are just one or two that know what would happen if they had me in.

01:17:50

The whole Norman Geisler area, the Reformed theology area slams lots of doors. Talking about Roman Catholicism slams many other doors.

01:17:57

There's a lot of fear because of Islam that slams many other doors. And believe you me, talking about Ergin Kanner and calling for integrity on the part of a president of a theological seminary to stop lying about his history and lying about his expertise in these areas, many, many doors slammed.

01:18:16

I don't know what else to do because what I value most highly, folks, and hear my heart here, when

01:18:26

I stand before an audience, my last debate was in London at Trinity Road Chapel, and there were many

01:18:35

Muslims there, many right in the front row. When I stand before an audience, if I cannot stand before them with integrity and honesty and a clear conscience, then

01:18:49

I cannot do what I do. And the force and the power of my proclamation of the gospel is going to be directly connected to the sincerity that is mine in its proclamation.

01:19:08

And I am convinced that if I know of people who call themselves

01:19:14

Christians, who are lying in their claims, lying about their background, misrepresenting the facts,

01:19:24

I cannot with integrity simply ignore these things no matter how much it costs me.

01:19:33

That's just the way I am, and that is why

01:19:39

I've done this. I don't have any desire for this kind of stuff. People who know me know this is not a pride issue.

01:19:47

It's not an ego issue, and people who know me know I hate politics. I'm not talking about just politics as in Democrats, Republicans stuff.

01:19:54

I'm talking about this kind of politics. People lying up to defend, people lying up to attack, blah, blah.

01:19:59

I hate that stuff. I want to be preparing

01:20:05

Lord willing to debate Christopher Hitchens. I've been spending all my waking hours preparing to debate

01:20:10

Robert Price. There are so many debates I want to do. There are so many books I want to write. That's what I want to be doing.

01:20:17

But this is an issue of integrity. I have to do it no matter what it costs.

01:20:23

So pray for us because it seems very clear to me that what Ergen Kander is going to do is he's not going to answer these questions, but he's got a lot of fuel for a flamethrower, and he's going to try to deflect his own lies by attacking others, and specifically yours truly.

01:20:46

So pray for us. Thank you very much for listening to The Valuing Line today. We will be back on Thursday, and we'll listen to the

01:20:53

Focus on the Family program and then take your phone calls as well. Thanks for listening. God bless. I believe we're standing at Let this moment of suffering

01:21:31

We must contend for the faith that fathers fought for We need a new reformation day

01:21:40

It's a sign of the times The truth is being trampled It's time to make some noise

01:22:00

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