December 30, 2003

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This is the device ready to give a defense for the hope.
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My name is James White and we are live this evening so you can participate 877 -753 -3341 877 -753 -3341
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I have a couple of things on the proverbial stack here. I guess sometime in the past,
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I know what it was, is when I ordered stuff from some of these like St. Joseph Catholic Communications or whatever it is and Catholic Answers and stuff like that.
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I end up on these mailing lists and I get all sorts of really creepy stuff in the mail.
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Not necessarily this is creepy, but I get some really creepy stuff in the mail. You know, these icons and rosaries and stuff like that.
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Anyway, I got something from Marcus Grota at the Coming Home Network this week.
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I thought I'd mention it to let me introduce you to the Coming Home Network. We're a lay Catholic Apostle that has helped hundreds of Protestant ministers convert to the
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Catholic faith. Right now we're helping 200 more who are on the journey to Rome. Each one of these pastors faces a severe personal crisis and I'm short of funds to help them all.
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Please read this important letter and consider helping us help more Protestant clergy convert to the
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Catholic faith. It's a big fundraising thing. Right before we headed out to Florida, I had seen a
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Presbyterian fellow's conversion notification on his website.
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I've seen some people who've written to him. It was interesting, the response is you never do get much of an in -depth response because the reasons for conversion are rarely actually theological.
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It was talking about, would you like to leave a loved one back to the sacraments and please rush your money and we need
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X amount of bucks and all the rest of this stuff. Basically saying, please pray that God will do this.
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You know what, I'm going to be quite up front and pray that God doesn't. These folks are praying upon individuals.
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Let's face it, there's a broad, broad audience that these folks play to.
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There are a lot of folks that are involved in quote unquote Christian ministry who were never called to be there in the first place in the sense of being given gifts by God to do so and having a solid understanding of what in the world they're doing.
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Anyone who watches much of quote unquote Christian television already knew that. They pray on these folks and they also pray on innocent people.
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People who, not in the sense of forensically innocent, but what I mean by that is there are difficulties you face in the
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Christian ministry. There are disappointments that you face. And so if you don't have a solid background as to why you believe what you believe, you're going through disappointments in your ministry.
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They come along, smack you at that particular point in time, give you their false information and away you go.
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We've seen it happen many, many times before. And so I would simply pray that the Lord would not in fact allow them to continue to do that.
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But whether he does or doesn't, I leave obviously in his hands. There is some interesting stuff out on the web.
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This afternoon or this morning or this afternoon, I forget when it was. Oh, if you haven't seen our blog, you need to take time to see our blog because Angel's back at it.
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Those of you who saw the caricature that he did of me that we posted, there's a little teeny tiny one up on the blog itself.
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And you can click on it to get a larger image. He does a wonderful job.
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Well, last night late he came into channel and he had put together a caricature of Jerry Matitix and the
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Heos Hu issue. Those of you who listened to the November 18th program know what happened and the 80 -minute program we did and the back and forth with Eric Svensson and Jerry Matitix and all the responses that that generated thereafter on Catholic websites and the like.
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And that really wasn't all that long ago. It was only a month and a half ago now that I come to think of it. And so Angel had listened to that and so there is this great caricature on our website right now, the main page that Angel put together.
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I posted it last night. And if you haven't listened to the November 18th program, listen to that first and take a look at it.
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It is very, very well done, especially for those of you who know what Jerry Matitix looks like.
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It is based upon a little earlier photograph. We all have photographs out there that show us how we looked 10, 15 years ago.
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But Jerry hasn't really changed all that much, just a little bit. I've certainly changed a whole lot more than Jerry has in the past 10 years.
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But it's a great little caricature. Take a look at it. If you don't have a sense of humor, then skip it.
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There are some folks that have no sense of humor at all. I sort of figure if major publications like Envoy magazine can constantly be printing that exact kind of stuff, that, hey, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
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And when we can demonstrate and document the foundation of that particular thing, it certainly helps,
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I think, in making that point. But anyway, sometime this morning, this afternoon, someone pointed me to a blog entry.
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This is the same fellow. I had mentioned him briefly before a couple months ago, who was panning
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J. Ligon Duncan's response to new perspectivism. And I'm discovering something about new perspectivists.
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They are the only ones who understand new perspectivism. And if you criticize it, it's because you're stupid. You can't possibly be as brilliant as N .T.
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Wright. And since N .T. Wright is the most brilliant man on the planet, then everyone wants to be like N .T.
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Wright. And if you dare disagree with N .T. Wright, then you're just simply a blithering moron. And therefore, if you say, you know,
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I don't really see that this is really being addressed here. Oh, we just need to read something else.
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What else do I need to read? Oh, well, you just need to read more deeply. Well, what are you talking about? You just never get much in the way of real specifics.
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But I had posted just a brief article, and not even an article. It's a blog, for crying out loud.
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It's something very short. And I had read the article from Credenda Agenda, the special edition of Credenda Agenda, where Douglas Wilson addresses new perspectivism.
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And basically, I was disappointed in the response. It did not seem to address the central issues, the real issues of the nature of justification.
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And especially if he's so upset about the fact that there are people who are noticing this coalescence, the fact that N .T.
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Wright is going to be speaking at the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church Conference a year from this coming
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January. And the fact that Steve Schlissel has already, right there from the pulpit at Auburn Avenue, said that justification is nothing more than Jews and Gentiles together in one covenant.
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And if you've read N .T. Wright, you go, hmm, I see a connection here.
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I wonder if it's going to get closer. I wonder if there's going to be further developments. Oh, how dare you do something like that?
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You're just so dumb, and you're a Baptist anyways. So anyway, this fellow was slamming on J.
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Ligon Duncan's article, which we have posted from, we have a link to it at the bottom of the blog archive thing on the website.
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You can track that down. And so anyways, he quotes just a brief section of this article that I posted.
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It's just basically my stating, you know, it seems like we missed the real issues here. We didn't really discuss justification.
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There's no interaction with the exegesis in N .T. Wright. And then part of it might be because it's based upon a little pamphlet published by John Armstrong's ministry.
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But why in the world you'd write an entire credenda agenda about a pamphlet without dealing with something like N .T.
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Wright, which he does a few times, just sort of branches out and goes and gets a quote. But I would think it would be significantly more important to look at 2
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Corinthians 5 .21 and the unique exegesis that's offered there, and Philippians 3 .9.
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And do stuff like that. Then again, I know, I know, I know. I'm just one of those strange, you know, people that are into exegesis.
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And there are people who don't think you can do exegesis anyways, at least outside of some sort of knowledge of tradition or medievalism or whatever it might be.
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But be that as it may, I just posted this article and I basically said, you know, I don't think that he really addressed the issue.
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I mean, he said some nice things. He said some good things about modern scholarship and stuff like that.
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But I just didn't feel like the response was overly useful. So, anyhow,
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Sunday, December 28, 2003. This appears on one of the many blogs out there.
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Everybody has a blog almost anymore. And one little quote. I said, N .P .I .S .M., at its heart, atomizes the text of Scripture, begins the fundamental denial of the relevance of the
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Gospel accounts, and especially the testimony of the Second Temple Judaism. Anyone who would like to know, no one bothered to write to me to ask me what
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I meant by that, if it was unclear, anything like that. You know, we're just sort of pulling it out of the air here, and evidently without any understanding.
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This fellow goes by the name of Alistair, by the way. At least his on -screen name is, anyhow.
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And what I was talking about is the fact that if you go back to Dunn, you go back to Sanders and N .T.
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Wright in his book. Look, if N .T. Wright is not representative of New Perspectivism, then
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I don't know who is. And we're all talking past each other, and nothing is ever getting accomplished if we continually have a moving target.
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But N .T. Wright, in his book, basically says, Look, I consider Sanders' thesis to be established, okay?
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Then he builds on that. Now, does he believe everything Sanders says? No. But the basic fundamental thesis concerning the nature of Second Temple Judaism and the things related thereto, he accepts as being a starting point, as being something that's been established.
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Well, the problem is, if you go back to Dunn and Sanders, you discover these individuals are not doing theology based upon a belief that the
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Scripture is an inspired whole, that it gives us a singular revelation from God, and, in fact, that we should be able to compare
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Scripture with Scripture. In fact, that's something that is not allowed, and anyone who's looked at the background issues knows that Matthew's testimony to the nature of Judaism, even the passage that Wilson brings up, that is the
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Pharisee and the Publican from Luke, these passages are not allowed to inform the construction of Second Temple Judaism.
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And even Paul, I remember, these folks aren't even concerned about doing all of Paul because they can dismiss elements of Paul as being non -Pauline.
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So you can have a restricted or a smaller Pauline corpus by saying, Well, I don't think these things over here in Second Timothy, Second Timothy isn't
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Pauline, it was written by somebody else, etc., etc., etc. So, in other words, by denying the inerrancy of Scripture and the doctrine of inspiration as it has been traditionally understood by Christians, then you can pick and choose your sources and, as a result, you atomize the text.
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You break it up into the parts that you want to give the most emphasis to. Well, that's what I was talking about.
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That's what I meant when I said, begins the fundamental denial of the relevance of the Gospel accounts, and especially the testimony of Second Temple Judaism.
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What Matthew says, what Mark says, what Luke says about the Jews, and about their religion, is not allowed to have the same weight as other passages.
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That's what modern liberal theology does. Well, Mr. Alistair comments,
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The Reformed faith really does not need defenders like this. This is one of the most ridiculous statements
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I've ever heard. It does not need to be commented on. Folks, whenever you hear someone say it does not need to be commented on, they probably shouldn't have commented on it.
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That's my personal belief, anyways. I continue reading. Anyone who has read a conservative proponent of the New Perspective will be well aware that precisely the opposite is the case.
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Really? N .T. Wright is not one of the conservatives? This is his favorite person,
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Alistair's favorite person, N .T. Wright. So, I got that from N .T.
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Wright. Maybe Alistair didn't understand what I was saying, just like Alistair seemingly did not understand most of what
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J. Ligon Duncan was saying, either. Anyway, since when did Baptists become the arbiters of what counts as Reformed?
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I love it. I just love this.
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You can always tell when someone's got that TR aspect going in their minds.
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I am truly Reformed, and you are a Baptist. And you're a bad person because you are.
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What does that have to do with what I said about New Perspectivism, anyways? This is tremendously irrelevant, but it gives you an idea of where the person is coming from.
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Much as I respect and appreciate Baptist theologians, their right to be on the good ship Reformed is tenuous in a number of respects.
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If John Calvin would be uncomfortable with N .T. Wright, he would be no less uncomfortable with James White. Well, that's nice.
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Never said otherwise. If you want to make Calvin and his entire ecclesiology the standard, okay, hey.
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I never said any otherwise, of course. I believe in that thing called sola scriptura, and, you know, testing your traditions by scripture, all that kind of stuff.
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If White had done his homework, that is, if he had agreed with me, we might have had a reasonable critique.
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He hasn't. It is high time the Reformed camp started to clamp down on shoddy scholarship within its ranks, and publicly expose it for what it is.
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There are too many clones of James Whites and John Robbins around. Their fundamental conviction seems to be that when
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God created the narrow way, he didn't create it half narrow enough. Well, okay, there's a clear demonstration of what we were just talking about.
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That is, he has no idea. He's going on second -hand information here.
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He's going on what somebody else has told him. I've never had, to my knowledge, never had any dialogue with this person.
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Maybe I have, and just don't recognize Alistair as a screen name. John Robbins doesn't like me.
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A couple of years ago, I got on his, well, everybody is on his wrong side, of course, but I got on his bad side because one of those, you know, email lists that just sort of pops up out of nowhere, you know, that everybody creates a
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CC list, and I think everybody would be interested in this, and they put your name on it, and all of a sudden this thing starts developing, and it ends up filling your email box with stuff you didn't want to read anyways.
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Then again, all of our email boxes are filled with that kind of stuff today. But anyway, the thing happened, and it was discussing
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Roberts and Jennis, and basically, you know, Robbins is just using all the buzzwords, all the, you know, nasty terminology, and I just basically said, you know, this topic's interesting.
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We might get somewhere if someone wasn't constantly throwing acid into the conversation by demanding that we use this highly charged emotional language.
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Since there's Catholics and non -Catholics on this list, how about, you know, you just dump some of that terminology, and, you know, you don't have to, you know, when arguing against this guy, say, your mother's ugly too, or something like that, just as sort of an added thing.
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Well, I become a compromiser and all the rest of this stuff, and he jumps on me. If Alistair can't tell the difference between myself and John Robbins and our approach and what we believe and what we do, then he's obviously clueless and did not bother to take time to, you know, at least
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I've read N .T. Wright and Sanders and stuff like that, and I think I understand where they're coming from.
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In fact, I don't see anything in this in providing a reasonable critique. Besides, I wasn't writing about who is and who isn't reformed in this.
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So it's a pretty amazing thing to see that kind of stuff. It's sort of sad, but, hey, it's very, very, very common out there.
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I've got another thing here. I wanted to look at... I pulled out some of the Armenian big guns today.
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One of them is truly a big gun. You could whack somebody pretty good with this. Good old Lawrence Vance's The Other Side of Calvinism.
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That seems to be the textbook of many folks these days. But then one of the older ones, the ones you go back to all the time when people say, oh, that's just a very scholarly work,
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Elect and the Son by Robert Shank. I wanted to demonstrate the reality of something that I said on BAM a couple of weeks ago in regards to John VI, and I'll do that by looking at those when we get an opportunity to do so.
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But first, we already have... Excuse me. I hit the cough button for the first one.
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The second one came back, and I didn't even know it was going to hit. We already have someone who is burning up the phone lines and called in early today.
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So let's go ahead and go back out to the flat land from the last time we talked with Howard, but he has a different question this time.
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So let's talk with Howard and his question about John 1 -1. Hi, Howard. Hi, Dr. White.
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How are you doing? I'm doing well. And, yes, Kansas is flat, and I've discovered why it's flat. Why is that?
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If you look out, you'll find out that there's no trees, and so it just appears to be flat.
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Yeah, except there are wheat fields and corn fields and things like that. And they just go on for miles and miles.
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They do. But there are hills, believe it or not. Anyway, I appreciated your debate.
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I listened to the debate with Greg Stafford today. Yes, sir. And I thought it was an excellent debate.
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He was a very good opponent, I thought, and he spoke pretty well. Yes. But he did bring up some things in his conclusion or his concluding remarks, and I was kind of wondering what he was referring to.
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He kind of accused you of not siding, I guess, with the definite rendition that scholars since the 70s have realized.
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To be honest, I really didn't follow what he was talking about. Yeah. Well, let's bring everybody up to speed.
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What happened was during the cross -examination period, and again, part of this,
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I will give Mr. Stafford credit. Everyone will tell you that before this debate began,
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I was telling folks, I personally believed that it would be the most difficult debate that I had engaged in.
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It was my 49th debate, and I really prepared for it. I knew it was going to be a very strong challenge, mainly because my opponent,
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I knew, would be very well -spoken and very well -prepared. But this was only his second debate, and so I had just a tad bit of an advantage at that point, and that came out in the cross -examination.
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What I mean by that is cross -examination is an art. It is something that you have to learn over time.
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You are, in essence, making your argument through the asking of questions and the demonstration of inconsistencies in what the other person is saying.
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I asked many more questions of Mr. Stafford than he asked of me. He really only asked about three questions of me.
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Two of them were on the same subject. He just kept hammering away on, as you saw, a technical point in regards to John 1 .1c.
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That is, how do you translate an anarthrus pre -verbal predicate nominative?
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That is the word theos in the third clause of John 1 .1, kaitheos einhalagos.
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How do you translate the word God there? Then he stayed on John 17 .3 forever, and then had basically one other line of questioning after that.
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The reason I bring that up is it is very clear from what you just said, and even from his comments thereafter, he completely lost the audience.
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The audience was getting restless. They had heard what I had to say. I had given my response.
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He did not like my response. He wanted to bog the entire debate down in a discussion of math and count nouns.
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For those who know Mr. Stafford, they know that there are literally hundreds of pages out there on the
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Web that have been posted between, for example, Mr.
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Stafford and Dr. Hartley from Dallas Seminary on the subject of math and count nouns, with Rob Bowman on the translation of John 1 .1c,
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all sorts of discussions, very in -depth discussions of the syntax of that last clause, etc.,
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etc. Now, if he wanted to do a debate like that, okay, that would be something that we could do.
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I think it would be better if he debated Dr. Hartley or something like that on a subject like that who is published in the field specifically, but I would not have any problem doing that and could get into it if I wanted to completely lose the audience.
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But what I wanted to try to do was to demonstrate a firm conviction
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I have had for a long, long time, and that is that Mr. Stafford and the Jehovah's Witness apologists who populate the
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Web, I have said many times, you can document this from the Dividing Line and from chats in the chat channel and from things that I've written, it is my belief that the majority of the
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Jehovah's Witness apologists who populate the Internet, their knowledge of the original languages is primarily limited to controversial texts.
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That is John 1 .1 or Colossians 2 .9 or other places where a controversy exists with historic and biblical
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Christianity. Once you get them out of those particular passages, they really don't know how to use the text or to translate the text consistently.
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And so, as a result, what I was trying to demonstrate is that Mr. Stafford's, I answer his question,
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I believe that what is being said in context, I believe you translate a language in context.
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You do not translate a language outside of a context. An author has an intention. John 1 .1
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through 18 is a singular whole, and you do not translate any section of a singular whole so as to make it self -contradictory.
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That's not how you do exegesis, that's not how you do translation, that's not how you handle a text in a proper way.
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And it almost seemed like he had never heard this before. Now I'm certain that he has, but to many in the audience anyways, it seemed to be almost a new perspective to him.
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And so what he was raising in the conclusion really required that you have familiarity with all of the articles that have been done and all the discussion that has taken place that I mentioned before on mass and count nouns and the validity or non -validity of Caldwell's rule and all the rest of this rather technical stuff that left you pretty cold and would leave the vast majority of folks pretty cold, simply because it gets extremely technical.
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And I think personally trying to address that, even if we did the entire 20 minutes on it, is absolutely ridiculous.
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This is something that I've found that it bothers me. It's not just what Mr. Stafford did, but this is something that, for example,
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Catholic Answers does all the time. Cross -examination is supposed to only be on the issues that were raised in the presentations and in the rebuttals.
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Bringing up entirely new issues and expecting a person to respond to those issues with an extremely minimal amount of time is really where a lot of debates go awry.
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And that's why in collegiate debated debates being graded by judges, you're not allowed to do that.
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You lose points or you're even disqualified if you break the rules. The rules are there to avoid that very type of thing.
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But in the type of debates we're doing, there's really no rules outside of the audience listening and knowing the rules and knowing when a person is breaking them.
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So the questions that I asked, I asked based upon the presentation that I had made in regards to monotheism, in regards to the person of Christ, so on and so forth, whereas he really wanted to focus upon stuff that would have...
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If we were to just debate that one thing and you had 25 minutes to lay out a case and then you did rebuttals and then did cross -examination, that's one thing.
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But to do it in that way, really... I really don't know that we would have even had a quarter of the audience there that we had if we had limited the subject to such a narrow extent.
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So that in essence is what he was making reference to. If you go to various of the apologetics websites that deal a lot with Jehovah's Witnesses, you'll find links to the various lengthy, lengthy exchanges on mass and countdowns and things like that.
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Things like he was saying since the 1970s, Trinitarians have changed their translation?
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No, I think what he's... Well, that may be the assertion he's making, but that's not really the case.
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The issue is there has been significantly more dialogue and discussion concerning the nature of pre -verbal, anarthrist, predicate nominatives, especially in regards to John 1 .1,
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but in other places as well. And in essence he's, I think, maybe taking credit for some of that on his own in regards to the exchanges that he has had.
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Obviously not since the 1970s, because he was not long at that point.
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But that, I think, is what he was attempting to state. And you'll see in the translations that's not the case.
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But someone like Daniel Wallace will say, look, what's being referred to here is that theos is telling us about the nature of the logos.
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And so he even suggests the translation of the word is deity in his footnotes, but he says you really can't do that as a formal translation.
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And that gets us into the whole issue of translational theories. Specifically, where do you do interpretation?
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Do you do interpretation in the translation itself, or do you do interpretation from the pulpit?
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And I've been thinking about that some myself. I think it's an important issue. And maybe addressing a little bit more of that in the future in regards to the function of the church and the preaching of the word and translation of the word and things like that.
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I read, like, Kenneth Wiest, who says that the word God in that 11C means that the word was the stuff.
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Basically, what I read him as saying is that whatever the stuff that makes God to be God, that is what the word is.
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Right. And he's trying to say that a God would change that?
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Well, what he's trying to say is that since it's a noun, it cannot be functioning to describe the nature of the logos.
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And that's where I think he misunderstands the categories of substantives, adjectives, and nouns.
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As many people know in the Greek language, adjectives very frequently cross that line, and nouns can as well depending upon the syntax and the usage.
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And what he was saying is, look, it has to be either God or a God. It can't be anything else. And that's what happens when you focus solely upon grammar and you do not deal with syntax and context.
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Because context, that's why I kept pointing him to John 1 .18. Here is the bookends. Here is the further explanation of this.
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And when we see all of it together, we know what John is attempting to say. You don't do exegesis the way you're doing exegesis.
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And he just kept giving me opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to make that point because he didn't want to move on to other issues and wanted to just focus upon that one thing, which really wasn't a wise direction to go.
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So, anyway, we've got a bunch of other folks online. I appreciate your call today, Howard. Thank you for calling 877 -753 -3341.
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I think we have one line open. If you'd like to get involved today, we're going to take our at -the -half -hour break.
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Take your phone calls on the other side here on the dividing line, 877 -753 -3341.
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You can order your copy of James White's book, Mary, Another Redeemer, at aomin .org.
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And welcome back to the
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Dividing Line. We are taking your phone calls today live at 877 -753 -3341.
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Let's head off. Oh, I haven't had a chance to do this in a long time. Let's head off to United Kingdom indeed and talk with Jason.
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Hello, Jason. I'm on the phone. Hello. Yes, I know you're on the phone.
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We can hear you. Hello, Jason. I don't think
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Jason can hear me. I can hear you now. Oh, you can hear me now. Well, we could hear you even before you could hear me.
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A bit worried for a minute there. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's great to be able to talk to you again.
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I'm sorry, but I haven't been able to do this in a long time and it just has to come out once in a while.
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I'm just waiting for the people on the channel to start complaining. Anyways, do you want to talk about Seventh -day
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Adventism? Yes. A couple of days ago I met a
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Seventh -day Adventist online. I'd actually spoken to her before. She tried to convince me that I should worship on the
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Old Testament Sabbath day rather than on Sunday. I found it difficult to make a response to her because I'm not really that clued up on how the law relates to the
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Christian life. I was wondering whether you'd be able to tell me whether the
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Bible does actually teach that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath now. Very interesting.
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Well, a couple things. First of all, as far as Seventh -day Adventism goes, the issue of Sabbaths and keeping of Sabbaths reminds me of something in Colossians 2.
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They use that sort of like Jehovah's Witnesses use Christmas and birthdays and the shape of the cross.
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It's a door opener through which they then want to bring all of their other stuff that is extremely bad.
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When you deal with Seventh -day Adventism, the real issue there is the issue of what's called the investigative judgment.
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You're going to find considerably more benefit, I think, in the long run talking to this individual concerning the subject of the atonement and the like than you are debating this issue.
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In my experience, for those who leave the SDA movement, this is not the issue that makes them to leave.
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In other words, an encounter with God's grace, a recognition of the true nature of the atonement, grace and freedom and things like that, that eventually leads to a recognition of not only the falseness of Ellen G.
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White and her writings, but once that person has embraced the gospel, then they begin to see the abuse that has been promulgated in regard to this particular issue of the time of the
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Sabbath and so on and so forth. The issue of whether Saturday or Sunday is the
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Sabbath causes all sorts of people to divide in every which direction.
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The biblical term that needs to be focused upon, and I'm speaking apologetically here, is the phrase the
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Lord's Day. John was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day. We see this in Revelation chapter 1.
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The question becomes, what is that day? There really isn't a whole lot of disagreement or much argumentation on the fact that in that particular perspective, that term, the
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Lord's Day, refers to the first day of the week, the day of celebration of the resurrection, which is
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Sunday. The Puritans did not hesitate to transfer the term
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Sabbath with everything that accompanies it directly over to Sunday.
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If you want to hear a defense of how that is done,
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I know that there is a seminar done specifically on that subject,
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I think last year at Grace Covenant Church in Gilbert, Arizona.
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I believe Dr. Jim Renahan did the presentation on that. You'd be able to get hold of that information.
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You'd probably be able to Google that fairly easily and track down the tapes of that as to how the
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Puritans did that and the proprieties of doing so, etc. It's difficult for me on an apologetic level, a debate level, to defend that wholesale transfer of the term.
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The Continental Reformers had a less strict concept of that and it wasn't built so much upon the idea of just a complete and wholesale transfer of things and the term and so on and so forth.
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They allowed for the concept of some element of fulfillment of the Sabbath and Christ and things like that.
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But there's got to be probably a dozen different major views on that with all sorts of sub -views along the way at the same time.
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I confess it's a little bit like eschatology for me and that is that I know that there's a big argument about it and I know there's big arguments in the circles that I'm even involved in, but it's just one of those things that I've never taken the time to dig any deeper than having that kind of summary knowledge and it's not something
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I really argue a whole lot about. Well, thank you very much for those comments.
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I'll see if I can get my friend to listen to the archives at some point and it might be good to listen to that.
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Especially for you personally, I would think that the study of that issue would also involve the study of the nature of the law.
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That gets into all the issues about New Covenant theology and the whole nine yards.
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I mean, there's a lot of stuff there. There's a lot of different perspectives from a lot of good people who otherwise on issues concerning justification think that that would all be pretty much on the same page.
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And yet when it comes to the specific application, that's an area of a tremendous amount of discussion.
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I mean, you're probably familiar with Reconstructionism and theonomy and various levels and differences between those folks and just all sorts of things like that.
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So there's a lot of ground to cover in that particular area and it can be very fruitful as long as it's done in such a way that we don't end up tying folks to stakes and lighting them up because they happen to disagree with us.
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Hello? Okay, well, thanks a lot. Well, thank you very much for calling. What time is it there in the
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United Kingdom? Oh, it's twenty to one in the morning. Twenty to one in the morning?
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Oh, my goodness. Well, you know, I did hear something very sad and that is that I heard that the
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Queen's dog died and that it was in fact killed by one of the princess' dogs.
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I just want to extend my sympathy to all of you who are grieving so deeply over there in the
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United Kingdom. Thank you very much. You're most welcome. Thank you very much. Toodle -oo.
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Bye -bye. Oh, we have fun around here. You know, the wonderful fellow who allows us to even do this webcasting hates it when
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I do those accents. But I can't help it.
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It's kind of like dragging your fingernails down a chalkboard. Come on. Come on.
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There were a couple times I sounded very much like Jason there. Come on. Everybody admits that.
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In your dreams. Oh, man, that's fun.
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Okay. 877. You can't say we don't have fun around here.
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877 -753 -3341. Let's go ahead and talk to Mike in New Jersey.
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Hi, Mike. Hey. Can you hear me? Yes. All right. You don't really have much of an accent, though, that I can imitate.
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No, no. I'm not even sure I want to go on with the call because, clearly, if that's an
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English accent, you're so horribly deluded that there's probably not much point to discussing that anyway.
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But that's all right. With this whole controversy, though, which is quite a convoluted situation, one of the things that bothers me the most.
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Let's put the context here. What conversation type? Is that the English accent controversy?
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New perspective. Ah, new perspective. See, everybody thought you were talking about my accent. No, no, no. That's probably worth just ignoring and hoping it goes away.
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You know you just got kicked out of the channel. Somehow I'm not surprised. Regarding new perspectivism, they took that topic down.
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One of the things that bothers me the most about it is that there's this vicious, kind of irrelevant rhetoric that's often employed that doesn't really do a whole lot.
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I don't think the controversy can even begin to get resolved until we get around that. Because, I mean, you'll be talking to them and there's just these constant false dichotomies being presented.
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Like if you express some kind of an issue or reservation against presumptive regenerationism, then they just kind of start talking to themselves or to other people, if they're in a group, for like the next 20 or 30 minutes about the evils of rugged individuals who deny the value of God's covenant.
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And it's like, well, that's nice, but I'm over here. Yeah, yeah. And so like, are you talking about me?
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They'll never say that. They'll just start talking about these people. And it's like, well, either you're saying I am these things, which
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I'm not, or you're just completely irrelevant over here. And it's like, what's going on?
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Well, you know, first, at least in my experience, the issue of presumptive regeneration is much more closely tied to the
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Auburn Avenue Movement than it is New Perspectivism. This particular review that I was reading, this
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Alistair fellow, I, as I noted, don't understand how we went from the discussion of one quote, which had to do with the background of New Perspectivism and its view of Scripture, into Baptists and Reformed and John Calvin and Shoddy Scholarship and John Robbins.
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I mean, that is the scattergun approach to providing a response to somebody.
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Basically, he didn't like what I had to say, and instead of interacting with it in a meaningful fashion, maybe demonstrating that conservative
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New Perspectivists can affirm inerrancy while somehow getting rid of all of the baggage and the foundation upon which their system stands, that would be something that would be useful to me.
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That would be something that I would like to see. But that's not what you get. You get this, well, you're a
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Baptist, and you're obviously too dumb to understand this stuff anyways, type of an approach. And as you said, it doesn't accomplish anything.
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It doesn't go anywhere. I mean, my article was real simple. If Douglas Wilson, up in Moscow, Idaho, is upset that people have been accusing him of this, that, or the other thing, okay, fine.
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Then in your response, what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to address the actual issues that have prompted the concerns.
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Now, for me, some of the things that have prompted the concerns have been the statements concerning the nature of justification made from the pulpit at the
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Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church Conference in January of 2003 and January of 2002, and especially summed up by Steve Schlissel when he said from the pulpit that justification is nothing more, this was in the same context as saying that Luther's view that justification, the article of the
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Standing or Falling Church, is hooey and hogwash. He made the statement that justification is nothing more than Jews and Gentiles are together in one covenant.
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Now, that's a very brief summary of what Wright and New Perspectivists are saying about what's going on in Galatians is that the issue in Galatians is only ecclesiology, not soteriology.
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It's about the church, not the nature of salvation. The justification basically is that we're all in this one covenant.
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Now, I have tried, and since I don't get any credit for trying, maybe
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I should stop trying, but I have this higher authority I have to answer to, I guess, but I have tried to make differentiations.
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I have tried to say, now look, Douglas Wilson is not Steve Schlissel, and neither one of them are
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John Barich, and they aren't Wilkins, and I discerned different emphases between each of the speakers.
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Okay, fine. I would expect that if Douglas Wilson does not agree with Steve Schlissel, that the easy way to handle this, the proper way to handle this, would be to come out and say,
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I disagree with Steve Schlissel in regards to the statement that justification is nothing more than the
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Jews and Gentiles together in one covenant. That is not enough. I listened to Brother Steve's presentation, and I interpreted him to mean that only within the context of the dialogue in Galatians, and I'm sure he doesn't mean that in regards to the full doctrine of justification, because the full doctrine of justification would involve the imputation of righteousness, and so on and so forth.
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This could be done in such a way that he doesn't have to say that Steve Schlissel is completely out to lunch or anything else.
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He can say it in a respectful fashion, but he can make the proper and necessary differentiation.
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I didn't see that happening, and not only did I not see that happening, but I did not see any meaningful exegetical interaction with the key passages, many of which
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I cited in the brief article that I posted this week, that I think any person who holds to the
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Westminster view of justification needs to interact with,
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I mean, how many times has 2 Corinthians 5 .21 cited as a proof text by the
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Confession or the Catechisms? Now, he has absolutely, this is
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N .T. Wright, has absolutely completely broken with that perspective on the interpretation of that passage.
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Why am I, I'm not the only one, but I would think that Douglas Wilson would recognize that's an important point, we need to address that, much more than the large portion of the verbiage that was printed in that edition of Credenda Agenda, but it wasn't addressed, so I was disappointed, but if you dare to express your disappointment, that means that you're not truly reformed, and all the rest of that kind of fun stuff.
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So, yeah, there's absolutely no doubt about the fact that the level of dialogue has been ridiculously inane.
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Yeah, well, there's really no positive presentation that I can see coming from them on just, like, pretty much anything.
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I mean, I have an interview done with the four of them from a Christian Renewal magazine, April 28, 2003, talking about the 2003 conference.
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Okay, let's again make sure that, because I'm watching the channel, and I know you can't do that because I kicked you out, but let's make sure everyone understands, we've now switched from N .T.
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Wright and New Perspectivism over to the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Conference.
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The four people you're talking about, Steve Wilkins, the pastor of Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, John Barich, who's, was he
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Unite Reformed? Something like that. Yeah, in Canada. Then we have Douglas Wilson from Moscow, Idaho, and Steve Schlissel from Messiah's Congregation in Brooklyn.
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Right. Okay, go ahead. And they asked Schlissel, I mean, basically they're asking him about his statement that, what must
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I do to be saved is the wrong question, which he made in the 2003 conference. Right. And his answer is that, to that part, is what must
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I do to be saved is a fine question in context. I'm not opposed to the question. Every unbelieving Philippian jailer -guarding apostle should ask it after an earthquake.
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But what does the Lord require is better, more helpful, for many reasons, and he goes into it. And it's like that hasn't answered the question, because that application is positively worthless to most people in existence today, because nobody around now is a
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Philippian jailer -guarding apostle experiencing an earthquake. And so it's just the constant referral to these hypotheticals, which is kind of witty, but doesn't really do a whole lot.
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Well, you know, I probably, you know, and again, my opponents, it's fascinating.
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People that I once helped to come to understand the doctrines of grace, once they start off into this stuff, all of a sudden
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I become the stupidest person on the planet. And they evidently don't think that I actually listen to these things.
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Actually, I try to be very, very fair. And as I listen to what you just mentioned there, and I place it back into the context of the
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Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church Conference, I would understand that what Schlissel's talking about in that context is the repeated criticism on the part of all of the speakers at AAPC of what might be called the
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Southern Presbyterian, or as they called wet Baptists. They're very against the
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Southern Presbyterians, but they are against the idea of calling baptized people to repentance and faith in Christ.
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And that's why there are those who would say that their greatest evidence of being a
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Christian is my baptism, because I was baptized.
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And the Southern Presbyterian calls the baptized child to repentance and faith in Christ.
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And there was a constant criticism of doing that. What you should do, and in fact some of those there are paedo -communionists, not all, but some are paedo -communionists.
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And you heard, I think it was Wilson who made the statement, well, this is why we should have paedo -communion, is because we're starving these covenant members because we won't let them come to the table.
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So my understanding of, I would probably try to put the most positive spin I could on what
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Steve Schlissel said, and what he was in essence saying is, if you're talking to a pagan, that's one thing, but when you're talking to people who are in the covenant, then what does the
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Lord require is the proper terminology we should be using. Now do I agree with that? No, of course not.
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But the reason I don't agree with that is a foundational issue in regards to the nature of the covenant. And that then, the higher argument there between various Presbyterian groups who would agree on the nature of the covenant in the sense that baptism somehow joins one to that covenant and that it should be given to infants before a profession of faith and so on and so forth.
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That becomes another issue that obviously I can sort of sit back and watch, but I'm not participating in because my difference at that point would be very, very clearly in regards to the nature of the covenant itself.
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And so part of it's intramural within the Presbyterian realms, and a part of it is not.
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Well, yeah, but there's a comment in the interview actually with Wilkins who's dealing with introspection when you're preparing to approach the
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Lord's table. And he says, there's been quite a lot of banner of truth type influence in the
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Southern Presbyterian churches, and I guess if you don't understand what that means, he goes on to say the Reformed Baptists have had a sizable influence on Presbyterians in the
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South and have played a big part in the revival of Calvinism, etc. And then he says, one friend of mine, a
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Presbyterian, commented to me recently that we should leave it to the children to decide when they are baptized. That shows how
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Baptistic many have become. And it's like, well, then he's not a Presbyterian. I mean, he's confused.
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He might be a Presbyterian in name, but I mean, he should probably become a Baptist then. And I don't understand how appealing to one friend of Steve Wilkins goes to show how many
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Presbyterians, as he says, are becoming Baptists. It's like, that's ridiculous. Well, obviously, many of these folks, when
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I've had interaction with some of them directly, make it very, very clear that what they're really saying there is a
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Baptist influence is an anti -Reformed influence, period. And I can confess the sovereignty of God and salvation, and I can confess particular redemption, unconditional election, and defend it, and so on and so forth, but it doesn't make me
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Reformed from their perspective. In fact, I'm anti -Reformed. And then you do have, and I think we need to recognize, there is a whole other set of emphases found in the
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Moscow movement that is not found in certain other elements of the
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AAPC. The medievalism, the emphasis upon a Christian society, the stuff that's coming out of New St.
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Andrews right now, and the things that are related to that, that's not something that I necessarily see being echoed in other elements of the
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AAPC. So part of it is, I think all of us, even those of us who would oppose the movement in general on theological grounds,
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I think we have a responsibility to try our best within the realms of being allowed to do so, as far as the confusion that has been engendered by the movement, to try to represent as accurately as we possibly can.
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But once we've done so, I think there finally has to come a point where the folks on the other side of the aisle stop saying, well, you just don't know enough to talk to us, and start really trying to talk to us.
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That's been my frustration. Basically, once I start the exegetical discussion, it stalls right there, and you know what
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I'm talking about. Right. Well, it's ridiculous, though, because if you dare to define what it means to be
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Reformed around justification and sola fide, then you're ATR, and you're being ridiculously narrow and whatnot.
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But if you define what it means to be Reformed around a certain view of the covenant, I don't even know what to call it.
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Basically, a hyper -Presbyterian at best, I think it's almost more a Roman Catholic one, with the baptismal degeneration.
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If you don't share that view, or Lutheran, I suppose, then you're not Reformed. Yep. I know, and I really think if we're truly
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Reformed, we should apply sola scriptura. But even when we do that, there's arguments about that now these days, too.
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Well, we press on despite the difficulties, knowing that the Lord has a purpose in it all.
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Thanks for calling today, Mike. God bless. Well, thanks for listening, folks. Hey, unless the folks on the other side of the wall tell me otherwise,
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I'm up for Thursday. All it is is a bunch of football on, so I'm up for Thursday at 11 o 'clock, if the guy across the wall is.
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And if he's not, we won't be here, but if he is, we will be. And he says he is, so we'll be back, 11 o 'clock,