James White is Teaching Heresy!

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Anyway, welcome to the program today. It's a Friday. If we were trying to always have the largest audience, people watching live and trying to do stuff like that, this would be a bad time to be doing this.

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On a Friday afternoon, people are getting ready for a long weekend. Some people have a really, really long weekend because of the

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July 4th stuff. My cats will have a really, really long weekend because of fireworks, that's for sure.

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But other than that, this wouldn't be the time to be doing it, but we only got the one program in earlier in the week.

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It was two hours long, but we only got the one program in. And by the way, let me thank everybody who called in.

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Great questions. Those programs are really, they're tough to do.

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You know, I mean, I'll tell you the inside scoop here. I'd forgot how many times

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I was on the Bible Answer Man broadcast, but it was many times. And he wasn't sitting there alone, okay?

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There were other people in the studio and there are people looking things up and sliding resources over and doing stuff like that.

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I'm here all alone. Once in a while, I'll just be straight up, hey, could someone look up such and such and tell me when that happened or something like that.

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But those call -in shows, you may see up on the screen what the question is.

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That doesn't mean that once you punch it up, there's gonna be a whole lot of connection between what was on the screen and what you end up dealing with in that situation.

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So anyways, enjoyed that program. We'll be doing more of those as we can. I just wanted to start off because I need to deal,

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I've got to get, I've said over and over again for what?

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A month now. We're gonna try to respond to the James White is

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Teaching Heresy article. And we just never get around to it. We put other things in front of it and then those things expand and so we don't get to it.

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So I need to get to that. And I think it should be helpful. It will involve some in -depth discussion of various elements of Christological inquiry and belief and so on and so forth.

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But it'll also illustrate, to be honest with you, one of the key issues in the,

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I don't even know what, no one's really come up with a good name. I mean, I've thrown a few good, a few zingers out there.

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The rise of Reformed Thomism, the new

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Reformed Baptist Scholastics. There's a lot of ways of describing it, but none of them really,

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I think, do it real justice. But there's certain fundamental foundational issues that are at stake here.

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And I think a lot of folks, they're out in the weeds because they're talking about something about simplicity or something about inseparable operations.

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And the real thing is, when you hear Reformed Baptist pastors, professors, writers saying, how

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I interpreted the Bible up until five years ago was completely wrong. Or it makes mincemeat out of the confession.

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And you start hearing, as I've had multiple, I've had three different people now who have listened to or attended the conference that took place a few weekends ago.

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Well, okay, a month ago now. In Gilbert, with most of the, not all, but a large number of the leaders of this movement.

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And they all said the same thing. There was next to no scripture, exegesis, preaching.

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There was reading of scripture before talks, but nothing really more than that.

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And every speaker mentioned the great tradition. Not one mentioned solo scriptura.

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And the great concern that I have expressed and others are seeing and are expressing is the trajectory where these things historically have ended up going.

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Because this is not the first time there's been a re -ignition of a fascination with scholastic theology or with Thomas Aquinas or anything else.

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It's not the first time it's happened. But it all comes back to foundational issues of where we derive our beliefs and how we pass them on the next generation.

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And that should be, did you notice on the calls? We're all thinking about the next generations in light of what we're seeing in our society right now.

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I think most of us sit back and we go, man, we had it easy. And that may be why we let things go crazy or didn't see things coming or became so comfortable with our place in the world is that we had our stuff and we believe in the myth of neutrality.

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And we didn't really believe what scripture said about the enmity of the world. And so we didn't give a lot of thought to how to transmit the essence of the faith of the next generations in the face of tremendous opposition because we weren't really facing tremendous opposition.

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We really weren't. Almost any inconvenience we considered to be great opposition, but it really wasn't.

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And so I forgot to, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I'm gonna have to drag this over here.

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I forgot to turn the cameras on outside and I really don't want to turn this on and discover that my vehicle is no longer outside.

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Hey, Phoenix is only two hours from the Mexican border. So, you know, unfortunately we've become

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LA East. We really have. So the idea of, ooh, got to clean that camera.

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There's just one, there's only two of them that can actually see where my vehicle is parked.

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So I need to get the right one there. All right, there, go full. All right, now

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I can see it. Well, someone could steal my front bumper, but I wouldn't see that. Anyway, passing on divine truth to the next generations, next generations, not just your children, grandchildren, great -grandchildren, great -great -grandchildren.

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You have to have something that is not temporary. It's not a fad. It has eternal foundations to it.

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That's definitely something I've been thinking about. And I am so thankful as a

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Christian that I can trust God's written word, that he has the oracles of God that have been entrusted to his people.

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They were entrusted to the Jews. Now they're entrusted to the true circumcision. They've been given to his people.

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And he has preserved them, not by tradition, but by supernatural means down through history.

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We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Maybe, don't know if we have time to get into it. And I just want to remind you, we normally go to 2

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Timothy 3 to talk about scripture as being theanoustos and what it's profitable for and its ability to equip the man of God.

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But remember that right before that, Paul's been talking to Timothy about, he knows he's gonna be facing deceivers who are growing worse and worse and imposters.

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Wow, people who claim to be something they're not. And in contrast to that, he says to Timothy, you, however, continue in the things which you have learned and become convinced of.

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You know the truthfulness of these things, knowing from whom you learned them and that from scriptures, you have known ta hiera gramata, the holy writings, the sacred writings.

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And then which are able, the holy sacred writings are able to make you wise and the salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus.

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Writings that have an ability, writings that have a capacity. These debates are taking place amongst reformed men.

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And if you're a reformed man of any stripe whatsoever, you recognize and believe that man is fallen in his sin and suppresses the knowledge of God.

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And so you know how many times in the New Testament, mankind is said to be incapable of doing this, unable to do that.

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Exact same root is used here. The holy scriptures are able to make you wise unto salvation.

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That doesn't turn the holy scriptures into a fourth or fifth person of the Godhead or anything like that.

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But what it does tell you is that if they are the hiera gramata, if they are the grafe theanustas, then their nature as God breathed gives them capacity in the purpose of God.

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And I'm simply going to tell you that down through the years, as I have watched first people my age go off to seminary back when

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I was younger and lose their faith or replace their faith with something very, very different.

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I've told you many times, I remember this one fellow, he was probably 15, 20 years older than me.

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Started at Fuller at the same time that I did, similar church background, hence similar set of beliefs.

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Evangelical. And by the time he graduated, he had what

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I've called a master's degree in confusion. You need to, in seminary, be exposed to all sorts of different perspectives.

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But what that does is it reveals whether you have a good solid foundation or whether you don't.

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And it'll either help you to build that foundation or if you've already got a bad foundation, it'll just break it up, it'll shatter it.

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And I saw that happen many times, unfortunately. And then as I've gotten older,

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I see younger men go off and I give them advice. I say, do not become enamored by the educational process.

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Do not become enamored by the men with great amounts of knowledge. Stay rooted, stay grounded, stay firm in the word, in your church.

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And has everyone that I've said that to done that? No. Have I seen shipwreck as a result?

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Yep, have, have. And so down through those years, one thing

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I can say to everybody, if you want to ground people, if you want to give them that which will edify their souls 20, 30, 40 years down the road, then what you must do is you must show them divine truth in the pages of the sacred writings.

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Because that's where they find the voice of the shepherd. And it's only the voice of the shepherd that will satisfy the sheep.

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It's only from the shepherd that they will learn truth. Everything else is just noise that gets in the way.

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And that's why my focus has always been not to try to convince people to listen to a particular school or individual or whatever else, but it's scripture.

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Be grounded in what you find in the Theanostos revelation of God, because that will last.

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The spirit of God can reignite even the most apathetic and cold heart that has at least once been touched.

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But the things of men and man's isms and movements and things like this, they won't last.

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They won't last. So when

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Paul says to Timothy, that you have known the sacred writings, which are able, much of modern theological education does not believe that the scriptures are able to do anything.

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They're just simply the words of men that contradict each other and that were never intended to have some kind of harmonious meaning.

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The vast majority of people attending college and seminary level teaching in the

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Western world, that's what they're taught. That Paul contradicted Paul and Paul contradicted Peter.

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And you just have to do your best to try to make something fit, put something together.

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You know, you've got to come up with a sermon for Sunday. So you need to find those resources with all the funny, warm stories and everything else, because we really don't believe anymore that that scripture is

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God speaking. That's what's in vast majority of it. And there really is a lack of confidence in the scripture's ability to accomplish these things.

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There's no question about it. And only the spirit of God can,

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I think, birth that confidence and then maintain that confidence. And that's one of the greatest things that you can pray for for any person involved in ministry is that the hurts that they will experience and the disappointments they'll experience, the betrayals that they will experience, the tendency is for those types of things to cause people to start looking outside of what

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God has given the church for their sufficiency, looking to the isms. And that's how people end up going off into the weird stuff is because they end up losing that conviction.

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And so if you want to pray for something for your pastor, pray that Lord would keep him rooted and grounded in the word and satisfied, satisfied in the word.

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And that becomes the means by which we pass the truth on. But it will have its greatest effect when it is passed on, not on the basis of the authority of a particular teacher or denomination or a creed or confession.

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But when you demonstrate that the creed or confession the person's holding to is consistent with scripture, that's where the voice of Christ will be found.

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Anything else, the voice of Christ will be secondary. It will be a reflection, it'll be an echo.

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We should never allow ourselves to get to the point. And there are people who are already well past this point who believe that the confession of the creed is a clearer expression of the truth of God.

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Of the voice of Christ than what is in scripture itself. We want our confessions and creeds to accurately represent and to summarize and to be a concise and clear summary statement, yes.

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But it can never become theanustas. It can never become the hieragramata, the holy writings.

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All this has to be seen for what it is, secondarily, beyond that. So, with your permission,

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I would like to maybe briefly respond.

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I can guarantee you one thing. If this had happened only 15 years ago, it would have been the first thing we covered on the very next program.

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It would have been. But I'm old enough now that I recognize that you have to prioritize things.

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And in this particular situation, being accused of teaching heresy, once you dig into it, you see exactly what it is.

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And I'm hoping that I can make it useful to other folks to see how this works out, but we'll do our best.

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Pray that I can do so. The issue is primarily brought up by Matthew 24, 36, and Matthew 24, 36 is a text that I would say

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I have had to deal with more often in the context of debate, yes, but very often, you see, in a debate, you're either dealing with a text when you have some time to develop it, or the really hard thing to do, that most people have never done this.

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And to be honest with you, most people shouldn't try to do this. You have to sort of be wired.

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It's very challenging to do. Ask anyone who's done it and struggled with it.

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But very often what'll happen is you'll get hit with something when you do not have time to lay the foundation and to give a full answer.

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I was talking with a friend the past couple of days about the issue of the canon, and he commented that some guy had asked a question of me from the audience, and you seem to struggle.

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Yeah, anyone who wants to give an honest answer on a subject as deeply theological and yet intertwined with history as the subject of the canon, and you're literally looking at having between 60 and at most 120 seconds to do it.

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Yeah, you're gonna struggle. And simplistic answers there, they're easy, but they're not necessarily truthful.

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And texts like Matthew 24, 36 are gonna come up in Trinitarian debates or come up in debates with Unitarians or come up obviously with the

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Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, all sorts of folks. And you can, if you want, do the canned answer routine where you sort of have a pre -memorized, this gets me around it in the amount of time

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I have type response. I struggle with those because of what my goal is.

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My goal is not to look good. My goal is not to get around it.

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I'm primarily focused on the person who really is going to experience the grace of God. They may even embrace

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Christ as a result of this. And I'm giving them some of their first examples of what it means to accurately handle the word of God.

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And to be honest with you, apologists, if we're honest, if we're open, apologists sometimes don't handle the word of God with accuracy because their goal is not to give an example of that, but to win a point or avoid an alleged pitfall, do something that your method demands you do, whatever.

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I think that's one of the things that does make me different as an apologist is I'm involved in the church. I can't put on the one hat and go out and handle the word of God in a debate one way and then stay on the pulpit and do something else and then stay in another context of teaching and do something else and be different people.

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And I think for those people who do know me, they recognize, no, you are the same wherever you are.

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If you're in the classroom, if you're in the debate, if you're in the church and the sermon, you are who you are.

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And I think that's important to be consistent in those ways.

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And so a text like Matthew 24, 36, I want to be able to handle it aright.

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And so I've heard a number of different types of responses to Matthew 24, 36.

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If I'm in a debate, I'm already telling the other person that could be a

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Muslim, it could be a Unitarian of a non -Muslim variety, person who claims to be a

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Christian, but rejects the Trinity. There's a lot of different contexts in which something like this could come up.

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I'm already challenging them to be consistent in their handling the word of God and to not bring in outside authorities.

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I've got to do the same thing. I've got to do the same thing. My first stop, my first guidepost is going to be to try to deal with Matthew 24, 36 in the context in which it was given.

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And that's where one of the problems is coming up today is we're being told, no, you can't do that. You need to, we can't access the minds of the original writers.

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So we can't know why Matthew said what Matthew said. Now, of course it was

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Jesus speaking in the vast majority of theological education. It would not be a given that Jesus said these words.

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For most Christians, that's a given, but in the large portion of higher education today, that would be one of those things that you would hear a lot of professors going, what year is it?

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As a way of basically saying, man, are you behind the times? If you actually thought that this is an accurate rendering of what

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Jesus actually said. The text, of course, sorry,

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I've mentioned it half a dozen times, didn't quote it. But of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the son, but the father alone, the father only, manas.

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So it's, udais oiden, no one knows.

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Udehoi angeloi ton udenon, neither the angels of heaven, udahahuias, nor the son, amahapater manas, except the father only.

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Now, there are sexual variants. There's a variant in regards to the inclusion of the phrase, nor the son.

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And there are a number of manuscripts that do not include it.

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I'm not gonna get into this right now, but it's painfully obvious why a scribe would wish to not include udahahuias.

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And the majority text does not contain it. So it just simply says, neither the angels in heaven.

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Well, why would it say neither? It should be udah, udah, that wouldn't make sense. It's sort of obvious that it's been deleted.

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But anyway, when there is a clear reason why a phrase would have caused a scribe to stumble, and yet you have earlier manuscripts.

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So the original of Sinaiticus, it's interesting, there's a, it's been put in, taken out, and put in and taken out in Sinaiticus.

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So a bunch of erasures and stuff like that. But it's in Vaticanus in D, Theta family 13,

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Lectionary 2211, manuscripts of the Vulgate, the old Italic, the

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Latin version of Irenaeus, certain manuscripts of Drom that contain it.

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Whereas mainly what we would call the Byzantine manuscript tradition does not contain this reading.

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Vast majority of scholars believe it's original. If you don't, then you can tune out to later on.

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But we'll go with the reading of the Nessean 28th edition. Now the angels of heaven, nor the son, except the father only.

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And so over the years, as I have explained this text, either on the program or in debates,

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I have pointed out, and that's where this whole conversation came from.

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I've pointed out that Jesus is speaking as, speaking in the incarnate state.

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And he's talking about the coming of the son of man, very next words, for the coming of the son of man will be just like the days of Noah, for as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying, giving marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark.

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They didn't understand until the flood came, took them all away. So Jesus is speaking in a context of a future event, and he is making it clear that the timing of that event is determined by the father.

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Now in eternity past, the father, the son, the spirit, well,

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I believe that the father, the son, the spirit out of the reality that there is only one being of God and that it is

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God's intention to bring glory to himself through his creation, that father, son, and spirit covenanted together to accomplish the one divine will, one divine decree.

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There are not three decrees. There is one decree.

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You could not, I would argue, you could not even have creation if you did not have the decree. You'd have, if you had three decrees, you'd have three different creations.

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They'd be in conflict with one another. The, whatever the nature of the relationship of the divine persons might be, and we have very, very little biblical revelation on this subject for obvious reasons.

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We're talking about, I mean, how, how could God even describe his eternal existence to us time -bound creatures?

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So we have those precious few texts where father, son, spirit, they interact with one another, but there are very few, very, very few.

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Gospel of John gives us a number of them. In fact, I, as far as specifically speaking of father, son, spirit together, that almost all was all there in John 14,

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John 16, as far as the roles that each one is going to be taking in the economic trinity, that is the outworking of that decree and bringing about of redemption.

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But the point being that each of the divine persons working in perfect harmony with one another without any division of the being or essence of God, you can't have a third of Yahweh doing one thing and a third of Yahweh doing something else.

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There's no, there's no way to divide up the being of God in that fashion. And yet we are forced by the very weight of scripture to define our categories in such a way as that the father, the son, the spirit have meaningful interaction with one another.

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You can read some people and it almost, it's almost like they're saying, well, there's sort of a father part of the mind of God that knows about the son part of the mind of God.

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And some of it goes so far as to say, and when the father part contemplates the son part and the son part contemplates the father part, the result of the contemplation is the spirit.

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And I'm just like, okay, that sounds doesn't sound anything like what you'd get from reading scripture, but there are people that have gone to that point.

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I, in fact, I really wonder if there aren't a lot of people out there that don't actually believe that we can root and ground key elements of our theology in the page of the scripture itself, that we've sort of filled in those gaps with theological silly putty.

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And we better not go there because we never tried to build anything of that stuff. It doesn't really last for a long time.

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Anyway, I believe that when you look at Matthew 24, verse 36, you should start with what the text was intended to communicate by the author at the time that he wrote the epistle.

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If you have come to conclusion that you cannot understand this and that no one could have understood it until, make up your mind where?

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Until Nicaea? Until Constantinople? Until Chalcedon? Until Thomas?

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Where are you going to put the place? If you say that it was basically unknowable until some kind of traditional authority was able to develop to fill in the gaps, you and I are going to have a real problem.

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We're going to have a real problem because these words are theanoustos, traditions created hundreds of years later are not.

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But to say that you cannot understand what is theanoustos until you have that tradition from hundreds or a thousand years later renders that divine revelation mute until certain other things happen.

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So I function with this concept in mind.

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I try to, can't do it consistently, but I try as best

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I can, knowing that no person could ever have the time in this life to do the kind of study that's required to do this consistently.

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I try not to be dogmatic on that which I know I could not possibly defend against an equally prepared proponent in a debate.

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So that's why I was non -eschatological for a long, long time.

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And that's why I don't have to put a number of people on a bus straight for the gates of Hades because I know that the areas where we disagree are areas where there can be meaningful disagreement.

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Now, the fundamentalist mindset is that everything is equally clear.

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And everything is equally important. And the leftist progressive, what we used to call liberal mindset, really wasn't liberal, but anyway, is that everything is up for grabs because you can't really know anything.

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Neither one gives you a balanced biblical perspective or a balanced biblical means of understanding.

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Practicing the Christian faith long -term. All that to say, what

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I start with in Matthew chapter 24 is I have to go, all right, as I answer this question,

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I have to answer it using the same standards that I have used to require of the person on the other side to give answers to my questions.

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And so if I go, well, in this particular instance, my doctrine of the

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Trinity requires me to make certain distinctions so that it's not really the son speaking, but that I can now somehow crawl through the page of scripture and go, well, this is the human aspect of Jesus speaking to the exclusion of the divine aspect of Jesus.

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So somehow I'm now dividing up the person of Jesus, not in saying one person with two natures, but in really getting to the point where are we even talking about one person at all?

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Now, I don't think it was Matthew's intention that we even be thinking along those lines, at least for the initial understanding of the text, to make further application, to answer questions down the road, to speculate about things.

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Well, we have to affirm in any other place, just think with me for a moment, man, we're never gonna get this done today.

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I had a bunch of other stuff to get to too. I should have known. In any other situation where we would have, as in John, ha -pater, the father, ha -huyas, the son, how many places in John do you have those two terms used together?

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And we had already gotten this in Matthew back in Matthew chapter 11. Remember the gospel of John and Matthew? Matthew chapter 11, that very

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Yohannine language is used there. In any other text, when the word son would appear here, together with the father, this would be naturally seen as being father and son, sender and sent, honor the son, even as you honor the father,

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John chapter five, right? That's what we would get. And in some texts of scripture, we are given a context that allows us to argue that the original author intended us to take the reference in a particular fashion.

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So John 14, when

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Jesus says the father is greater than I am, there's a context there. The context is

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I'm going back into the presence of the father. If you'd loved me, you would have rejoiced for the father's greater than I am.

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So there's a sense the context is something I'm going to be doing in the future in light of a present reality.

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Then there you have something right there in the context, whoops, right there in the context that says, we're talking incarnation here and we're talking post -resurrection.

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And so we can validly and must validly bring in these other aspects of what the author has revealed to us about Jesus.

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And so it's perfectly proper in John 14 to say, when

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Jesus says the father is greater than I am, he's speaking as the incarnate one. And that is meant to be a elucidation for them of the fact that he is going to be exalted when he returns back into the presence of the father.

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And if that they loved him, they'd rejoice that he was going to go back to that exalted status that he had, which then really sort of gets fleshed out a little bit more in John 17.

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Just really the same larger context there in the epistle, in the gospel.

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But here you don't necessarily have that. I mean, there's, you know, you could argue, we're in Matthew 24, okay?

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There's, can you think of too many passages of scripture that have spawned more interpretations in Matthew 24?

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But you really don't have, you know, you have Jesus' assertion that, you know, he's giving prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem.

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If you don't believe that, well, whatever. He talks about this generation, verse 34.

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I think it was that generation. I know all the, hey, I was on the other side once.

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I know what the answers are. And then heaven and earth will pass away. My words will not pass away.

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Some people would want to say, oh, see, that's about preservation of scripture and things like that.

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Well, in the context, would the apostles have thought of it that way? This is, that is a way of saying, truly,

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I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away.

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My words will not pass away. So he's specifically talking about what he has just told them and saying, what

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I have told you is true, going to take place. And once he says that, he then says, but of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the son, but the father alone.

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Now it's a real strong temptation to go, well, what's probably being said here is, you know, the emphasis is on the father's sovereignty to set the time parameters.

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Well, yeah, I mean, John six says it's the father, you know, the father gives a certain people to the son.

46:29

And so the father has that right and that power. And so in this situation, it could be again, it's the father as the source of the decree and all things that has fixed this time.

46:49

So I have heard people go that direction, but again,

46:56

I have to be able to defend whatever it is I'm saying in the context of my having criticized someone else in their position and their interpretation.

47:07

I've got to be consistent. And so what I have said in the past is that for the purposes of Jesus fulfilling his role as the anointed one, the incarnate one, the suffering servant, all the different roles that he takes as prophet, priest, and King in the incarnate state that this knowledge of that day or that hour, not the fixing of the day or the hour, that might be a possibility.

47:45

I just, I couldn't defend it. I couldn't, I could not defend

47:50

Oida, Oiden in verse 36 as being anything other than to possess knowledge of the specifics of.

48:05

You might be able to make an argument, but I wouldn't be able to defend it. So that's again, my standard, whatever that ends up meaning.

48:17

In Matthew 24, 36, Jesus is speaking and he refers to himself as the son.

48:28

And he said, he includes the son in the Oida group, not the angels of heaven, nor the son.

48:36

And that appears before I'm a, except the father only.

48:48

Now, if we want to go, well, this was the human aspect of Jesus speaking.

49:02

Okay, prove it. I mean, it becomes somewhat arbitrary, doesn't it?

49:12

To go, well, if that doesn't fit my paradigm, then that just means it was the human aspect of Jesus speaking rather than the divine aspect.

49:26

If we can even utilize those terms, we can't avoid the fact that scripture uses language like they crucified the

49:38

Lord of glory. Crucifixion, that's something you do to physical body.

49:45

You can't crucify the Lord of glory, but the Bible says they did. So there is a proper way of understanding that the

49:55

Lord of glory was crucified. And so we cannot avoid dealing with the

50:06

God, man, Jesus. And therefore there's going to be absolutely unique situations.

50:13

And I think one of our problems is instead of saying that's an absolutely unique situation.

50:18

And therefore let's follow the wisdom of the scripture writers. Scripture writers did not insert themselves for example, into Jesus's life, except once prior to his public ministry, right?

50:38

Jesus's presentation in the temple. And the

50:47

Gnostics didn't like that. And so they made up all sorts of stupid stories that ended up creating all sorts of havoc and ended up in the

50:57

Quran too. But that's the problem. That's what happens.

51:04

There are aspects about the incarnation that we will not understand until eternity and we may not fully understand then.

51:11

And if that's a problem, then I would simply go, there are aspects of God being eternal that we will not understand to eternity and probably not fully understand then.

51:22

And that's a basic element of God's revelation of who he is. So I need to be consistent in the answers that I give and the methodologies that I use.

51:37

And if you can find a way of somehow discerning in the phrase,

51:44

Udah Ha Huyas, that Jesus, that only part of Jesus is speaking, rather than Jesus said these words, this is how it would have been understood by the writer and his original audience.

52:08

And when we then ask the question, well, how can that be?

52:19

How can that be in the broader sense of our understanding of who

52:26

Jesus was? Then we take this as a data point, but we don't try to bury this under some construct that we come up with, as if we're literally making some passages more important than other passages, more inspired than other passages, more useful than other passages.

52:57

And so what I had suggested for a number of years is I see it in the context of that veiling, not that getting rid of, not kenosis, but that laying aside voluntarily of the exercise of certain prerogatives.

53:21

And to go beyond that is to enter into speculation that Matthew had no intention of ever addressing.

53:34

And to pry into things that the word of God does not reveal is to deny, well, the statement of scripture, the secret things belong to the

53:47

Lord. And there is a proper distance that we can go in the light of scripture.

53:57

And when the light of scripture ends, we make an end of speaking and should make an end of speculation too.

54:05

And so I likened it to the fact that Jesus in his pre -incarnate glory is indeed glorious, but outside of that brief period of time in the mound of transfiguration,

54:18

Jesus's glory is veiled for the purpose of the accomplishment of his mission to be the

54:27

Messiah and to bring about redemption. So with all that having been said, in this article,

54:40

Andrew Warwick and Rich, I've got my phone here. Are we trundling along?

54:49

Are we good? We're going to survive so far.

54:56

All right. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I love this. I wonder how much time we now spend in our lives looking at those three little dots going bloop, bloop.

55:09

Which, when did that start? Because that, I don't know how long ago it was, but that little bloop that says they're typing, how much time have you sat there going, oh man, they're typing a lot.

55:25

This is, they're typing a book. You know, and sometimes I'll even go, hey bro, hit the return key, you know, something.

55:36

Oh man, oh, ow. Oh, I just forgot what I was talking about because I just took a shot to the heart.

55:47

Where's my cardiac medicine? I'm going to tell you folks, you don't know.

55:56

You don't know what I put up with. You don't know. He said

56:01

I need to get to the point eventually. So anyways, brother

56:08

Andrew started off saying that he used to be one of his favorite theologians. When you say used to, not anymore, so there you go.

56:17

Let's just hit a couple of these things as quick as I can here. In this dividing line, James White has vigorously denied teaching the canonic heresy, and has charged all his accusers with dishonesty.

56:27

Whether or not there is a crucial distinction between his teachings and the teachings of the most prominent teachings of Kenosis is not for me to say.

56:37

I'm going to accuse him of teaching heresy, but it's not for me to say. Okay.

56:43

I do not claim to have studied canonical writings in any depth and several, I will neither be accusing nor vindicating him of that specific charge.

56:50

That's wonderful. I have, I had to in seminary, and hence was, you know, anyway.

56:59

But what I will say is that like the advocates of Kenosis, James White is involving the attributes of divine nature in the humiliation of the sun, and so is likewise departing from Calistonian Christology.

57:10

So I'm not going to say he's teaching Kenosis, but I am going to say he's teaching Kenosis, okay?

57:18

So notice what the essence of this accusation is. He's involving the attributes of divine nature in the humiliation of the sun.

57:27

Well, if Jesus was one person with two natures, and yet you could look upon him without immediately bursting into flames, then the incarnation involves in some sense, the veiling of at least some of the divine attributes of necessity, of absolute necessity.

57:47

We are talking about an absolutely unique situation, but every Orthodox theologian that I've ever read recognizes that the state in which the sun contemplated,

58:05

Philippians chapter two, Karma Christi, contemplated his obedience to the father and his humiliation, that the state that he was in prior to the incarnation is different from the state of the incarnation.

58:33

That's just a reality that cannot be argued one way or the other.

58:41

So if you in any way say that Jesus takes a role of a servant, was he a servant in heaven before?

58:54

Oh, you believe in kenosis. No, you don't. Kenosis has a specific meaning. I'm the one that defends the sun as autotheos.

59:05

So go read the actual German authors that promoted the idea, and maybe you'll get the idea.

59:12

I continue on. In no uncertain terms, James White understands the ignorance concerning the day or the hour depicted in Matthew 24 as an ignorance that not only exists in the sun's humanity, but also in his deity.

59:26

So what Andrew wants to do is he wants to have

59:32

Matthew answering questions that Matthew is not even attempting to address or raise or anything else.

59:39

All I'm saying is Jesus said these words. Jesus said, the sun does not know the day or the hour.

59:49

Now we can place that in the context of the incarnation. We can place it in the context of Jesus accomplishing his messianic purpose.

01:00:01

But what does this supposed to mean? See, this is the danger. We take our later fully developed theology and we bring it back here.

01:00:10

And now we're going to force Matthew 24, 36 to serve us and to fit into the nice, neat parameters we've made someplace else.

01:00:20

Guys, if it was that easy, there wouldn't be a textual variant of Matthew 24, 36. There wouldn't have been scribes who were going, well, either the sun, hmm, what?

01:00:33

And so there were scribes who were like, hmm, hmm. Jesus said, the sun does not know the day or the hour.

01:00:44

Now, you need to limit the speculative asking of questions to the context of Matthew 24.

01:00:59

And if you want to go, well, does that mean that the sun never knew or does now not know?

01:01:05

Did Matthew address any of that? I mean, we can sit back and go, well, it would make sense to say that in eternity past, that was fixed in the decree of God and therefore was known fully by Father, Son, and Spirit.

01:01:29

And we could speculate that post -resurrection exaltation, a messiahship accomplished, that there would be no reason for there to be, for the situation that Jesus refers to here to continue into that context.

01:01:52

We can speculate about those things. The reality is when you start accusing people of heresy based upon your speculations, eventually you will find yourself alone in a very small circle.

01:02:10

Be very careful because I believe the sun in the most pure, love -soaked, sovereign choice chose to make himself nothing.

01:02:43

Now, if you think you know everything, Andrew, if you have learned everything that that means and exactly how it works out, great.

01:02:53

I haven't and so I'm not going to accuse you of heresy the way you accuse me of it because there's a lot more to this.

01:03:03

And if you're comfortable, if I would like to hear please don't go out and do it because I don't think it would work real well, but I would like to hear how you would respond in 60 seconds.

01:03:21

So you don't get to establish any contact. 60 seconds, a

01:03:28

Muslim asks you, Matthew 24, 36. I'd like to know how you would provide a meaningful response and introduce whatever categories you need to introduce.

01:03:45

So what he's saying is, well, you're saying that the sun has never known. I never said anything of the kind.

01:03:51

I'm simply saying that in Matthew 24, 36, at that time, in that context, Jesus as one person said, the sun does not know the hour.

01:04:00

That's what the Bible teaches. And you've got to fit what the

01:04:07

Bible teaches at that text into everything else. You don't make

01:04:12

Matthew 24, 36 say what you want it to say to fit into your system.

01:04:17

That's the issue. And if I want to sit here and accuse a brother of heresy, teaching heresy,

01:04:26

I could do it. Got a whole lot bigger audience than you do. I could make your life miserable, but I don't do that kind of thing.

01:04:33

And you shouldn't be doing it either. You really shouldn't be.

01:04:43

Anyway, he says, first it paints

01:04:49

God as a creature of time, baloney. Baloney. I'm not exactly sure how that use of baloney is spelled.

01:04:58

Is that balogna or B -A -L -O -N -E -Y? I'm not sure, but it qualifies as both.

01:05:09

I am saying that Jesus, the incarnate one, experienced time.

01:05:15

You know how I know that? Because he fell asleep in the boat and because he talked about what we were going to do on the morrow.

01:05:25

And because when Lazarus died, he said, we're going to hang around here for a while. In other words, he experienced time.

01:05:31

That does not make him a creature of time in the sense of deriving his essence from a temporal existence, but the man

01:05:40

Jesus was born in time.

01:05:47

So in the incarnate state, whatever you, however you want to go with that, the one person, wait,

01:05:55

Chalcedon, remember? One person, two natures. Sometimes I'm wondering if you guys are really balanced on that.

01:06:02

One person, two natures. It's almost like the human nature.

01:06:08

You just sort of get to turn it on there, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up. Really think that's what the

01:06:15

New Testament writers are doing? You think you can defend that? This is in contrast to Declaration of the

01:06:26

Sun made during his humiliation, earthly ministry, saying that before Abraham was, I am, John 8, 58.

01:06:34

I wonder if I was one of the first people to introduce Andrew to the I am sayings of Jesus. It's wonderful when your students become so much wiser than you are.

01:06:47

There is no contrast whatsoever. The one who identified himself as the I am is the incarnate

01:06:54

Yahweh. No one's denying that. But what does that have to do with what

01:06:59

Jesus said? Jesus said, the sun does not know the hour.

01:07:05

You've got to deal with that. You can speculate, well, if we're gonna believe that, then that, no, no, we have to believe that.

01:07:13

That's what the words say. And this is where, again, if you start with what the words say, then you build your theology so that it fits everything the words say, not just, here's my theology and that doesn't really fit, so I'm gonna shave that off and file it down and just sort of make it work a little bit better.

01:07:34

No, you can't do that. That's what the other side does. And if we're sitting in a debate going, hey, you're doing that.

01:07:42

And then they go, hey, so are you. Sorry.

01:07:49

No, he did not say before Abraham was, I was, but rather I am, the past for us is ever present unto the eternal, timeless

01:07:54

God. Vast majority of the verbiage in this article had nothing to do with anything I said. Therefore, it is absurd to imagine him at one time knowing something and another time not knowing something when he is outside all moments of time and always experiencing everything that he is and has done.

01:08:12

So what aspect is being referred to there? God in his timeless being, but he became incarnate, right?

01:08:21

So this would make absurd any statement that Jesus ever made about, well, tomorrow we're going to do this, or we're going to not go see

01:08:29

Lazarus until he's dead. And because there's some times gap, absurd, absurd. You're putting

01:08:35

God in time. Oh, you're making him a time -bound creature. No, he's incarnate. So I'm just allowing the scriptures to say what scriptures say, right?

01:08:44

Yeah. Second, James White's interpretation contradicts Calistonian Christology.

01:08:50

The creed states the distinction of natures was by no means taken away by the union that is the incarnation, but rather the property of each nature is preserved.

01:08:59

But omniscience is undoubtedly a property of the God who knows all things, 1 John 3, 20. And so it would not be the case that the property of each nature is preserved in the incarnation if the son as God ceased to know something for a time.

01:09:11

And as already indicated, the very notion of God losing something for a time confuses the natures of creator and creature.

01:09:22

So the question, once again, we'll use the same illustration you used before because no one's ever refuted it or explained how it could be.

01:09:33

It is proper to the nature of the son to be glorious, but he hid that glory to accomplish the incarnation.

01:09:48

The proper nature of the son is to have all knowledge. We are not told why knowledge this particular issue at this point in time is necessary to his fulfillment of his role as a

01:10:00

Messiah, but evidently it is. It in no way, shape or form changes the fact that the son from all eternity has known these things.

01:10:09

And the confusion here is on Andrew's part because who's speaking in Matthew 24?

01:10:16

Well, he wants to divide Jesus up so that you've got a part of Jesus speaking and the other part of Jesus just goes, no,

01:10:24

I know exactly what that is, right? We've got the schizo

01:10:30

Jesus going on again. Remember, maybe you guys aren't doing it, but I'm actually asking people outside the

01:10:38

Christian faith to consider the claims of these things. And so I don't get to do the flip the human side of Jesus on Oh, flip that out.

01:10:48

Oh, divine, divine sign. Oh, that's fun. That's fun.

01:10:54

That's easy. You expect someone to go along with that? Or when the oneness

01:11:02

Pentecostal folks are doing that as part of their theology, how do you criticize them when you do it yourself?

01:11:14

So the reality is it would be very easy for me, very, very easy for me, if this was the type of thing that I wanted to see being done.

01:11:28

To turn this around and say, it's Andrew who's teaching the heresy. It's Andrew doesn't understand

01:11:33

Chalcedon. It's Andrew that is not taking the biblical foundations of Chalcedon seriously and giving us a schizo

01:11:45

Jesus. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna get into this stuff going on online right now where you just light people up to demonstrate how brilliant you are, theologically speaking.

01:12:06

The real issue is whether we are going to root and ground our proclamation in the words of scripture so that when we proclaim that not only to people outside, but inside, it becomes that objective spirit born reality that will

01:12:30

Christ's sheep hear his voice. Or whether we're gonna subjugate that to our theological systems.

01:12:42

Now, look, I think there's great wisdom in Chalcedonian definitions, not because, this takes us back to what conversation we had about Nicaea, not because it's

01:12:55

Chalcedon, but because it's dealing with the biblical revelation we have in scripture of who

01:13:04

Jesus is. It does seem to me that after that point in time, a lot of speculation started happening.

01:13:14

There was speculation before then, but really, once you start asking the questions that scripture never intended to answer, you have to start filling in with non -theanoustos filler, and you can't make the two mixed together very well.

01:13:36

You really can't. There's a whole lot more here, but I think we've addressed much of it already because the whole idea here is, well,

01:13:50

Jesus couldn't have really been incarnate. He couldn't have really veiled his glory.

01:13:57

He couldn't have really veiled knowledge if that was what was necessary to accomplish his purposes in the sight.

01:14:03

Couldn't have done it because our theology doesn't say that. Well, your theology is supposed to be derived from scripture and the son said, doesn't know the day.

01:14:14

Doesn't know the day. Unless you're gonna do the thing, now it's human, now it's divine.

01:14:21

I mean, sometimes in the same sentence, human divine, this type of thing. That's not gonna fly.

01:14:30

Oh, I'm sorry. That'll fly in certain Facebook chat rooms. That'll fly in certain seminary classrooms, but that's not gonna fly out in the real world where we're dealing with all the objections that come to the faith.

01:14:48

And we're trusting that the one means we've been given to communicate these things to the next generations and to people outside the faith today is that which is the honest us, it's

01:14:57

God -breathed. It's not gonna work for them. I had a bunch of stuff queued up here.

01:15:06

As far as I can tell from my phone,

01:15:13

I haven't gotten any, I'm almost afraid to ask, make sure everything's still okay because I might get burned again by Rich.

01:15:26

That was really, that was just nasty. You know what? Screenshot.

01:15:33

I'm keeping that one. Yep, got a screenshot now. Can't be deleted. And I'm gonna keep that one for future reference.

01:15:43

I'm in the middle of dealing with Matthew 24, 36, and this is what

01:15:48

I'm getting from the guy that all the time I give, you're so mean to him.

01:15:54

I'm just gonna keep that. I'm gonna put it in my favorite photos on my phone and just go from there.

01:16:04

Okay, one thing, and then we'll wrap up. I'm trying to be calm, cool, and collected.

01:16:18

I just want to ring the bell of warning one more time. Let history show that someone was trying.

01:16:30

I got an email from IRBS today. I -R -B -S. There's all

01:16:36

Reformed Baptist seminaries have RB somewhere in them. You can get them confused from I -R -B -S.

01:16:46

And under faculty books of the month, we have why

01:16:54

I preach from the received texts co -edited by Dr. Jeffrey Riddle, IRBS adjunct professor of New Testament.

01:17:03

An exceptional volume confirming the integrity of the traditional text of the Bible. Now, I doubt very much that at this point anyways,

01:17:19

I -R -B -S is taking a stance as a institution in favor of what is being called confessional bibliology, also known as TR -only -ism.

01:17:34

But, and maybe faculty books of the month just simply means these are books that faculty members have contributed to.

01:17:43

Maybe that's all it means, because as far as I know, it's not out yet. God, I'm pre -order, I haven't gotten it yet.

01:17:52

I can see how a form of confessional bibliology would fit with the current rise of a form of traditionalism amongst

01:18:10

Reformed Baptists and a certain kind of confessionalism. It just, it's just amazing to me because as expressed by Jeffrey Riddle, the system stands refuted.

01:18:27

It really does. These men want to, on the one hand, say you can't engage in reconstructing a text that is a, that's questioning

01:18:41

God's providence. And yet the text that they're promoting is reconstructed. And the only way to identify the text and to answer questions about the text is to engage in some form of textual critical work.

01:18:54

It is self -refuting. It stands refuted.

01:19:01

You cannot answer the questions about which reading in certain passages, even in the published

01:19:08

TRs, without engaging in textual criticism. And as soon as you do that once, your system's done.

01:19:19

It's done because as has been demonstrated and documented over and over again,

01:19:26

TR -onlyism uses whatever argument it needs to use to substantiate any reading in the

01:19:34

TR. Even if in two different verses, it will use the exact opposite arguments.

01:19:40

That doesn't matter. That's okay because the TR is your final text.

01:19:47

So it stands refuted. It's indefensible. And yet here we have in the

01:19:55

IRBS newsletter, the promotion of this system.

01:20:03

And like I said, it could just simply be, we have professors and they've contributed to these books.

01:20:12

And so we will let people know when our professors have contributed to a book. Maybe that's all there is to it.

01:20:20

But like I said, their argument is a confessional argument.

01:20:26

Not that the confession was intended to answer those questions. Oh, but that's the case in other areas too,

01:20:34

I think. So maybe it'll come along and maybe we'll see it happen.

01:20:39

I don't know. That would be fascinating to see. That would be fascinating to see, it really would be. I am looking forward to the book coming out.

01:20:50

Really don't think there'll be anything new in it that has not already been fully responded to in the past, but you never know, you never know.

01:21:00

We'll find out. So next time around, we will look at Romans 1 .20

01:21:09

and we'll look at a claim by Ian Clary. Romans 1 .20

01:21:15

says that we can know God's attributes from the things that were made. If we can know those attributes, i .e.

01:21:23

eternal power, divine nature, then we can theologize from and about them, hence natural theology.

01:21:33

Now I'm thankful anyways that he corrected the first line because it says we can know

01:21:38

God's attributes. No, we can know a very, very, very limited range of aspects of God's being from the things that were made.

01:21:55

But who is the, who's doing the theologizing? If it is a regenerate mind, what if it's an unregenerate mind?

01:22:09

These are the questions that need to be asked. So we'll look at that.

01:22:15

I'll try to remember to look at that. Of course, I said we'd look at what we got to today for quite some time too, but didn't get to it today.

01:22:23

I should have thought we probably would not, but background stuff is important.

01:22:30

All right, probably while I was on the air, Joe Biden said some more insane stuff.

01:22:39

I hope y 'all noticed the statement that was made by that one, he's sort of the hit man for the regime.

01:22:50

When someone said, you know, how long can we expect? As long as it takes to defend liberal democratic ideas.

01:22:58

In other words, as long as we can keep that war going as an excuse, and then we'll find another reason after that.

01:23:03

Oh my goodness. It is so transparent. It is astonishing.

01:23:10

It really is. So yeah, it's probably been something even over the past hour and a half that I'll look at here in a moment and go.

01:23:18

But we press on. Thanks for watching the program today. I think next week's pretty much standard.

01:23:24

We'll see. But if not, we'll just let you know via the app. Make sure you've got that downloaded.