February 1, 2022 Show with Dr. James R. White on “How to Prevent the Implosion of Biblically Faithful Theological Movements”

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Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions and now here's your host

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Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and for those listening internationally over the internet this is

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Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for our first live broadcast in a long, long time.

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We were airing reruns as many of you know who have been listening regularly. We've been airing reruns for quite some time because we have relocated to a new home here for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio not only for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio but also for me personally and I'm so delighted and thrilled that the

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Lord has enabled us to finally relaunch the program and if you have been following the history of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio going all the way back to 2005, whenever we have had a first time on this program such as when we first launched in 2005, when we first relaunched in 2015 when we moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania from New York and now when we're relaunching again after a long period of reruns due to our studio not being ready, we have always had as a guest for these firsts, my dear friend going back to 1996, actually the conversations began in 1995 but I have considered him a

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He's a Reformed Christian apologist, a New Testament Greek scholar, seasoned debater, author of many books, conference speaker, and member of the pastoral team at Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona, and he is co -founder of Alpha and Omega Ministries and today we are going to be addressing a very controversial theme, how to prevent the implosion of biblically faithful theological movements when disagreements occur over secondary and tertiary issues.

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It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to a live broadcast, my dear friend, Dr. James R. White.

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Well it's good to be with you Chris, you know we first tipped up just a few minutes ago the cameras were on and I was looking at your camera feed and I was going, who is that old guy

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Chris has working for me? And then I realized, oh no, that's actually

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Chris wearing glasses, sort of doing the old man staring at the computer thing, what is this technology stuff?

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And I realized I look just as old if not older. It has been a very, very long time, maybe 96, we're coming up on 30 years, not quite there but it's not too far away from the start of the great debates and it's like, wow, okay.

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In fact I was trying to, somebody's got to teach me how to do this, I was trying to cut one sentence out of a video, which is the trailer for a new movie that's out, and the clip is where a mobster is sitting on his couch and somebody is calling him, preparing to enact revenge on him, and the mobster is sitting there, he answers the phone, how did you get this number?

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Which is the first word I ever heard come out of James White's mouth when

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I called him for the first time, and then the voice on the other end says, same place I got your address.

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Yeah, that would have been definitely fitting given how things started and you know some of those, you know one thing that really strikes me about the passage of time is the number of people that I have debated over the years who are no longer on the earth.

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Wow. So you know John Shelby Spong has died, Greg Strawbridge last week,

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Barry Lynn. Oh I didn't know Barry Lynn passed. I'm pretty sure of that,

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I don't want to, I'm not trying to wish him ill, but I'm pretty sure he did, yeah. So it is a reminder that eventually

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I'll be one of those too, but the grass withers and fades away, and we're all getting older, and so hopefully there's some level of wisdom that one gains from all of those years, but I'm certainly hoping to finish well.

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That's not something that, I'll be honest with you, I can't think of anyone when

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I was younger that tried to communicate that to me, that you should have as your goal finishing well, but I've certainly tried to communicate that to others today because that's not something you just start on after 50 or something like that.

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That's something you need to be planning on for quite a while before then. I think that's a very, very, very important thing to consider because you and I both can think of people that we know that did not finish well, and that's, you know, a lot of people start off and you know, they're rising stars, but then 10, 15, 20 years later, now 10, 15, 20 years is starting to become a, yeah we'll see how they're doing after that amount of time, you know, instead of the old ways that we used to do things.

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But anyhow, yes, it's good to be with you, and obviously I think back to the times on Long Island where we would take the train into the city, we'd actually go to WMCA and be in studio and do all sorts of stuff like that long, long, morning.

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When I went to the station, I think it was near that pizza place, if I recall correctly.

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I would have been wherever, you know, the German couple that I stayed with, it was... Oh yeah,

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Roland and Mariana Bloch. Roland was actually from Switzerland and Mariana was from Germany. Right, and I think it was somewhere near their house or something like that, wherever that station was on the

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Long Island Railroad. And I made the huge mistake of walking up there.

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And first of all, I stopped and I stood there and evidently I took someone's place. I didn't realize that there were saved places that everybody has.

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And then the worst thing I did was I actually tried to talk to someone, you know, because I'm from Arizona, you actually talk to people.

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And I'll never forget the look that everyone gave me, like, who is this visitor?

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And should we push him in front of the train or just what? You know, it was like, yeah, welcome to Long Island.

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And didn't you and I get lost once, get separated? Yes, that was the famous Ronkonkoma train station.

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Yes, Ronkonkoma. Yes, as we were about to board, I said to you,

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I'm going to get a cup of coffee and you probably didn't hear me and kept walking. And I went into a little stand where they sold coffee and candy and all that stuff.

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Got my coffee, walk out and you're nowhere to be found. And I'm calling out your name, James, James, James, James.

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And then I run up to the platform. The train has arrived. I don't see you anywhere. So I say, well, he must have gotten on this train.

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I get on the train and in a panic, I actually walk up to somebody who was on their cell phone and grabbed their cell phone out of their hands and and called you.

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And yes, and I called you. I said, please tell me that you're on this train.

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And your answer, I could vividly remember, was no, sir. No, sir. So I had to meet you in Deer Park.

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I had to get off the next stop and then wait for you for the next train to arrive from Ronkama Ronkama to Deer Park.

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I figured out I figured I was pretty much dead at that point. That was that was going to be the end of that. That was actually when you were speaking at Red Mills Baptist Church in Mayhapock Falls, New York.

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How in the world do you remember that? I'm like, I knew I was going someplace to speak, but that's that's hardly a major thing.

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I have no earthly idea where we were headed or anything else. But I'm sure that I'm sure that the pastor and congregation of Red Mills Baptist Church are very pleased to hear you say that's no big deal.

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No, what they should hear me say is I've spoken, you know, a thousand different places and which one

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I was going to that day. Don't have a clue. I don't I even know what year it was. It's a little bit like Michael Fallon.

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He can always remember exactly what cruise we were on when something happened. And I'm like, I don't know. It was a ship. It was in the water.

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That's the best I can do. So, yeah, by the way, Michael Fallon has agreed. I don't know when the actual event will occur, but he's agreed to be one of my pastor luncheon speakers in the near future.

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Ah, well, he I saw him do his presentation on what's going on in the world just excuse me just recently, and it was very, very good.

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So you'll you'll get a good good talk there. But anyways, so there's there's 10 minutes of reminiscing from the old folks.

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I hope your rocker is going back and forth as smoothly as mine is. Well, today is one of those days where and it actually typically is with you and I, where we pick a subject that no doubt will get some folks angry and some folks will be probably sighing with relief that there are others in agreement with them.

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But you and I are Reformed Baptists. We are confessionally Reformed Baptists.

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We both adhere to the 1689 London Baptist Confession. We are both members of congregations that adhere to the 1689

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London Baptist Confession. And so it has been grieving us.

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I don't know if you have been grieved or I have been grieved for a longer period of time, but it is a time for sadness when you see on the one hand

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Christians to give the good news side of the equation, that there are still

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Christians left that care deeply about theological and doctrinal accuracy.

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It's refreshing in a day and age when the mantra is doctrine divides.

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Let's not harp or focus on theological distinctives. Let's just lift up Jesus.

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And of course, without theological astuteness and biblical faithfulness and accuracy, what does that even mean?

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What's Jesus and what are you doing to lift him up? So you have on the one hand the good news that Reformed Baptists have been historically known for people really seeking to teach and obey and live out principles that are actually taught in the scriptures, no matter how unpopular they may be during any given era of history.

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But the sad side of that is when people become so consumed only with that side of things that they become micromanagers of others' beliefs.

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They become anal retentive, for lack of a better term. They become really overly obsessive with secondary and tertiary issues to the point where they are saying to men and women that they formerly called not only brethren but close friends and allies in the faith, they're calling into question their theological stance.

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They're calling into question their right to be considered Reformed Baptists, and disfellowshipping has been occurring, and on and on.

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But I'll let you pick up where I just left off. Yeah, let me name names.

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No, that's the way to do it. Let's set it up, and then when he's right up to the edge, go ahead and push and see how long it takes him to hit the bottom.

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I bet she bounces when he hits the bottom. No, seriously, when

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I first heard of Reformed Baptists, I think

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I was in seminary. Yeah, I picked up a tape at a

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Berean Christian bookstore that was sitting in a display next to the Bible counter, and it said

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Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. I'd never heard of it before, and I had to go actually in the bookstore to the section where I knew they had a handbook on denominations for sale, sort of use it as a library, and looked it up and went, oh,

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I didn't know about this. And this was a couple years after I had started reading

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Sproul and stuff like that and going, oh, okay, now everything's making sense and coming together and stuff like that.

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And so I was raised as a Baptist, but not as a Reformed Baptist.

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But my dad graduated from Woody Bible Institute, which is not certainly anymore any bastion of Reformed Orthodoxy, to be sure.

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But back in the 50s, the textbook that they used was by a guy named

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P .B. Fitzwater, who was a Presbyterian. And so I had sort of had some of the theology, some of the terminology, but it was sort of,

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I don't know, mediated through a general association of regular Baptist style of experience.

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So anyway, obviously, I started attending

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PRBC in 1989, early 1989, and started speaking at various Reformed Baptist functions over the next decade, obviously out there on Long Island, speaking at pretty much all the

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Reformed Baptist churches at one point or another, and then other like -minded churches along those lines.

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Even beyond that, you were the very first non -Worldwide Church of God member to conduct a conference on the

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Trinity at the Amityville Congregation of the Worldwide Church of God after they had officially adopted not only the doctrine of the

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Trinity, but also salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, their abandonment of all of the cultic peculiarities of that cult.

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And you were the, I can vividly remember that, how people were thrilled over that conference.

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Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that. That was quite an honor. And so I remember very clearly lecturing on the

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Trinity, and attributes of God, and having no issues whatsoever with my fellow

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Reformed Baptists. Nobody came up to me and said, you don't really have the whole story, or there's more to it, or anything like that at all.

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We were all on the same page, and we were all saying the same things, and that really extended through the first decade of the 2000s as well.

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And that means even you know, so about 20 years, I was speaking in Reformed Baptist churches.

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I spoke at Trinity and Montville. I, you know, I spoke at a number of the Southern California Reformed Baptist churches, and there simply wasn't any emphasis in the area of theology proper, the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the

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Trinity, that was controversial amongst us at all.

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It was, we were all on the same page, we were saying the same thing. And then just a few years ago, now, you know,

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I haven't been, I started doing a lot of global travel.

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So from probably, you know, 2014 to 2019, that five years,

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I did much more travel outside the United States than I did inside the

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United States. And so I wasn't doing as much, but that meant I was speaking at Reformed Baptist churches in the

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UK and Scotland and stuff like that. But I wasn't doing as much travel inside.

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I was doing a lot in South Africa, Australia, Ukraine, and I can get around London real well on the

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Tube and everything else. So there wasn't as much of a connection here in the

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US during that particular period of time. But starting about 2015, there was a pastors conference,

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Reformed Baptist pastors conference in Southern California. And the topic of the conference was the simplicity of God.

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Now, most people hear that term. And let's be honest, the vast majority of even

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Reformed Baptists who have been attending their churches consistently for a lengthy period of time would hesitate to say, yes,

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I can define that term very easily and confidently.

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In fact, there's something counterintuitive about that theological label of we who are

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Reformed, and of course, there is a unique definition of simplicity being used in this specific doctrine.

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But when you think about our concept of the vastness and unsearchableness of God, to call him simple, the knee -jerk reaction for a

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Reformed person who may not be completely familiar with the term that you just used would be, what? What do you mean

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God's simple? Right, right. Yeah, and I think that's, let's just,

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I think most people would honestly say that up until that point in time, the doctrine of simplicity was not a highly emphasized aspect of Reformed Baptist experience.

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And so when I wrote my book on the Trinity in 1998,

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I included a brief description of it. I wrote an article for Ligonier for a table talk,

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I think in 2003 -ish, where I had a fairly brief discussion of it, and I defined it.

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But simplicity simply means that God is not made up of parts. God is not complex like a

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Rubik's Cube, which is made up of all these different blocks. And so there's nothing more simple than the nature of God, that you compound all those things together, now you've got the nature of God.

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God's being cannot be divided up. And most people do get that, because we strongly emphasize the

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Father is not one -third of God, the Spirit is not one -third of God, the Son is not one -third of God.

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It's not like you can divide God's being up into thirds or hundreds or thousands or anything else.

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God is not made up of all these different parts being put together. Unlike what the Mormons teach, and even the

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Word of Faith movement, Pentecostals, and even Jimmy Swaggart, who was not a

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Word of Faith guy, but he fell into that heresy of believing that God the

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Father had a physical body. Yeah, well that would be,

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I was not aware of Jimmy Swaggart's view on that particular subject, but it's specifically in reference to the being of God.

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What defines God as God cannot be built up so that if you take a part out,

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God ceases being God. So that's what simple means. It's not simple as in easy to understand, it's simple as in there is only one substance or being of God that cannot be divided and have parts cut out or anything else.

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And so that's what I had always defined it as, that is important in dealing with, for example,

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Mormonism or things like that, because they tend to think that we take

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God's being and divide it into thirds and give one to the Father and one to the Son and one to the Spirit and stuff like that. And so they struggle with issues like that.

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And it's biblical in the sense that very clearly in Scripture, I think one of the strongest evidences, not only of the deity of Christ, but of the unity of the

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Godhead is the fact that the one divine name Yahweh is used of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

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So those key texts that identify, everybody knows the Father's identified as Yahweh, even though I wonder how many

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Christians, if you had to take a quiz, you could identify in the

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New Testament a place where the Father would be identified as Yahweh. It's just assumed because he's simply called

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God normally. But for example, it's Yahweh that lays our sins upon the

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Messiah. And so this is clearly the Father that does this. But in the same way, the

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Son is identified as Yahweh. And that's a big element of my apologetic with Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and Muslims and so on and so forth, is that especially, and I think you've seen the sermon that I did a couple of years ago at G3 on Isaiah 6, it was very well received.

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You have John 12, 41, John saying the one that Isaiah saw was in fact

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Jesus. And going back to the temple vision that Isaiah had in Isaiah 6.

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So you have a biblical foundation for saying that God's being is not made up of parts, but God has eternally existed.

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There is only one God. And you can't divide that up to where you've got half of a

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Yahweh over here and half of a Yahweh over there or something along those lines. So while the term is not strictly biblical, as if there is a verse that says

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God's being is simple, it is the consistent understanding of the teaching of Scripture concerning the nature of God's being.

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And so that's how I defined it. That's how I had always heard it discussed. And then you join to that the fact that we as Reformed Baptists, you cannot interpret the 1689 without recognizing the deep, well, it's an appropriate term, the deep animosity that exists between the writers of the 1689 and the

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Roman Catholic system. I mean, when there are specific references, so much of the terminology is obviously flowing out of the continued

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Protestant Reformation. The original 1689 identified the

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Pope as the Antichrist. Right, right. But then the whole, even the theological terminology that we use in regards to the

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Lord's Supper and the concept of the ordinances or sacraments and things like that, that's in the background.

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It's very, very clearly there. And so my experience amongst

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Reformed Baptists from the late 1980s well into this decade, the last decade, was one that did not include a high level of admiration of Thomas Aquinas.

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There was far more interest in the Reformers and there was a recognition that the medieval period, there was a real issue in regards to the overlaying of scripture with human tradition and the loss of balance there and things along those lines.

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And so, as I said, in 2015, there was a pastor's conference and Dr. James Dolezal presented on the subject of simplicity.

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And one of the elements of simplicity that he presented and emphasized that is really the issue now.

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I call it the extended assertion or the strong assertion of simplicity.

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So some people call it strong simplicity versus weak simplicity or so on and so forth.

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But when you adopt or when you take into consideration the metaphysical assumptions of Thomas Aquinas, which most of us know absolutely positively nothing about.

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And while Aquinas was a brilliant theologian, and while Aquinas was significantly better in a sense than much of what

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Rome had produced before and after him, especially amongst many of the popes for that matter, still he was a

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Roman Catholic. He did not believe in sola scriptura. Norman Geisler tried to come up with the idea that he actually did, but it's just really, you can't go there.

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And Trent, years later, did not Trent really echo his understanding of justification, his heretical understanding?

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Yeah. Well, yeah, certainly. Well, they certainly felt that they were. There was a great desire to stick with Aquinas' formulations because the divine doctor had become the standard of orthodoxy at that point in time, though that wouldn't necessarily be the case today.

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For example, some of his views on Mary were opposed to what has been defined as dogma since then.

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But I don't know if you saw that great video somebody put out recently where they took that that tape stuff that you can slap on a leaking barrel and it stops the water, cut the boat in half and then tape it back up and take it out.

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They took that commercial and they edited over the sound with fix it with Newman.

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Cardinal Newman. And so do you find any of the early church fathers contradicting what you believe is

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Roman Catholic? Fix it with Newman. And it was really well done because that's exactly what they do.

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It's Wells' development. And for our listeners who are unfamiliar with Cardinal Newman, he was an

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Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism. Right. Who came up with what's called the development hypothesis that the divine tradition was given to the church like in the form of an acorn, but it grows and develops over time.

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And that's how, because Newman had opposed the promulgation of the concept of the infallibility of the

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Pope. He knew that that was not what the early church believed. It just isn't. It's obvious given

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Honorius and everything else that happened that the early church did not believe in papal infallibility.

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Well, once Vatican one defined it, then he had to get in line and come up with a way of explaining how this all happens.

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And so the development hypothesis is for Roman Catholics who want to continue to pretend that theirs is the church for 2000 years, but then you run into facts that demonstrate that it's not.

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And so you just slap on some Newman. And it was also famous for saying that to know history is to cease to be

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Protestant. Yeah. To go deep into history is to cease to be Protestants. And so, and that was horrifically ironic given what he himself did.

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So anyways, so Aquinas, you have to explain a few things.

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And he wasn't certainly as bad as a lot of the Popes and stuff like that, but he was deeply influenced by Aristotle and Aristotle's doctrine of God is not in any way, shape, or form able to be made consistent with a

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Christian understanding of God. And so it has been said that what Aristotle did is he, or what

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Aquinas did, is he tried to baptize Aristotle and fix the places where he didn't quite get it right.

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Well, the problem is the entire metaphysical concept of Aristotelianism is based upon certain philosophical assumptions that just simply are not biblical in any way.

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In fact, let's pick up where you left off on Aristotelianism and Thomas Aquinas, because we have to go to our first break right now.

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And if anybody has a question that they would like to ask Dr. White, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence if you live outside the

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USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

33:28

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com. First name, city and state of residence, and country of residence.

33:36

We'll be right back after these messages don't go away. Since 2007,

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39:45

Again, I'm Pastor Anthony Invinio, and thanks for listening. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzin, and if you've been listening to Iron Sharpens Iron radio daily for quite a while lately, you've been realizing that there have been reruns every single day.

40:02

Today is Tuesday, February 1st, 2022, and at least on that date, this is not a rerun, because I'm sure this will be a rerun eventually.

40:13

And our guest is Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. Our topic today is how to prevent the implosion of biblically faithful theological movements when disagreements occur over secondary and tertiary issues.

40:29

And our email address is chrisarnzin at gmail .com. If you have a question, chrisarnzin at gmail .com.

40:35

Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

40:44

And we were speaking, or James White was speaking right before the break about Thomas Aquinas and the

40:54

Aristotelian philosophies that he taught and have been now adopted by a growing number of Reformed Protestants, including

41:07

Reformed Baptists. And if you could pick up where you left off. Yeah, well, what I was specifically referring to was

41:13

Aristotle's doctrine of God simply doesn't fit with the Christian concept, and especially his idea of the unmoved mover.

41:22

There's all this Greek philosophy, obviously, in Aristotle's assumptions, such as the idea of motion in God.

41:31

There can be no motion in God. Whatever that is supposed to mean.

41:37

I mean, I can read my Bible carefully. I can read it in the original languages.

41:43

I can read it in the original context. And I don't really end up with a metaphysic that is emphasizing issues of motion in God and stuff like that.

41:53

But certainly, Aristotle comes up with that. And Aquinas is influenced by that. He does try to filter some of these things out.

42:00

But the point is, he's not completely successful in so doing. And so, make a long story short, to get out of the weeds and get back to where we probably need to be.

42:13

The assertion, the strong assertion of divine simplicity based upon the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas is that if you can conceptualize, if you can think of and make differentiation of the attributes of God, so God's omnipotence, his omniscience, his justice, his love, his mercy, if you can distinguish those things in your mind, then, and if anyone has ever studied the ontological argument that was put forth by Anselm, you know where some of this is coming from.

43:02

Some of the parts is anyways. If you can distinguish parts, then those parts actually exist.

43:09

And here's the problem. You can't have parts in God. Anything that is in God is

43:14

God. And therefore, within God, this is a strong assertion of divine simplicity.

43:22

Within God, all God's attributes, so ad intra, if you want to use the

43:29

Latin phrases, internally to God is intra, externally

43:34

God is extra, ad extra. And so, within God, God's attributes are identical to one another.

43:46

They are not to be distinguished. And so, as, and of course, many theologians have accepted this idea and operated on this idea.

43:56

Many others have rejected it. There's a large number of Reformed theologians who have questioned this.

44:03

It doesn't seem to have been a real major big deal in the thinking of Calvin for example.

44:09

But the assertion is that within God, God's omniscience is the same as his justice.

44:21

God's mercy is the same as his omnipresence. These are all one because to distinguish them is to create parts within God.

44:33

Now, again, this was not something that was a regular part of preaching or teaching, but the assertion being made now is that some people are saying on the basis of their analysis of the framers of the 1689, there's others who dispute this, but on the basis of their analysis of the framers of the 1689, that when they said without body parts and passions that the parts, that phraseology refers to this strong assertion.

45:10

And that therefore to be truly confessional, and this is the big issue, to be truly confessional is to interpret the confession in the way that the writers intended it to be interpreted.

45:29

And that's how they themselves believed it. And so therefore to actually be confessional, you have to hold to this extended assertion.

45:40

Now, the thing that's baffling about that, I mean, everything in some sense is baffling about that, but how can you say that God's mercy and God's wrath are the same thing when they are directed to two completely different groups of people, the mercy of God being extended in an eternal sense only to his elect, his people, and his wrath only being poured upon the reprobate, those who will be in hell for eternity?

46:19

How can they be the same thing? Right. Well, a couple of things.

46:25

First of all, they will rightly say that human language is insufficient to truly express everything there is to know about God.

46:34

They are talking about internally to God. And we would all agree that God's attributes are in perfect harmony with one another.

46:41

There is no discord between them, anything along those lines.

46:46

So we could certainly agree with that. But the distinction that is being made is the distinction between ad intra and ad extra.

46:54

So Turretin, who certainly was a tremendous theologian,

47:01

Turretin emphasized that ad extra outside of God, the attributes must be distinguished from one another, can be distinguished.

47:12

We should teach what the difference between omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence and all these things are, because that's how we know

47:21

God. That's how we glorify God, is in knowing him and in his revealing of his attributes and things like that.

47:31

And so ad extra, the attributes are to be distinguished. But ad intra, so as to maintain the validity of the metaphysical commitment that comes from Thomas Aquinas, you have to make this extra assertion that in God, they are not to be distinguished because that would create parts and hence destroy the simplicity of God.

47:59

And so to the vast majority of Reformed Baptists, we have to, and they will admit this, the people who

48:09

I was speaking at conferences with in the 1990s and the first decade of 2000s, they'll admit no one was preaching on this.

48:17

No one was talking about this. No one was emphasizing this definition of simplicity. And we didn't end up with a huge explosion of tri -theism or anything else in the process.

48:28

So there is some questions I would have about how now, all of a sudden, this is a key pastoral thing.

48:36

Somehow we had healthy churches for decades, but we're not emphasizing or even teaching this extended concept.

48:46

But the argument basically is that you have to have that foundational assertion of the absolute simplicity of being

48:58

God. And if you distinguish any of the attributes internally to God, then you are creating parts.

49:06

Now, from my perspective, I am not going to seek to kick somebody out of the kingdom of God if they find some kind of blessing and insight in asserting that in the mind of God, all of God's attributes are one.

49:34

I would say they're certainly one in the sense of being harmonious. They're certainly one in the sense of not being in contradiction to another.

49:41

But if you believe that that helps you, that that's an insight that is useful to you, more power to you.

49:53

I just don't see it. And in fact, I have some problems with it.

49:59

Problem that I have with it is, and this is, you know, if I was wanting to create problems and go on a campaign and everything else,

50:11

I'd have all these quotations that I do have in my system, but I'd have them up and I'd be throwing them out and trying to do all the rest of the stuff.

50:19

I'm not trying to do that. But basically, what a number of people have said, who have attempted to be balanced about this, and Turretin, I think, even though he holds to strong position, recognizes that you need to say, well, for us, we distinguish.

50:42

We have to distinguish. It's the only way we can know God. If we can't distinguish between these things, then you end up with pantheism.

50:50

You can't say anything about God. You can't say anything about what he's done. You can't say anything about how he's acted, anything about God at all.

50:56

But what people have done is warned, okay, you can't go to the extreme on one side, and turn attributes into parts that you put together to come up with God.

51:10

Okay, that's obviously erroneous. The other side is if you don't recognize the valid distinctions between the attributes, the result moves toward pantheism.

51:22

And here's the issue. I don't think any of these guys are going to become pantheists. So I don't see any danger there.

51:30

I'm not going to start going around warning, this person teaches the strong assertion of simplicity, and therefore will lead your people into pantheism.

51:39

No, it's not a possibility. It's not something to be worried about in that sense, in any way, shape, or form.

51:47

The problem is, what I'm seeing is that that is what we're getting from the other side toward us.

51:56

That is, if you do not affirm the strong definition, and the fact that the attributes are to be identified with one another, then you're going to get canceled.

52:11

I've had young men that I introduced to the Reformed faith, whose first introductions to Trinitarian theology were from my debates in my books, who have decided that they need to re -evaluate their utilization of my materials, all based upon this, this one issue.

52:34

And then you have what I would call, what I think is, a form of hyper -confessionalism, where in essence, you not only need to agree with what the confession says, you also need to know exactly what the authors of the confession meant by, and here's one of the problems, you can't always do that.

52:55

You simply can't always do that. There were differences between men, especially, it's better known in regards to Westminster Confession of Faith, because we know more about how they came up with it.

53:09

But you have to agree with everything they thought that that meant.

53:16

So you've got to go beyond just simply subscribing to the confession. There's stuff beyond that that you need to likewise hold to, or you cannot say that you are confessional.

53:29

And so that's another aspect of this, is how do you even define that term confessional?

53:37

If you take an exception to something like, you know, the Pope being the

53:42

Antichrist, does that mean you're not confessional? And if you don't say that that what parts means is that you have to assert that the attributes of God at intra are the same thing in God's mind, then you're not really confessional.

54:02

And what concerns me, and I know we're going into a break here fairly soon, but what concerns me is we're talking about internally to God.

54:13

And normally, normally Reformed people follow Calvin and say, you know, we need to make an end where God has made an end of speaking in Scripture.

54:24

And this is a very, very extended conclusion. It's based upon accepting a number of different assertions as being true, and then putting those together, and then going to the next level, and then going to the next level, and bringing in Aquinas' metaphysics and everything else.

54:45

And that's concerning if you say, and yeah, you not only have to do that, but that's the only way to be confessional.

54:53

In fact, we have to pick up where you left off there on what might be called hyper -confessionalism.

55:00

We'll be continuing the thread of what you were just referring to after the midway break.

55:07

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Wow, that's some compliment. How much do I owe you for that? You don't have to owe me anything.

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01:11:36

And we are now back with Dr. James R. White, Valfant Omega Ministries. Our theme is how to prevent the implosion of biblically faithful theological movements when disagreements occur over secondary and tertiary issues.

01:11:49

We have been mainly addressing some issues that threaten the implosion of Reformed Baptists.

01:11:58

It is a dark and scary cloud looming above this movement that has blessed humanity with its biblical faithfulness for centuries, but there can be an exaggerated concern over secondary and tertiary issues that can happen with anyone.

01:12:22

We have seen it happen with independent Fundamentalist Baptists for decades, but it looks like it's knocking on the door of Reformed Baptists as well.

01:12:33

And before the break, we were, or you I should say, were beginning to get deeper into definitions regarding the simplicity of God and how some of these things that are demanded with boldness and loud voices and sternness, some of these things are being demanded to be accepted by Reformed Baptists universally, even though that was not a part of a proclaimed faith until fairly recent in history.

01:13:08

Not a major focus of proclaimed faith, I should say, until recently in church history. And if you could pick up where you left off there.

01:13:17

Right, yeah, well, you know, the issue, and you know, if we're putting it in the larger frame of how to avoid an implosion,

01:13:28

I think I do have real concerns for our

01:13:34

Reformed Baptist movements in the sense that if it's going to continue to grow, there's two perspectives upon this, and it seems like for many of the idea is, we need to be like Baptists and divide more and more and more.

01:13:56

I mean, you go through any, you know, I remember driving with a fellow we both know, we called him

01:14:04

Skyman, David King. I remember driving through Georgia, we were going to visit the famous Andersonville prison from the

01:14:13

Civil War. And which side was David on again,

01:14:19

I forget. Yeah, yeah, I think he's still got his musket ready to go when the south rises again.

01:14:33

But we're driving along these country roads, and you'd come around a corner into a little town, and here's the first Baptist church, and you go around a corner, and there's the second, and you go around the next corner, and there's the third.

01:14:45

And I think we saw a seventh Baptist church at one point. And Baptists just are incredibly able to divide and divide and divide and divide again.

01:14:57

And I think that will be the end of our movement.

01:15:03

If we adopt a brittle, uncompromising, you have to walk, you have to toe the line on every single thing.

01:15:18

There's obviously, obviously, there's things that are completely non negotiable. But how can you take the extended speculative assertion based upon questionable metaphysical concepts of what goes on in the mind of God and how

01:15:38

God sees his own attributes, when plainly and obviously, this is not something that the biblical authors communicated or were operating on the basis of or anything like that.

01:15:51

If you turn that into an absolutely necessary mark of orthodoxy, you're going to make sure that you're going to remain a very, very, very small and diminishing movement.

01:16:07

There's no question about it. And we live in a day where I really think the consistency of the

01:16:17

London Baptist Confession is a huge point in its favor. And it's something that can attract people.

01:16:24

And I mean, look at this. This is something that we need in our day and so on and so forth.

01:16:30

But at the same time, I have over my years as Reformed Baptist, likewise encountered those who, in some ways, seemed averse to growth and averse to expansion and averse to even considering maybe doing something slightly different than has been done for 50 years.

01:17:01

It's nope, just got to keep doing the exact same thing over and over and over again. And I'm not saying change the gospel or anything else.

01:17:08

But I am saying that we are facing challenges in the world today we were not facing even three years ago, let alone 30 years ago.

01:17:20

And so there does need to be a vibrancy, there needs to be a deep enough conviction that what we believe is true, that will allow us to tackle more and more difficult and challenging things, not necessarily just keep doing the same old thing over and over and over again.

01:17:49

And so my concern here is, really,

01:17:54

I think we've demonstrated in some sense that this particular issue that I have raised and that has been raised to me, in essence, this particular issue is illustrative of sort of what happens when you start getting so deep in the weeds, in digging deeply into stuff, that you, in essence, narrow things down very, very deeply.

01:18:29

And for what reason? I'll be honest with you, I hear people saying, hey, if you don't hold this, this is going to happen, that's going to happen.

01:18:39

And it didn't happen in the 1990s, it didn't happen in the 2000s. And I don't see the argumentation that will be able to actually demonstrate that this has some deep pastoral application to it.

01:18:53

I just leave that to other people to answer.

01:18:58

I mean, do you really feel that, you know, I mean, this may explain, this may help actually, now

01:19:05

I think about it, this may actually help us to explain Chris Arntzen. This may be the one thing that was missing in Chris Arntzen's formulation, and that explains the humor, and the songs, and, you know, all the stuff that makes us sit around and talk about Chris Arntzen behind his back.

01:19:29

Yes, I am a product of Aristotelian philosophy, I'm an accident with no substance.

01:19:37

So... Well, actually, Eric and I have sat around and talked about you at times in the past, so this could explain it,

01:19:45

I don't know. You mean my webdester, Eric, you mean? Yes, yes. But, you know, honestly,

01:19:51

I think for most people we go, you know, I think I could have continued serving the

01:19:57

Lord without ever knowing that this was actually a big dispute. I really think

01:20:02

I could have pulled that off. So, if we make, you keep describing it as tertiary issues, here's the problem.

01:20:15

As you know, in fundamentalist circles, nothing's a tertiary issue.

01:20:21

That's the issue. Oh, believe me, I was a witness to the board meetings of a program that I actually,

01:20:29

I'm sorry to say, I created a program in the 1990s in WMCA called the

01:20:35

Fundamental Baptist Forum, and of course there were some excellent men on that program.

01:20:41

I don't mean to disparage all of it. There were some really Christ -centered, gracious men who were part of that who

01:20:49

I still love as friends. But to sit at their board meetings, it was often hilarious to see the arguments that would erupt.

01:20:56

I can remember one was over whether or not they should allow pastors to participate who did not have the word

01:21:03

Baptist in the name of the church. And one of the pastors, who was a landmark

01:21:09

Baptist, insisted that a participant had to have the name Baptist in the name of the church, not

01:21:16

Bible church or anything else. And he got very annoyed and impatient and erupted and said, it's time for us to stop talking about what people think and start doing what the

01:21:27

Bible says. And I just, I raised my hand very slowly and I said, I'm sorry, is there someplace in the

01:21:34

Bible that says we have to call our church Baptist? Anyway. Yeah, exactly.

01:21:42

Yeah, no, we see that over there and figure it could never happen amongst us.

01:21:49

Right. But the point is, my brethren who are very zealously proclaiming this as a divine truth, see the full, strong doctrine of simplicity as the gatekeeping doctrine.

01:22:08

That's how they've described it. It keeps falsehood out of the church.

01:22:17

And once you make that decision about a particular doctrine, and it is vital like that, then you just don't see how anybody can't agree with you on that.

01:22:28

And you have a hard time actually fellowshiping with people who do. And so we may view this as an extended speculation and hence tertiary and certainly not definitional of anything that's going to have any impact on the proclamation of the gospel, the worship of God, et cetera, et cetera.

01:22:47

But the other side doesn't. And that's where divisions end up coming from and taking place and creating serious issues.

01:22:57

And I don't want to see that amongst Reformed Baptists. But I'll be honest with you, as far as I can tell,

01:23:09

I have not tried to do any...

01:23:14

I'm not calling people up and getting roll call votes and all the rest of this kind of stuff in any way concerning who's on what side.

01:23:23

It's just that when I talk to folks, a lot of them don't want to take a position because they didn't know it was an argument in the first place.

01:23:30

And they'll agree with me that I don't really see why this is so definitional, but I also don't want to be accused of being non -confessional or sub -biblical or...

01:23:45

And people saying, well, you have to be careful about that James White guy.

01:23:52

I've actually had people contacting me over the past number of months. Hey, someone just told me you've become a

01:23:57

Trinitarian heretic. What's this all about? And then when you explain it to them, they just stare at you going, what?

01:24:09

I've never even heard of this before. What? And it's like, I know. Well, what can

01:24:14

I say? That's what it's all about. Has anybody taken issue with the forgotten

01:24:19

Trinity that never had previously to this? Yeah. Yes. Yes. Uh -huh.

01:24:25

Yeah, definitely. Because it doesn't make that extended application. It's definition of simplicity is rather basic.

01:24:34

And so, yeah. And then the big thing has been, uh,

01:24:40

I had a debate with a Oneness guy and, uh, there was, uh, there was a question and answer with during the cross -examination.

01:24:49

And the guy used terminology of, of, uh, three separate centers of consciousness.

01:24:55

This wasn't directly relevant to the simplicity thing, but I had a number of Baptists who 11, was it?

01:25:04

Yeah. 11 years after the debate took place, all of a sudden started quoting that and sending it around as evidence of, of my unreliability and so on and so forth.

01:25:16

So I had to write a brief article about it. Um, in, in some ways, honestly, it's, um, there, there are some, uh, debates going on, on the doctrine of the

01:25:27

Trinity and, um, it is related to this simplicity issue because when you think about it, that extended concept of, of simplicity raises issues regarding the existence of three divine persons.

01:25:42

How do you, how do you define who the three defined persons, divine persons are?

01:25:47

They're actually, they're, I am actually now encountering foreign Baptists. They're very uncomfortable using the term divine person in the first place.

01:25:56

Um, they, they would, they would insist that needs to be subsistence. Um, and there, there are some who, cause to see

01:26:07

Aquinas because of his strong emphasis upon this simplicity idea has some quotes that are,

01:26:15

I think, very dangerous. Um, that in, in, in some ways to make it difficult to even identify who the

01:26:25

Father, Son, and Spirit are. And one of my concerns is we cannot, we dare not say more than scripture says, but we dare not say less than scripture says.

01:26:37

And the description of the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, there are key texts, the, the

01:26:47

Carmen Christi, John 17, um, a number of passages in John Hebrews 1 that give us an insight into, uh, where the, the, the

01:27:01

Father and the Son have a, a deep and meaningful, um, relationship with one another.

01:27:08

And there are those who are saying, well, and this, this takes us to another, again, directly related, they're directly related concepts.

01:27:18

This emphasis now upon classical theism. There is a, there is a growing anti presuppositional, uh, movement amongst

01:27:26

Reformed Baptists. Really? And a, I'm sorry? I said, really? Yes.

01:27:32

Oh yeah. Yeah. Very, very much so. Uh, and amongst, amongst Reformed people in, in, in general, but it's catching on amongst

01:27:38

Reformed Baptists as well. And again, it's due to this, uh, quote unquote revival in classical theism.

01:27:44

That is the, the perspectives of Thomas Aquinas. And Aquinas in some places did make statements that reduced the reality of Father, Son, and Spirit to concepts like God thinking about himself and the reflection of God's thought is the

01:28:07

Son back to the Father and stuff like this. And, and I'm just like, no, no, no, no, wait a minute.

01:28:12

That sounds modalism. Not modalistic, but, um, it's actually, there's actually parallels to that in ancient

01:28:19

Near Eastern religion and in Gnosticism. I mean, that's, that's how all the eons, uh, uh, developed within Gnosticism is

01:28:28

God's self -contemplation. Um, and, um, so, but again,

01:28:35

I'm not saying that's where these people are going. I'm simply saying that if you begin to exalt

01:28:43

Aquinas and this quote unquote classical theism in this fashion, um, there can be ramifications.

01:28:52

I mean, um, um, I've, I've pointed out more than once and I'm sort of stunned at some of the responses

01:28:58

I've gotten, but I've, I've pointed out that I, has anyone sort of taken a look recently at Southern Evangelical Seminary that Norman Geisler started in, in Charlotte?

01:29:10

Um, it's basically all online now, and it's, it's, it's fading away, basically.

01:29:18

And one of the reasons for that, historically, was Geisler was just so gung -ho on Aquinas that there's an entire book written by former staff and students at Southern Evangelical Seminary who are all

01:29:34

Roman Catholics today. And they credit their constant exposure to Aquinas as what brought them to that, that position and to that understanding.

01:29:47

And so I'm just sort of like, um, yeah, I'm, why, why is it that, that we find this so attractive all of a sudden?

01:29:57

Uh, this, this return to some kind of, uh, of an emphasis upon, uh, the, the, the classical theistic proofs and, and a rejection of, of presuppositionalism and, and all these things.

01:30:10

And, and why is it that I'm literally hearing Reformed Baptists, who would struggle to be able to express that the

01:30:21

Father and the Son not only had a relationship with one another prior to the Incarnation, but it was a relationship marked by, by love and fellowship?

01:30:33

Uh, where's, where's that coming from? It, it, I, I, I don't know. But it's,

01:30:38

I consider that dangerous. I consider that to be something that, that could, that has in other contexts had a really negative, uh, negative result.

01:30:49

Um, so anyway, uh, yeah, you, you sounded actually rather surprised to hear that.

01:30:56

But yeah, I'm, uh, classical, classical theism, I, I believe that, you know, when

01:31:04

I read Calvin and I read Calvin's discussion of the relationship of, of God's truth to man's knowledge and our, you know, the, the whole beginning of the

01:31:15

Institutes where what comes first, our knowledge of ourselves or our knowledge of, uh, of God.

01:31:20

Um, when I follow that through, I find it highly consistent with an understanding of the presuppositional approach and understanding of, of, uh, uh, that form of apologetics.

01:31:33

I, I don't see it consistent with, with the schoolmen and with Thomas Aquinas. And Calvin just did not have anything positive to say about those folks.

01:31:43

He really didn't. Um, so yeah, those are, those are some of the issues that are, that are, that are coming up.

01:31:49

Didn't he, uh, Calvin refer to them as the men of the academy or something to that nature? Yeah. Yeah.

01:31:54

He, he, he doesn't make a lot of comments about them, but the, but the ones that he does are not positive. Uh, he, he does, he's not looking to them as, um, now that doesn't mean that he does, is not quoting folks from the medieval period.

01:32:07

He, he is, but the schoolmen specifically and the scholastic methodology, uh, was, was, uh, was he influenced by it?

01:32:15

Everybody was, but, uh, did he get away from it in many ways? Yeah, he did. And, uh, we do have a, an anonymous listener.

01:32:24

Uh, oh, I'm shocked that somebody would want to remain anonymous, sending in a question about this.

01:32:31

Uh, but the anonymous listener says, I am a firm believer in the doctrine of impassibility.

01:32:39

However, could you see this movement that you are describing coming out of an exaggerated, distorted, inflated, or hyper understanding of impassibility?

01:32:52

Uh, I hesitate to, uh, say too much about this because I did not, um, like I said,

01:33:00

I was out of the country a whole lot during this time period, but there, as you know, was a major conflict amongst

01:33:06

Reformed Baptists, um, you know, a decade ago or so on impassibility that, that led to basically, uh, almost one third, two third, or three quarter, one quarter split, um, amongst

01:33:22

Reformed Baptists. And it does seem to me that, uh, it was the study of impassibility and the applications of impassibility that led to the, uh, what's called resourcement, or looking at sources in regards to, uh, divine simplicity.

01:33:44

Uh, and that divine simplicity in its strong form is seen by many as a necessary bulwark for the defense of a strong doctrine of impassibility.

01:33:57

So they, they do seem to be, um, closely related to one another in that, in that way.

01:34:04

And as far as I can tell, uh, anyone who takes a, uh, extremely rigorous impassibility stance, um, would also take a very rigorous, uh, simplicity stance as well.

01:34:19

So yeah, they, they are related. Thank you, Anonymous. And we have CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says,

01:34:28

Chris Arnzen had to interrupt you during the beginning of the midway break when you were defining

01:34:34

Aristotelianism and its effects on the Protestant Church today. Do you have anything further to add?

01:34:42

Yes, I apologize for that. Yeah, there, there, there is the, the

01:34:48

God of Scripture is so much more than an unmoved mover.

01:34:54

Um, I, I really am, am concerned that if you, if you really buy into fully what that means, that there, that you end up having to say that all of the description of how

01:35:13

God interacts with us in time. In fact, there are people today that I would say they would no longer say that God interacts with us in time at all.

01:35:21

Um, they would say that that's, that that is, um, see, if, if you, if you use any of the

01:35:28

Bible's language of what God is, is doing in time, um, that, that's supposedly social

01:35:40

Trinitarianism, that, that you are, you are, um, rejecting simplicity and you're embracing social

01:35:46

Trinitarianism. In fact, that was one of my concerns and I, I haven't, um,

01:35:52

I think I mentioned it when I engaged Dr. Golzal's, uh, biblical, uh, presentation on the dividing line a few weeks ago, but, uh, in his first book, one of the things that bothered me when

01:36:05

I read it was it divided everybody up into two groups and either you were in the simplicity group, the strong simplicity group, or you were a social

01:36:19

Trinitarian. And that, that meant that there were just all sorts of people thrown into the same group.

01:36:25

And that's not fair. That, that's just, that, that is not a, a fair approach in my opinion.

01:36:32

Um, so for example, William Lane Craig rejects, uh, divine simplicity pretty much in toto, not whether weak or strong formulation thereof.

01:36:44

And to say that William Lane Craig and I have the same issues or that we are allies is, is obviously not the case.

01:36:53

We're coming at this from completely different perspectives and we have very different, uh, sources. And so when

01:37:00

I first mentioned, uh, I don't know, last year sometime, I heard something that Craig was, had said, he specifically was rejecting

01:37:11

Aquinas's formulation. I'm like, Hey, look, Craig and I agree on something.

01:37:16

Uh, Aquinas's formulation here isn't, uh, isn't something that, uh, I think we should be promoting.

01:37:22

Well, all people just went, went bonkers. Um, uh, how could you ever agree with anything

01:37:29

William Lane Craig said? I'm like, uh, okay. All right. Uh, I'm, I'm, I'm rubbing my forehead right now because, um, uh, you can, the, the, the most effective and efficient way to disagree with someone like William Lane Craig is not to disagree with every single, single thing he says about everything, because he's not wrong about everything.

01:37:51

You have to be specific. You have to be clear. You have to be, you have to be clear minded in your, in your analysis.

01:37:58

Just like these reformed Baptists are attempting to do with Thomas Aquinas, they don't adopt his gospel.

01:38:05

Right. Right. Yeah. Most definitely. They, they, they, they don't want to embrace the soteriological aspects, but they're making a very strong distinction between the soteriological errors of Thomas Aquinas and the, um, uh, metaphysical, uh, claims of Thomas Aquinas.

01:38:25

That's, that's where the issue is really coming up. And, um, I, I want to say,

01:38:33

I hope that it doesn't go beyond that. I'm just simply saying that I have seen it go beyond that many, many times in my life.

01:38:41

I've, I've honestly, I can't think of a single instance where I know of any young man who all of a sudden became enamored with Thomas Aquinas, that it had positive impact in the longterm for that individual.

01:38:54

And I'm, I'm finally getting old enough where that actually means something. I can,

01:38:59

I can think back enough decades now to where I think that that's starting to have some kind of a, of a relevance to it.

01:39:06

Now, uh, you and I both have admired for many years, uh, somebody that I would even call a great hero of the faith that is now in eternity with Christ, Dr.

01:39:17

R .C. Sproul. He, he strongly promoted Thomas Aquinas as being one of the key, the, one of the primary

01:39:26

Christian theologians of all history that he sought to, uh, glean, uh, blessings of truth from and, and promoted him.

01:39:38

Now, did you see, uh, obviously even men as great as R .C. Sproul had flaws.

01:39:45

And, uh, did you see the impact in a negative sense of Aquinas upon him?

01:39:50

Obviously he was not a presuppositionalist. He wrote a book with, uh, John Gerstner against presuppositionalism.

01:39:58

But, uh, other than that, do you see any primary way that this has negatively affected him and his writing?

01:40:04

Well, yeah, that, that was the, that was the primary impact. Uh, when you listen and I strongly encourage people to do so when you listen to the dialogue, uh, between Greg Monson and R .C.

01:40:16

Sproul on, uh, apologetic methodology, I, I think you can, you can hear the echo at times of, uh, of Aquinas in the background.

01:40:27

And, and that seemingly was, was most of what the, the impact was.

01:40:33

And, you know, during his life, I didn't really understand it. But, uh, in the, in the few times that we had time to sit around and talk and chat, uh, that wasn't something that, um, that I necessarily brought up.

01:40:46

Um, so I didn't see a bunch of super negative, uh, impact there.

01:40:51

Now, someone that I did see it in would be Norman Geisler, obviously, um, in, in a wide variety of, of ways.

01:41:00

Aquinas and really Roman Catholic categories as a whole had an extremely negative impact.

01:41:06

Yes, he, he believed that the Roman Catholic church was a true church with some false teachings rather than the reverse.

01:41:16

Yeah, no, they did that big book, uh, in what was that 19, what, 92 -ish or something like that.

01:41:25

Um, I didn't have much conversation with Norm about it, but I did with his coauthor. And, um, how did his coauthor describe me again?

01:41:34

Uh, he listened to a couple of my, uh, debates with Roman Catholics and, um,

01:41:40

I think he said I was hard -nosed. Was that the term he used? Something like that. I can't remember. Yeah, but we, we sat at, uh, the

01:41:47

Christian Booksellers Association. Um, and I'm right now I'm spacing on his name. It's Geisler, McKinsey, McKinsey.

01:41:54

Um, and Dr. McKinsey and I sat around and, and I really challenged him, um, on, on where Rome was coming from, where he was coming from and any, and a couple of times he got a glint in his eye and a smile and he said, well, okay,

01:42:09

I'm not sure how I could respond to that one. And so I, I, I did, I did make him think through a number of, uh, of issues along those lines.

01:42:17

So which I, uh, which I think is a, is a good thing. But, um, anyway, uh, yeah, the, the, the fascination with Aquinas, you know, no one can read him without being impressed by his tremendous intellect.

01:42:33

Um, but I personally, you know, uh, down through the years, as I have encountered many instances where this kind of thing has taken place, where you've got some kind of imbalance, uh, developing,

01:42:49

I've, I've learned to, and part of it's because of where I went to seminary, but I've, I've learned to, um, take the, you know, chew the meat and spit out the bones.

01:43:02

And, uh, I, I look at somebody and I look at what they do and I look at what they write.

01:43:07

And always in the back of my mind, did this person understand themselves in the light of scripture so as to understand the gospel correctly.

01:43:18

And like I said, Aquinas was closer on that than many of his contemporaries.

01:43:23

Um, but still a long ways from where he needed to be. And that makes me just go, okay, you know,

01:43:34

I'll, I'll read him. He has, he has a place in history, but that is a, that's not something

01:43:43

I can get around. That, that's not, and I'm not just simply saying I'm too fundamentalistic to get around that.

01:43:48

That, that seems to me to be, to be central to having a proper orientation of how your thought process in dealing with scripture and theology is actually going.

01:43:59

And he did not have that. And, uh, so that's, that's pretty important to me.

01:44:05

And we have to go to our final break. It will be a lot shorter than the other breaks. So don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr.

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NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Steve Herford of Eastport Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida and the

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NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Roy Owens Jr. of the

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Church and Friendship in Hockley, Texas and the NASB is my Bible of choice.

01:50:30

Here's a great way for your church to help keep Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on the air. Pastors, are your pew bibles tattered and falling apart?

01:50:39

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01:50:49

Go to nasbible .com that's nasbible .com to place your order.

01:51:04

I'm Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

01:51:10

I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

01:51:16

Hope Reform Baptist Church in Coram, Long Island, New York, pastored by Rich Jensen and Christopher McDowell.

01:51:23

It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear... As soon as we're done, Chris, I've got to run real fast.

01:51:30

You have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word and to enthusiastically proclaim

01:51:41

Christ Jesus the King and His doctrines of sovereign grace in Suffolk County, Long Island and beyond.

01:51:48

I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love as I have.

01:51:57

For more information on Hope Reform Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net.

01:52:04

That's hopereformedli .net or call 631 -696 -5711.

01:52:12

That's 631 -696 -5711. Tell the folks at Hope Reform Baptist Church of Coram, Long Island, New York that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.

01:52:26

Welcome back. Dr. James R. White, we've been talking primarily about major issues that have begun to threaten the implosion of a great movement like the

01:52:42

Reform Baptist movement. What is some of what you would call medicine of prevention that not only

01:52:51

Reform Baptist but anybody who is a part of a biblically solid church movement that sees implosion looming in the horizon, what can we do to prevent this?

01:53:05

Well, I think we need to be praying for one another. I think we need to be evangelizing.

01:53:14

I think we need to be out in the world because when we're stuck, like a lot of people have been for a few years in lockdowns and online and things like that, that's when imbalances can start doing this kind of stuff.

01:53:33

So I think if we were standing outside abortion clinics together, we're probably not going to be arguing about simplicity.

01:53:42

And you're probably not going to be saying, well, you know, I think we need to cancel James White because he's just not quite there.

01:53:50

If we're actually getting out of our comfort zones and getting out and doing the work,

01:53:57

I think that has a huge, huge impact on things. I think we need to learn from our

01:54:03

Presbyterian brothers. I've had a few of them contact me because they're watching this from outside and they're going, wow,

01:54:12

I've never heard Presbyterians arguing about this like you guys are. Well, they're busy dealing with people doing ballet during the worship service.

01:54:21

Well, and I'm talking about really conservative, meaningful OPC guys.

01:54:26

I mean, they're fighting against those things. Right. And they're basically saying, we learned a long time ago, you need to have some breadth in what you allow in the interpretation of the words of the confession.

01:54:42

If you demand that everyone read every book written by one of the framers of the

01:54:49

Westminster Confession so that you know all the different viewpoints and everything else, you're not going to have anybody left believing it.

01:54:59

So there needs to be a willingness to go, you know, I think that this is an important insight, but I can fully understand how others might not see it this way.

01:55:14

And let's not shoot each other over this. Here's my case. Here's their case. And let's move on to talk about other things because there are all sorts of other things that we ostensibly have complete agreement on.

01:55:26

But those things end up getting diminished when people start focusing solely upon one thing in an imbalanced fashion.

01:55:35

And so I think those are some things that we can do. But I think the movement as a whole needs to ask itself the question, is this 1689 or is this 2022?

01:55:50

And what does that mean? And what does it mean to hold on to that which is definitional, but not confuse that which is definitional with that which is connected to the past in such a way that doesn't necessarily communicate with the current situation.

01:56:11

Those are all issues that every movement has to deal with. Every generation has to deal with it.

01:56:17

We have to do the same thing, but let's do so while being so appreciative of what

01:56:24

God has done for us already. And I'm assuming one of the areas that has to be really examined and reflected upon and prayed over is whether or not you have unconsciously,

01:56:38

I seriously doubt there is any Reformed Baptist worth his salt, that is consciously elevating our cherished confession up to an equal par with the

01:56:49

God -breathed scriptures. But people need to really examine whether they are unconsciously doing that, don't they?

01:56:57

Well, I discovered recently when I repeated the phrase

01:57:04

Semper Reformanda, I was reminded that's not a Reformation phrase. And I was like, well, okay, but the concept that the words of the confession are subject to the words of scripture has to be absolutely central.

01:57:23

And I'm seeing some people that are really to the point of thinking that that indicates a problem with me.

01:57:33

There wouldn't even be any Reformed Baptist if it weren't for Semper Reformanda. I know in that sense, but I am encountering people who really are getting close to thinking that was the epitome, that was the apex, that was, we got it, we got it right.

01:57:54

And anything that moves away from that is a movement away from the best formulation of biblical truth that's ever been put out there.

01:58:04

And so one of the questions that has to be asked is, when we say our standards are subordinate to scripture, what does that mean?

01:58:13

Right. How does that function? Can it function? I think it has to, and you know why

01:58:22

I do. I mean, I've dealt with so many people that, from the Roman Catholic perspective, I've got to be consistent.

01:58:29

I've got to be consistent. Well, Dr. White, I know that you have to do a dividing line in a very short period of time.

01:58:37

I want to thank you so much for squeezing Iron Sherpins Iron Radio into your busy schedule again, and I want to remind our listeners on how they can benefit from your ministry.

01:58:48

It's AOMIN .org, AOMIN .org, which stands for Alpha and Omega Ministries, and you can also view the dividing line podcast from that website.

01:59:00

Thank you so much, brother, for being once again a first guest during one of the firsts in the history of Iron Sherpins Iron.

01:59:09

Indeed. Well, as long as I'm still kicking, we'll have to keep trying to do it. I'm not sure which one of us is going to kick off first, but we'll definitely see.

01:59:21

Yes, and hopefully it won't be by the hands of any of our dearly beloved brethren. Indeed.

01:59:30

Well, God bless you, brother, and have a good dividing line today. All right. Thank you. Thank you. God bless you,

01:59:36

Chris. God bless you. I want to thank everybody for listening today, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater