Jimmy Akin "Destroys" Me By Ignoring My Argument, CS Lewis, Then Decree In Scripture

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We are back in, I think we should just call this the regular studio now. I sort of feel sorry for the other one. It's just sitting over there. I should go over there and get a little duster out and dust things off and stuff like that, because who knows when we will ever see it again.

Might just put a dummy in there. You know, just close the door, let people walk by. Oh, we remember that. Yeah, something like that. Anyways, here we are on a Tuesday as 2026 marches onward and starting to head into the fall.

I went for a bike ride this weekend. I don't do a lot of outside riding anymore, but I did. And it was downright cool when I started. I mean, OK, it was seventy six degrees. For most of you, that's not really cool.

But with an 18 mile per hour wind, it felt really cool. And it's like, yeah, here it comes. Starting a little bit early for us. I'll have to admit that I'm not complaining. I'm not complaining in the least that we are that we are experiencing.

I mean, I don't I don't my my weather prognosticator has no one hundreds in it right now. Ninety nine. And you might say, what's the difference? It's for us, triple digits is sort of this dividing line type thing.

So. So, yeah, here we are and into the last month before the debate coming up October 17th. Hope you're praying about that. And, you know, it'll be live streamed. So hopefully those who want to watch live will be able to do so.

I recognize the timing stinks for attendance and watching live nine o 'clock on a Saturday morning. A lot of you who are parents, you've got kids, you know, playing soccer or baseball or whatever. You know, I get it.

That's why it's being recorded and we will make sure that it is recorded and you can catch it after that. But certainly very focused on that right now. I have on the board are our new phrase that got a lot of people all upset.

The Decree of God and Its Critics

There were some real strange responses to the Bulla Makoi. And I'm not talking about riches, though. That was a strange one, too. But for those who forgotten, Bule is the decree of God. And so the Bulla Makoi are those who fight against the decree of God.

And there are a lot of ways of fighting against the decree of God. There's a lot of people who simply mock the idea that God has a purpose. They will allow God to have a very vague purpose, much more vague than humans.

You know, humans can have very specific plans and intentions and things like that. But, you know, God can have a, you know, sort of a general feel good type thing going on. You know, I'm going to win in the end.

Everything is going to be fine. Just trust me type thing. But the idea that God created in such a way that everything will result in the praise of his glorious grace, that everything is being summed up in Christ.

I mean, those are the big words that, okay, scripture uses in Ephesians chapter 1. Working all things after the counsel of his will. That's just too big. That's too much. And so people mock that. And you'll see it every day.

The provisionists are big members of the Bulla Makoi. They are sort of the loudest people of the Bulla Makoi, at least amongst evangelicals of some stripe. And so it is a form of mockery of the decree for someone to say, well, it shouldn't bother you that I'm doing this because God decreed I would do it.

They say that all the time. I had a Mormon use that one, Hayden Carroll, who really annoys me in many, many ways. He reminds me a lot of the guy who wrote Itzhar al-Haq back in 1864, the Indian Muslim scholar.

Or was he Pakistani? Anyway. And what he did is he took all the skepticism and liberalism from German scholarship, applied it to the Bible, and then gave that to the Muslims as ammunition against the Bible.

And that's what Hayden Carroll's like. He has always been, from the time I first met him, and I've dialogued with him on the streets in Mesa, he is a hyper-skeptic. So he's doing all this stuff online now, and he'll get Christians to talk to him, and he'll throw this stuff at him.

I saw one, how do you know that Hebrew is the scripture? And what bugs me about it is that if he applied the same standards to his own position, it would refute everything. Mormonism started off with assumptions on canon issues and saying that you know Hebrew is the scripture because Joseph Smith said so.

I don't think Joseph Smith ever did say so. He probably wasn't even thinking about things like that. But to say, well, we can because we have this ultimate authority, it's just so circular, so silly. And the skeptics that he loves to quote, and the skepticism he loves to promulgate, is 10 ,000 times more effective against something as weird as the Book of Mormon, as far as historicity, and origination, and the missing pages, you know, all the rest of it.

So anyway, you have that kind of skepticism being thrown out there. But he used it. He uses that same type of stuff. I had mentioned some of the stuff that Joseph Smith did, his treasure-seeking. There's this stuff in Mormon history from Joseph Smith's money-digging years.

He was brought up on charges on money-digging. They found the records of it, and this was many years ago, and he'd charge people to dig for treasure on their land that had been hidden there by preceding generations, Indians or whoever.

And then they would say that, I'm getting close, I'm getting close, I can feel it's really close, I hit something. And then, oh no, it's getting slippery. And it would slip into the earth, so they couldn't get it.

And that ends up in the Book of Mormon, where their treasures became slippery. You know, this kind of pagan magic that was part of what was going on in those days ends up in the Book of Mormon. So the skepticism that you have for something like the Book of Hebrews, which is historical, intertextual relationship, both the Greek Septuagint and New Testament, and all the rest of this stuff that's found in P46, has all that kind of historical stuff.

And then you look at what these guys will accept, and we're not talking about antiquity here, we're not talking about the ancient world. We have this documentation from less than 200 years ago, and well, it's coming right up on 200 years ago now.

Anyways, relatively short period of time. The incoherence of it, the inconsistency of being skeptical about that stuff, but we will just accept the silliest explanations of other things, is really, just gets tiring after a while.

Anyways, back to the Billimacoi who are not non-Christian heretics, i .e. Mormons. So you, I'm sorry, he had said, well, your God, in your view, predestined Joseph Smith to do those things, so I just don't even know why you'd even mention it.

So again, it's the same thing. It's understandable why the Mormons don't have a concept of primary and secondary causes of the biblical parameters that have been provided to us in the story of Joseph and his brothers, in God's use of Assyria to punish Israel, and in the very words, which I hope we'll be able to get to later on, of Acts chapter 4, where the sinful actions of Pilate, Herod, the Romans, and the Jews are specifically said to have been predestined by the bullae, the decree of God.

I mean, it's right there. It's not something you're making up. It's not something you're implying. It's stated right there on the page of scripture. I understand why the Mormons don't get it. They're just not reading the Bible that carefully anyways, and they've got all this other stuff, with the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants of the Prophetic Price, and all the other stuff that Mormonism throws in the way, and so they're not deriving their beliefs from scripture in any way, shape, or form.

So I get that, but the latent flowers of the world and the nest of Susas of the world, that's what's really weird, that you have this kind of clear scriptural foundation, and yet still they mock the bullae.

They'll say, well, I don't know why you're upset that I don't believe what you believe. God predestined I wouldn't believe what you believe, and so they flatten everything out. I've said this. Everybody needs to understand.

I've been criticizing provisionism before it was called provisionism, and I have said that latent flowers especially is guilty of flattening out the biblical testimony. So instead of having the full orb, I even have a it's probably still in the other office someplace, either that or I've stored it away, but I even bought a gem once, because I've used that as the illustration, sort of a prism type thing, where if you think of a gemstone and how you can turn it, and you'll see different colors and different gradations and refracting of light, things like that.

The truth about God's eternality, his creatorship, his purposes, how he weaves the elements of time together, it's beautiful. It's throughout scripture. You can trace it from Genesis to Revelation, but if you flatten that down into just two dimensions, that's just not there anymore.

You just get a, well, God's like us, and God can't do big stuff, like being holy and having a holy purpose in everything he decrees, and mankind doesn't have a holy purpose in what he does, and so you've got the same action, but completely different outcomes, completely different intentions, and completely different responsibilities.

You have primary causation and secondary causation, and you have all these things that are seen right there in the page of scripture, but they just ignore that part. It doesn't fit the narrative, so we're not going to talk about it, or we're just going to explain it away.

And so the real surface level mockery type thing is, well, you shouldn't be concerned about what I believe or teach, because God decreed it. Yes, God decreed it, and God has a purpose for it, and it doesn't change your responsibility, and you're going to be judged on the basis of that intention of your heart, and I see no respect, no respect at all for the boule of God, the decree of God on the part of many of these people.

They have one purpose, one goal, clicks and followers and likes and things like that, and if I have to mock God's purpose and lower him down to my level in the process, okay, I'll do it. So yeah, the boule of mockery are all over the internet, and just five hours ago, Dinesh D'Souza, who I think was busy over the weekend, so there weren't nearly as many D'Souzian examples of his hatred of Reformed theology, though this one does make sense.

C. S. Lewis, Total Depravity, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Reading

I had been told a few weeks ago that he has announced he's working on a book on C .S. Lewis. Now, C .S. Lewis was a brilliant man, but C .S. Lewis was not a brilliant theologian. He had great thoughts.

We can be thankful for many of the things that C .S. Lewis said and did and wrote, and we can be disgusted by what modern people are doing with his writings and with Tolkien and all the rest. In fact, that they're literally, what is her name, the chick that played the Prada movie, whatever her name is.

I stink at remembering celebrities' names. I just don't care about things like that. But they're having a female voice Aslan in, I don't even know what to say. It is so offensive. I mean, it's Hollywood saying, we are going to blaspheme everything, and we're going to continue to do it, and we don't care if what this means is this film will absolutely bomb.

It will cost 17 times more to make it than it'll ever make. We're going to do it because this is what we do. We detest Christianity, and we detest everything about it, and so that's what we're going to do.

Um, her name will come to me later, and I'll be in the middle of something else, and then I'll throw it out there. Anyway, Meryl Streep, there we go. See, you didn't know about that, huh? Meryl Streep is voicing Aslan, who is Christ.

Aren't they brilliant? They're not even brilliant in their hatred. They're dumb in their hatred. It is doing something on C .S. Lewis, and here's what he writes. He says, is Calvinism an unwitting form of devil worship?

Question mark. Here's what C .S. Lewis, the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century, well, that's certainly disputable, had to say about total depravity and placing God above all human standards of good and evil, good or evil.

Now, here's the thing that concerns me here. I'm going to read you what Lewis said. That's not what Lewis said. And if D'Souza is such a poor reader, and he has demonstrated himself to be very willing to read a-contextually, this book is going to be a disaster, because he doesn't understand Lewis.

So here's what Lewis said. If God's moral judgments differ from ours so that our black may be his white, we can mean nothing by calling him good, for to say God is good while asserting that his goodness is holy other than ours is really only to say God is we know not what.

An utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying him. If he is not, in our sense, good, we shall obey, if at all, only through fear, and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent fiend.

The doctrine of total pravity, when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing, may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil worship. Now, there's a lot there that we could unpack.

There's a lot there we could talk about common grace and the fallenness of man, and I have to wonder if Lewis would have said some of the things today that he said 60 years ago, 70 years ago, 80 years ago, given how utterly perverted our society has become even since then.

But notice what he says. He's not saying the doctrine of total depravity, when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing. That's what Lewis said.

It goes right over to Sousa's head, just like the words weren't even there on the page. That either demonstrates an incredible incapacity on his part to read in context and understand things on a basic English comprehension level, or more likely, it indicates the man has a, well, he's suffering from CDS, Calvinist Grangeman Syndrome, and so he hears what he wants to hear.

But in either case, so much for even accurately reading what, so he, notice he says, C .S. Lewis had to say about total depravity. What he had to say was taking a certain conclusion from total depravity and placing God above all human standards of good or evil.

Notice, human standards. No, what Lewis was talking about is that there needs to be a conjunction between our understanding and what God defines as good or evil. That's not the same thing. He hasn't even thought this stuff through.

This man does not know what he's talking about. I mean, he is ignorant, and he is so proud of his ignorance. It's astonishing. It's just, like I've said, we're all ignorant, but trying to be proud of our ignorance is not really a good thing at all.

Progressive Christianity and Gnostic Eucharistic Claims

Oh yeah, I did want to mention this. I will forget this if I didn't. There's a Lutheran brother, a young Lutheran brother, Potamapotas. Okay, I don't think there's a name here. Lutheran father, farmer, beekeeper, lay deacon, theologian, is what his description is here.

Doesn't give us any more. But he announced, their little boy, it looks like he's one and a half maybe, but something happened. I don't know the details, but the little boy passed away. He has here, tomorrow we will bury our son.

He will be laid to rest under a great ash tree in the graveyard where most of his fathers lay. I want to say a deep felt thank you to the thousands of people who have prayed for us and the dozens of people who supported us.

May God comfort us. He also said another message, I don't know why my son had to die. I don't think I ever will. That's got to be a devastating thing. We pray for this brother and for his family in that difficult situation, we really do.

But he's not haranguing God. And as a Lutheran, well, okay, as a believing Lutheran, because my goodness, I am seeing, we see so much online now of the progressivist Christianity that is anything but Christianity.

And so we see the PCUSA stuff. We're seeing the stuff from Talarico's church. There was a sermon recently from his pastor that is causing all sorts of people just to lose their minds. He's questioning the resurrection of Christ.

Well, wake up folks, that's progressivism. Progressivists don't believe Christ rose from the dead. That's why we had a debate on this with John Dominic Rauschen and Marcus Borg, what, 20 years ago now?

I think it was around 2005-ish, something like that. I've been telling people, warning people for decades, this is what progressivism is about. It has no foundation for maintaining even a semblance of Christianity.

And so it should not be shocking to us what is being said, but now the internet allows us to, internet allows protestia anyways. Can you imagine that job? That is a spiritually dangerous job to have. Protestia guys, that's a spiritually dangerous job.

You are being exposed to the dregs of what calls itself Christianity on a regular basis. That cannot be healthy in the long term. Just saying, that's rough stuff. Anyway, thanks to protestia and people like that, some other groups post similar things.

We now see this stuff. It's now put out there in short sound bites that we can grab hold of. And you start hearing this stuff about literally saying that the supper needs to be put into the concept of the feminine and that the blood is the blood of birth.

And all this other gnostic nonsense that the church condemned and fought for hundreds of years at the beginning and is being resurrected by these people. It is pure pagan heresy. Redeemed Zuma needs to wake up and realize that he is a part of the synagogue of Satan and get out of there.

It is not schism to separate from people who teach the things that are taught in the PCUSA every single Sunday from pulpit after pulpit after pulpit. It is abject foolishness on his part not to see that.

Man, that there would be somebody in his life that could slap him across the face and say, wake up boy, you are being an idiot. And I'm being straightforward because he needs somebody to tell him that straightforwardly.

Anyway, so that went viral. The whole thing that was talking about the supper. And I'm like, yes, that is absurd. Yes, that requires you to reject any kind of consistency in scripture. That's what they're all about.

They have been that way for decades. For decades. And it's just now that we get to see these things and see them with enough clarity that we're like, oh my goodness, that is a different religion. Sure is.

Sure is. From the world's perspective, no. But yeah, that's a completely different religion. And they're all around us. And you just have to stop and go, if God is allowing this stuff to parade under the name of Christianity, is that not judgment?

What else can you call it? What else can you call it but abject judgment? And it is. It's judgment upon, I'm sorry, a tweet from my daughter just popped up on my screen and she's talking about my four-year-old grandson.

I cannot believe he's four years old. All right. Now that I mentioned it, it is awful cute. I've got to mention it here. If we have to go long because of this. My four-year-old son, so that's my grandson, ransom brought me a grape.

I'm so good to you, he said. I said thank you and put it in my mouth. He didn't take his eyes off of me, leaned in real close and watched me chew. He then giggled maniacally and yelled, do you like it?

Me, what did you do to it? Why are you staring at me? Why wouldn't I like it? Him, oh, no reason, no reason at all, nothing, just want you to like it. Guys, what was that? You know, when you're a parent and you experience that type of stuff, one of the thoughts always in the back of your mind is that you hope that someday they will get to experience the same thing.

It's not just what goes around comes around. It's not just when they're being crazy to you, that you can't wait for the day when their kids are crazy to them and you can just sit back and go, told you so, because it always happens.

It always happens. That day when it hits you that, oh my goodness, my parents knew what they were talking about. Oh, wow. Yep, it happens to everybody. But the cute things like that, you know, just the crazy things of life that she gets to experience because she's homeschooling the kids.

And I see her older kids, you know, my oldest granddaughter is driving, working, and yet is so helpful in taking care of the young ones. That used to be how families function. You know, it was only a century and a half ago that for most Americans you would see your grandparents die.

You'd be a part of that. You'd see the dead body. You would see their decline over time. It made you sober. It made you recognize the brevity of life. And it connected you and grounded you. It's not a part of our culture anymore.

And man, we're seeing the results. We are seeing the results big time. Okay, all right, let's get back to things. Someone sent me, and I, well, where'd it go? Oh, it's a different program here. Yeah, here we go.

Jimmy Akin’s Response to the Romans 4 Argument

Someone sent me, oh, I've got to get rid of the Willamakoi here, a video, and I haven't spent a lot of time with it. It's of Jimmy Akin, and I'll just be, I'm just gonna be straightforward with you. I pretty much lost all respect for Jimmy Akin a couple years ago when we debated in Louisiana.

He comes walking in, pretty much dressed like that. I think he thinks he's a reincarnated Confederate general or maybe a major. I don't know. Wearing that insane hat in a church, which of course he doesn't believe is a church, so he didn't feel like he was being disrespectful, but he wore it the whole time anyways.

And his white jeans and white jean jacket and different colored t-shirt thing that he seems to think is his cool thing. Anyway, and of course the main problem wasn't just his dress, but the fact that he had come there under the false pretenses of doing a debate when he had no intention of doing a debate at all.

He had his opening statement, his rebuttals, his questions, and his closing statements all prepared on slides, and I could have been speaking Swahili. I could have broken into German. It would not have made any difference because it would not have changed his presentation.

He wasn't, and in fact in the first debate he talked about how Paul said don't dispute about words, and so as soon as I did my rebuttal, he's like, well, I'm not here to dispute about words. The Bible says not to dispute about words, and this goes back to his presentation.

That was disrespectful. I think at that point from now on, any reasonable person should just simply let him, you know, he does all this science fiction stuff and Star Trek stuff and alien stuff, and that's what he spends his time on.

He really, in many ways, sort of views himself as the Pope in the sense that he doesn't really care what other Catholic theologians believe or say or do. He just comes up with his own stuff, his redefinition of anathema, and all the rest of the stuff.

You just have to believe whatever he says. He's out there on his own, doing his own thing, and it's, I don't know how really representative he is of anything. He's on with Matt Fradd, and the title of the, I think it's, what was it, about 12 minutes, something like that.

The title of the, is that on here? Oh, 28 minutes, so it's about half an hour. The title of the thing is, Jimmy Akin Destroys James White. Now, I'm gonna be perfectly honest with you. I would imagine that there are people, especially younger guys who will post a clip from a debate that I've done or something like that, they'll use similar language.

I don't use that kind of language because it's childish. That's the staller, it's childish. You know, from my perspective, if you do real well in something, just put it out there and let the people come to the conclusion, well, he destroyed him.

When you have to put it out there, you're covering something. You're trying to poison the well, you're trying to do something, and playing a few clips of something destroys nobody, okay? It's just childish.

You know, Matt Fradd, I've said, hey, Matt, you like to take pot shots? How about you debate? Oh, no, no. He'll put other people on, and he'll let them say whatever they want to say, but he won't do that.

Still would be interesting to do, really would be. There's all sorts of topics, but I don't have half an hour right now to be worrying about stuff like this. I did throw it at Claude, and well, first I used a really cool program called MacWhisper that produces transcripts, incredibly accurate transcripts, even differentiating who's speaking and stuff like that in seconds.

It's amazing how fast it works and how well it works. So if you're looking for something, MacWhisper, I can't recommend it more highly. Anyway, I threw it at MacWhisper to get a quick PDF, and then I'm just sort of scrolling through it real fast to see what some of the topics were.

That's a lot faster than trying to sit there with a video, and then you have to sit there and listen for a while, see if you can get the context. If you can read it, you can do stuff. And I ran across this section, and so I thought, you know what?

This is well worth taking a look at here. It really, really is, just simply on an evangelistic basis, because first of all, it demonstrates that Jimmy Akin's understanding of Reformed theology has gotten very old.

He was a Presbyterian back in the 80s, but it's aging, and he's not keeping up with stuff, and the accuracy is not what it once was as far as that's concerned. So his comments are, as I'll point out, are inaccurate at best, and of course Matt Fradd will never challenge anything.

He just lets everybody say whatever they want to say. That's his thing. But this is about Romans 4, and Romans 4 is an exceptionally important text in speaking Roman Catholics, because Romans... where is Romans 4?

Well, Romans 1, 2, and into 3, universal sinfulness. Chapter 3, once every mouth is stopped, all Jew and Gentile stand before God guilty, now you have justification by faith apart from works of law. And that's not N .T. Wright Sanders law.

That's not New Perspective law. And then chapter 4 gets into the argumentation, especially in response to the Jews. What about Abraham? And how is Abraham? And what about the offering of Isaac? And then you've got the development of the empty hand of faith grasping the hand of grace.

You can't have anything in that hand of faith, or it gets in the way. It's by grace through faith, and then the conclusion in Romans 5, 1, therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

That is central to the entire New Testament's presentation of justification itself. Okay, so over the years, I have asked many a Roman Catholic who is the blessed man. I should have, man, I should have brought it up, but go find it.

Put James White, Peter Stravinskis, blessed man. It'll pull up, much to Stravinskis' dismay. He's not happy about that. But I asked Peter Stravinskis this question during a debate 25 years ago on Long Island on the subject of purgatory.

Who is the blessed man of Romans 4, 6 through 8? Because Paul quotes from Psalm 32, blessed is the man whom God imputes righteousness apart from works, and then he defines, he's defining that differently than what you might think if you just simply read Psalm 32, and then he makes the statement, blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.

Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. That's the phrase. Okay, so what does that mean? That's how he quotes it in Romans 4, 8. So who's the blessed man? Who is the man whose sin is not imputed to him in Roman Catholicism?

Now that's my question. I'm asking a perfectly valid question from a dogmatic perspective within Roman Catholicism. Is there a category of non-imputation of sin? And there isn't. So if you commit a venial sin in Roman Catholicism, is it imputed to you?

Well, yes. You have to go to confession, there's temporal punishments, you may have to say a certain number of Hail Marys or Our Fathers or whatever, and there's temporal punishment. And that temporal punishment has to be taken care of, or that's what purgatory is for.

Now, the venial sin doesn't destroy the grace of justification. This is old style Roman Catholic theology. I realize a large number of even the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church today, they really don't believe this stuff anymore.

But it's still what's on the books. It's still what you got to deal with, even if most of them just don't really live by it any longer. So what if you commit a mortal sin? Well, the mortal sin destroys the grace of justification.

So you have to be re-justified. And so you have to go through the sacramental process of re-justification. But the point is, if you commit a mortal sin, is it imputed to you? Yes. If you commit a venial sin, is it imputed to you?

Yes. There is no category of non-imputation of sin. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account. Blessed is the man whose sin is not imputed to him. So who's the blessed man? And I've heard lots of different attempts.

It's the man, you know, it's the child who was just baptized before can walk out the door and do something wrong. The adult who's just baptized and converted and before they can walk out the door and have an evil thought, that's the blessed man.

It's a tiny little period of time. No. The blessed man is every single believer in Jesus Christ, because every single believer in Jesus Christ has had his sins imputed to Christ as his sin-bearer and has had Christ's righteousness imputed to them.

That is the forensic nature of justification, which is denied by Jimmy Akin and by Roman Catholic apologists as a whole, and by the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. They identify it as a forensic myth, a fable, a fiction, forensic fiction.

You have to literally be made righteous by the infusion of grace. That's what makes you pleasing to God. That's why you go to heaven, is you have been made pleasing to God by the infusion of grace, not by the imputation of Christ's righteousness.

This takes us back to Luther and the Dunghill and what the difference is between justification and sanctification, which are conflated and made one thing in Roman Catholic thinking, and how that's dangerous and things that we have spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on over the decades on this program, in my book, The God Who Justifies, which I would be interested, I should have looked at the PDF, maybe I will.

I'm going to take a wild guess here, just a wild guess, and say that book doesn't get mentioned while I get destroyed by Matt Fradd and Jimmy Akin. So there's the background. That's why Romans chapter 4 is extremely relevant.

I shared with you that this is something that I ask Roman Catholics all the time. So given that, and given that Jimmy Akin and I have been crossing swords in various formats since before the internet came along, back from the late 19, mid -1980s probably, let's see what they had to say and see how this goes.

Why is it that I can ask a Roman Catholic priest, Peter Stravinskas, who is the blessed man of Romans 4? And he's like, well, I hope to be. And that's the best they can do. That's the issue right there.

Because there is no finished work.

Akin’s Commentary on Romans 4

Peter That was it. Pete Okay. So what he does in that second part is he does something that's unique to him as James White. Now he's referring to Romans chapter 4. And in Romans chapter 4, St. Paul is having a longer discourse.

And one of the elements in St. Paul's longer discourse is he appeals back to a passage from the Psalms, which are traditionally attributed to King David. And he notes that there is a Psalm where.

David Are you noticing something? I'm just going to comment here. Jimmy Akin wants to project himself as an expert on all things. He didn't have to say 90 of what he just said, you know, which are traditionally attributed to David.

And so he's quoting from a Psalm. Yes, he's quoting from a Psalm and from David. And it's a long discourse, the Apostle Paul. Are we going to get to the point someday? You've got a video camera on you.

And it's all just, I am so wise and so well read in these things. This is just basic level stuff. It's a little on the annoying side because he does it all the time. It's just part of his shtick.

David or the Psalmist, whoever you believe it was, proclaims blessedness on he whose lawless deeds are forgiven, whose sins are covered. And he says how blessed this person is. And lots of Calvinists talk about this passage in Romans 4.

And there's no bad reason for that. That's a perfectly good thing to do.

Now, notice something. Yes, that is the first part of the verse, whose sins are covered, forgiveness. Yes. But what's my focus? What did I say? Who is the blessed man to whom the Lord will not impute sin?

That's the whole issue. If Jimmy Akin had any, if he had read my book, if he read the Roman Catholic controversy, if he read The God Who Justifies, if he'd listened to the debates with Stravinskis, with St. Genes, this was a big part of the discussion with St. Genes too.

And this was a quarter century ago. But the reason I ended up debating St. Genes on that topic is because he bailed. He had said he'd do it and then backed out. Jimmy Akin did. So, there is no reason to be ignorant of what my argument actually is at all.

But he is not.

Dealing with my argument so far. Part of scripture, it should be commented upon. And Calvinists do that. What James White uniquely does is try to turn this passage into a gotcha moment. And the way he does that is by saying, posing a question, who is the blessed man from Romans 4?

And this is a uniquely James White question. This is not typically used by Calvinists. It's used by White, it's used by James White fanboys and people like that, but this is not a typical question Calvinists ask.