Open Borders Means Anarchy and Lawlessness, Then Open Phones on Deep Theological Topics

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. One hour today, no jumbos, megas, or anything else, but we wanted to sneak one in before I head out of town and end up doing

Skype programs for a little while. Open phones, 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number, and while we try to get a few folks online,

I do realize it is an unusual time period for us to do this, but while we try to get folks queued up, just one quick topic to address, which may get a few phone calls.

Now, I've been, I've thought about this for a long time, I've never really addressed it directly, but I think someone needs to, with some level of non -emotionalism, point out some rather obvious realities about something going on in Western culture.

You cannot have a nation without borders.

You can't have a nation without borders. Think about it.

Why can we drive down streets in any nation in which we live?

Well, because of borders. You define what the borders are, you set up a governmental structure, you have taxation of business, private transactions, income taxes in some situations, whatever it might be, and those governmental entities then either contract out or themselves maintain those roads, determine where the roads are going to go, determine how roads are going to connect with one another, who can get to be on the roads, what it's going to cost you to be on the roads, etc.,

etc. But if you're going to have transportation, if you're going to have infrastructure, if you're going to have water distribution, electricity, you're going to have medical facilities, you're going to have educational facilities.

And then once you've built all this stuff, you just don't want somebody marching in and taking it, so you've got to have the ability to stop evil men from doing evil things.

That's what the military is supposed to be about. Very frequently, it ends up becoming what you use to do evil things as well.

But you can't do any of that without borders. And I hear these people,

I mean, we have, you know, what took place in New York in this primary election with the defeat of a liberal, and we need to stop using the term liberal by the way, liberal doesn't mean anything anymore, leftist, what was it, 10 times he had been elected, 10 times, in fact, my understanding, he was in line to be

Speaker of the House if the Democrats took the House. Defeated by, let's be honest, a communist, a 28 -year -old communist.

How'd that happen? Well, because we didn't win the

Cold War. The other side got smart and pretended to die, and instead invaded in another fashion.

Couldn't do it militarily, so they invaded the universities. And now we have, now they're in our backyard.

And it is their intention to destroy this system of government in the

United States and the Western cultures as a whole. And what you're seeing right now, look what's happening with Hungary, look what's happening with Poland.

They're being called every name under the sun because they want to maintain their borders and maintain their ethnicity and their culture.

And you should have the right to be able to apply to go to a country where your values are valued more than the negation of your values are valued.

Now that country has the right to determine whether you get to come in or not, or that it's not a country.

And so all this open borders stuff, you need to understand. You might say, stay out of politics, listen, follow me for a second.

Open borders is anarchy. Anarchy is not a biblical concept. Ever read Romans 13?

Anarchy is a bad thing. What happens when you have anarchy is people eventually recognize that no one can live under anarchy and will accept any type of governmental system that will get rid of the anarchy, which is normally not a good governmental system.

We were, I forget what the context was, but someone was telling me that, for example, if you flee

Peru, not Peru, Venezuela right now, you are allowed to leave.

If you get to leave Venezuela, you leave with a single suitcase and everything else you owned the government takes.

That's socialism, that's communism, that's the left for you. And that's what we have people electing people to office in the

United States for now. And when they talk about open borders, they're talking about anarchy.

Anarchy is not something that Christians should support. Anarchy creates more poor people.

Anarchy destroys law. It destroys order. What got me thinking about this a lot was contrasting

Zwingli and Luther in how they approached issues.

And one of those issues was the orderliness that both insisted, but for slightly different reasons,

I'm not going to go into all that right now, but that both insisted had to be in the

Reformation. And so if you're familiar with Reformation church history, maybe even following the church history series on sermon audio that I've been doing,

I'm just about to wrap up. You know that, for example, Luther and Karlstadt ended up at loggerheads with one another.

Why? Because Luther believed that anarchy was a terrible thing.

And he was a sacralist. And so that took a certain perspective. And Zwingli likewise was a sacralist.

And so by 1526 in Zurich, you have the death penalty being used against Anabaptists.

Why was that? Well, you have more Reformation by democracy in Switzerland than you had anywhere else.

But still, both were committed to the idea you can't have anarchy. Anarchy is not an appropriate, proper governmental system.

Order and law, God is a God of law. Look at the nation of Israel. They had borders. They had laws.

They had means of dealing with people who wanted to come into that nation and different statuses of individuals within the theocratic system.

And so for people to come along and say, hey, you know, the Christian thing is we should just have no borders is absurd.

It is the utopian dreaming of individuals who don't have any idea how the world works or any idea how the world has worked.

And you know, the Bible grew out of how God works in this world. It didn't just float down on a cloud.

It comes from the way this world works. And hence, it's actually meaningful along those lines.

So when I hear these young people, when I hear, well, when I hear the left renting evangelicals to mouth the open borders stuff, you need to understand something.

This nation has been exceptionally generous toward people who want to come here.

We want people to come here. But if you decide to come across our borders illegally, that's an invasion.

And I'm seeing Christians sitting around going, well, these are just poor immigrants.

No, they're invaders. And they are making it next to impossible for other people to come in legally and do it the proper way.

There's something called law. There's something called order. And without it, you got a problem.

You're looking like something's completely wrong over there. No? The look on your face is, oh, okay, all right.

Rich is sending me mixed signals from the other direction. Be very careful when you see

Christian leaders mouthing leftist ideologies and trying to When you turn

Jesus into an illegal immigrant, you're obviously trying to get at something you can't get to by any other means.

You can't get to it by the actual exegesis of the text of scripture. You can't get to it through church history.

You're trying to come up with something new. And when you have this concept of open borders, you are a person promoting the concept of anarchy.

And it is a bad, bad, bad, bad thing. So just thought I'd mention that in passing, get people all riled up.

And all of a sudden, we had a bunch of phone calls up there. And then they all went bye bye.

You'll have to tell me about this later, I suppose. I wish

I had a, nope, that doesn't work. I wish I had a camera sometimes to show you what

I have to deal with on this side of things, just so you know. We grabbed the wrong Dilly Wobbier thingy -thinger.

So we're back to the 1982 vintage. I think this might be 1982 vintage earpiece, but it still works.

That's the really cool thing about it. All right, 877 -753 -3341.

Boy, it looks like we're going for just the really exciting questions here. Let's talk with Josiah.

Hi, Josiah. Hey, James. Yes, sir. So I have a question.

I've been looking into kind of some of the stuff that the early church believed, including the

Nicene Creed. And recently, I just bought John MacArthur's biblical systematic theology book on that.

And I'm noticing that actually a view that I thought wouldn't be common is actually very common.

And I'm noticing that a lot of people hold the belief of eternal generation, that the father is communicating divine essence to the son.

I don't know what your view was on that. Well, that's certainly the historically orthodox perspective.

I'm not sure what your question about it is. So I guess from that, because I know

Scott Olson at Westminster Theological Seminary, I know he doesn't actually, he doesn't take that position.

And I mean, taking the position he holds, where to say that the son is having essence being communicated to him, that means he is less of God than the father, or, you know, he's not as divine as the father.

I'm not, like, the view for me, it sounds almost kind of weird. Sounds like a subtle heresy,

I would say. Well, obviously, we have some miscommunication.

I would be a little surprised if Dr. Oliphant didn't hold to what the

Westminster Confession of Faith or the great creeds say along those lines.

So it must be some type of application. And my assumption is this has something to do with the concept of the eternal subordination of the son.

At least that's my guess. But the eternal subordination issue is not the same thing as the eternal generation issue.

Those are not the same things. One does not lead to the other. Okay, so I think it might be.

Yeah, yeah, there's been a big controversy over the past couple of years about the idea of eternal subordination.

But most who would hold to eternal generation would say that's one of the best ways to avoid holding to eternal subordination is to hold to that historical understanding, at least in the sense that they're wanting to avoid any type of tritheism or any capacity of subordination as to essence, obviously as to function in what's called the economic trinity.

You have voluntary subordination of both the son and the spirit to the father in the economic trinity.

But as to the issue of the participation of the divine persons, when you realize the eternal generation does not mean a temporal thing.

It is not a time thing. It is an identification thing. It is a necessary identification thing.

It helps us to recognize who the father is, who the son is, who the spirit is. And as long as you don't take eternal generation to the point of denying that the son is autotheos, that he is truly

God in and of himself. See, I think that's where some people maybe think that eternal generation requires you to go, is that this means that the son is not autotheos.

And some people have taken it that far. So again, you have to figure out who you're talking about and exactly what the context is.

You can hold to both the eternal generation of the son as well as to the idea that the son is autotheos, that he is

God in and of himself, if you just seek to remain balanced and not fall off one side or the other.

I think the eternal subordination folks fall off one side of that direction. And I guess some others would argue that if you don't have an intimate personal relationship between the divine persons that's defined by eternal generation, then you can end up with tritheism.

So the idea is that historic reform folks would want to, with Calvin, emphasize the fact that the son is autotheos while at the same time recognizing the intimate personal relationship that exists and hence the ability to differentiate between father, son, and spirit.

So my guess is that that's probably what's behind what you're thinking there is what came up.

Right, that's actually exactly it. So what does it mean that he communicates the divine essence?

It's a relationship term. If you want it in one of the most simplistic, but I think really good, illustrations, anything that's trying to illustrate an absolute unique relationship is going to fall apart.

But C .S. Lewis, who had some theological issues, but I think he had a good insight on this. C .S.

Lewis in Mere Christianity, if you remember the illustration he used of this, he used the relationship between two books on a table.

And he says, now, if one is sitting upon the other because of our human experience and time, we say that the one depends upon the other for its position.

And we know that there was once a time when that wasn't the case. So the one is always going to be lesser than the other because it's dependent upon it.

But if you take that out of time and make it something that is definitional of the relationship of those two books, then that's the illustration that he's making is that it's not.

See, our minds just automatically import human categories into the subject.

And so when we think of generation, we think of it in time. We think of it as logical priority.

And most of us don't have much of an emphasis upon understanding the need to be able to differentiate between Father, Son, and Spirit in a way that is not dependent solely upon the economic activities of the divine persons.

In other words, we can see who the Father is, who the Son is, who the Spirit is because of creation and redemption and the roles that each takes and things like that.

But is there any recognizable way of recognizing who

Father, Son, and Spirit is in eternity past? And generation and inspiration are the two terms that have been used to talk about the relationship of the divine persons before they did anything temporally in creation.

So in other words, it's an attempt to say that you could differentiate between the persons by their relationship with one another even before they did anything, and that this then plays out in the roles that they take within creation.

So it's ironic that you mentioned John MacArthur's systematic theology there because John is one who is well known back in the 1980s,

I think, to have changed his position on the issue of the relationship of the

Father and the Son and related topics in regards to that particular subject.

And so it's interesting that you used – in fact, that threw me a curveball at first when you mentioned it because I was like, well, is he going back to the 1980s thing or just what's going on at that point too?

So yeah. Right. So he – because I'm reading his systematic theology that he put together with,

I forget the guy's name. And so I was thinking, oh man, more eternal subordination of the

Son. Oh my gosh, I have to get away from that. Yeah, no, no, no, no. You have to differentiate between those, and there's a tremendous amount of discussion of this last year about this time.

Actually, year before last, I actually spent about two years now about this time, all over blogs and everything else.

And at the time, I was a little concerned that there was one other issue that I think is very important, and if you've read the

Institutes of Christian Religion, you know that Calvin thought was very important, and that is that we always affirm that the

Son is autotheos, that he is God in and of himself. That is not – that does not require a rejection of the concept of eternal generation as long as that is held in a balanced fashion, and I think most people have done that in the past, though there have been exceptions to that.

Well, thank you very much, Josiah, for allowing me to lose everybody in the audience. Only you and I are now watching or listening to anything on the program, so thank you.

Thanks loads. All right, Josiah, thank you, sir. All right, bye.

All right, bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341. Hey, we're staying in the same area.

Let's talk to Anthony in Oklahoma. Hello, Anthony.

I'm clicking and nothing's happening. Am I hung?

What? Did everything just die? The phone service just crashed.

Huh? So the

Comrex just died. It's rebooting. Well, Anthony, Jonathan, and Matthew, very sorry, but the phone system just reset itself, and so you're going to need to call back in at 877 -753 -3341.

My screen just disappeared, and it died. I don't think I've ever seen that before.

It just died. So we're hoping that it will reboot, though I'll have to admit this system is so old that it's probably running on like an 8088 or maybe a 380.

If any of you remember a 380, the chip. You don't remember the 380? 386?

Okay, 386. Yeah, 386, 486, and then Pentium. That's right. It's 386, 486, and Pentium.

Woo, Pentium. Woo -hoo. Yeah, there you go. That's great.

So you guys, if you could call back in once the system gets back up.

Right now, Rich is taking his headphone off and going over to the box, and now he's getting his gun out, and no, this is not good.

So if you hear a loud bang in the backdrop, you're going to know that the open phone segment is pretty much done, and that's all there's going to be to that,

I'm afraid. So, oh, it's completely frozen up, huh? So it's not even rebooting. You're just...

Okay, I don't know what that means, but... So are you trying to restart it, or is it done?

I'm not getting much of a direct answer from anybody at the moment, so... Okay, if there's any flames or anything, we'll take care of it.

Yeah, all right. Okay, well, so, you know, it's not all that easy.

Well, I'm hearing... Well, something's working, since it just about took my eardrum out there.

Captain, she can't take much more of this. Oh, evidently not. So, see, well, we managed to get through one, and then we were going to go to a call on the filial quay clause in the

Nicene Creed. So we'll see what comes of all of that. I'm just trying to refresh my thing here, and...

What? Okay, it says I can log in. So, yeah, it says it's ringing, so we're good.

877 -753 -3341. If you were online, please feel free to call back, and Rich will try to get you on as quick as possible, and we'll try to get to you.

And again, our apologies for the... Richard said, I don't know, a month and a half ago, he says we need to get a new phone system.

This is just getting too old, too rickety, and...

Oh, great. Someone wants to talk about the Book of Mormon, and I removed... Oh, wait a minute.

Nope. Yep, I did. I removed my... My quad is in the other room.

But I do have the LDS scriptures on my computer here, so I can get to it.

So I'm going to go ahead and take that first call, if that's okay. All right. Let's try talking to Bruce.

Hi, Bruce. Hey, Dr. Wyatt. This is Bruce. How are you? I'm doing great.

I just got back from a mission trip to Manti, Utah. Well, that's an interesting place to go.

And I think you've been out there to the Miracle Pageant before? No, I certainly know about it, but I've not gone to the

Miracle Pageant in Manti. I've heard it's quite interesting. It is. I got to hang out with Bill McKeever and do some evangelism on the street.

So, yeah. I guess my question is, we staked out outside of the

Missionary Training Center out there in Provo. Yes, yes. So we were just... We were getting tons of great conversations, and I caught one guy who...

Now, how did you... Wait a minute. How did you do that? Because that's actually on the grounds of BYU. I don't know.

We just were driving around, and we saw the Missionary Training Center's entrance. And there's a parking lot across the street.

Right. That's where the temple is. Right. Well, it's like a parking lot between there and the temple.

We were just standing there on the corner with some literature and just picking people off and having some good conversation.

No one stopped us. The security passed by a couple times, but they didn't say go away. That actually really surprises me.

Lord must have made you invisible to them or something. Yeah, so I was talking to some guy who works there, walks by, and he,

I guess, works on the website. Like, he answers questions on the chat and the

Facebook and stuff. And so typically, we got in this conversation about the Gospel and how the

Mormon Gospel is basically impossible, considering 2 Nephi 25, 23, Moroni 10, 32, et cetera.

And it always devolves into this, well, you know, after this life, we can do

X, Y, or Z, right? So the thing that he brought—so we usually bring up, when we get to that point,

Alma 42, or Alma 42, as they pronounce it, which really talks about this day.

This is the modal probation now. And so the thing that he responded to me with was that that was specifically—he was trying to over -contextualize it,

I think, because he was saying that that applied then, before Jesus went to the spirit prison, and now that Jesus went to spirit prison, things have changed, and now it's not all about this life.

It's about, you know, now you can do proxy repentance and proxy baptism and all this stuff in the afterlife.

So I don't know if you've encountered that or what you might say to that. No, I haven't. I'm just glancing at Alma 42 here.

Therefore, as they had become carnal, sensual, and devilish by nature, this probationary state became a state for them to repair.

It became a preparatory state. So I don't know that I could really comment much on that.

I don't see how Jesus is going to spirit prison is overly relevant at that point, because Mormons go to the spirit prison and proclaim the gospel according to Mormonism.

So I'm not sure what the issue of argument was. Oh, actually, did I say 42?

Yes. Sorry, I meant 34. Alma 34, 33, 335, it talks about this life.

For behold, this life is a time for men to prepare to meet God. Behold, the day of this life is a day for men to perform their labors.

Yeah. Well, obviously, this is one of the difficulties that you're dealing with here, and there's something going on in the background there.

It's sort of hard for me to hear you because there's something going on. I'm not sure what it is. But what you're dealing with here is one of the clear evidences of the evolutionary nature of Mormonism.

When Joseph Smith writes the Book of Mormon, he doesn't have all the rest of that stuff yet. That's going to be 1834, 1835, the full polytheism stuff, not till 1838.

So that's why I've said many times, if Joseph Smith had not been murdered in 1844, there would be no Mormonism today, because things were changing so fast and so radically that if you had just given him a few more years, nobody could have made head or tails out of any of it.

So I'm not sure. I don't have a Book of Mormon commentary nearby to know how they explain that today, but it's rather obvious that that was

Joseph Smith's view in 1830. It just didn't remain that way over time.

And Joseph didn't have any problem with that. And interestingly enough, a lot of modern

Mormons are losing having any problem with that. As more and more stuff comes out, they're just sort of like, hey, well, you know, that's how prophecy works.

And they have this really loosey -goosey postmodern view of how stuff works.

And as long as believing Joseph was a prophet, hey, why not? So it's a strange perspective.

But yeah, I can see how you would say that, because I think functionally the Doctrine and Covenants does end up becoming—it does supersede portions of the

Book of Mormon, functionally, as far as LDS theology is concerned. So would you say it wouldn't be useful to use

Element 34 to kind of put them in the corner of, this is your life? Like, kind of to reduce the absurdity,

I don't know. Well, I've never been big—I've used the Book of Mormon to say, you know, here's what

Mormons believe about X, Y, or Z, but I've never been one to try to use it in a positive way of saying, this means you should believe what it says here, that this is a time of probation, or so on and so forth.

Because there's always a way around it. I mean, the Book of Mormon contradicts itself, and it certainly contradicts the

Doctrine and Covenants in numerous places. So they get to pick and choose what weight they're going to put on what.

Gotcha. Yeah. All right. If I have one thing to add, if you can tell

Rich that the Dallas Cowboys are America's team, I know he needs to know that. Okay, he's—I think

I'm going to do this for—what's this? Don't ever call here again. All right, thanks,

Bruce. Talk to you later, and there you go. And Anthony was the fellow we were trying to talk to, so let's try to get to him here real quick.

Hi, Anthony, before the computer dies. Well, yeah. Greetings, Dr. White. Yes, sir.

Like I said, I have a question about the filioquid. I really want to know about the logical implications of it as far as—if there are any, there may not be—implications for the

Christian life. So I was reading an article about the filioquid. He was basically saying that if you don't have it, it leads to a kind of amorphous spiritualism that you kind of see in Eastern Orthodoxy, and I don't know if that logically follows.

The idea in the article was that because the Spirit proceeds from the

Father separate from the operation of the Son, that the

Son and the Spirit are distinct in their operations, and so basically their argument was that you can approach the

Father through the Son and through the Spirit in a different way, and I don't think that the

Eastern Orthodox would say that. But I was just wondering what your thoughts were, or if it was just a kind of petty early church controversy, like, you know, the

Quarter Decimant Controversy or something. Well, it certainly had a significantly more important role than the

Quarter Decimant Controversy, let's put it that way, historically. But the fact that it was not a central aspect of major debate in the early church would cause you to go, well, it's worthwhile to think it through, and there could be ramifications, but let's just be honest.

For 99 .99 % of people who have just even called themselves

Christians down through the history of the church, they had no idea what in the world this was. So the idea that there is a necessary result of an imbalance one way or the other here,

I would have a really hard time defending that in debate, let's just put it that way. I could certainly see, like what you just said,

I could see someone presenting that and saying, you know, it's more consistent, it's tidier, it's more reflective of what we see in the

New Testament, to see the unity of the work of the persons in this way.

Certainly how Jesus and the Father make their presence with us via the

Holy Spirit. I think a lot of this, to be honest with you, it's John 14, 15, and 16 is almost all you've got to be able to come to any conclusions on this particular subject.

And so I would have a real hard time, obvious, I think all the anathemas that have been thrown around for the past thousand years, as a person who believes that what we've been given in Scripture is sufficient,

I have a hard time with the anathemas and all the rest of that stuff. At the same time, I think you can make a good, clear case from John 14 through 16 of the view, but as you said,

I don't hear Eastern Orthodox folks saying or necessarily doing what the article was saying would be the necessary result of that.

So I don't, I would, let's put it this way. I think the unbiblical characteristic of much of the spirituality of Eastern Orthodoxy is due to nominalism and culturalism far more than it's due to any theological foundation in regards to that clause.

In other words, when you look at Energia in Eastern Orthodox thought and practice, the energies, and you look at the religions of the peoples around them and things, you see where they've been influenced by that.

I think that's much more of an influence and much more of a reason than anything about, well, you know, if you don't have the filiocra clause, then you've got the possibility of this or that.

Yeah, I would struggle with making that a real major issue.

I mean, it's interesting speculation, it's interesting theology, but historically, I think there was a lot of other things that were more important in the development.

You know, anytime you get a state church, I'm sorry, once you get state churches, the specific theological stuff fades into the background and nationalism and politics and all that stuff ends up being predominant.

So yeah, that is a fascinating speculation, but I'm just not sure how far you can take it.

All right. Well, thank you. I did have another question, if you have time. Real quick, yeah. Yeah, it's about Roman Catholicism.

I'm asking these questions because in our Sunday school slash Wednesday study at my church, I'm teaching, and we're going through the

Apostolic Creed. And so I'm teaching on the Holy Spirit, and I'm also teaching on the forgiveness of sin.

And so we have a Catholic church built a new building here in town, and it's apparently this wonderful, glorious structure, and so everybody at our church is like, oh, it's so wonderful, and it's so beautiful.

And so I was talking to one of my friends, and they were like, in the place where they hold the bread and the body, it's made of pure gold, and I'm like, yeah, because it's an idol.

And so I want to talk about how in the Creed, how to tactfully approach pointing out that the

Roman Catholic doctrines, particularly of justification and all of those things, and why they are anathema, and bringing up in a tasteful way, not an attacking way, because it does kind of bother me how a lot of people, even some of the elders in our church, are just kind of enamored with how beautiful this church is.

And you've even had—oh, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, that is not unusual. Though, it's funny, this morning

I was watching David Old, who is a wonderful Anglican minister down in the

Sydney area. He's currently in Rome, and he was Facebooking his adventures in Vatican City, and it was very obvious to me he was having the exact same reaction to what he was seeing that I did in 2004 when

I was there. It was—I'll just be honest with you, and people thought I was crazy, but I'm just like, this is so gaudy.

It was just marble and gold, and Jesus just was off and over in a corner someplace, and there were these other people that were in the center and all this stuff, and it's like, ugh.

And I look up at the cupola where they have the Petrine promise from Matthew 16 around the top, and I'm looking at it, and it's in gold, and I'm like, you know what?

That was purchased by selling the grace of God to peasants all over Europe.

That makes it disgusting to me. That's not beautiful to me. That's disgusting to me. And the problem is, if people are looking at the monster in Siborium, Tabernacle, whatever they've got, that brand -new church, and going, wow, this is just fantastic, what does it represent?

Do you really want your God in there? Do you really want your encounter with Jesus to be in that methodology?

Do you really realize what's being said in the Mass? What this represents is that most of our people don't know what

Roman Catholicism teaches, and even if they do, evidently they don't know enough about what we believe, in contrast to it, to be able to go, wow, this is really important stuff, and I can't just allow my emotions to run away with me.

But look, in the church today, emotion is the big thing.

It's not revealed truth. It's not our standing upon those things. It's all about emotion.

So sadly, I do understand what you're saying, and when you say, I want to do this in such a way that it's not, you know, obviously you don't want to be

Jack Check, okay? I mean, you don't want to go there. And there is an appropriate way in looking at our current context to go,

I want to address these things in a way that's going to be most effective now, but at the same time, I can't give in to the emotions of today.

I need to try to bring my people higher. I need to try to challenge them to come up to a higher level. So that's a balancing act that you're trying to do between the two, and obviously this is a good subject to be able to do it on.

I would say the way you have to do it is, as difficult as it might be, is to provide that contrast.

Say, the once -for -allness of the sacrifice in Hebrews 7 through 10 contrasted with what is represented by that fancy gold tabernacle, the repetitiveness of the non -perfecting sacrifice of the mass, and just trying to get them to see what the real, real issues are.

They're looking at the outward, not the inward, and what the actual meaning is. And so, yeah, I think the best way to do that is to lay a biblical foundation and then compare the results and then say, and look at what this leads to.

This looks to people, this causes people to be coming into this building over and over again, seeking to be re -justified or to have the temporal punishments of sins removed from them so they don't have to spend so much time in purgatory and then go satisfaccio and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

There are real results from all of this, as I think came out pretty clearly in the debate that I had with Peter D.

Williams just a few weeks ago. Yeah, that was a great debate. So, though, look, let's just be honest.

My bow tie versus his sunglasses, that wasn't even close. I mean, that was just a wipeout right there.

I'm sorry. I hope you're saying that your bow tie won. Oh, of course. Of course. I mean, he's just got his fancy sunglasses hanging there.

It's like, come on, man, you know, buck it up. Put them on your head, do something with them. But just hanging your sunglasses there,

I ain't going to cut it. So anyway, yeah, those are important things, Anthony. It sounds like you're doing a great job, and I'm glad you called back in so we could talk about it.

Yes. Thank you so much. God's blessed me a lot through your ministry, and I hope he blesses you all the more. All right.

Thank you very much, Anthony. God bless. All right. So far, the phones are holding on just barely.

Let's just take these three, and we'll wrap up with these. And let's talk with Matthew.

Hi, Matthew. Hi, James. I have a question about Aisha and the history of Islam.

So I had a discussion with a group of Muslims a couple weeks ago, and the question of Aisha's age came up.

I didn't bring it up, but there was a man who had come, not with our group, but with someone else, and he was very bombastic in asserting that Muhammad was with this, you know, essentially child bride.

And I didn't take that route, but I recently read a book about early

Islamic history that seemed to assert that Aisha may have made up the youngness of her own age to try to give her more prestige, you know, to say that she had been with the

Prophet longer than her other wives. So I'm just asking what your opinion is on all that. Well, the documentation's pretty strong.

The marriage is contracted at six and takes place at nine.

Was that wildly unusual at that time? No, it wasn't. As I've said many, many times, you have to –

I realize a lot of people, this is their go -to argument. The number one reason why this is an important issue is the elevation of Muhammad to the point of being the example of human behavior for all people at all times.

That's the issue. That results in child brides. That results in the bad stuff that comes from this.

But that's a separate question from the facts of the historical record and then the recognition.

This is where, again, the bombastic folks don't care about this, but I care about being consistent in applying the same standards to Islam that I apply to my own faith.

And so I just – I watched – I think I bookmarked it.

I watched a video that was put out by – and it's one of those videos that we haven't gotten good enough to do yet ourselves, but it's where you've got the person talking and then you've got stuff going on around them and graphics and stuff.

And it's very engaging. And it was an interesting attempt to get around the issue of Aisha, and it did raise all sorts of questions about how in the early history of the

United States the age of consent was extremely low in certain states and goes through all these people that had these very, very early marriages and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that is why when I deal with Aisha, I'm either going to deal with Aisha in the sense of the elevation of Muhammad to the standard of all behavior or the contrasting of the fact that the

Quran shows no embarrassment whatsoever about Aisha. In fact, as you sort of alluded to there,

Aisha is looked upon as the mother of the the only virgin wife of Muhammad.

Everybody else had been previously married. And obviously, according to the stories,

Muhammad dies in her lap. She is the source of a huge amount of the

Hadith literature. She's extremely beloved by the Sunni, not so much by the

Shiites, et cetera, et cetera. But what I do then is

I contrast that with the obvious embarrassment that the

Quran shows concerning the marriage to Zaynab bin Jash.

And I think that's just a... I'm sorry? Is that the marriage with the daughter -in -law?

The daughter of Muhammad's adopted son, the wife of...

I'm sorry, the wife of Zayd, who Muhammad had adopted.

And so she divorced from Zayd, but in Arabic culture, it was considered to be incest if he were to marry her.

And so this entire revelation has to come down, which ends up in the Quran, allowing

Muhammad to marry Zaynab bin Jash. There's clear embarrassment. And what you can do is you can go from there into the issue of adoption.

And see, for me, that then is a wide open road right into the Gospel. So on a very practical level,

I think it's much better to go that direction, because the Aisha issue, you're dealing with a beloved woman amongst the

Sunnis who have already heard every accusation under the sun. And so it's almost as bad as trying to discuss

John 1 with Jehovah's Witnesses at the front door. They've heard it all before. You want to go a different direction, actually get them thinking.

And the Aisha direction, I find just to be a huge closed door until a later period in time.

And so they do have their answers. They do have their apologists. I don't necessarily accept what they're saying.

But I likewise recognize that the serious discussion of Aisha needs to be focused someplace else than where it normally is.

I'm so glad you say that, because I used to take the Aisha question much more central. And it really closed a lot of doors.

Oh, yeah. Thank you for your ministry and having... Oh, really? Yeah, especially with Muslim women. I did the whole, you know,

Muhammad practically rapist thing. It completely shut her down. She was heartbroken. I never got a chance to talk to her again.

I was very upset with myself over that. That was not the right thing to do. But, yeah, thanks to a lot of people.

Well, Matthew, keep in mind, I have been vociferously attacked, not by Muslims, but by Christians, for expressing my concerns about how we approach that subject and how to approach it.

So mainly by people who think it's the very central thing you should be talking about all the time. So that's the way the world works right now.

So hopefully that's helpful to you, Matthew. Thank you very much. All right. God bless. Bye -bye. All right.

Two more. Let's talk with... I'm going to take a wild guess here. Devonta? Yes, Devonte.

Devonte, okay. Yes. How are you today, doctor? I'm doing good. Okay. My question is along the lines of, like, textual criticism and manuscripts.

Uh -huh. My question is, I have, like, a layman's knowledge of it.

My question is, like, resource -wise, where should I go to start to develop a deeper knowledge of it?

It kindled, like, a deeper fire in me, because I was recently watching a lecture of yours on the reliability of the

New Testament, and I think it was after your debate with Iglesia Ni Cristo, and you were talking about how in Isaiah 6, in the

Septuagint, which would have been most likely the Bible, I mean, the Old Testament that Jesus and his disciples had, that in Isaiah 6, it doesn't say the train of his road filled the temple, but his glory filled the temple.

And so how in John 12, they would have known exactly what John was saying, and that Jesus was identified as Yahweh.

And I was like, man, it would be awesome if I just knew stuff like that. I was glad to learn it.

But I was like, man, where do I go to learn stuff like that? Well, you know, the sort of exciting thing is, just a couple months ago,

I was in Davidson, South Africa, which is one of the townships there in the

Johannesburg area, very poor area. And the church there had asked me, every time

I go to those places, they ask me to talk about Jehovah's Witnesses. And so here's this really excited group of folks.

And they know about Isaiah 6 in the Greek Septuagint, and the vast majority of Christians around the world do not, because that's definitely one of the things that I share with people every time

I make that type of presentation. But obviously, that information was in my book on the

Trinity. And as far as resources, we used to carry a number of things.

You know, obviously, I think they're still available through our Amazon bookstore or something like that.

But Philip Comfort's book, Textual Commentary on the

Greek New Testament, is extremely useful along those lines. Got a lot of information in it. Obviously, my own book on the

King James Only Controversy gives you a lot of background information as well. Metzger's Commentary on the

Greek New Testament is not as easy to read. Comfort at least tries to make it understandable. In fact, most of Philip Comfort's stuff is meant to, like, encountering the

New Testament's manuscripts. Now, I've put it in the other room. I used to have it behind me here.

But a lot of his stuff is meant to be a little bit more understandable to folks. The problem is that material on textual criticism and textual critical issues is rarely meant to be accessible to the layman.

Almost all of it assumes a knowledge of the biblical languages, minimally

Greek, and sometimes more than that.

And so it is a challenge. Comfort can get you past some of that. But it is a bit of a challenge along those lines because the assumption is, well, if you're looking at textual criticism of Greek manuscripts, then you must be able to read

Greek manuscripts. And that's not necessarily the case with everybody today, especially now that so much more of that information is becoming available electronically.

Like, Philip Comfort's Commentary is available, I'm sure. I know it's in Accordance. I imagine it's in Logos as well.

So you can get it electronically, which is sort of neat. If you have a program like Accordance or Logos, Olive Tree, you can get those resources and create a screen that would have, for example, your favorite

English translation, then maybe the Nessiallen 28th edition, and then the text notes, and then the commentary right next to it.

And that can be very helpful, but at times it can be also very frustrating if you can't read the language because you can see something's going on, but you may not necessarily be able to make heads or tails out of exactly what it is.

So those are some of the issues. If you really want to know that kind of stuff, one of the best things to do, people always ask me, what are the two classes you took that helped you the most?

Church history and Greek. And even a first -year level knowledge of Greek will open up those textual footnotes for you so that you can tell exactly what's going on.

Any person who has gone through Mounts first -year grammar will be able to understand what the footnotes are about and follow the discussions and stuff like that.

That makes a huge difference right there. Okay. I had one more quick related question if time permits.

Real quick, yeah. Okay. In your opinion, because this is your field of expertise, what is the reason, specifically in American Christianity, where there's not as much interest in learning how the

Bible came together historically? Because in my experience, not that I have this perfect knowledge, but I feel like I have enough to where I can converse with a

Roman Catholic, whereas I see with my friends or just people in general, it comes to questions of the canon, and they just get their heads lobbed off because they haven't thought about it.

Why is there this lack of wanting to know where it came from? Well, I don't know what gave you that interest, but the fact of the matter is, in the vast majority of evangelical churches in the

United States, it is not modeled to people from the pulpit to have those types of concerns or interests.

And so if you don't have those things coming to you in the church, in your

Sunday school classes, or wherever else it might be, if you don't have a minister making reference to these things, you don't even know it's important.

And if you're not involved in talking with other people, in something more than on Facebook or Twitter anyways, in serious conversations, if you're not challenged in that way, then why would you spend your time on it?

Why would you invest yourself in it? So obviously for me, it's simple for me.

I have to deal with this stuff all the time, so I realize those types of things. And if other people are doing the same things, they have the same set of priorities.

But look, most of our folks don't get involved in meaningful conversations with people from other religious faiths.

They don't get challenged. And so when they do, it can get pretty ugly, as you said. So I think there's a lack of interaction with other perspectives.

We're happy with what we got, and we're not overly... Look, amongst a lot of evangelical churches, they're like, just leave the

Mormons alone, just leave the Jehovah's Witnesses alone. There's plenty of just plain old pagans out there that you can go talk to.

The problem is those plain old pagans are reading Bart Ehrman now. So we're behind the eight ball.

We really are. We're, as always, the truth is still putting its shoes on while error has run the first quarter mile.

So that's just sort of the way it's always been. Okay. Thank you.

I appreciate that. All right. Thank you for your phone call. I appreciate it. God bless. Bye -bye. All right, real quick, let's talk to John.

Hi, John. Hey, Dr. White. Yes, sir. Hey, I actually called you two weeks ago,

I think, talking about how my wife's kind of reconverting back to Roman Catholicism. I don't want to bug you over and over.

Maybe one day I'll be able to call in and be like, hey, I got her back! Well, you can certainly do the best you can, but that's not your job, unfortunately.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Understood. So I had just some quick questions.

So I'm actually going to be kind of going into my own debate with one of the people on her side, and this guy has actually been on Catholic Answers and has his own conversion story to the

Roman Catholic Church. But it's kind of like I'm going to be facing a guy with a PhD, and I've been doing this for maybe like six months.

Well, that seems fair. Yeah, well, I'm the one—well, we're both challenging each other.

I think it was fun. It was fun for me. I've been studying you a lot, because I think you're the main person that I see going head -to -head with their leading

Roman Catholic apologists. But I wanted to ask a couple things.

I think we're going to start with Sola Scriptura, because the last time I called, you had mentioned authority would probably be the first thing you want to get agreement on.

Well, you're not going to get agreement on it. Everything is going to go back to it. Yeah. I was wondering of strategies on going about that,

I suppose maybe knowing the canon and how to debate that part, and then

Sola Scriptura itself and the scriptures. I was wondering if there's any other things I need to look into. Well, if you haven't obtained the three volumes set by William Webster and David King on Sola Scriptura, I would highly recommend it, because it deals with the vast majority of the arguments.

William Webster has done a great amount of work on the Apocrypha, on the differences between, for example, the early canon lists and then the

Council of Trent. They actually define things differently, though most Roman Catholics aren't aware of that, because they didn't understand exactly which books were which, or what their names were, and so on and so forth.

And then just simply the massive number of patristic citations that were amassed by, especially by David King in one of the volumes there, would be extremely, extremely useful to you.

And then you have to combine that with Dr. Kruger's books on the canon, so you understand where that's coming from.

I would assume you saw the conversation that Dr. Kruger and I had on the canon from G3.

Yeah, G3, yes. So his books would be an important follow -up there. So, but you're not going to end up with any agreement on that, but you can most definitely demonstrate the incoherence of the argumentation.

So, for example, in the debate I just did with Peter D. Williams, he repeated the canon has to be a part of Revelation or you're violating solo scriptura.

I pointed out that presuppositionally, he is assuming certain things, not only about the nature of scripture, but the nature of the canon, that he then cannot apply to the church, which becomes his ultimate authority after that.

And so I have a feeling that he and I will probably end up addressing that, because I want to go directly at his distinction without a difference argument, because it's what you're going to get from Catholic Answers, too.

That's their primary argument as well. I happened to flip through on the local

Catholic radio station just a few days ago and heard them doing the exact same thing. So that's a fair amount of material right there, because those are secondary sources.

They'll make reference to William Whitaker and to Good, G -O -O -D -E. These were also post -Reformation resources that have a tremendous amount of information in them, as well as Salmon's book,

The Infallibility of the Church. These are all things that those of us who have been dealing with Roman Catholicism for a long time have sitting on our library shelves, and they're well -worn and well -used.

And I don't know if they're available electronically yet, but you need to have them.

And those are going to be your go -to sources on that. Awesome.

One of the things mentioned by the person I'm going to be speaking with, as his reputation itself,

Scriptura, was going to Martin Luther and saying he was trying to get rid of the

Book of James and things like that. Well, that's irrelevant. That shows, again, when someone does that,

I automatically know I'm not really dealing with a super serious person, because they somehow think that's going to be shocking to me.

First of all, Martin Luther quoted from James as Scripture even after that time period.

Luther said a lot of things that did not end up translating into him believing he had any power or ability to do any of those things.

But if you want to go there, then the easy thing to do is to point out that Cardinal interviewed

Luther in 1518, himself rejected the apocryphal books all the way up until that point in time, and represented the views of popes as well as Jerome on that subject.

We can have, as I've said many times, so much for the infallibility of Luther. They can't do that with the pope.

They can't go so much for the infallibility of the pope. Well, there you go. Which is, you know, you can do that with the current pope as well.

He's out in la -la land on a bunch of stuff. But the point being that on the issue of authority, those who live in glass cathedrals should not be chucking bricks around.

And that's really where they find themselves at that particular point. Anyways, John, we went over time just for you.

I hope those resources will be helpful to you, and I'd be real interested in seeing how all that turns out.

But I appreciate your call today. Thanks so much. All right, thank you. God bless. Bye -bye. All right, there you go.

Open phones went five minutes long, but we're not on a network, so we can do whatever we want to do.

And besides that, we fiddled around for five minutes trying to get the phone system back up. So there you go.

I'm going to try over the next three weeks to do some

Skype stuff. Some of you may remember that in July, I frequently am away, so we have done

Skype stuff before. So we'll try to make it work. We'll plug it in and make it work. Not sure when, though, but we'll let you know.