Reviewing the Spong Debate

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desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded

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Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now, with today's topic, here is

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James White. And welcome to The Dividing Line. On a Tuesday morning, back in the saddle after being gone for two weeks.

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But if you've been following the blog, then you know what we've been doing for the past two weeks. We have been very, very busy.

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There is still, at the very top of the blog, a picture of the group that was with us on the

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MS Viendom. And I don't know if it's just the lighting or just what it is, but when

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I look at Mike there down front, he looks like a picture from the 1950s.

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You know, like sort of the slicked back hair and the thin tie type thing. And that's not what he was wearing.

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That wasn't, that's not, I don't know how it turned out that way. Maybe it's just that he's right in front of the guy in the kilt, that, you know, the contrast or something.

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Maybe so, I don't know. But you can see some of the pictures. Well, you look nice and, he's complaining now.

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He looks nice and svelte and everything there. There's something wrong. The 1950s weren't that bad, you know.

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But anyway, there are a number of other pictures we've put on the blog over the past week and a half or so, and some of them have absolutely shocked you and made you laugh.

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But we had a great time on the ship and in the conference, and we'll be talking about that some today.

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But I want you to please notice something if you are listening live today. If you will look at the upper right hand side of the right column, there are,

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I guess there's two columns in our website, in essence, and then you've got the navigation thing over on the left, which of course is from our 1993 design website.

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And so anyway, is it not?

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The internet was not a public thing in 1993, at least nobody knew about it. That's the point.

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Okay. You're making my point for me here. We did that site around 2000.

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Okay. All right. So it's six years old. Yeah, about that. Okay. About that. Just checking. Just checking.

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It's old. It's retro. And so that means it's coming back into Vogue. Oh, it's already back. It's already back?

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And gone again. Yeah. I think we're just, the fact that we just won't change anything is proof that we stand firm on our foundation, see, and it's just, it just goes with, you know, the whole ministry idea.

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Change? Change? Why would we change? Why would we change? What's that all about? Yeah. That's the...

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Anyway, upper right -hand corner, you will see a very pretty picture of the

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Mercury. Now that is a ship that I know very well, I've been on her twice, and she is a beautiful ship and I have been where she is in that picture, going through the

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Inside Passage and just glorious places up there.

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But there you see next year's cruise, and you're going, oh, good grief, that quick?

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Yeah. And here's the reason why. We've never done anything like this. We've done some great cruises in the past, but we've never done anything that I've been as excited about as this one.

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First of all, please notice the date, October 15th to the 19th, that's not seven days. That's four days.

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So it's going to be a shorter cruise. Now, for some people, that's a negative thing, because for most of us, you're just starting to figure out where things are on the ship by the time you get off on the seventh day.

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But at the same time, the people that we want to try to have with us, you know, it's wonderful when elderly, retired folks who have all the time in the world and no earthly responsibilities are able to go on cruises, and that's wonderful.

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We can learn from folks like that, and we've had some great times. But to be honest with you, the people that are most,

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I think, interested in what we have to do are younger people, and the vast majority of folks who support

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Alpha Omega Ministries are working people. They are people who give sacrificially.

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They are people who work 40 and 50 and 60, wow, I just disappeared, and 70 and 80 hours a week.

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And they're younger folks and they've got zeal and energy, which

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I used to have too, and still got zeal, there's not so much energy. And sometimes, you know, they have 10 day, 14 day cruises, stuff like that.

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Our folks just couldn't get away for that kind of thing. I don't know very many people who can get away for that kind of time frame.

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So this is going to be a four day cruise, and it's going to be very intensive.

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Please notice the little pretty yellow, what do they call those things? Star explosion things.

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I don't know what it is. I meant to get your attention. Starting at $250.

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Now, that's what I think most folks are going to go, excuse me? A four day cruise, $250.

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All the food and all the rest of that kind of stuff on board, $250. That's exceptionally affordable, and it is.

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And that's what we try to do is we try to make these things affordable. So you've got a really low cost.

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You've got a time frame that a lot more people, especially since you've got 11 months to be planning this, to be getting your vacation, et cetera, et cetera.

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So you've got the affordability, you've got the time frame, planning ahead. But why worry about it anyways?

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Well, look at the title, the Cross Historicity and Theology. Historicity and Theology.

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What's this about? What we're going to be doing? Now, obviously, a person does not have to sign up for the class portion of the cruise to go on the cruise.

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There are people who would not be overly excited about having a seminary level class on the cross, it's

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Historicity and Theology. But there happen to be a whole lot of people who would. And this is going to be a seminary level class.

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It does not mean that you have to have a bachelor's degree to take the class in that sense.

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I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is this is going to be an intensive class.

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It will include four hours in two two -hour segments, four hours of intensive in -class training lecture interaction with yours truly per day during the course of the cruise.

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Now, that's a lot. And that's going to be that's going to be a lot of teaching on my part.

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I'm going to be working hard on this cruise. But that's what we want to do. We want to address the cross, it's

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Historicity and it's Theology. Now, why those two areas?

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Well, real simple. Actually, on the website, I just this morning typed up very quickly a description of the of the topic and what we're going to be addressing.

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But the real issue here is Historicity goes to the attacks upon the the very existence of the cross.

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Islam, for example, Surah 4, 157 denies that Jesus Christ died upon a cross, that he was crucified by the people of Israel and by the

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Romans, so on and so forth. It denies that that was a historical event. This is one of the primary apologetic conflicts between Islam and Christianity is the cross itself.

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We know what the Jesus Seminar says. We know what John Dominic Crossan says. We know what John Shelby Spong says.

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We know what the extreme left says. And we need to be prepared to give an answer.

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For the existence of this great redemptive event in history.

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And that is the cross of Jesus Christ. That's the historicity aspect of it. Then we have the theology aspect of it.

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We all know what that's about. We all know that there is a tremendous amount of unbiblical belief concerning the nature of the cross and the atonement in the post evangelical world.

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There's a whole lot of warm fuzzies, but not a whole lot of biblical teaching. And yet, even then, there are conflicts with those who do seek to present a particular theory of the atonement.

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And so when you look at the whole area, it's a huge area.

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And so what we're going to be doing, and just over the next couple of weeks, I'll be putting all of this together.

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What we're going to be doing is we are going to be having pre -class readings. There is going to be a reading list, and you're going to be able to focus upon certain aspects of these areas.

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Maybe your interest is primarily in the historical area, and your interest is in Islam. And so there's going to be works to read in that particular area.

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Maybe it's primarily in the theological sections. There's going to be books to read in that particular area. There will be some basic reading to be done in the whole area so that nobody's just left sitting there going, well,

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I don't know what you're talking about there, and you've just completely left me behind on that subject, whatever else it might be.

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I'll be putting that together along with a syllabus. So there'll be things that you need to do for the class.

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And I'm arranging, haven't finished all the arrangements yet, but I'm arranging with Columbia Evangelical Seminary to offer this as a class through the seminary, hopefully as part of a larger program.

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And so there will be some book reviews and some reading beforehand that you bring with you, or you can submit to me prior to the actual cruise.

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And then after the cruise is over, after we've done the classroom elements of it, and done it within the context of this beautiful Pacific Northwest area that we will be in, then within a certain period of time after the cruise, the final papers, not so much a final examination, but the final papers will be due for the class.

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And what I will be doing is I will be providing a grade for those who sign up for the class.

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You will be graded and provided with that information. Those who do the best in the class, there will be an offering to you of having your papers published on the omen .org

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website. And so there is a just it's totally different than anything we've done in the past.

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I know that there are going to be some who would like to go on the cruise, but are not interested in spending four hours a day in a classroom setting.

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I understand that. But then there's all sorts of other folks who would like to do nothing better than that.

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In fact, four hours isn't enough for them. So this will be a very intensive coursework that will be made available.

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And I don't at this point in time yet know what else is going to be done.

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I think four hours of teaching for me is probably pretty much take me out as far as anything else.

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But it's possible. I haven't completely arranged yet. There might be some other things going on in the evenings and things like that that wouldn't be quite as intensive.

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We will be letting you know as we develop our thoughts on those. But I would love to have to utilize the biggest rooms available on the

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Mercury to be able to do this class. I would love to have many, many people I know that many of the people who listen to this kind of program.

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This is what you want. And you can tell we're making it available to you at an incredible, incredible cost here.

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Yes, sir. I think perhaps it's not something you necessarily would think about. But what struck me when

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Mike told me when this was going to be was immediately for a lot of people who have younger children,

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I think this is going to fall right into when the school systems, at least here in Arizona, have fall break.

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And so a lot of folks have issues with being able to go on a cruise when their children are in school and pulling them out of school.

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So this very well may solve that problem for some people. Yeah, yeah. For some people to be able to bring the kids along or, you know, be able to send them to a relative or something like that and not, you know, be concerned that they're pulling them out of school.

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Right now we are in the discussions seeking to find someone for a debate.

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October 15th, I believe, is a Monday. And so for the Saturday night prior to the debate, we're looking at an opportunity possibly to have a debate up there that would likewise be either on the issue of the atonement and specifically whether one believes in particular redemption or whether one believes in a variant form of that.

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Everybody believes unless you're universalist to some sort of particular redemption. But having debate on that Saturday night, either on the theological aspects, we can find someone who would really claim to believe in substitutionary atonement, but also present a universal atonement.

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There would be willing to actually go that direction. Not a wild -eyed liberal, but someone who actually believes the

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Bible's word of God. So you can get into some exegesis. Or obviously, the historicity issue raises the whole possibility of debating the

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Islamic aspect of it. And of course, I know someone who might be interested in that, too. And thankfully,

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October 15th is after the end of Ramadan. So it does not fall during that period of time.

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I think Ramadan ends like 13th or 12th or something. I think it was 12th next year or something like that. So that actually might be a possibility.

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But anyway, there are some of the, I think, really exciting issues going on there.

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One other thing to mention, then we'll go to the Spong debate about next year's lacrosse cruise and class.

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And that is at that kind of money, that kind of cost,

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I would challenge you to go see what anybody else is offering. You're going to have four digits in the cost, not three smaller digits in the cost like this, especially on a beautiful ship.

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I can recommend the Mercury highly. I've been on her twice. I know her like the back of my hand. She's just beautiful.

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I've spent 14 days on her so far. And definitely one of my well, by far my favorite ship.

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No question about that. But given what time of year it is, this would be an incredible Christmas present for someone.

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I mean, yeah, it's not something they can open. I suppose you could print out some pictures and put them in something or whatever you want to do along those lines.

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But goodness, talk about having something that people will be looking forward to for a long period of time.

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Almost everything you give somebody at that season, you know, they've forgotten about by the end of January. This is something that they'd be looking forward to for the next 10 months after that.

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And there are all sorts of folks that would be just so excited to be able to do something like this, you know, elders and things like that.

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So please give consideration to that. I really want to see an excellent group of folks on this on this cruise seriously focused in upon studying deeply the cross, its historicity and theology.

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Really looking forward to it. I think it's going to be a tremendous, a tremendous time. Yeah, I'm seeing some people in channel.

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No, please do not buy this cruise for people you do not like. Don't don't we don't need.

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No, don't need any of that kind of stuff going on. And so on and so forth.

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So with that, please keep that in mind. We will obviously be reminding you of that and letting you know as further developments are put together, you know, book lists and things like that as they as they come around, we will let you know about those things.

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Now, with that, I would like to go to a little bit of report on what took place recently, specifically haven't had an opportunity to talk much about the

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John Shelby Spong debate. I, I suppose

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I shouldn't have been surprised how it ended up turning out. I don't see a whole lot of difference between this debate and Barry Lynn debate, honestly, if you have not seen or heard the

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Barry Lynn debate. Well, let's put it this way. We we have a much better recording of the John Shelby Spong debate than we had the debate.

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Let's put it that way. But as far as the attitude of the individual

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I was debating, I know that Bishop Spong has already expressed his feeling that no dialogue took place because there really couldn't be any, because I, I ignore the past two to three hundred years of biblical scholarship and things like that, which, of course,

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I do not. I just reject the conclusions of that form of biblical scholarship that he follows.

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But once again, I, I think I would have every ground.

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It's not something I've really been thinking about. I'm not the type of person that's easily offended along these lines. But if I were a type of person who was easily offended, it would be very easy to be offended by the way in which

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I was treated in this debate, specifically two areas. One was just a behavioral thing.

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And that is Bishop Spong wasn't overly concerned during the cross examination period and during the audience question period about something called time limits.

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He was given a certain amount of time to answer questions. And he would just, you know, even though you could hear the, the, the timer going off, just continued going and going and going as long as he wanted to, even if what he was saying wasn't overly relevant to what it was actually asked of him.

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And he likewise seemingly believes, seemingly, since he mentioned it more than once, thought that I had been given excessive time in my rebuttal.

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It was a 20 minute rebuttal period. And I used less than that. I, my timer did not go off.

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I used less than 20 minutes, 19 minutes and something, but I did not go over my time limit. I'm very fastidious about such things.

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And, and he kept talking about how, you know, that was the longest rebuttal period

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I've ever heard and blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and I, I had not gone over my time at all.

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I had refuted everything he had said. You know, it does make you feel like it's a long period of time, but anyway, so I could, you know,

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I could be concerned about things like that. And much more so on another point, I could feel quite disrespected by the fact that halfway through the debate, when we took the break,

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I walked over and our table, there's a picture of this on our blog, our, our table was immediately off to my left, a little bit behind me and off to the left of the, of the stage.

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And I went over and I asked Alan Hampton to hand me a copy of the same sex controversy, because as I looked on Bishop Spong's table, there were no books.

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And in fact, there was not even a Bible. One of the commonalities of the

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Barry Lynn and Bishop Spong debates is my opponents while debating the subject of whether homosexuality is compatible with biblical

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Christianity did not bother to bring along a biblical to debate the issue.

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And so I went over and I had Alan hand me a copy of the same sex controversy, the book that I coauthored with Jeff Neal.

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And I went over and gave it to Bishop Spong. I thought he was going to refuse to take it because he handed it back to me.

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But then he said, would you sign it? And I said, well, yes. Would you reciprocate?

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And he said, well, I don't have any of my books. And I said, well, I have your books on my table. And I went over and got a copy of the sins of scripture.

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And when I brought it back, I didn't point out that it was marked up. And he signed that and I signed his.

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But what that means, of course, is that while I had his books and I had had his books probably about at least 10 or 11 months prior to the debate, not just one or two,

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I had pretty much all of those that he has available. I not only had hardback or the hard copy, the paper copy,

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I also had two of them that were the most relevant to the to the issue, especially sins of scripture.

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I had those in electronic form as well, which I had purchased from the Internet. And so as you as a listener of The Dividing Line know,

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I had reviewed various of his lectures months ago. I had reviewed the radio program that he was on with Barry Lynn.

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We had gone through these point by point. We had talked about entering into the world view that gives rise to his comments.

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We had obviously and I've mentioned on my blog, I have spent hours and hours and hours listening to John Shelby Spong understanding where he's coming from.

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And he seemed like some have. John Dominic Crossman was an exception at this point, but he seemed to be rather offended when

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I began quoting him to himself. Peter Stravinskis, likewise, was quite offended about my gizmo where I had everything he had ever written on purgatory on my handheld unit.

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And so my questions to him, likewise, were drawn from his own writings, and that seemed to bother him to no end that I had taken the time to enter into his argumentation, to enter into his presentations, to come to an accurate knowledge of why he believes what he believes, and then to disagree with him on that.

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And I had to hand him my book because he could not have been bothered in all of that period of time prior to the debate to have actually obtained it himself and to have had some idea of why

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I believe what I believe and the conclusions I come to. Because quite obviously for John Shelby Spong, if you hold my positions, you just simply aren't worthy of that kind of human respect.

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You're just not. I mean, his antipathy toward what he lumps together as fundamentalism is very, very clear.

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It's very, very strong and it overrides anything else. And so once again, we had a situation just as we had with Stravinskis, just as we had with Lynn, where you have an opponent and Spong says he had, was it six doctorates?

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I think six doctorates. Spong had six doctorates. Stravinskis, two doctorates. Barry Lynn is an

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ACLU attorney, so he's got a doctorate level degree. So that's six, eight, nine doctorates between the three men and not a one of them could be bothered to do any kind of meaningful preparation as to the individual they're going to be debating or the worldview with which they were going to be disagreeing.

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And that tells you a lot, I think, about the mindset of the ultra left, which simply dismisses the possibility that there is anyone who could possibly mount a meaningful objection or case from the other side.

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And I likewise would note that at one point and this is what caught a lot of people in the room that night in a shocking, just shock looks on their faces.

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And that is, I was pointing out how far out of even the stream of tradition that was his in history, he was, and I mentioned

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Anglican Bishop J .C. Ryle and he had no idea who

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J .C. Ryle was or when he lived. And I remember looking out over that sea of mainly reformed faces and the tonsils that I could see as people were sitting there going, you've got to be kidding me.

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That's not possible. You are an Episcopalian bishop and you've never even heard of J .C.

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Ryle. Really? Wow, there's something that tells you a little something about it.

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Anyway, that's like a Baptist saying, he's never heard of Spurgeon as Amphibo and Channell just said.

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It is truly amazing. So anyway, I wanted to play two clips for you. One is from the cross -examination.

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It gives you an idea of what the cross -examination was like. Once again, Bishop Spong was to begin cross -examination and I should have sat down and timed this out.

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But I would estimate, and I'm being conservative here, that I didn't get to start saying anything when

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I'm supposed to be. I'm the one supposed to be being examined. He's supposed to be asking you questions for at least four minutes into that time period, possibly five or six.

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He just goes on and on and on and on. This is long

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Tim Staples -like soliloquy where you're supposed to be asking me a question.

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Is there a question there, sir? You're just going to take this time to just go on and on and on?

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What's the story? Maybe he felt he was making up for lost time because he thought I had gone over in my statements or something, which

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I had not. He was provided with a timer. He could have checked all this himself, but he did not.

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So what can I say? But eventually, we got into something where I would ask a question and everyone could see.

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I didn't get any responses that were directly relevant to my question outside of maybe, well,

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I can't really answer that because our world views are so different. But there was clearly no either ability or capacity or willingness on his part to even try to communicate with this audience.

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And he's actually said since the debate, he doesn't really have any interest in communicating with an audience of people who believe what

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I believe anyway. So I guess that follows. But just to give you a taste of what took place, let's listen to some lacrosse examination.

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Bishop Spong, why should anyone on a scholarly level examining Paul's writings conclude that his words about homosexuality in Romans 1 and 1

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Corinthians 6 are the result of repressed homosexuality rather than a consistent application of the law and the prophets as is seen throughout his writings on a wide variety of topics and issues?

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Well, I think you have to learn to play with the scriptures in a little bit more flexible manner than you seem able to do.

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I know that if you read Maccabees, for example, it's not in the scriptures, but it's in the Apocrypha and it's very popular literature in the first century.

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And Paul certainly was familiar with Maccabees and Maccabees says that if you if you can repress all desire, then you're not going to have any trouble.

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And I think Paul really tried to do that. The person that helped me to see that for the first time was a gay man who said,

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Paul, it's just like I am. I couldn't accept the fact that I was gay either, and I fought against it with all my heart. I tried to repress it.

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I did all sorts of things. I sometimes hid in a marriage, making even more people complicitous in your own inner struggle.

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But once you accept the fact that that being gay is not evil or you can act evil out of being gay is no doubt about that.

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But maybe you haven't noticed you can be pretty evil if you're heterosexual, too. You know, you can be a prostitute. You can be a pimp.

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You can abuse children. Those are all heterosexual proclivities. Overwhelmingly, sexuality itself, in my opinion, is absolutely morally neuter.

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You can act out homosexuality with holiness. You can act out heterosexuality with holiness. You can also act out both of them with great corruption and great destruction.

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Bishop Spong, you wrote concerning Paul's statements about homosexuality in Romans 1, quote, Is there any reason why anyone should believe that this convoluted and bizarre understanding of the tortured

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Pauline mind could ever be called the, quote, word of God, end quote? Yeah.

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Could you explain, sir, why you isolated Paul's statement from the context before and after, ignoring its consistency in that argumentation, and ignore the balance of the entirety of the text, which addresses the entire spectrum of human sin?

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You see, I don't see the Bible as the word of God. I see the word of God as that which

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I hear through the words of the Bible. And there's a very big difference. I don't want to blame

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God for a lot of things in the Bible. I think some of the things in the Bible are dreadful. I think they reflect our tribal upbringing.

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They reflect the adolescence or even the childhood of our humanity. I think the

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Bible is a growing book. There's an enormous difference between when you get into the prophets, for example, and you get

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Malachi, who says, From the rising of the sun to its setting, God's name shall be great among the Gentiles.

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That would have been something that the God in the book of Exodus would not have understood. In every nation, says

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Malachi, incense shall be offered unto my name. That's the dawning of a sense that God is a universal presence, drawing all human beings to God's self.

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So to act as if this book, written between 1000 B .C. and 135 A .D.,

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somehow captures in some inerrant or infallible form the literal word of God, is to me to become an idol, make the

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Bible into an idol. It becomes bibliolatory. It's not finding and engaging the word of God in scripture that constantly challenges our own prejudices and calls us into a deeper and deeper sense of our own humanity.

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So you wrote, Furthermore, no text in the Bible can ever be used appropriately to validate the prejudiced behavior of homophobia, which is clearly evil.

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That kind of outcome can never be derived from the quote, word of God, end quote. Yes, I think that's correct.

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Since I and almost every evangelical scholar I know are not afraid of our own sex, nor are we afraid of the sin of homosexuality.

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Will you now address the wide and deep stream of scholarship and theology that approaches the text of scripture in the same fashion that the

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Lord Jesus did, and that concludes that Paul's words as an apostle of Christ are indeed representative of God's will?

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You continue to say that Jesus sort of has a view of scripture that agrees with yours. The New Testament wasn't written when

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Jesus was here, and all of that was added. The we didn't agree on what books would constitute scripture in a final sense until about 367 of this common era, and that was in a letter from a man named

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Athanasius, who sent out a teaching epistle once a year, and one year he decided to list the books that were in the

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Bible that were legitimate canonical books. Before that time was a great debate. There was still a debate.

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Even when you get to Luther in the 16th century, Luther didn't think the epistle of James should have gotten into the canon and tried to get it out.

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There's been a lot of debates. One of the great things that Dan Brown has done for our world is to open many people who read murder mysteries up to some of the early theological debates about which books go in and which books go out.

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There's enormous study in that area going on today, so I don't start with the premise you start with, and so I don't know even how to respond to it except to say that's not the way

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I would approach the Bible. Okay, Bishop Spong, wouldn't you agree that in the canonical gospels, the view presented to us of Jesus Christ is that he had the highest view of scripture and, in fact, had a view of the scripture as the word of God, constantly saying it has been written?

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Would you at least not say that at that point? No, I wouldn't say that because he clearly thinks that Moses wrote the first five books of the

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Bible and David wrote the Psalms, and I think that's both of those. You'd flunk if you put those on a test at any theological seminary that I'm familiar with.

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Not in my class, sir. Okay, well, you see, that's where the issue is.

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Yes, it is. That's where the barrier is. Now, if you want to excommunicate all of the other

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Christians who disagree with that very narrow, very Protestant point of view. And very historical point of view.

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Well, see, that's part of your claim, that you have the truth, that it's historical, it's canonical, it's right. All I'm telling you is that Roman Catholic scholars wouldn't agree with you, and most of what

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I would call the great Protestant tradition of the 19th and 20th century would not agree with you, and my plea is for you to recognize that they, too, are part of the body of Christ and are wandering, walking forthrightly into the mystery of God, and I hope we walk together.

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I have no desire to put the wagons in a circle and shoot anybody who disagrees with me. I'm also not willing to have somebody define

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Christianity within a very narrow confine and say, if you don't believe the way I believe, you're no longer a Christian.

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That's not a world I think is going to survive. Bishop Spong, if what you're saying is true, then the illustration

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I used, if I dress like an imam, and I say I'm a Muslim, and I reject that Allah exists,

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I reject that Muhammad was a prophet, and I reject the Quran, am I a Muslim? The question you're asking is not one that I can give a yes or no, because the presuppositions around it need to be exposed.

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Are you suggesting that I don't believe that Jesus is the center of the Christian faith, that I don't believe he's the son of God?

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You do not believe in the creedal doctrine of the Trinity, right? I didn't say that. I've tried to say over and over again

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I'm a Trinitarian. I don't believe that I can therefore say what God is. I can say how

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I experience God. Do you believe that Jesus Christ eternally existed as the divine son of God, who became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, that he died upon a cross and rose again the third day from the grave, bodily?

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You have just strung together things that were debated in the first 500 years of Christian history with enormous energy and vitality.

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1 ,500 years ago. Yes, sir. That still is our tradition, is it not? Well, I'd say that's the orthodoxy, in my opinion, is not what's right.

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Orthodoxy is what won the debate. And then they repressed everybody who disagreed with them. And the history of Christianity is that the repressed voices keep rising up and challenging again.

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And I think that's going on over and over again. I could take you through, I think, whether you would accept this or not,

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I could take you through the New Testament and show you that the affirmation is always that in Jesus of Nazareth, God has been met and engaged in a unique form.

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But how that took place, I think, is if you line up the books of the New Testament, the order they're written, you'll find that debate rages.

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Paul says in the first four verses of Romans that God declared Jesus to be the son of God by the action of the

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Spirit at the time of the resurrection. Mark says that God poured

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God's Spirit into Jesus at the time of his baptism. Neither of them knew anything about a virgin birth.

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Virgin birth doesn't come into the Christian tradition until the ninth decade. That's a tremendous leap of logic,

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Bishop Scott. Well, it's not. Certainly, let me suggest. This is the very argument I had with John Dominic Cross in last year.

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Well, I'm glad John Dominic and I agree. And I'm quite certain. And the problem is that you have a tradition here that has no basis in your own historical tradition.

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This is totally modernism being read into the text and disassembling the text and saying, well, we can look at this text over here and this text over here and we can put them at odds with one another rather than allowing for the harmonization of these texts.

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See, the harmonization of the text was a trick that Christians developed to try to take care of all the problems that are in the text.

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How about that's what comes when you believe that God has actually spoken in his word? Well, I think that's where you and I would agree.

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It would disagree. The idea that God dictated the scriptures is to me an idea that that I could not ever embrace.

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I don't want to blame God for some of the things. But let me go back to what I was trying to say. If you line up the

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New Testament in the order in which it is written, you find that our understanding keeps growing. Virgin birth comes into the text in the night.

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OK, let me go ahead and stop it there, because it continues with the standard. What I can only describe is standard atheistic argumentations against the canon, against the development of theology, all the things that we've addressed over and over and over again in the past with various and sundry groups all collected together and just thrown in there by an

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Episcopalian bishop. It is truly fascinating to observe this, but I want to get some of the audience questions and maybe we'll come back to this and see if I can throw in here my closing statements.

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There was a time frame here in which he asked that the pulpit be removed so he could give this very personal, you know, fireside chat type thing.

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You know, the only thing that was missing was Mr. Rogers' sweater. The sweater would have helped a lot in that particular situation.

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Let's look at the, listen to the response I give. A woman asked about what my definition of unconditional love is.

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Listen to the response and then listen to Spong's response to it, and then I'm going to see if I can track down another response he made, the same type of thing.

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Definition of unconditional love. Well, there's no particular biblical passage that uses that language, so I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that.

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God's love is unconditional for his people in the sense that it provides everything that they need to have peace with him.

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It is not a love that denies his own nature. It's not a love that gets rid of his own holiness, his own law.

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It's not a love that winks at sin, but it's a law that provides everything in and of himself in Jesus Christ for any person who would repent and believe in him.

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And so it really is one of the reasons that I'm a biblical monergist. I believe that God saves and God saves alone is because in his love, he has provided a perfect means of salvation in Jesus Christ that I cannot add anything to.

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And because I can't add anything to it, I have to do nothing more than just simply fall at the feet of God.

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And my boasting can only be in him. I don't believe there is anything in the Bible about an unconditional love that allows for a violation of God's holy nature.

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And I'm just trying to apply it to the topic of our debate this evening, if that's what the question is about. And that is that there could be an unconditional love that actually causes

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God to deny his own nature, which he has revealed in his word. There wouldn't be anything in scripture that would substantiate that.

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I still hear nothing except judgment in those comments. And I think judgment belongs to God.

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It doesn't belong to you. It doesn't belong to me. Now, immediately, that was a repeated theme.

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And it belongs to God. But we are going to absolutely stuff a sock in God's mouth so he can never say anything judgmental.

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If there's anything that God says that is judgmental, we're just not going to believe it.

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So it is to say judgment belongs to God. But then to say and God can't speak means

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God can't judge. And that means there can be no judgment. There can be no right or wrong. And so we are left to create our own very subjective ethical system, which, of course, is exactly what

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John Shelby Spong has done. He has developed his own ethical system, which he cannot proclaim as having any intrinsic value outside of his own cranium.

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That's the only place where it can have any type of authority. It cannot be relevant to anyone else. And so there you have this.

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And every time I would speak of redemption, I would speak of forgiveness, I would speak of atonement. Well, you know, all we hear here is guilt.

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All we hear here is judgment. Let me see if this is I'm looking at a waveform here. So you can imagine trying to figure out.

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Let me see if this is the next section. Dr. White, Paul discusses those who sin sexually, sinning against their own body, given that text and perhaps any other specifically as it relates to homosexuality.

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Would you lump homosexuality along with, say, fornication and adultery into this like a special category of greater sins?

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Well, greater sins, not in the sense of receiving from from God anything other than the wrath that all sin is due and the separation from God that comes from that.

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And that's why you have to have the sacrifice. And that's why the New Testament writers speak of sacrifice and define the cross within that way.

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But they are possibly more personal. And the wrath is more immediate because it's a sin against our own body.

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There are certain sins you can commit that you can basically get away with it in this life. But sins against your own body tend to sort of catch up with you in this life and as a result can be a little bit easier to see, shall we say, or illustrate.

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But as far as there being a special category of sins or somehow worse, I think there are levels of judgment.

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The Apostle Paul spoke of Chorazin and Bethsaida would be more tolerable in the day of judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah than Chorazin and Bethsaida.

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But that was based upon the level of revelation that they had received. These people are rejecting the very incarnate son of God, whereas Sodom and Gomorrah did not have that kind of revelation given to them.

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And so I think if we keep those categories straight, we'll be able to understand how he's referring to there. I still hear words like judgment, a punishing parent deity, demanding a sacrifice.

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I wonder what kind of God it is that demands a sacrifice, a human offering rather than a

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God who can say, I love you like you are and I accept you for what you are. There is

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Spong's religion in a nutshell, and call it what you will.

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It is a different religion than Christianity. There is simply no logical way to look at the history of Christianity, to look at the proclamation of the apostles and say that's what they believed.

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It is revolutionary, not in the good sense. It is revolutionary in the sense of trying to overthrow the reality of the

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Christian faith that Bishop Spong is presenting here. It's very, very clear that the idea of revelation, the idea of law, the idea of sin, the idea of wrath, the idea of punishment, the idea of sacrifice, all these things that are fundamental, he has rejected them and he's just refused to reach up and take off that collar, which is what, in any meaningful sense, in any historical sense, claiming to be a bishop of the

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Christian religion is what he should have done a long, long time ago, but he refuses to do so. And this came out over and over and over and over again.

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It was just repeated over and over again. And so that became the essence, as I see it, of the debate.

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Now let me see if I can find for you here, just very quickly, I believe we had 10 minute closing statements.

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Let me see if this is mine or if this is Bishop Spong's. Of the Christian church. Okay, that's mine.

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So what I'd like to do is, what did I feel was important to emphasize? Given the fact we knew that we had homosexuals in the audience, we knew that there was at least one homosexual couple, very clearly a male couple, on the second row in the audience, even though, honestly,

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I expected a much larger turnout of homosexuals, I honestly think that even we probably have been taken in a little bit by their own press, their own media.

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They love to promote the 10 % number, the 10 % of the population is gay. That is simply a lie.

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It's balderdash. It's ridiculous. Maybe 2 .5%.

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I think that's a pretty safe number. There's lots and lots of meaningful studies. Kinsey was not a meaningful study.

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They based the 10 % on the Kinsey thing, but the first 1 ,500 people the Kinsey study were sex abusers in prison, for crying out loud.

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To use them as representative of the entire sample is absurd. Maybe 2 .5

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% is homosexual and not all of them are quote -unquote out. So you're talking about a small percentage.

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They want larger numbers so they can exercise more political clout.

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And since they don't have to worry about children and raising children and so on and so forth, they've got a lot more discretionary funding to be able to spend in political campaigns and things like that.

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And that's why they succeed the way they do. But still, we knew that there are homosexuals there.

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And so I wanted to seek to address them. And so let me play my closing statements. This was before the audience questions, but the closing statements of the debate for you.

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The doors of the Christian church are, in fact, the doors of the Christian church.

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Let me explain why I repeated myself, first of all. Though that was recorded, it was not in the house.

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You couldn't hear it. The microphone wasn't on the house when I started speaking. So I said the doors of the Christian church. No one heard that, except it did make it into the tape for some odd reason.

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He had just said that a Christian church excludes anyone on the basis of their sexuality is not worthy of being called the

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Christian church. This is a part of his closing statement. And so that's what I was picking up on in this statement.

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The doors of the Christian church are, in fact, the doors of the

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Christian church are, in fact, open to all who will repent and believe in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. That is the most ancient message of the church. The church does not exist when repentance is removed and God's law is rejected.

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Repent and believe is the most primitive Christian message there is. But to repent, one must know what one is repenting from.

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And therefore, the fundamental disagreement of our debate this evening is I would assert that if God has not spoken, if God has not revealed his truth, repentance is an empty word.

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It is a word that Christians have not been able to use properly for all the years of the church.

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Bishop Spong says, I'm content to leave it to God who is right and wrong. But how is God going to judge? Is there a right and wrong if God has not, in fact, spoken?

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Bishop Spong said that some can become arrogant when they believe that they have the word of God. But I submit to you that it is not arrogant to humbly accept

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God's revelation. In fact, if God has, in fact, spoken, then to dismiss what he has said is the very height of hubris.

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And we as creatures cannot engage in that. Our subject this evening is extremely important, and it is extremely not only important, but weighty for everyone here.

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I would like to point out a little bit more about a study I mentioned earlier to illustrate this.

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Obituaries numbering 6 ,516 from 16 U .S. homosexual journals over 12 years were compared to a large sample of obituaries from regular newspapers.

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The obituaries from the regular newspapers were similar to U .S. averages for longevity. The median age of death of married men was 75.

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Eighty percent of them died old, 65 or older. For unmarried or divorced men, the median age of death was 57, and 32 percent of them died old.

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Us men don't help the women out as much. Married women averaged age 79 at death, 85 percent died old, and unmarried and divorced women averaged age 71, and 60 percent of them died old.

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So in other words, guys, it's better to be married, and ladies, well, you're stuck with us. However, the median age of death for homosexuals was virtually the same nationwide, and overall less than two percent survived old age.

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If AIDS was the cause of death, the median age, 39. For the 829 gays who died of something other than AIDS, the median age of death was 42, and nine percent died old.

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The 163 lesbians had a median age of death of 44, and 20 percent died old.

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Two and eight -tenths percent of gays died violently. There were 116 times, they were 116 times more apt to be murdered, 24 times more apt to commit suicide, and had a traffic accident death rate 18 times the rate of comparably aged white males.

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20 percent of lesbians died of murder, suicide, or accident, a rate 487 times higher than that of white females age 25 to 44.

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Life itself is the issue this evening. This is not just an academic debate, though we have tried to engage the academic issues.

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We've done so, unfortunately, in such a way that we have had to come to recognize a fundamental contradiction of worldview between the two sides.

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The reason I tried to ask questions about who in Christian history has ever believed in non -theistic gods who are the ground of life, but whether they can reveal divine truth is because I don't believe that there really is any way to argue against the fact that that's what

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Christians had always believed up until last century. And if we cannot define what

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Christianity is, remember what the thesis of the debate tonight is. Homosexuality is compatible with authentic biblical

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Christianity. Well, only one side believes that you can define authentic biblical

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Christianity in the first place. Otherwise, it changes from generation to generation, place to place, language to language, and time to time.

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And there's really no way to end up debating that particular thesis. I am sorry to hear, and I had heard other stories.

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I took the time prior to this debate to listen to many hours of Bishop Spong's lectures, obtain his books.

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It was never my intention, and I don't believe that I did misrepresent Bishop Spong.

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But I am sorry that Bishop Spong has experienced hatred. So have I. But for some reason, in his writings, he seems to project that onto anyone who believes in the quote, and I keep using quote because that's what he does in his books, puts in quotes, word of God and project onto them hatred, prejudice, bias.

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And it is my assertion to you that you can believe that the Bible is the word of God. You can accept it as the word of God, and you can live consistently within its parameters without mistreating anyone.

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I do not believe it is mistreatment in any way, shape or form to disagree. And in fact, I do not believe it is mistreatment to say to Bishop Spong that I do not believe that the definition of the

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Trinity as life is good, life is love, be all you can be a ground of being

53:44

Paul Tillich and so on and so forth. No, I believe that there would be many Anglican bishops of the past who would agree with me.

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That's not Christianity. That does not fall within the parameters. Call it what you will, but we have to have the right to define our own faith.

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And if we can't even define it at the level of who God is, rational discourse has come to an end.

54:05

We cannot discuss anything at all at that point. This debate is not about personal experience.

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It's not about whether homosexuality is something that can be accepted within a naturalistic worldview.

54:20

It is about whether homosexuality is compatible with authentic biblical Christianity. And if one side cannot even affirm that we can define that meaningfully, then

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I think the debate is clear. Bishop Spong spoke about being accepted and loved.

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What does that mean? All of us want to be accepted and loved by God. What does that mean?

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Do we have the right to demand of God what his standards will be?

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The Christian faith tells us that God has revealed his standards and that he has gone so far as to provide in the person of his son a sacrifice for sin.

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That is the heart of Christianity is the cross. And the cross is not merely the idea that we crucified the one who showed us

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God's love. That's not even what Jesus said in any way, shape or form. And you'll notice when we tried to get to what Jesus' words were, well, you know, we've got canon issues and you've got

55:25

Athanasius 39th Festal letter, and we don't even know what the New Testament was. There is an agnosticism about the words of Jesus.

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But I submit to you that just as Jesus knew what the Old Testament was, the canon of the

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Old Testament, having developed over the same period of time as the canon of the New Testament, that since God has spoken,

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God knows how to reveal to his people what is and what is not his word. God has that capacity and he did so.

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And when we look at what Jesus himself said, he defined his own mission as coming to seek and to save that which was lost.

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And he did so by laying down his life for his sheep. Now, why would he have to do that?

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If there is no law that has been broken, if there is no law that has been broken, my friends, there's no reason for a sacrifice.

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Christianity does not exist without a divine savior who gives his life as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin and who rises again the third day and calls us to follow him, to follow him in his life, to follow him in his obedience to the father.

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He gives us an example of how we are to live. And he honored God's law. He honored that law that this evening has been relegated to the mere speculations of ancient men who were ignorant about modern scientific discoveries that homosexuality just is.

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I believe that we're creating the image of God, so nothing we do just is. We may be born with a propensity, for example.

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To overeat, a propensity to be overly zealous in pursuing the other sex, but God's will calls us to be obedient to his law in those areas and to exercise discipline and to seek his spirit's assistance in those ways.

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Bishop Spong spoke of homosexuals being judged by the church. Well, if the church has any moral standard in regards to what

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God's law is, then the church judges fornicators and adulterers and liars and people who are hateful and murderers and thieves.

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If the church is going to proclaim God's will as to how we are to live, then there has to be judgment.

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But is that very judgment that brings an understanding of who Christ is and why he died?

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A church without the ability to judge is a church with no message. It becomes a religious social club.

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Judgment is not wrong when that judgment is then used by the Holy Spirit of God to bring conviction of sin. I take you back to the words of the

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Apostle Paul. Who was not a repressed homosexual. His words are far more easily seen and have been down through history as being a consistent application of what he believed the law of God was in all aspects of human life.

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After talking about homosexuals and fornicators. And thieves and adulterers, he said to the

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Corinthians and such were some of you. That's a message of hope to everyone here to stay.

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And I think that's a message of hope to everyone in this room. Because when you start going through those lists and I start looking through the faces in this crowd, we don't have to just talk about homosexuality.

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We can talk about lust. We can talk about impatience. We can talk about disobedience.

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And every single person sitting in this room needs to hear a word of hope. The difference is,

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I think for the majority in this room, you haven't started a movement that says, God must accept me the way

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I am, rather than saying, I want God to change me to be the best that I can be to conform me to the image of Christ.

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I will not demand that he accept my standards. I, as his creature, want to know what his are.

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And can we know what his are? I submit to you that the united voice of the

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Christian people down to the ages, the united voice of every single one of the writers of Holy Scripture is that, yes,

59:54

God has spoken. That's what Jesus said. When the Sadducees came and tested him about the woman who had married seven brothers,

01:00:02

Jesus' response to them was, have you not read what God spoke to you saying?

01:00:10

Have you not read what God spoke to you? He did not say, have you not read what

01:00:16

God wrote to you? He did not say, have you not heard what God spoke to you? He said, have you not read what

01:00:21

God spoke to you? He considered the word of God to speak to those individuals to whom he was speaking at that time.

01:00:31

That means God's word speaks to every generation and he holds us accountable there, too. Yes, his view of Scripture in all of the

01:00:40

Gospels. And there are no other Gospels we can look at that would even begin to be relevant to this particular point in time.

01:00:46

All of Jesus' views about Scripture are very clear. It's God speaking. What about you today?

01:00:54

Do you need to hear a word of hope? That word of hope remains just as true today as it was when

01:01:02

Paul wrote to that church and he said, such were some of you, but you were washed, you were cleansed, you were justified, you were sanctified, not by anything you did, not by any actions you did.

01:01:16

But through repentance and faith in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Thank you,

01:01:24

Dr. White. Thank you,