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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.
It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.
Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday.
On the last Friday of 2023, Friday, December 29th, 2023, and we have for your edification and delight today, day number two of a two-day interview we began yesterday with Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and if you didn't know already, he is a New Testament Greek scholar and author of numerous books, accomplished debater, highly sought-after conference speaker, professor of apologetics and church history at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, and he's also one of the pastors, one of four pastors at Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona, and the director and resident apologist of Alpha and Omega Ministries.
We are discussing part two of Vital Issues Facing the Church and the World today and giving an overview of Dr. White's upcoming debates and speaking engagements in 2024, and it's my honor and privilege to have you back for day number two in spite of the fact that you are battling an illness, Sedell.
We thank you for still making the effort to be on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio again today, brother.
Well, it's good to be with you, and I started off more quietly yesterday, and I should have stuck with it, but I literally, I just forget, it's just that you get going into the conversation and the volume goes up, and it's, you know, I grew up doing radio, and you have to project even when you've got a microphone right in front of your mouth, as you well know, being the legendary radio man that you are.
I mean, I just remember when we would walk into WMCA, the way that people would fall all over themselves to reach you, the pictures they had of you on the walls and stuff like.
That.
It was really an experience to get to be with someone like that, walking along the streets of New York and people calling out from across the street, Arnzen, Arnzen. So as you can tell, I'm a little delirious, and I'm sure that those days that I walked.
Into the studio of WMCA with you or any reformed person were the most frightening days of management at WMCA and their experiences there, knowing that they would certainly get complaints from those outside of our theological orbit.
And that would be the majority, the vast majority of listeners to Christian radio in any given inner city.
But I knew all the inside jokes you told theologically about WMCA, even while you were still there. And appropriately so, I'm sure, given some of the programs that were on there. But hey, at least we had Andy Anderson that would allow me on once in a while and had some interesting programs with him over the years.
And yeah, those are the days. Those are the days. That's when I learned that I remember walking to the train station at the Long Island Railroad. And I remember the first time I came to learn that when people are catching that to go into work, they all just walk up on the platform and they have their pre-assigned spot.
And they just stand there. And so never take their spot, even though there's no markings, but you never take their spot. And the worst thing you can possibly do is to actually talk to someone, say something to someone, because that's when they realize you're not from around here.
That's when you get shoved in front of the train as it arrives. So yeah, that was. And then you have to be really careful about the people that you're trusting to to get you around on Long Island, because sometimes they'll just leave you on the train alone.
And then you have no idea where you're supposed to get off or anything like that. And and we all know those trains end up as a part of the film Escape from New York. So yeah.
And James is actually referring to an actual incident where he got into a train because I had disappeared to get coffee and he didn't realize that. And I got on the train. I'm sorry. I got on the train and you did not because you were waiting for me.
Right.
And I actually for the first and last time in my life actually approached a total stranger and demanded that he give me his cell phone, which he immediately did. And I called you and I don't know why I couldn't use my own.
I guess the signal wasn't working or something. And I can remember saying, are you on the train right now? And you said, no, sir. No, sir.
No, sir.
And then I had to get off.
I had to get off at the Deer Park train station and wait for the train from Ron Concomitant, the next train to meet up with.
Yes. Yes. Ron Concomitant. The very word Ron Concomitant still gives me night sweats and things like that. So, yeah.
And if Michael Finney is listening, that was what happened, if you didn't know, before we arrived in upstate New York for Dr. White's speaking engagement. Well, I guess upstate New York is kind of an exaggeration, but Mayapak Falls, which is north of Westchester, I think.
And I remember you speaking at Red Mills Baptist Church at that time.
Yeah, I don't actually remember much of what happened after that. It's sort of got wiped out by the stress and things like that. So, yes, yes, there are also, we could probably do an entire program just of the various really interesting experiences.
The church, was the church in Syosset where I did the debate with Hamza Abdel-Malik?
Yes, it was at the time called the Bible Baptist Church of Syosset. Now it is called the Cleft of the Rock, I think. And it's one of those multi-campus churches. No longer has a Reformed Baptist pastor as they did at that time that you had the debate.
There.
Right, right. Yeah, I had heard about that, but I just—.
Shelter Rock, I'm sorry. Shelter Rock Church. That's what it's called.
Okay.
All right.
But I just remember sitting there in that church. If I recall correctly, it was fairly warm. They didn't have central air, and it had gotten pretty toasty in there, and there were lots of Muslims there.
And that's where we had first run into Hamza as he would attend the Catholic debates and would always get up during the Q &A and ask some off-the-wall question, which you'd expect from a Muslim, obviously, in that context.
That Mohammed was the paraclete?
Yes, yes, yeah, right. But the thing during that debate was when he—the famous line, Paul was just fooling with them Philippians.
Yes, yes.
That was the first time I had ever encountered the Paul was just fooling with them Philippians defense. And then, of course, the guy that got up to ask the audience question. And I've used that in my presentations over the years.
I clipped that from the video where this guy, he just goes on and on. And I don't remember the pastor's name, but he was doing the moderation, and he was trying to get this guy to get to his point because he was talking about growing up in Trinidad or something like that, and he's just going on and on and on and on.
And so finally, he gets—he's gesturing at one point, and he hits the microphone and knocks it off the stand and sends it flying down the aisle like the microphone needed to get saved. It was coming forward at the invitation, and eventually, they put it back up because the Muslims were doing the video recording.
And so they're taping it, and he's trying to talk, and I'm just sitting here going, oh my goodness. And eventually, he got to his question, which was, was Jesus a white man or a black man? And nothing he had said before that had almost anything to do with it at all.
It was—yeah, it was—because the debate had been so one-sided, the Christians didn't get up to ask questions. So what people don't realize is that then gives the other side the end of the debate. The other side's getting to ask all the questions, and you're always on the defensive.
But it did lead to some very, very interesting questions that have been very useful down through the years. And one of the cool clips is—Summer was there. I don't know if you remember that, but Summer was sitting on the front row during the debate.
And I've always been very thankful that—I think she was nine at the time, eight or nine. And here she is looking back at that row of Muslims asking her dad these questions. And, you know, that's the kind of thing you want your kids to remember is, that's what my dad does.
That's what he did then. And I think that was probably in the back of her mind when she went to college the first year and had this nasty, nasty, nasty professor at Glendale Community College. I mean, a Bart Ehrman clone, but without Bart's class, just a nasty guy.
And he had been talking about how the Gospels were contradictory and how they had been written and all this stuff. And finally, she had enough, and she put her hand up and challenged him. And he lost his cool.
And the final thing he said to her was, well, just Google it. I mean, that's the level of his scholarship. But that was, I'm, you know, she knew, she knew the language that Gospels had been written in and stuff like that, because she was attending my debates when she was eight, nine years old.
And so I'm really glad I have that, that clip. You're in it too, Kelly, Summer, and you are all in like the front row in this one camera shot where it's, it's shooting me. You can see all the front, and then it swings back to catch the questioner.
So I don't know if you've ever seen it, but I'll have to show it to you sometime.
Yeah, definitely. The pastor, by the way, was Richard Leverence. And he was a Calvinist, even when he was a member and a supported missionary of Charles Stanley's church. And he told me that he preached on, I don't know if he did a very rapid overview of all five points of Calvinism, but he taught something very Calvinistic when Charles Stanley was away.
This was obviously years ago, in the 90s. And Charles Stanley heard, according to Pastor Leverence, when he came back, that they had more orders for Pastor Leverence's tape on Calvinism than any other recording of the sermon that they ever had in the history of the church.
And therefore, Pastor Leverence was banned from ever preaching again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I, your, your, your ability to remember names is truly astonishing. I mean, as soon as you said that, I did remember it, but I would never be able to bring that kind of name up from my memory that, that way.
And Anthony Uvino just said the exact same thing. I'm sorry.
I do not consider that my first Muslim debate, because I was simply defending the Trinity, and I had not yet begun studying Islam in the way that I did prior to the debate with Shabir Ali, which was, because that was 1999.
I'm pretty sure I recall that. And my first real Muslim debate was 2006 with Shabir Ali at Biola in Los Angeles.
So of course, you have to remove the glory from me for being responsible for your first actual debate with a Muslim.
That would be, that would be vain glory. So, yeah, no, we don't, we don't want that. But yeah, that, that was a, that was an incredible experience and very different from the Church of Christ debate that you, that you arranged, where at the end of the debate, the guy is literally, I don't know if he was standing, did he stand up on a chair?
I can't, I just remember him like running around, yelling at the top of his lungs.
And he was, he was literally spitting on the audience. I remember that, but I was behind him, so I could, I could see the phlegm flying through the air, and these poor people getting showered upon in the front row.
And, and I'm like, well, okay, this is interesting. That was, that was Ed Moore's church, right?
Yes, and that was Don Parker, who was the Church of Christ debater. He was actually in the instrumental wing of the Church of Christ, and the classic moment of that debate was when he said, and of course I'm paraphrasing, but he said, and can you believe what my opponent is saying?
He's saying that people are made vessels of wrath or vessels of honor before they're even born, and I don't even know how God could find a fault in us if that's the case. And you said, Brother Parker, you sound like you're quoting the hypothetical man that Paul brings up in Romans 9, and he goes, exactly, and everybody in the audience roars because he didn't even realize what he was saying.
Now, I thought that was Jim Barker.
No, no, that was Don Parker. Jim Barker, you also debated in the same building.
But, you know, I, this is, this is interesting. We weren't planning on doing this, of course, but I'm looking at my official list at AOMN .org. We don't have that, the debate you're talking about with Parker.
We don't have it listed.
Ah, that's interesting.
Well, you should edit.
And come to think of it, I don't know that I have a recording of it.
I got to ask Ed Moore if he does. I would be shocked if he didn't, because they did.
We're going to have to track that down. And you realize what this does is it increases my, my debate total by one from one that, because, because what happened was, I don't know, about 10 years ago, I sat down and I just tried to remember all the debates and counted them up.
And then I've just been keeping a count since then. But this is one that escaped me. So, hey, there you go. I'm now one debate closer to 200. Well, maybe we'll make it now. Who knows?
Let me give up.
You're going to have to, if you can, if so, this was in Queens.
Yes. North Shore Baptist Church, Bayside, Queens.
The Jim Barker debate says May 21st, 1997. So do you remember if that was before or after that?
I think the debate with Don Parker was after that. I'm almost certain.
Okay, well, we'll have to, we'll have to get hold of Ed and see if they've got a recording because if they had, because it would be an old cassette tape someplace. And we always put dates on our old cassette tapes.
So, yeah. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I have a Paul. You said Parker?
Yes.
Not Paul Barber.
Oh, that's it. That's it. I was wrong.
Bummer. Oh, bummer. I'm back to where I was. Redestination election, May 16th, 1998.
Yeah, it was the very next year, huh? I don't know how I got Don Parker, but Paul Barber. Okay.
Paul Barber. There you go. All right. Well, all right.
Not as good at names as you thought.
There you go. Anyway, well, we are talking about debates and I guess we're still somewhat on the same, the same proper topic along the way.
So, yeah.
In fact, let's go to our first break right now. And then this way, I don't have to interrupt you mid-sentence. And if anybody has any questions for James White, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.
C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, such as you disagree with your own pastors over some issue we are discussing or perhaps you're even the pastor yourself and you disagree with your fellow elders or your denomination, those kinds of things.
But if it's a general question, give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. We'll be right back. Don't go away.
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We are now back with my friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and we're talking about upcoming debates and speaking engagements that he has lined up in 2024. It's definitely a marathon.
We need to pray for his health, which is not really all that great at this very moment, and he is still taking the time to be our guest today, for which we are honored. And so, Dr. White, tell us about the events that we did not already cover yesterday on our part one of this discussion.
Well, I'm sorry, Chris, I'm currently scrolling.
Through royaldiadem .com, so just hold on a second. I'm checking out what they got here. No, seriously, I'm going to have to keep that tab open so that I can check things out.
And don't forget to mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
That would be an actual tragedy if I forgot to do that. So, yeah, yesterday we seemed to notice how the volume is getting louder automatically, and I need to back that off. Yesterday, we talked about the first two debates, which will be the first ones in February in Houston with Trent Horn, and we talked a little bit about what's going on within Roman Catholicism, you know, Pope Francis, the challenges that are being presented by a very clearly non-traditional evolutionary pope who intends to fundamentally change the trajectory of the Roman Catholic Church, and is succeeding in so doing.
And then mentioned briefly the debate in Tullahoma in the middle, where I'll be debating Jason Bretta on the subject of particular redemption, the, I think, plain biblical teaching that the Son's sacrificial work is in perfect harmony with the Father's decree and the Spirit's application.
It's just, I think, one of the more beautiful aspects of Reformed theology and biblical theology is Trinitarian harmony in the gospel. But what we really didn't get into, we mentioned them in passing, but didn't get into, is the last two debates, which will take place about two weeks after the Jason Bretta debate, because that weekend after that, I'm teaching at the seminary in Conway, and then head from Conway down to Houston.
I'm going to stop by, by the way, through a little bit to the east of Dallas, where Tom Buck has his church there, a sweep by there, and I think he's been on with you as well. So I know the RV park just south of town real well, and that's in Tyler, which is where Keith Green's grave is, and have visited that a couple times with Tom.
And so the first of the two debates, there will be a day between them, thankfully. The first of two debates will be with Leighton Flowers, and I have debated Dr. Flowers before, I believe it was 2015, in the Dallas area.
It was supposed to be on the subject of Romans chapter 9. It ended up being on other topics. I think that's very plain from anybody who can just watch the debate itself. And there have been years of back and forth that have taken place since then.
Actually, Rich Pierce did a whole long thing on the dividing line. Most people don't know that he's hosted programs in the past, but he did a review of that debate while I was overseas. And so there has been a lot of conversation over the years about that particular debate and how it went, and there were certain quotes we still pull from that.
For example, I asked Leighton at one point, would you say you use the same exegetical and hermeneutical methodologies to defend your position on this subject, the free will of man, that you would use in defending the deity of Christ or the resurrection?
And he goes, nope. What? He admitted to that. And for me, that's the debate right there. I mean, that's the whole point. If you use a methodology there, then you've just admitted that the other guy won the debate.
So we're going to be debating John Six. I would suggest to people, if you go to materialogy101 .com, go to the YouTube page and look at the very large number. Now, I can't complain about how many YouTube videos he has posted, because obviously, Alpha and Omega Ministries has been at this a whole lot longer.
And in fact, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but starting, I don't know, about four or five months ago, we have a tab at ailmen .org called transcripts. And a fellow approached me in Tullahoma earlier in the year, showing me this technology, and then they put it all together.
Basically, all the dividing lines back to 1998. So that's 25 years of dividing lines, all my debates, all my sermons, and all my church history classes. So pretty much everything I've recorded over the past quarter century is fully searchable.
And I'm not talking about just searching titles. This is an AI transcription technology. And so you can put Is This Moron My Brother? I suppose we need to explain that, or we could just let it fly,.
You know, whatever. It's James White's biography of me, which was a sequel of Is That Mormon My Brother? And he wrote, according to my stand-up comedy routine, he wrote the sequel to Is The.
Mormon My Brother? Is That Moron My Brother About Me? That's right. And it should pull it up. And what's amazing is if it's a video type thing, I'm not sure why sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does, but at least when we first started using it, it would actually time index it.
So you'd click on this thing, and up would come the video, and it would be time indexed to where I was saying what you were looking for. That's scary when you think about it, because obviously it's really helpful for me to find stuff, but my opponents can use it too.
And you've really got to try to be as consistent as you can be when the past quarter century's worth, which includes, I think, getting close to 2 ,500 dividing line programs in there. Those are all searchable and available to folks now, which is really fascinating.
But anyway, back to Leighton Flowers, if you just scroll through his YouTube channel, you will see that an incredibly large percentage of especially long two, three-hour videos have my picture in the thumbnail.
It's Stuff About Me. And 98 of the videos are all against Calvinism. So I have just very straightforwardly criticized Leighton for being a one-string banjo. That's his topic. He's the head of evangelism for Texas Baptists, which is not a Southern Baptist thing, interestingly enough.
But his thing is being an anti-Calvinist. And so he has a number of videos on John 6 out. So I know exactly where he's going to go, exactly what he's going to say. But I still think it's very important.
I've been collecting, in a sense, strange and odd ways of getting around John 6 for many decades now. I've lost track of how many Radio Free Geneva episodes we've done where I've been talking about the normal way around it is, this was only for then.
So there's a hyper-dispensationalist way of doing it. And then there's the, this is just about the Jews of that day way of doing it. Or these are specific Jews that were judicially hardened by God, and it doesn't have anything to do with us today.
And just all sorts of really amazing things. Because when you think about it, it's not just John 6, but then you have to come up with a consistent way of differentiating John 6 from John 5, John 4, John 3, John 3 .16, and so much more of the testimony of the Gospel of John.
And yet there are people literally willing to fundamentally disregard all of these texts and take them away from us. All the passages about, you know, I go to prepare a place for you, and all this kind of stuff.
If that doesn't have anything to do with us, if it was only about the disciples, then so much of what Christians have relied upon and rejoiced in for many, many years is no longer actually relevant to them, or only secondarily so.
But still, having the opportunity of presenting the text, letting it speak in its own context, and dealing with the common errors that people make in trying to get around it, like jumping over to John 12, 32, and stuff like that, will be hopefully worthwhile doing.
And I hope the cross-examination will be useful. The cross-exam we had before wasn't as useful as I would like it to have been, but there's only so much you can do about that. So that'll be on the Thursday at First Lutheran in Houston.
And then, like I said, I've got a night off. And then I, you know, maybe over time this will be the most useful debate, though right now it's the one selling the least tickets. And I think it's because of its topic, but I'll be debating Dr. Dale Tuggy, who is certainly one of the best-known Unitarian philosophers, because that's what he is.
He's not an exegete. I don't believe he reads the biblical languages. He teaches philosophy, and he is a Unitarian, so he denies the deity of Christ. I reviewed a debate that he did. Well, I hesitate to call it a debate.
Again, I think it was during COVID. It was one of these online things where you don't really have strict time limits and things like that. But he did a back-and-forth with William Lane Craig on the subject of the Trinity, and that got us talking and had my followers and his followers and so on and so forth.
So there are many things we could debate, but I will be defending the assertion that Jesus is identified in the New Testament as Yahweh. So the texts where New Testament writers take specific texts about Yahweh and apply them to Jesus in the New Testament in a way that communicates to us the deity of Christ.
In the long run, that's why I think certainly the Trent Horn issues, but we've already done lots of debates on those subjects. We've already got debates on Purgatory and the rest of that kind of stuff.
This will be a first in this area. I think one of the more interesting debates we've done, and make sure to just cut me off when you need to.
Take a break. You have almost 10 minutes.
Oh, okay. When Michael Brown and I debated Sir Anthony Buzzard and Joseph Goode in, I think that was 2011? Yeah, I think it was 2011 on the Jewish Voice broadcast. That was extremely useful, and it had a lot of the same elements to it.
Dr. Tuggy is not as interesting a speaker, to be perfectly honest with you, as Anthony Buzzard is. He is very, very connected to manuscript, so he's reading his presentation. In fact, he made as a requirement for engaging in the debate that he would have my opening presentation on by February 1st.
That's very unusual. I'm thinking that there may have been a couple of times there on Long Island where a debate opponent requested something similar to that. It's happened a few times over my career that someone wanted to have exchange opening.
Statements. Was that possibly Robert Sabin when you debated him on the Trinity?
That's possible. I don't honestly remember. I just have a vague recollection that there has been some discussion of that in some of my debates in the past to do that kind of thing. I'm not opposed to it on principle.
The problem is that I don't, as you know, there have been times on certain topics because of time constraints and things like that, I will use a manuscript or something along those lines, but most of the time I don't.
If I'm doing PowerPoint slash keynote, I'll just use the slides as the outline. I'm not going to be reading something along with it because the fact of the matter is you can tell when people are doing that.
When I debated Bart Ehrman, he used the exact same PowerPoint presentation he had used a year earlier debating Dan Wallace, and he hadn't even taken the time to fix the typographical errors that he had noted in the debate a year earlier.
They were still there. It's just the way that it is. When someone's reading their presentation, unless they're really good at doing it, the audience is well aware of it, and you're sort of sitting there watching the slides going, well, you know, we could do that on our own, basically.
That's not how I normally speak. I'm much more comfortable speaking contemporaneously. I only have a month, literally, to get that presentation put together and have it sent off to him. I guess after that, it's more freeform, though, again, having listened to debates he's done, it does strike me that even his questions are all written out beforehand and where he wants to go from this to that.
It's all staged. I'm not sure how scintillatingly exciting the debate will be, but my hope is that he does have an audience amongst Unitarians, and again, these would be Unitarians who claim that the Bible is actually a revelation from God.
It's not like the Unitarian Universalists, where they're just, you know, woo-woo-woo all the way, whatever that means.
Now, he would differ from a Oneness Pentecostal, would he not, in that Oneness Pentecostals claim to believe in the deity of Christ in spite of their denial of the Trinity, whereas Tuggy is actually denying the deity of Christ, right?
Right, right, right. He's a full-on Universalist, and so now he has what's called a Trinity's podcast, and so he likes to present the idea that there are many, many Trinities, and the Orthodox understanding is just one of many of these different Trinities, and again, he's primarily a philosopher, so the idea that there is a singular divine revelation from God that needs to be consistently interpreted and things like that, that's where things sort of start falling apart, and that's where I will be pressing things, is from his perspective, there is a deep level of rationalism in the Unitarian approach to things, there's a suspicion of supernatural harmony between texts and things like that, and if it doesn't fit within your philosophical parameters, then you're to dismiss it, and that's eventually where it's going to go as far as that's concerned, but his disciples have been grousing for a debate for a long, long time, and there are other topics that would be well worth pursuing in the future as well, his stuff on John 1 -1 and things like that would be worth going after, because again, he's not an exegete, he's not a biblical scholar, he's a philosopher, and so it's going to be biblical theology versus philosophical rationalism in that last debate is what I would assume, but I've said this so many times when preaching and teaching on this subject over the years, without the highest view of scripture, there is no reason to expect someone to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity.
If you hold to the standard view of scripture that's found in most seminaries and Bible colleges today, and that is that it's a cobbled together, redacted, edited collection of human writings that have been elevated by the authority of tradition in the church, but it's not God-breathed, it's not God-speaking, there's no reason to believe in things like the doctrine of the Trinity, because that requires the harmonious testimony of the entire breadth of scripture from Genesis 1 -1 to Revelation chapter 22, and so if you don't believe that that kind of harmonious revelation exists, then you're not going to believe the doctrines that flow from that, which would include predestination election, reformed theology, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the whole nine yards.
In light of the rise of secularism, naturalism, and the fact that the church is deeply infected with this kind of stuff, there's more and more Unitarianism popping up. Now, it's sort of a stopping place.
In other words, once you start down that road, there really isn't any place to stop, and for most people, you may have a period of quote-unquote supernatural Unitarianism, but that's just a stopping point on the way down the cliff to unbelief, and atheism, and utter rejection of everything, too.
So, it's not like it's some big huge thing, but there are very dedicated Unitarians out there still trying to beat their drum. They never get very far, because Unitarianism always ends up producing a...without a supernatural savior, there is no supernatural religion, and that's where it ends up going.
But yeah, that'll be the second.
Debate, and it will be a quite interesting one. Well, we might as well go to our midway break right now, so I don't have to interrupt you mid-sentence, and please be patient with us, folks, because the midway break is always a bit longer than the other breaks, because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break, because the FCC requires of them to localize this show geographically to Lake City, Florida, where the radio station is located, and they do so with their own public service announcements.
We do not air those public service announcements. We simultaneously air our globally heard commercials. So, please use this time wisely. Write down as much of the contact information as you possibly can for as many of our advertisers as you can, so you can more frequently and successfully respond to our advertisers.
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Sharpens Iron radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland, going back to 2005. One of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio, Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.
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Since its beginning in 2001, Solid Ground has been committed to publish God-centered, Christ-exalting books for all ages. We invite you to go treasure hunting at solid-ground-books .com. That's solid-ground-books .com, and see what priceless literary gems from the past or present you can unearth from Solid Ground.
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Today, Dr. James R. White from solid-ground-books .com. Not only books that they themselves have published by Dr. White, but also the books of other publishers by Dr. White, including the Roman Catholic Controversy, the King James Only Controversy, is the Mormon My Brother.
For some reason they don't have Is That Moron My Brother in stock, but they have probably every single book he's ever written in stock there at solid-ground-books .com. And keep in mind, folks, they are going through a book sales crisis at solid-ground-books .com, and when one of our advertisers hurts, we hurt.
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Go to solid-ground-books .com frequently, purchase generously, always mention that you heard about them from Chris Arnson of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And before I return to Dr. White, I just have a couple more announcements to make.
Please, folks, if you really love this show and you don't want it to go away, go to ironsharpensironradio .com, click support, then click click to donate now. You could donate instantly with a debit or credit card, and if you prefer snail mail, mailing in a physical check to a physical address from your local post office, there will also be a physical address that appears on your screen when you click support at ironsharpensironradio .com, where you can mail your checks made payable to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
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Go to ironsharpensironradio .com, click support, then click click to donate now. Last but not least, if you're not a member of a biblically faithful church, no matter where you live on the planet earth, I may be able to help you find a church that is indeed Christ honoring and doctrinally sound, like Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona.
So wherever you live, send me an email if you are in that predicament, chrisorenson at gmail .com, and put I need a church in the subject line, and that's also the email address where you can send in a question to James White, chrisorenson at gmail .com, give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.
We do have a question from Horsefly, British Columbia, and this is from Margarita, and Margarita in Horsefly, British Columbia says, how do you respond to your Roman Catholic opponents if they ever bring up, as Roman Catholics have brought up to me, John chapter 6, trying to prove their understanding of the mass?
They say that is the very reason why many of Christ's disciples left him to never return, because they were actually acting like evangelicals, and if they had an understanding of transubstantiation like Roman Catholics do, they never would have walked away.
Now that's interesting, because the last thing that Jesus said before they walked away is not about that, it is that no one can come to me unless it is granted him from the Father. That's the last thing Jesus says, and then it says, as a result of this, many of his disciples withdrew and were not walking with him anymore.
So really, it's really the Calvinistic doctrine that Jesus quoted, of course, 2000 years before, well not 2000, but many years before John Calvin existed. But what do you have to say about that?
Yeah, actually, my first book, The Fatal Flaw, had a whole section on that very issue, because that is a very common claim. And of course, the debate on Long Island with Robertson Jennings on the mass went through a lot of that as well, and pretty much every time you debate the mass, that's going to become a central issue.
The problem, of course, is that in John chapter 6, when the conversation in the synagogue Capernaum begins, Jesus defines the eating and the drinking there as coming and believing in him. So it's the concept of transubstantiation, which is based upon Aristotelian categories of accidents and presence that is not going to become popular in anything called the Christian church for another 900 years.
So it's way, way down the road before there'd even be a category to understand something like that. That's not in the context of John chapter 6 at all. What is in the context is Jesus' identification of himself as the bread of life, his connection to the manna in the wilderness, the fact that he is the one that they're to look to for spiritual life.
And they find this to be offensive. They are grumbling about this. And that's why Jesus says, don't grumble about this. No one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him. And then he repeats that at the end of the chapter after talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
He repeats, as you pointed out, and in fact, using the imperfect tense. So it was a repeated action in the past that no one can come to him unless it has been granted them by the father. And that is actually what causes them to be offended and to and to walk away.
And so in the fatal flaw. And then I did the same thing. I'm sure you paid the material in the Roman Catholic controversy. I walk through John 6 and say, actually, the literal reading of John chapter 6 has to start with Jesus' definition of eating and drinking as being coming and believing, not eating and drinking transubstantiated elements in a concept that wouldn't arise for nearly a thousand years later.
Well, thank you very much for the excellent question. And we now have Amber in Ruby City, Nevada. And Amber asks, does Mr. Tuggy, the anti-Trinitarian, believe that Jehovah's Witnesses are his brothers?
I would imagine, you know, I don't want to speak for him as to what he believes as to if there is such a thing as Christian brotherhood because he's a universalist. I don't believe that. I'm sorry,.
Because he believes everyone's going to heaven. Right. Then you say, oh, I thought you said he.
Was a universalist. I'm sorry. No, no, no, not to my not to my knowledge. I could be, but he's Unitarian, not a universalist. So I don't I hesitate to speak for him as to what he would consider necessary orthodoxy or if he would even believe that there is necessary orthodoxy.
I honestly don't know. But I think he would at least say that they're on the right track anyways and that they have less unbiblical traditions to be dealing with than Trinitarians do. But as to the unique defining doctrines, well, the Witnesses themselves are changing.
They've just gotten smart enough to realize they need to do it much more slowly than has happened in the past. So when they had the failed 1975 prophecy, you know, they lost over a million people over the next 10 years after that failed prophecy.
And Covid has been really rough on them. Their growth rates are really bad. I mean, when when the Jehovah's Witnesses are reduced to writing letters instead of going door to door, which they were for about two years.
Yeah, it's going to be very, very rough on them. And it has been. But they their eschatological focus for decades was on the year 1914. And before that, it was 1874, which is 40 years earlier. And, you know, the whole idea of the coming of Armageddon, and Armageddon is right around the corner, and the generation that saw the events of 1914 is not going to pass away until Armageddon takes place.
Well, 1914 was a very long time ago now. And in fact, we're going to be looking at 110 years. And no matter how you stretch the idea of a generation, it's not going to be 110 years. And so they began back in the 90s, recognizing this.
And so they are phasing out elements of their theology, not by denying them, but by deemphasizing them and coming up with things to replace them that they slowly, they slowly present and just sort of naturally allow it to take the place of the doctrines they're trying to get away from.
So it's it's very purposeful. And it's very clearly purposeful on the leadership's part. And their their hope is that the older witnesses will just sort of go with the flow and bring new people in that just aren't even aware of the changes that they're making in regards to the nature of of what's called the anointed class, the great crowd, the chronology, the 1914 stuff.
But it's been it's been hard for the Jehovah's Witnesses because up until up until the 2000s, they could pretty much control what information their people would see. But then the Internet came along and that messed everything up.
And it's made making doctrinal changes all that much harder for them because their people, they can't guarantee exactly what their people are going to be seeing, which they could for a very, very long time.
And so, you know, the blood transfusion issues and stuff like that, I don't know what Tuggy would think about any of that stuff, to be honest with you. But witnesses, again, still represent a an unreached people group that that is right on our doorstep.
And you would think that there would just be all sorts of Christians excitedly waiting behind their doors. But it just it isn't the case. And they need Christians to reach out to them in that way because they are facing it's a it's always been a rather depressing religion, to be perfectly honest with you.
Right. But I think it's even more so now because it's at least before they had the excitement of growth. Now they they have the doldrums of of diminishment. And so it's yeah, they're a tough group to deal with.
No two ways about it.
Yes. Speaking of dull, I saw a movie called Apostate. I don't know if you ever saw that.
About. Go ahead. No, I'm trying to trying to think of a house.
It is it's a fairly recently made movie, not made by Christians or anything, but it has to do with a Jehovah's Witness woman who leaves the cult. And my friend Jason Contino, pastor of Harborview Christian Church in Port Jefferson, Long Island, he was a former Jehovah's Witness.
And he said that the movie was nearly perfect in its representation of what goes on in the Kingdom Hall and so forth. And if you're talking about boring.
Oh, yeah. Those services were painfully. Oh, my gosh. I've I've attended. I've attended district conventions. I've attended studies in Kingdom Halls. And it is so scripted. It is so dull. There is there is absolutely no joy.
The singing is it's their death dirges. They really, really are. When you do your studies of the Watchtower articles, all the questions are already written out. And I mean, so I mean, around the world in all the languages and the Watchtower is global.
So, you know, they they produce materials and I don't know how many different languages, all those every question that every witness studies on whatever day of the week they meet, because they they have five different meetings per congregation and they meet at different days during the week.
So your congregation may be meeting a different time. Some other congregation is. But everybody hears the same question and is expected to give the exact same answer. And the answers are are just right there in the sentence you just read.
And so there's no meaningful conversation. And so you've got these guys walking up and down the the aisles with a microphone on a boom that they reach out to you for you to answer the question. But everybody knows what the answer is in the first place.
So it's it's just. Yeah, if you ever if you ever feel like, man, I wish I could find something more exciting than I have in my church, that that's a good reminder that if you're getting fed the word of God, be thankful for what you've got, because there are millions of people that endure that kind of thing on a regular basis.
It's yeah, it's rough. And by the way, the movie is actually called Apostasy. I.
Just looked it up 2017. And and for some reason, one of the websites lists it as a drama horror movie. It's not a horror movie. It's a drama. And I've learned some things about Jehovah's Witnesses watching that that I never knew.
I didn't know that you have the freedom to go to a local pub and drink alcohol, dance to secular music and stuff. All of that was news to me. I didn't have.
Any idea that they permitted. Yeah, well, but but there are also, for example, historically, there were time periods when, for example, men weren't allowed to have facial hair. So so they they they do if it impacts the congregation and congregational meeting.
But yeah, there is sort of a schizophrenia. There is a most witnesses that I knew, you know, were almost addicted to television movies. You know, back in the blockbuster days, they were renting everything they could get hold of because they lived such a sheltered life otherwise.
So, yeah, there is sort of a your life in the Kingdom Hall, your life outside the Kingdom Hall type of a situation. That's true.
And we also have Derek in Clay City, Indiana. And Derek wants to know, I don't remember what you said about the specific topics that you are addressing in debate at First.
Lutheran Church in Houston, but can you repeat them? Yeah, sure. The first weekend, once the trip starts, the first weekend, which would be the 16th and 17th of February, will include the debates with Trent Horn of Catholic Answers on is Sola Scriptura true and is Purgatory true?
And so those would be the debates at that point in time. The next, I think it's the 23rd in Tullahoma, is the debate with Jason Bretta on particular redemption. And then we'll be back in Houston for the 7th of March at First Lutheran with Layton Flowers on John Chapter 6.
And then on the 9th of March, Dale Tuggy is Jesus Yahweh. And then I head home after that.
Now, that's quite fascinating that Pastor Evan of the First Lutheran Church in Houston is having you debate. His name just flew out of my head, the Layton Flowers, because even though your average Lutheran pastor might smack you if you called him Arminian, there is still a lot in common over Calvinism, because long gone are the days of the bondage of the will by Luther that seems to have been forgotten by most Lutherans today.
And so it's kind of an interesting situation there. Well, I don't want to get him into trouble, but he's much more bondage of the will Luther than most modern Lutherans would be. He's much whiter red and is obviously very friendly toward us Reform types.
And if you'll recall, maybe you didn't see it or maybe you didn't recognize it. The first time I saw First Lutheran in a debate was the two-on-two debate. I forget what year it was. It wasn't all that long ago, probably seven, eight years ago now, where Layton Flowers and one of the guys from Trinity Seminary that he teaches for took on the Zaccariades and this other guy whose name keeps escaping me, these two radically hyper-Calvinist.
Oh yeah, I saw that. I did see that. Okay, that was First Lutheran, and Evan was moderating it. You probably didn't know him then, so I didn't make the connection. And of course, you'll recall, that was a food fight.
In fact, I don't think the two hyper-Calvinists even agreed with each other, did they?
There were differences, yeah. They tried to work together afterwards, but that didn't last very long either. But it got pretty nasty and pretty much on only one side. I mean, Flowers and the other guy, they fought back, but most of the yelling and screaming, and you're not Christians anyways, was coming from the weirdos.
And we can be thankful that Evan didn't get such a bad taste in his mouth about debates that that was the last one he did, because I've lost track now how many debates I've done there, and this will certainly expand the number a good bit.
And so yeah, that's where he started. I hope he would say that the debates have gotten better since then, because I've been doing a lot of them. But yeah, we've had dinners with local seminary students, and one of the last times I was there, we had dinner with Bob Gagnon while I was there.
And so he has a pretty wide theological exposure there, and is friends with a lot of different people from different perspectives. So yeah, he's a solid guy.
Yes, he very much appears to be, after conducting a couple of interviews with him—several. Now, we have been really lamenting the infighting amongst Reformed Baptists. Obviously, we both believe that wishy-washy, mamby-pamby attitudes are, you know, anathema to us, so that's a dangerous way to think, and so on.
But the reverse of that, where every hill is a hill to die on, and when you are denouncing your brethren who are so close in theology, and even share the same confession, in spite of different ways of interpreting certain elements of the confession, how dangerous is this, in your opinion?
Because number one, we know that God is in control, but at the same time, we can't have a flippant attitude like, God's going to work it out, you know. How dangerous?
Well, you know, we have talked about this over the past couple of years. A couple of times, I remember I was in Conway when I was on with you once, and we discussed some of the elements of this situation.
But I've made the statement, and I'll make it again. If the attitude that is being expressed by certain vocal individuals in the leadership of the Reformed Baptist movement continues this direction, and continues to encourage this hardening of attitudes, to the attitude primarily being, we get to define what confessionalism is.
We get to define the confession based upon our scholarship and our understanding, and everybody needs to use the same language, speak the same way, cross the T's and dot the I's in the exact same fashion.
We will see the Reformed Baptist movement no longer be a movement, but much more of a past historical reality. We'll look back at basically 1980 through 2020, as the 40 years of Renaissance that then blew up, basically, and died a slow and horrible death.
People who are familiar with the movement know what happened 14 years ago now, resulting in a split. There had been the development of a denominational structure. Not all Reformed Baptists were a part of it.
For example, the church I used to be in supported every institutional aspect of the denomination without being a part of the fellowship. There was somewhat of a pulling together there for a while, but as you know, that came apart.
There are lots of reasons for that, some internal, some external. I have been in a lot of Reformed Baptist churches over the past number of decades. You're aware of the fact that, for example, there used to be a split between Grand Rapids and Montville.
Yes, over authoritarianism, basically.
I'm sorry? I think the division was over authoritarianism.
Obviously, each side would define it differently, but I managed to tiptoe through the landmines and speak at Reformed Baptist churches without really even having to ask, okay, which side are you all on?
Part of that was because PRBC didn't take sides in all that stuff and basically said, look, we do what we do and we're not going to try to pigeonhole ourselves. I started trying to do the same thing as well.
You could get away with that. I'm not sure that that works anymore. I say this as an individual who well knows that there are dozens of Reformed Baptist churches that I have preached in the past that would not have me in the pulpit ever again.
It's not because I somehow have radically changed, though they would say, well, yeah, you wear a cross now or you've become a post-millennialist. You and I know that I can think of one Reformed Baptist church there on Long Island that I spoke at a billion times, and the pastor was a post-millennialist, and I wasn't.
We got along just fine, so you can do that, but the hyper-confessionalists, the TRBs, the truly Reformed Baptists, they're just not willing to allow that kind of freedom. Part of me wants to say that I really think that a lot of this would go away if there was all of a sudden a massive outbreak of persecution against the Christian church, and all these little things would fall off to the side.
They probably would, though I can think of some people that would probably go to the mat one way or the other. I really think that the London Baptist Confession is a treasure. I think that it has to be interpreted in the context in which it was written.
I think we have to do this with all of church history. We cannot get into this as Baptists especially. We have to recognize that our view of the church, our view of sacramentology, the ordinances, baptism itself, requires us to be some form of a Biblicist, and that has become a bad word.
That's astonishing to me. As soon as I heard that that had become a pejorative term by Reformed Baptists, to call somebody a Biblicist being an insult is mind-boggling.
It is to me as well. Now, obviously, they give a definition, and the definition is people who say that you should never use any other language than what is found in the Bible to describe Christian theology.
Now, I've met a few people like that, but not many at all. Seriously, what it really is, honestly, is someone like myself. I had a guy today declaring me a heretic and saying that I deny the Council of Nicaea and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
All of it goes back to, and you've heard me speaking since the 90s, so you know where I've stood on this, and I have not changed one iota. I have said from the beginning that my acceptance of the Council of Nicaea and its creedal statement.
Now, obviously, I don't accept the canons and the creeds of the Council of Nicaea, and no Baptist does. For example, the sixth canon talks about the authority of the Bishop of Rome over its area, of Antioch over its area.
They already had a monarchical episcopate developing in places like that. We reject all that, so there's no Reformed Baptist that accepts the Council of Nicaea in toto. We all utilize biblical standards to analyze things and to go, no, that's wrong there, and that's wrong there, but we're talking about the creedal statement in regards to Jesus being homoousius, of one substance, the Father, the full deity of Christ.
Now, you know that I have defended that in debate over and over again, and so to see Reformed Baptist saying that I deny Nicaea and stuff, it's just crazy. It's crazy talk, and it's unhinged, and it's sad, but it happens, but what I've said from the beginning is the creed of Nicaea is authoritative only insofar as it accurately represents what is found in our ultimate authority, which is the God-breathed scriptures, and so I've said that over and over and over again.
To say that now in certain quarters is to cast doubt upon your orthodoxy, and this has been a development of a form of scholasticism amongst leaders within the Reformed Baptist movement that's really only a few years old.
It really has its origins around 2011, 2012, and then really taking off in 2015, and I find it highly inconsistent and indefensible. It's one thing to do that on theology proper, but the reality is to be a Baptist is to hold the broader tradition to a biblical standard, because believers' baptism is not the historical standard from about the 5th century onward.
You just can't argue that kind of stuff, and so that's where my issue. I have made comments about the Council of Chalcedon, and I've talked about the Hypostatic Union, and I've said, look, we need to defend the biblical teaching on these subjects based upon biblical revelation and not simply the statements of the Council of Chalcedon, because once we do that, we become horribly internally inconsistent on so many different areas, and I see where it's going to lead, because I'm the one that ends up talking to all the people who end up becoming Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, whoever else it might be, because they eventually went, you know, this Sola Scriptura thing, it just doesn't really work.
If you have to prop it up with these external traditions, then maybe I need to be looking at what these external traditions are and giving them their due weight and so on and so forth, and so I am deeply aware of these things.
It does not seem to me that many of the leaders in the Reformed Baptist movement are deeply aware of these things and hence are skipping down a road towards some real problems along the way if they don't recognize the inconsistency of where they're going.
So, you know, we just keep moving on. I am convinced that the large majority of folks understand what we're saying and why it's important. We may not have the big names, but to be honest with you, when I look at articles that are written and stuff like that, the people that are promoting this, they have a small audience.
We've got the big audience. We've got, I think, the people in the pews, and so I hope and pray that wisdom will win out, and is it fun to have, you know, a guy like today, you know, declaring me a heretic and accusing me of pretty much every possible Trinitarian heresy, some of which are contradictory to each other too, which is weird, but, you know, I'm a tritheist and I'm this and I'm that and all the rest of this kind of stuff, all just this morning while I was doing a funeral.
You know, that's not something that I recommend as an enjoyable experience, but at the same time, I learned a long time ago that the key to surviving in social media or in the broader context is to give to your critics the weight that is due to their opinion that is based upon what that person has accomplished in life.
And we've got to go to our final break.
Right now, bro, but you could pick up where you left off. We'll be right back, folks.
Have you noticed the gap that exists between the Sunday morning sermon and the Sunday school classroom or the small group study? So often we experience great preaching from the pulpit, but when it comes time to study God's Word in those smaller settings, well, let's be honest, it leaves a lot to be desired.
It seems like it is nearly impossible to find good curriculum out there today that is true to the Word of God and is built upon sound doctrine, much less it's hard to find curriculum that will actually teach people how to study the Bible.
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Welcome back. Dr. White, was there a thought that you didn't finish making before we went.
To the commercial break? I thought you were about to ask me, was I even having a thought? All I was saying is, only give to your critics' opinions and criticism of you the weight that their accomplishments require you to give it.
That's what allows me to keep on, even when you've defended the doctrine of the Trinity for decades, and kids that are 30 years younger than you call you a Trinitarian heretic. You press on because you just don't give it that.
Much weight. Well, I think that you should summarize what you most want our listeners to remember, I guess, and especially involving your upcoming trips and debates and speaking.
Engagements. Yeah, I just appreciate prayers of my fellow believers for the five debates coming up in February, March, and obviously, traveling mercies. There's 4 ,400 miles worth of driving to do in that time period, as well as the debates and the teaching and for weather.
Let's not have another snowpocalypse in the middle of that. There's a lot of things that could happen, so I'd appreciate everyone's prayers and that the debates will be useful.
Well, I want to give the websites that are pertinent to these speaking engagements and debates. Of course, always go to the Alpha and Omega Ministries website when you're looking for information about Dr. White—aomin .org, aomin .org.
And of course, one of the places where there will be debates is First Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas. Their website is flhouston .org, flhouston .org, and the church in Tullahoma, Tennessee, which is also having a conference and debate featuring Dr. White, Covenant Reform Baptist Church in Tullahoma, Tennessee.
Their website is covenanttrbctn .com, covenanttrbctn .com. And if you go to that website and you click on leadership, do not be confused that you have entered into the website of an Eastern Orthodox Church, even though the pastor there, Jeffrey Rice, in that photograph of him looks exactly like an Eastern Orthodox priest.
But, Dr. White, I am so thrilled that you, even in spite of your sickness, made time to be with us today. I look forward to your frequent returns to the show, and I hopefully, God willing, will be able to see you at one of these events that you are going to be.
Speaking at and debating at. Well, I hope you can make it too, Chris. It's been great, and God bless.
And I want everybody to have a blessed and safe and healthy and happy and Christ-honoring weekend and Lord's Day, and I hope you all always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.
Happy New Year.