Ratzinger on Purgatory

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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

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

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

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

James White. And good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line, you're talking with the new

American Taliban. We were sent an email notification this afternoon from a

Catholic website, no less, informing us that the folks at Newser, which

I had never seen before, had put up a link to a story about Steven Anderson, and I guess there was a danger in linking, in putting the search items into yesterday's video that I did,

I wanted people who were looking for Steven Anderson to find my response to Steven Anderson. And, hello,

I have no idea what that was, oh, there it is, and you're welcome.

And so, as a result, here I see this, and it's been fixed, thankfully, somebody got through to him, but here's this picture, and there

I am from my video yesterday, and under it, the new American Taliban. They had confused me and Steven Anderson, and so for a while I was the head of the new

American Taliban, but I have been removed from that position, so that's a good thing. I'm very happy to no longer be the head of the

American Taliban. It was a very nice article from the,

I think it was Inside Catholic, Inside Catholicism, something like that, and it didn't say terrible, horrible, anti -Catholic, anti -this, so on, and so forth.

It actually identified me for who I am and what I've actually done. It was very refreshing, it was very nice, and so I appreciate that.

But in light of that, I want to again thank everyone who has pretty much decimated the ministry resource list.

I'm going to be putting something on it hopefully next week. You know what I need, Rich? Rich is busy clearing calls, but Rich can multitask, because he is a highly professionally trained broadcast professional.

Is that what it is? That's what Rush says. But anyway, we are, how many years of training have we had to do this?

Is that before or after the radio stint? The radio stint counts. Oh, okay.

So 19? 11 years. 11 years. Well, from the KPXQ days, we're looking at about 11 years, and then before that was probably a section there of about four or five years.

Yeah, we started doing this in 88. 88. Was it 88? Was that late? 88 or 89.

It may have been 87. Because I remember, well, that wasn't the dividing line though, but I remember going down to KPXQ on my

Yamaha 750, so I was 20. You mean KXEG. Was that KXEG then?

Yeah, that was KXEG. KXEG, that was. That's right. That's right. Talking about Mormonism, I was 20 years old. Did you get radio stationed next to the train tracks?

No, this was even before it moved there. This was when it was downtown. Oh, it was bad. Yeah, we did do some downtown stuff, and then they moved us out next to the train tracks, and that was a real trip, trying to get a program in and hope that the trains don't come by.

I remember that now. I had forgotten. You know, when you start feeling everything shaking.

You and Mike would be in the studio, and I had this old -fashioned push -button phone outside, and I was sitting on the floor, and I would write the question down and slip a note underneath the door, and Mike would pick it up and hand it to you.

It was high -tech, folks. There's no two ways about it. And then we got to KPXQ and started all over, and they had all kinds of bells and whistles and technology and stuff.

Not like what we got now, though. But it was a different engineer every week, and usually they were a weekend engineer, and they didn't really know what they were doing.

Yeah, weekend engineers are scary. Yeah, I know. So eventually, I just kind of said, guys, would you just let me do it?

Yeah, that'd be good. They let us. They gave us a key and everything. Yeah. Remember that? I do remember that. Yeah.

Well, thank you very much. I really wasn't looking for all that much, but hey. I asked for it. I multitasked. Anyways, I was going to tell you, you know what

I need? I am tired of coming home without usable video of my debates.

We're still eight debates down from 2008, and I'm hoping that that situation is going to get fixed, but I still don't have any debates.

And my little Casio camera is great, and it's nice to be able to have that as backup, throw something up on YouTube, but that's not

DVD -able. There are little cameras that have extremely long battery life and lots of memory in them, or to get really long battery life, you'd have to have like a 16 gig or a 32 gig

SD card or something like that. But you can put on a tripod, and you can get at least

SD, if not HD, video, and I just need to be able to have all those things, set it up, and forget it until the debate's over, and then we've got the video.

That's not a two -camera shoot, that's not all pretty and everything like that, but that's what we need to do. It needs to be small, it needs to be transportable, and that's just, we just got to do it, because I'm tired,

I mean, I'm eight debates down, man, that's not good. And I'm still hoping to get them, all the

London debates, the Duke debate, all that stuff, I'm still hoping to see it. But it's, you know, we're in September of 2009, and it's been over a year for most of them, 18 months for at least one or two, and that's very, very exceptionally frustrating.

And so I just need to do something about it. And technology has gone a long way, so I'm looking for that. If you've got some suggestions, you might want to write them in, because I'm going to be putting something on the ministry resource list, because we've just,

I'm just, evidently, especially, you know, when I'm traveling, and I'm doing a debate, the only way

I'm going to get this stuff is to do it that way. I've got to take care of it myself. So that's just sort of the way it is.

So anyway, I was talking about the resource list, sorry about that. And we've already got three folks online, so I'll get to that in just a moment.

But I, one of the books that I received from the ministry resource list is by Joseph Ratzinger, also known as the current

Pope. Eschatology, Death, and Eternal Life, second edition.

And so I turned to the chapter on Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And I started reading through this, and remember,

I played, and I didn't have time to get it queued up, I thought about playing it again. But I played the comments by one

Tim Staples on the subject of Purgatory.

And, you know, he was quite firm in his assertion that 1

Corinthians chapter 3 is very plain in teaching this doctrine of Purgatory. So I figured, well, if an apologist thinks it's plain, then the

Pope, it should be really plain, right? I mean, he is the head of the visible church.

He's the vicar of Christ on earth, and he's infallible in things when he's defining matters of faith and morals and all that stuff.

And so I finally found the discussion of 1 Corinthians chapter 3. I want to read it to you, and then we'll go to our calls.

This is on page 228. In the wake of this brief historical sketch, the question remains, what is the authentic heart of the doctrine of Purgatory?

What is its rationale? In listening in to the patristic discussion, we had occasion to mention 1

Corinthians 3, 10 through 15. For this text, there is a foundation, Jesus Christ, in which some build with gold, silver, and precious stones, and others with wood, hay, and straw.

What each one has, in fact, built will be brought to light by the day of the Lord, and then the quotation of the text.

J. Nilka, it's G -N -I -L -K, so if it's

Polish, it might be pronounced differently than that. I don't know. J. Nilka has shown that this testing fire indicates the coming

Lord himself. Echoing a passage of the prophet Isaiah, it is an image for the majesty of the self -revealed

God, the unapproachability of the all -holy. According to Nilka, who here sets himself over against the opinion of Jeremias, this excludes any interpretation of the text in terms of Purgatory.

There is no fire, only the Lord himself. There is no temporal duration involved, only eschatological encounter with the judge.

There is no purification, only the statement that such a human being will be saved only with exertion and difficulty. But it is by following justice exegesis that one is led to wonder whether its manner of posing the question is correct, and its criteria adequate.

If one presupposes, now listen to this, if one presupposes a naively objective concept of Purgatory, then of course the text is silent.

Now that's the Pope. And what better description than what

Roman Catholic apologists like Tim Stable are defending than a naively objective concept of Purgatory that the

Pope says the text is silent about? Uh -huh. I continue my quotation.

But if conversely we hold that Purgatory, now listen to the Pope talking about Purgatory. Now I can't go back and, if you want to see what

Rome once really believed about Purgatory, get, is it F. X. Shoup? I think it's

S -H -O -U -P -P -E. It's on the shelf in the other room. F. X. Shoup's book on Purgatory from Tan Book Publishers.

And all this modern stuff about, well, it's a state of mind or a state of being, that's not what

Rome taught all along. Anybody who is even semi -honest with the historical information knows that Purgatory was a place where spirits of the departed but who are justified go, where they suffer torment for the temporal punishments of their sins that were not remitted during life.

And there's all these visions of people who've become saints. Rome has made these people saints who had visions of other saints, or other people who were in Purgatory.

They weren't, they were saints, they wouldn't go to Purgatory. But they're, you know, and they're bathed in flame and they're in torment.

And folks, there would be no St. Peter's today if people hadn't been afraid of Purgatory as a place where people go and suffer for a long, long, long, long time.

Because that's what indulgences are all about. And so, you know, the whole thing with the

Carmelites and the Scapular and the promise that Mary would descend on the

Saturday after your death to remove you from Purgatory. If there's

Saturday in Purgatory, folks, that means there's got to be a Friday, and a Thursday, and a

Wednesday. There's time for crying out loud. It's obvious. I mean, you really have to just completely throw out history.

And what people plainly believed, or say, they were all wrong. All the popes, and all the bishops, and all the priests, they're all wrong.

Because we modern Roman Catholics are right. Well, anyway. It's plain that Rome functioned on the belief of Purgatory as a place of the punishment of the soul.

And there's lots of Catholics that still believe that to this day. Right? All right. So, listen to your pope. He's mentioned

Nilke's interpretation, which says there's no room for Purgatory. This fire is an encounter with Jesus.

All right? Now, you tell me if he's totally rejecting that, when he says, If one presupposes a naively objective concept of Purgatory, then of course the text is silent.

But if conversely we hold that Purgatory is understood in a properly Christian way when it is grasped

Christologically, in terms of the Lord himself as the judging fire which transforms and conforms us to his own glorified body, then we shall come to a very different conclusion.

Does not the real Christianizing of the early Jewish notion of a purging fire lie precisely in the insight that the purification involved does not happen through some thing, but through the transforming power of the

Lord himself, whose burning flame cuts free our closed off heart, melting it and pouring it into a new mold to make it fit for the living organism of his body?

And what in any case can it mean in concrete terms, when Nilke remarks that some will be saved only after exertion with difficulty?

In what does such exertion difficulty consist? Would this not become a merely mythical statement, should it say nothing about man himself, and more specifically about the manner of his entry into salvation?

Surely these terms must refer not to something external to man, but to the man of little face heartfelt submission to the fire of the

Lord, which will draw him out of himself into that purity which befits those who are gods.

One really can't object that Paul is only talking here about the last day as a unique event. That would be hermeneutical naivete, though exercised in the opposite sense in the type we considered in parts five and six of this book.

Man does not have to strip away his temporality in order thereby to become eternal.

Christ as judge is ha -eschatos, the final one, in relation to whom we undergo judgment both after death and on the last day.

In the perspective we are offered here, those two judgments are indistinguishable. A person's entry into the realm of manifest reality is an entry into his definitive destiny and thus an immersion in eschatological fire.

The transforming moment of this encounter cannot be quantified by the measurements of earthly time.

It is indeed not eternal but a transition, and yet trying to qualify it as of short or long duration on the basis of temporal measurements derived from physics would be naive and unproductive.

I beg to differ. It was very productive. That's how you got St. Peter's. It was very productive.

You got lots of money out of that to temporality. The temporal measure of this encounter lies in the unsoundable depths of existence, in a passing over where we are burned ere we are transformed.

To measure such existence -ight, such an existential time, in terms of the time of this world, would be to ignore the specificity of the human spirit and its simultaneous relationship with and differentiation from the world.

The essential Christian understanding of purgatory has now become clear. Purgatory is not eschatolian thought, some kind of supra -worldly concentration camp where man is forced to undergo punishment in a more or less arbitrary fashion.

Rather, it is the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God, and thus capable of unity with the whole community of saints.

Simply to look at people with any degree of realism at all as to grasp the necessity of such a process, it does not replace grace by works, but allows the former to achieve its full victory precisely as grace.

What actually saves is the full ascent of faith, but in most of us that basic option is buried under a great deal of wood, hay, and straw.

Only with difficulty can it peer out from behind the latticework of an egoism we are powerless to pull down with our own hands.

Man is the recipient of the divine mercy, yet this does not exonerate him from the need to be transformed. Encounter with the

Lord is this transformation. It is the fire that burns away our dross and reforms us to be vessels of eternal joy.

This insight will contradict the doctrine of grace only if penance were the antithesis of grace and not its form, the gift of a gracious possibility.

The identification of purgatory with the Church's penance in Cyprian and Clement is important for drawing our attention to the fact that the root of the

Christian doctrine of purgatory is the Christological grace of penance. Purgatory follows by an inner necessity from the idea of penance, the idea of constant readiness for reform, which marks a forgiven sinner, etc.,

etc. And so, you just don't get the same sense from then

Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Ratzinger, that you do from the

Roman Catholic apologists. Somehow, the Pope isn't as clear about this as the apologists are.

In fact, it has been suggested by more than one person that Ratzinger had, and you can see some elements of it in that, had suggested that purgatory is a instantaneous change.

Isn't that what Protestants think happens at death? Instant sanctification?

Oh, well, interesting stuff, isn't it? Yes, most definitely. Well, much more on that because I am very hopeful that sometime over the next month and a half or so, probably it will be after the

Dan Barker debate, but hopefully not too long after that. We haven't worked out the dates yet, haven't worked out the time yet, but I'm hoping to have a guest on the dividing line to discuss this by the name of Tim Staples.

He said he's willing to do it, so we just have to figure out when. So, I'm really hoping that's going to happen because I want to discuss 1

Corinthians chapter 3, and I've been looking at what a bunch of Roman Catholic scholars say about it, and they're not nearly as confident as Mr.

Staples is. Besides that, there's just this little problem of the exegesis of the text, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the historic doctrine of purgatory.

Now, if you want to change the doctrine of purgatory into what Protestants have believed all along, that's fine, but that sort of isn't normally what

Roman Catholic apologists are doing. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number.

Let's get to our phone calls here and talk with Marcus. Hi, Marcus.

Hello. How are you doing? Doing good. That's great. I wanted your opinion on the difference between what's being said in Acts 13, chapter 13, verse 46, and verse 48.

I noticed that there's a contrast being made. Verse 46,

Paul and Barnabas told the religious leaders that they rejected the gospel and did not consider themselves worthy of salvation.

But for the Gentiles in verse 48, they were appointed for eternal life, and that was why they believed.

So I kind of wanted your opinion as to whether or not that's saying that if we— it seems to me it's saying that if we're rejecting the gospel, then it's on us, but if we believe, then that was

God. Well, there's no question outside of grace no one's going to believe, so the rejection of the gospel is going to be a given outside of the opening of the heart.

I mean, Jesus said, no one is able to come to me unless the Father's hand draws him. But for the Jews, there's a specific context here.

They're in a synagogue. You have had the promises that have been delivered to the people of Israel explained to them.

The scriptures have been opened to them. And what's really going on?

Back up to verse 44. The next Sabbath nearly the whole city assembled to hear the word of the

Lord. But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began contradicting the things spoken by Paul and were blaspheming.

So there is a—well, you know, you read 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and you read some of Acts, and you read some of Galatians, and there is obviously a very strong opposition to Paul's missionary efforts by the

Jews in the local cities. And here's an example of it. But this one is not simply due to just a rejection of the

Messiahship of Jesus. There's jealousy here. There is a, shall we say, petty motivations involved here.

And so they've heard the word of the Lord in the previous meeting in the synagogue. The word of God has been brought to bear.

And as a result of that, Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and said it was necessary the word of God be spoken to you first because that was the apostolic example.

They would go into the synagogues. They would proclaim to the Jewish people, the people who already possessed the scriptures.

That was how they did it. They went to the Jews first, then to the Gentiles. Since you repudiate it, that is, they were blaspheming.

They were repudiating what's called the word of God here, which is an interesting indication that not only was what they were preaching, it's not just the citation of the

Old Testament here, but the apostolic interpretation is identified as the very word of God here.

Since you repudiate it, they are rejecting the word of God, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life.

Behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. So here you have the same proclamation being made in regards to the

Jews that Jesus makes, for example, in Matthew chapter 23. It's very similar to what

Jesus says in Matthew 23, 37 about the Jewish leaders. They're trying to keep people from hearing the truth.

So your judgment has come upon you, and now we turn to the

Gentiles. But not all the Gentiles are going to be saved.

I mean, Acts chapter 17, Paul's going to stand on Mars Hill. So in verse 48, when the

Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing, glorifying the word of the Lord. But even then, not every

Gentile saying in the audience said, Oh, hey, we're in, as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.

And so, like I said to a caller a few weeks ago, I don't think

Acts 13, 48 is meant to be an explication of the doctrine of election.

I don't think that it's the first place you go. I think it is demonstrative of the fact that in the thinking of the writers, this was just a given.

It could be mentioned in passing because it was just that obvious. It was that much that's similar to,

I think, Paul's statement that he endures all things for the sake of the elect. So they might be saved.

It's not even controversial. He recognizes that when he proclaims the gospel, after all those years of doing that, he has seen when he proclaims the gospel, there's different responses.

And he knows that any positive response of the sinful soul of man to the message of redemption is due to the sovereign grace of God.

He knows that, but since we don't know who the elect are, we proclaim the gospel to every creature.

And that's how they did it, and that's how we do it too. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, that helps a lot. So you're saying then that 13, 48 shouldn't be looked at as a proof text for election.

Well, it's important. I think it's a proof text in the sense of whether someone will allow the text to speak for itself.

I mean, it's clearly what it is talking about, but it's not the intention of Luke in Acts 13, 48 to explicate this.

He just mentions it in passing. It's a clear recognition of the reality of the sovereignty of God and salvation, that there were people who were appointed to eternal life, and as a result, they believed.

He doesn't explain that. That's elsewhere. And what worries me is when people try to come up with all sorts of incredible ways around this text.

I mean, that's what Dave Hunt does, and that's what everybody does. Well, it's actually a middle, and it's not really a passive, and they don't recognize that it's a paraphrastic.

They just come up with all sorts of wild and wacky ways. If you go back and listen to the debate

I did with Steve Gregg. I agree with that, yeah. I mean, it's correctly translated in the vast majority of English translations.

You don't have to come up with the Jehovah's Witness excuse and the Dave Hunt excuse, and, of course, the greatest excuse of all time, which was this was originally written in Hebrew, and that in the never -before -seen

Hebrew, it actually means this. That's the Dave Hunt, what love is this, third edition excuse for Acts 13, 48, which is just hilarious.

That, to me, is where it becomes extremely useful, is if you have to engage in all that stuff, then you're not really dealing with the subject in a biblical manner.

But at the same time, I think on our side, we have to say, hey, this is not Ephesians 1, this is not Romans 9, this is not

John 6, this is not John 10. It is not the text intention to explain all of this. It just asserts it, and you go on from there.

So I guess you could look at verse 46, but kind of like in the same light. Well, verse 46 just flows from the natural biblical teaching concerning the nature of man, and specifically in this context, the hardening of the people of Israel.

I mean the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, and now you've got Jewish leaders out beyond Jerusalem, but they're responding in the same way.

And these specifically out of jealousy, which was one of the motivations that caused the

Jews to do what they did in Jesus' life as well, in his ministry too. Okay, thank you.

Okay, thanks, Marcus. Thanks for calling. God bless. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341.

Let's talk with—oh, boy, I hate to, at this close time to the break, throw somebody on there and then say, let's take a break.

So let's just skip the break and talk to Kyle. Hi, Kyle. Hey, Dr. White, how are you? How are you doing? Hey, thanks for letting me on.

My question was in regards to— So should I not have done that? No, no.

No, my question's friendly. I wanted to ask you about sola gratia, or grace alone. And my question is, if someone is an

Arminian as opposed to someone who's Reformed, how are they going to view the doctrine of grace alone in a different way?

Or would they view it in a different way? And if so, how? Well, yeah, sola gratia is going to be greatly impacted by a synergistic system because when they say grace alone, again, just like the

Roman Catholics historically, what they're saying is that grace is primary, grace is necessary, but grace is not sufficient.

So the gratia is sola only in the sense of its primacy, not in the sense of its sufficiency.

And that was the issue of the Reformation. I have said it so many times.

It just drives me crazy when I hear leading non -Catholic speakers get all excited.

I remember listening to Norm Geisler on the Bible Answer Man broadcast once, and he was talking about, if you just look at the

Council of Trent, the Romans says that it anathematizes anyone who would say that you can be saved apart from grace.

We need to be accurate. Well, he's exactly right, of course. The Council of Trent did exactly that.

But at the very same time, the issue of the Reformation was never the necessity of grace.

Never. That's Pelagianism. The issue of the Reformation was not the necessity of grace.

It was the sufficiency of grace. And unfortunately, many people today who call themselves non -Catholics are on the

Catholic side when it comes to that particular issue of whether grace is both necessary and sufficient.

All right. Thanks. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. God bless. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341.

You know what? We got through that one fast enough. Can you still bring it up? I think I can go find a

Gatorade here real quick before we go to Arlen in California. And your call is at 877 -753 -3341.

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Hello everyone, this is Rich Pierce. In a day and age where the Gospel is being twisted into a man -centered self -help program, the need for a no -nonsense presentation of the

Gospel has never been greater. I am convinced that a great many go to church every Sunday, yet they have never been confronted with their sin.

Alpha Omega Ministries is dedicated to presenting the Gospel in a clear and concise manner, making no excuses.

Man is sinful and God is holy. That sinful man is in need of a perfect Savior, and Jesus Christ is that perfect Savior.

We are to come before the Holy God with an empty hand of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Alpha and Omega takes that message to every group that we deal with, while equipping the body of Christ as well.

Support Alpha and Omega Ministries, and help us to reach even more with the pure message of God's glorious grace.

Thank you. My phones are a -hopping today, so let's talk with Arlen in California.

Hi Arlen. Hello Dr. White. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. When I was...

Sorry, my throat got a little sticky. I understand. While I was in Uganda on one of the last days, we were driving home and our bus broke down in the middle of a

Muslim community. And some of the drivers came and tried to help put the bus back together, and one of them actually engaged us in a debate.

And one thing I found, it was really difficult to reason through the language barrier partially, but one particular argument that reminded me a lot of a lot of many

Muslim apologists I've heard is he just repeated the phrase, you know, God cannot reproduce, God cannot have a son, etc.,

etc., etc. And I mean, it's not difficult for me, myself, to think through that and recognize that's a bad argument, but do you know of any effective ways of explaining that from the ground up with someone who fundamentally does not recognize the term son being able to even be applied to someone in the

Godhead? Yeah, that's... What you're really dealing with there, other than the language, is just the depth of the false teaching that is the

Qur 'an itself. I mean, that's coming directly from Surah 112, لَمْ يَلَدْ وَلَمْ يُلَدْ

He neither begets nor is he begotten. And it is just pounded into the

Muslim's head that what the Christians are saying is that God begat a son in time, and most of them believe via a relationship with Mary.

And so, the only way to try to deal with that is to...

There's two ways to approach it. I mean, if you have enough time, you can actually use it as a demonstration of the fact that the

Qur 'an is not the word of God, because that's not what Christians believed in A .D.

600 or 610 or 632, wherever you want to place the

Qur 'anic revelation at that point. And therefore, if it's not an accurate representation of what

Christians believed, then it can't have come from Allah, because even if the trinity is wrong, Allah knew what the trinity was in 632.

That's if you have enough time to develop that. But if you're just dealing with the issue of the relationship of the father and the son, what you might want to do is sort of follow along a line something along like this.

Do you believe that Allah is eternal? And of course, they do. Now, some may not have thought through the issue of eternal existence.

You might have to explain, well, you know, I don't believe that God is just merely very, very old.

I believe that God, his way of existence, is outside the realm of time.

It is not measured by a passage of time. In fact, God created time itself.

And so when we speak of God as being just, we mean that he has eternally been just, that he did not become just at a point in time, that it is his nature to be just.

When we speak of God as love, God has eternally been loving. It is his nature.

He does not enter into the state of being loving at a point in time.

In the same way, when we talk about the father and the son, we are talking about a relationship that has always been.

God did not beget Jesus, and the father did not, and it is very important to start using father and son, because they, in their mind, father is always

Allah. And you need to try to break that down by distinguishing between father and son.

But the father does not, at a point in time, beget the son and bring the son into existence.

We are talking, when we speak of father and son, the father has eternally been a father.

The son has eternally been the son. It is a relationship we are talking about. And since that relationship never began, just as his holiness never began, his justice never began, his lovingness never began, all those things are eternally true of God and did not require a beginning in time.

In the same way, father and son should not be understood in a human sense, as the

Quran errantly does, but in the divine sense of the relationship that exists between the father and the son, which is eternal.

There has never been a time when the son was not the son, and the father was not the father.

It is an eternal relationship that exists. And if you want to know why God has revealed himself that way, part of it is so that we can distinguish between the divine persons.

Secondly, it is an illustration of the fact that God is love, and that he is revealing his love, especially in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, because this is revealed in the coming of Christ, who clearly differentiates himself from his father, who is not the offspring of God the

Father, the Virgin Mary, etc., etc. And so maybe by starting with something where you both can agree, that God has eternally been these things and didn't have to start being this way, and then the assertion that this relationship is itself eternal, and outside the realm of time, there's never been a time when it was not true, that they can see this idea of begettal, as in creation, derivation in time, and therefore inferiority, is not a part of the actual

Christian assertion at all. Well, thank you. That helped a lot.

I tried to make a distinction with him between the physical sonhood and the notion of using the term son in a different way than the physical, but it didn't really get very far.

That's hard through translation. I mean, that probably can only be done in the native language by a native speaker, which is why...

They all spoke English, it's just that the accents were very, very thick. But it was interesting.

We were in a lot of Muslim areas, and it really gives you a different perspective on Islam, when every morning at 5 a .m.

you hear the call to prayer, and then four more times throughout the day you hear the call to prayer. It's so ingrained.

It's so obviously works -based. Well, yeah, and it's so obviously cultural in many of those places as well.

I mean, it's just simply what you do. It's not necessarily something that is...

I mean, it's what you've always been raised with, so it's what you do, and yet in so many ways it does not end up impacting the culture in any positive light, because it's just simply a cultural artifact, and that's a bad thing whenever that happens, whether it be

Islam or Christianity or anything else. Any religion that you didn't choose and that is not a part of your heartfelt faith is rarely an overly good thing.

But anyway, well, thanks for that story, Arlan. Yes, thank you very much. Okay, thanks for calling. Bye -bye.

Bye. All righty, we press on. Let's talk with Roy in Florida.

Hi, Roy. Hey, Dr. White. Thanks for taking my call. Yes, sir. I have a question concerning, and I hope my terminology is right, because I'm fairly new when it comes to studying the

Reformed faith and Reformed terminology and things, but when I've been looking at,

I guess, the sovereignty of God and the divine decrees of God, my question is how involved and how detailed does that go?

I mean, is it just in the area of salvation, or, I mean, is it everything?

I mean, everything in my daily life. I mean, how far do we run this thing and say, well, this was the creed of God or this was the sovereign will of God?

Well, let me answer that first from a theological source and then from an illustration, and then we can look at some scriptural passages.

Okay. I am an elder in a Reformed Baptist church, and therefore we use the 1689

London Baptist Confession. Chapter 3 is on God's decree, and it starts off by saying,

From all eternity God decreed all that should happen in time, and this he did freely and unalterably, consulting only his own wise and holy will.

Yet in so doing he does not become in any sense the author of sin, nor does he share responsibility for sin with sinners.

Neither by reason of his decree is the will of any creature whom he has made violated, nor is the free working of second causes put aside, rather it is established.

In all these matters the divine wisdom appears, as also does God's power and faithfulness in effecting that which he has purposed.

God's decree is not based upon his foreknowledge that, under certain conditions, certain happenings will take place, but is independent of all such foreknowledge.

By his decree and for the manifestation of his glory, God has predestined or foreordained certain men and angels to eternal life through Jesus Christ, thus revealing his grace.

Others whom he has left to perish in their sins show the terrors of his justice. And so the first assertion is,

From all eternity God decreed all that should happen in time, and this he did freely and unalterably, consulting only his own wise and holy will.

Now, one of the illustrations I remember, I don't know why I was driving back from Flagstaff, Arizona at this particular point in time, but I was driving with a fellow that actually now

I realize I have not seen in many, many years, and we were discussing this very question, and he said, you know,

I can see how God's sovereignty over the big stuff is necessary, if he's going to accomplish his will over what nations do and things like that, but what

I have for breakfast just simply can't be relevant to God. I said, let me illustrate it this way.

Back then, and I still do wear them once in a while, I don't know if you ever saw a

Rush Limbaugh tie? I don't think so. Okay, Rush Limbaugh had a line of ties for a number of years.

They were wildly colorful. I mean, anybody who saw one, you could see it coming before you could recognize who the person was.

They were just that distinct. In fact, one time right before my son had his growth spurt,

Josh and I were standing outside of the South Gate of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, and I had purchased for Josh a couple of the little 14 -inch clip -on

Rush Limbaugh ties, and I had mine on, and we're standing there passing out tracks to folks, and we see, and we saw a lot of Mormons who had

Rush ties, and we see a guy striding toward the South Gate of the Temple, a pretty, you know, fairly decent -sized fellow, and immediately we recognize he's wearing a

Rush Limbaugh tie, and he recognizes that my son and I are likewise wearing Rush Limbaugh ties.

And so he smiles, and he's coming straight for us, and he takes a track from us. But, of course, once he got close enough, we recognized who it was.

It was Senator Orrin Hatch. So my choice to wear that tie that morning,

I'm not sure if that's what prompted me to give this illustration to my friend as we were driving down from Flagstaff, I said, let's say this morning

I got up, and I'm looking at my ties in my closet, and I do have a lot of ties, because I never throw one out, and I choose a tie, and I put it on.

From what you're saying, it doesn't matter to God. And so I go downtown, and I get into an elevator, because I've got to go to a meeting on the seventh floor of a building, and the elevator starts going up, and it slows down, and it's going to stop.

I hate when that happens. It happens a lot in very busy buildings. And the door opens, and in walks a guy, and guess what?

He's wearing the exact same tie I am. And, of course, we see each other, and we realize that, and we laugh, and it opens up an opportunity for a conversation, which leads to an exchange of business cards, which leads to a meeting, which leads to this person's salvation.

Now, do we say in that instance, well, okay, in that one instance. You see, the problem is, as R .C.

Sproul has, I think, very well put it, if there is so much as one renegade molecule in the universe, then how certain are the promises of God that he's actually going to accomplish things?

Because we all know that the tiniest things can overthrow the greatest plans.

I mean, it has been said, and I should verify this, that a certain major battle, the

Battle of Waterloo, was lost because of a speck of dirt under the saddle of a horse, so that somebody couldn't see what they needed to see.

I think it was Napoleon Bonaparte. And, voila, the entire direction of the

European continent changed by a piece of dirt. And how did that piece of dirt get there?

I mean, it didn't even come from the actions of a human being. So, the idea that God has created all things, and, okay,

I'm being told in Channel, it was the Battle of Boswell Field, Richard III. Okay, whatever. Who knows?

But the reality is that when God says he creates all things, and that he's working all things according to the counsel of his will, according to his purpose,

I think that it means all things. And as I understand creation, especially

God's role in his relationship to time, I believe time itself is the creation of God.

Otherwise, you have the idea that God creates something, and then how does

God know what's going to take place in time? Well, it's either actively or passively.

Either he sort of rolls the cosmic dice, and creation comes into existence, and he takes in foreknowledge of what happens, and goes, hey,

I won, all right, great. Well, then why glorify him if the actual fabric of that time does not reflect his glory and reflect his purpose and intention?

Further, I think that as the Confession stated, this establishes my creaturely role in all of this.

And that is, if I didn't believe that God's sovereignty extended all these things, there are all sorts of other powers that God has created in this universe that are greater than I am.

And I don't want to be stuck under their control. I want to be under God's control. And it is clearly his intention to hold men accountable for their actions based upon their desires.

And the only way I can see that working is if God's sovereignty includes the results of what

I do. If that's not a part of it, then I don't know how prophecy exists. I don't know how

God can know the future. I don't know how God can make the promises that he makes. And yet the scriptures tell us that he accomplishes all his holy will in the heavens and the earth and the seas and all their depths.

And all these things are part and parcel of his sovereign decree. So the difference between that and the concept of fatalism is that fatalism has no purpose and it's impersonal.

It's just simply the toss of that cosmic dice. What will be will be. Que sera, sera. That's totally different than the fact that God is accomplishing his own glory and his own purpose in the creation of the universe.

And here's another thing that's very important to keep in mind. And he has decreed his own involvement in and interaction with his creation.

He doesn't just wind it up and then go on vacation to the Bahamas. It includes his own active involvement and providence in his creation and in the forming of a peculiar people in Jesus Christ.

And of course the greatest illustration of that, the incarnation itself. Where God enters into his own creation.

But it's crystal clear that the exact time, place, and mode of the incarnation was fixed from time eternity when

God determined to do that. Now in any system where man ends up in control of these things, especially open theism and stuff like that, that's just not possible.

That just doesn't work. It makes sense what you just said, the comment by R .C.

Sproul. I never thought about that before. If one renegade molecule is what you said, what R .C.

Sproul's comment there was, that kind of makes some sense. So wait a minute. So R .C. Sproul, he gets credit for that one, but my rush tie thing, nobody cares about that.

Fine. I keep trying, man, I tell you. Well, let me ask you this.

I'm still struggling with this because let's use your tie illustration. Let's just say

I do wear a Rush Limbaugh tie and a lost man has one too and we're in the same elevator.

There's been instances where I have felt a desire or impress to witness to somebody and I haven't witnessed to somebody, and then

I beat myself up for the rest of the day for not witnessing to somebody. Okay. Was I supposed to witness?

I mean, how does that work? You know what I mean? Remember. Did I beat myself up over it or not? Well, remember, what you beat yourself up over is whether you have obeyed the revealed will of God.

You never beat yourself up over having knowledge of God's sovereign decree, which you can't have in the first place.

That's the one danger here is that people hear about the sovereignty of God and God's decree, and then they start trying to operate on having knowledge of that, which you can't have.

If you had the opportunity and because of selfishness, sin, whatever, you didn't do what you should have done, that is obeying the revealed will of God where he's giving you those opportunities, that's what you, quote, unquote, beat yourself up for, but not second -guessing

God's providence. That's not an escape. No, no, no, no. Exactly.

That's where the hyper -Calvinists fall off the bus and so on and so forth is we don't have access to the divine decree of God outside of seeing a part of it in the past.

We see in a glass darkly, but we don't have access to that. So you can drive yourself crazy going, well, if I had done this, then what about this, and getting into time paradoxes and all the rest of that stuff.

God did not create us to exist in that realm. We have a yesterday and a today and a tomorrow.

We live in time, and we are judged on the basis of God's revealed will, not the secret will of God.

So you don't need to get into that stuff at all. Okay, well, I have one more quick question.

Sure, go ahead. This is a different subject. I noticed that you're on the faculty of Columbia Evangelical Seminary.

Yes. Now I talked to, is it Rick? Rick Walston. Walston, yes.

And I was curious about your mentoring, but he said he wasn't sure if you're mentoring because of your busy schedule.

Are you, in fact, taking on students or no? Yeah, that's the problem. Right now I'm not simply because it wouldn't be fair to the students.

I am and have been for years now. I have one awesome student right now, and he is producing so much great work that I can't even keep up with him, and I've only got one.

So it's just not fair. I would love to be able to do that. I wish I had time to do that kind of thing. And I did tell one other person that I've known for many, many years, that if he were to go that direction,

I would try to find some way of doing that. I mean, I'm looking at my schedule right now, and I see young people say, man,

I'm bored. And I go, I haven't been bored since 1978. I don't know what it's like to be bored.

I wake up first thing in the morning, and I have a list of stuff I've got to try to get done. And I just now live in the constant feeling that I will never get it done, and it's just never going to happen that way.

I've got to get a syllabus done for a class I'm teaching for Golden Gate. I'm out of town next weekend.

I'm speaking in Santa Fe. Two weeks later is the debate with Dan Barker. I've got, I don't know, how many hundreds of pages of reading to do.

I'll never get through all of it, but that's a good thing. I'm not complaining about that. It's just the way it is.

And so I wish I could, and I feel badly that I can't, but that's just the situation

I'm in. All right. I appreciate your time. All right. Thank you for calling, sir. Yes, sir. All right. God bless.

Bye -bye. Bye -bye. Excellent question. Yes, sir? Okay, we've got one more question that was emailed in.

Emailed in? Emailed in. I don't normally do this, but it was a question that I had at the time, and I thought, you know what, we're going to get email on this.

That's interesting. Last program you were talking about. Where was this emailed into? Just to the contact link?

Yeah. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah. And so you were talking about Arminianism. Arminianism.

In fleeting thought, throughout a conversation that you had with a

Mormon missionary that convinced you or pointed out the inconsistency of Arminianism.

And our emailer wants to know what the Mormon missionary said. My recollection was, we were standing in, this was when

I was literally, I think, 20 years of age. We were standing in the second bedroom of my parents' house, if you recall that, where I had my little library.

At that time, my entire theological library took up two shelves in that room. And I was talking with, it was either

Elder Reed or Reese, I think. And we were talking about justification and grace.

And as I recall, what he pointed out was that the way

I had defined faith, because I wasn't reformed yet fully. I mean,

I was raised with a lot of reformed elements in it, but just hadn't put all of it together yet.

That was still a little ways away. As you may recall the night that I introduced you to those things and the look you had on your face, which was rather classic.

But anyway, he pointed out that the definition of faith

I had used would be contradictory to the definition of grace that I had used.

Because, in essence, it was something that needed to be added to grace for grace to accomplish what it needed to accomplish.

And he was right. And I had to think about that.

And that was part of that whole process that leads you to go, oh, oh, okay,

I get it. Well, great, we're going to have to start giving out that email address or something like that.

But I'll let you. There's no way I could do this and read emails that were coming at the same time. So, yeah, that's what happened many, many, many moons ago.

Great calls today. Didn't get to anything I had queued up, but that's okay. I enjoy it when the callers take over and we get all those great questions.

Thanks for calling. We will see you, Lord willing, on Tuesday here on The Dividing Line. See you then. God bless.

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