The Marian Dogmas Debate

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming this evening. I know that some of you who've been to concerts and maybe seen the orchestra tuning and warming up, those of you who arrived earlier probably had a comparable experience this evening with some of the technology we've been putting together.

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I'll just try this microphone if that one's not behaving.

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Okay, there we are. How's that? Is that better? Okay, we'll see how that goes. Thank you. Okay, so thank you for coming.

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My name's Peter Byron. I'm going to be your moderator this evening. So, first of all,

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I just need to give you a few housekeeping rules before we begin. So, first of all, mobile phones.

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Very important to make sure that we have those turned off or put on silent or vibrate.

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We don't want any distractions this evening and we don't want any profound theological moments to be underscored by somebody's ringtone.

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So if we can make sure that mobile phones are off, that would be great. And please can we have no clapping, heckling or verbal agreement or disagreement or any other kind of interruption while the speakers are talking.

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A short applause can be given at the beginning and the end of the various speeches, but it's better not to interrupt them in the middle.

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So please save applause and that kind of thing for between the speeches. If anybody needs a toilet break during the debate, then there are facilities at the bottom of the stairs just along the hallway that you came up.

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And if that one's busy, there are other facilities through a door on the right side of the hall as you enter the building.

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And last of all, in the unlikely event of an emergency, please just walk calmly and at a sensible pace down the stairs the same way that you came in.

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Now that those details are dealt with, I'll introduce the two speakers and describe the agreed structure of the debate this evening.

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So the topic of tonight's debate is, do the Catholic Church's doctrines on Mary constitute authentic Christian teaching?

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So that's very specific. Do the Catholic Church's doctrines on Mary constitute authentic Christian teaching?

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That's the question that both of our speakers are going to be addressing this evening. So Peter D.

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Williams, he is a Catholic apologist, speaker, and writer. He began public media apologetics during the papal visit of Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.

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And he has debated on television, radio, and in public settings like this one ever since.

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This is including at Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham Unions, and the

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Philanthropy College, Dublin. He is a speaker for Catholic Voices and an author of the

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Catholic Truth Society, having written a booklet on same -sex marriage. He will be presenting the positive case for the

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Catholic doctrines on Mary this evening. And James R. White is a

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Protestant apologist and writer. He has been a defender of reformed evangelicalism for around 30 years, debating with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, one -less

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Pentecostals, modernists, atheists, Muslims, and of course Catholics, amongst others, in over 150 moderated debates.

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He's the author of over 20 books, including The Roman Catholic Controversy and Mary, Another Redeemer?

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Dr. White is also a pastor of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, and he will be presenting the negative case against the

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Catholic doctrines on Mary this evening. Having heard both of these gentlemen before,

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I can assure you that you are in for an exchange of the highest quality this evening. No matter how rigorously or uncompromisingly these gentlemen present their cases tonight, and no matter how critical they might be of each other's most fundamentally held beliefs, they will only ever be attacking the other person's arguments, and never the other person themselves.

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By willingly making their worldviews vulnerable to the scrutiny of the other, they are in fact actually serving each other and everybody here listening, by helping us all to think through seriously what we believe and why we believe it.

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So that is the respectful scholarly spirit of the debate that you can expect this evening. So, both gentlemen will be observing the following debate structure.

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We will begin with Peter D. Williams, and they're both going to do opening statements of no more than 20 minutes each.

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These will be followed by 15 minute rebuttals, then followed by a half hour cross -examination period where they will both be allowed 15 minutes each of asking each other questions.

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Then it will be 15 minutes more rebuttal again, then we will open it up to the question period.

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So that will be your chance to ask your questions to them, and we will wrap up with a 10 minute closing speech from each of those, ending with James White.

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So, to begin our debate this evening, I will ask Peter D. Williams to give his opening presentation.

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I'm going to do that real quick to see if that's alright.

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Okay, testing, and starting. Okay, well ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters in Christ, or else in our common humanity, thank you very much for having me here today, thanks for coming, thanks to Peter for his work as moderator, thanks to Dr.

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White for attending as well. It's a great pleasure to be with you, and I've really looked forward to having this debate on this very important topic.

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So the question before us this evening is, do the Catholic Church's doctrines on Mary constitute authentic Christian teaching?

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And I think if we're going to answer that question that we have to answer some preliminary questions first, essentially on epistemology, on hermeneutics.

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The principle of epistemology that I'm going to be proposing this evening is what's called the dual -source theory in theology, as opposed to the single -source theory that I expect

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Dr. White to present later. I'm going to suggest that there are two main sources for our

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Christian doctrine that we find. I'm also going to suggest that the principle of those two sources is then developed over time by the

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Church herself in history. So the first source, of course, is Holy Scripture, that which is theionousos,

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God -breathed or God -inspired. The second is sacred tradition, those truths passed down from the apostles in the early

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Church, whether they be explicit or even implicit, or even absent from Holy Scripture itself.

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And then both of those are developed over time in the history of the Church itself, a magisterial development.

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And to illustrate the way this works... Sorry, is this not working? You're fine.

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Okay. Everything that has gone wrong this evening is going wrong almost.

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One, two, okay. To illustrate, then, the principle that I've just set out is the principle of the canon.

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The canon of Scripture is the knowledge of what texts are indeed theionousos and thus canonical. This is a tradition.

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It's a truth passed down to us from the early Church to us today. It was recognised in and by the

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Church over time. So we see authentic Christian teaching proceeds from those two sources.

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We have Scripture, but Scripture itself, and the knowledge of what Scripture is, is in fact something which is a tradition that is then recognised in the historic particularity of the

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Church over time. Then we have to talk about hermeneutics. We read

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Holy Scripture in its totality. I'm going to suggest that that's a breadth, but it's also a depth.

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That there is more than simply reading all of the literal sense of Scripture, there's also a typological sense. I'll go on to that in a second.

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But we also read tradition in continuity with Holy Scripture itself as well. I'm going to suggest today that Mary, the doctrines of Mary, are indeed something that we see in the depth of Scripture, the breadth of Scripture, and in the continuity with sacred tradition.

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So therefore let's talk first then about Our Lady in Holy Scripture and what it tells us about her. Well, on the one hand we have her life.

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We have biographical details about Our Lady within, for example, Luke's Gospel and St John's Gospel. Those two, and also the

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Apocalypse of St John, I'm going to suggest those are very important texts, mainly because we know that they are the ones most closely associated, those two authors, with Our Lady.

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St Luke is, according to tradition, someone who knew Our Lady, lived with her in Ephesus, but also is someone who spent a lot of time, very meticulously, if you read

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Luke 1, he says very clearly that he focused on the eyewitnesses for his historical methodology.

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That's quite important. And of course we know from St John that he in fact was entrusted Mary into his care after the crucifixion, so indeed he had direct biographical knowledge of Our Lady.

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We also have the typology of Our Lady in the Old Testament, as recognised by the early

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Christians. I'm going to focus on four of those. I'm going to focus on Our Lady's daughter of the New Zion, Our Lady as Queen Mother, Our Lady as the

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New Eve, Our Lady as the Ark of the New Covenant. These are the scriptural foundations of the traditional and developed doctrines about Our Lady.

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What is typology, you might ask. Why am I referring to that? Well, typology comes from tupos, which means a blow or hitting or a stamp, to which is then added ante, when we're referring to the things within the

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Old Testament that correspond to those things in the New Testament that they are prefiguring.

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So it's the prefigurement of New Testament realities in the Old Testament. So, for example, St Paul in Romans 5 .14

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calls Adam a type, a tupos, of the one who is to come, that is Christ. Our Lord himself uses the sign of Jonah as an antitype of the resurrection.

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Also St Peter uses the antitype of the great flood when he discusses baptism in 1 Peter 3. Taking the first step,

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Luke 1, we see the angel Gabriel addressing Our Lady, greeting her as Chaire Kekaratomene, the angelic salutation.

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If we investigate into how the Greek fathers in the Byzantine liturgical tradition, such as the Akathistos hymn that we see later on, has understood these words, particularly the word chaire, which

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I'm going to focus on right now, we see actually there's a lot of shed light on them. In secular Greek, chaire is commonplace, but in the

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Septuagint, it always refers, in the words of John McHugh, to the joy of the people at some striking act done by God for their salvation.

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Specifically, it's to those verses where it's talking to Israel as a corporate personality, as the daughter of Zion.

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So in Zephaniah 3 .15, we see, Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O Israel! Rejoice, Chaire!

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And exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst.

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These address Israel in that corporate person, as a daughter who is also a mother, in the context of the expectation of messianic fulfillment.

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So the fact that the angel Gabriel is referring to Our Lady, is talking to Our Lady, and saying, Chaire caratoimene, is quite telling.

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She is, in fact, the daughter of the new Zion. Our Lady also is seen as the

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Queen Mother. We can see that by the parallels that we see within the Old Testament to Her. Now we know, of course, just very basically,

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I'll go on to talk later about Our Lady as Theotokos, but Our Lady is the Mother of Our Lord, who is the

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King, not only as the successor of King David, but as the Theanthropos, the God -Man.

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So He has a royal lineage on a spiritual level, as well as on a physical fulfillment of the

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Old Testament Israel. St. Gabriel says, And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name

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Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father,

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David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

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Also St. Elizabeth says, Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And why is this granted me that the

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Mother of my Lord, and that's where the Greek has gone wrong, the mater tu curioumou, so in other words, the

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Mother of my Lord, curios, which is Lord, the word for God, in the Old Testament. This shows us the duality of the physical fulfillment of that Old House of David, but also the spiritual fulfillment as well.

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In Israel, what's interestingly here, is that the mother of the king was not the wife of the king, of which there might have been many, but the mother of the king, the geberah.

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So if the antitype of Christ are the kings of Israel, if all of those are antitypes of our

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Lord, then the antitype of Mary is the queen mother. And we see this, for example, importantly in Queen Bathsheba in 1

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Kings 2, 17 -20. A particular person comes to her as they believe the king will not refuse her request, and then orders a throne to be brought in for her, and she's seated at his right hand, the position of authority.

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Now, someone will point out, no doubt, that there's an objection to this, that this isn't a fulfillment really, because the king refuses the request of Bathsheba.

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But remember, this is an antitype, which is always a shadow of the type. Yes, it failed, the queen mother failed in that instance to secure the favor for which she was asking.

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But if Christ surpasses the kings of Israel, so our lady surpasses the queen mothers as well, just as the resurrection surpasses the falling of Jonah into the fish, and then his regurgitation onto dry land, or baptism completely surpasses the great flood.

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All of those were temporary physical acts, they're temporary consequences, but baptism has a supernatural consequence, the resurrection has a supernatural consequence, our lady as queen mother has supernatural consequences.

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Next, our lady is the new Eve. We see so many parallels within the

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Old Testament, within the New Testament as well, of our lady, and it so communicates the fact that she is the new

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Eve. Eve is bone of Adam's bone and flesh of his flesh, which is why he calls her woman in Genesis 2 .23,

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and then Mary, our Lord says, our Lord is the bone of Mary's bone, and the flesh of Mary's flesh, and he calls her what?

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Woman, at the wedding of Cana. Eve is prompted by an evil angel, starts the fall of mankind by causing

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Adam to commit his first sin in Genesis 3 .6. Mary, prompted by a good angel, starts the salvation of mankind, not only by her fear to the incarnation itself, but by causing our

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Lord, the new Adam, as we said in Romans 5, to perform his first public miracle in the wedding at Cana.

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Eve, through Eve came disaster, through her disobedience, through Mary comes grace and redemption through her obedience to God.

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Eve is cursed for her disobedience, for her pride and her lack of faith, whereas Mary is blessed because of a humble and obedient faith.

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These parallels are very clear. And this is something that the early church fathers also saw very clearly.

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St. Justin Martyr in AD 160 says that our Lord became manned by the virgin in order that the disobedience which proceeded from the serpent might receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin.

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For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death.

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But the virgin Mary received faith and joy when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her, that the

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Spirit of the Lord would come upon her and the power of the Highest would overshadow her. Wherefore also the holy thing begotten of her is the

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Son of God. And she replied, Be it done to me according to thy word. That's in his dialogue with Triphae. St. Irenaeus of Lyons similarly says what is joined together could not otherwise be put asunder than by inversion of the process by which these bonds of union had arisen.

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So that the former ties be cancelled by the latter. It was that the knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary.

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For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, thus did the virgin Mary set free through faith.

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That's in his Adversus Horatius in AD 180. And he goes on as well. I'm not going to spend up too much time.

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But Our Lady is also seen within the Old Testament as the Ark of, well, in the New Testament as the Ark of the

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New Covenant. There are so many parallels here. I'll try to zip through them. For one thing, she, the

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Ark of the Old Covenant contained the tablets of the old law. We know all this by Hebrews 9 .4. There are other verses as well which undermine this, underline this.

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In the Ark of the New Covenant, in the New Testament we see that Mary contained the fulfilment of the law as we see in Matthew 5 .17

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and the new law itself, Galatians 6 .2. The Old Testament Ark of the Old Covenant contained the manna from heaven that fed the

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Israelites as they wandered through the desert. Who does Our Lady contain? The bread of life. The Ark of the

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Old Covenant was overshadowed by the Shekinah on the mercy seat. Our Lady was overshadowed by the

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Holy Spirit as the angel Gabriel says to her and by the power of the Most High in Luke 1 .35. The primary role of the

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Ark of the Old Covenant was to mediate the presence of God to old Israel by bearing the Shekinah. But the primary role of Our Lady is to mediate the presence of God to the new

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Israel by bearing the Theanthropos. We also see this in the parallels very, very direct parallels between Luke 1 allusions between Luke 1 and 2

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Samuel 6. And David arose and went with all the people who were with him from Baal Judah to bring up from there the

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Ark of God. What does Mary do when she goes to visit Elizabeth? In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to a city of Judah.

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Post Uzzar, that is post Uzzar trying to reach out to stop the Ark from falling and being struck down dead

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David was understandably afraid of the Lord that day and he said how can the Ark of the Lord come to me?

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Elizabeth upon greeting Mary says and why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

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So David was not willing to take the Ark of the Lord into the city of David but David took it aside instead to the house of Obadidam the

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Gittite. Our Lady enters the house of Zechariah and greets Elizabeth and then into Samuel 6 and the

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Ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obadidam the Gittite for three months. How long does Our Lady stay with Saint Elizabeth in the house of Zechariah?

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For three months. And it was told King David the Lord had blessed the household of Obadidam and all that belongs to him because of the

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Ark of God so David went and brought up the Ark of God upon the house of Obadidam to the city of David with rejoicing and Our Lady's response to Saint Elizabeth's greeting is my soul magnifies the

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Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the

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Ark of the Lord with shouting what does Elizabeth do before Our Lady? She exclaims with a loud cry.

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So the Ark of the Lord came into the city of David and Michael sees David leaping and dancing before the

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Ark. What is Saint John doing in the womb of Saint Elizabeth leaps in her womb when she comes near to Our Lady.

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Then we've also got the patristic evidence of Our Lady's Ark of the Covenant. Hippolytus says at that time the

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Saviour coming from the Virgin the Ark brought forth his own body into the world from that Ark which was gilded with pure gold within by the world and without by the

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Holy Ghost so that the truth was shown forth and the Ark was manifested and the Saviour not just a parallel with Our Lady but with Our Lord as well came into the world bearing the incorruptible

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Ark that is to say his own body. Saint Athanasius of Alexandria himself also says O noble Virgin truly you are greater than any other greatness for who is your equal in greatness

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O dwelling place of God the Word to whom among all creatures shall I compare you O Virgin you are greater than all them

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O Covenant clothed with purity instead of gold you are the Ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manner that is the flesh in which divinity resides.

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Gregory the Wonderworker and John Damascene also make reference to the idea of the Ark as well. This is something noted by more than just a few fathers.

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So how does this become relevant then to the doctrines of the Catholic Church regarding Our Lady?

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Well I'm going to now very quickly present what those doctrines are and show you why they're supported by the parallels that I've just shown.

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So the first and most important doctrine about Our Lady is that she is Theotokos the God -bearer.

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The one who bears the one who is God would probably be the most literal translation. And that is a defidae dogma of the

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Church that she is the Mother of God. It is of course something which was developed in the Council of Ephesus in 431

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AD against the error of the Nestorians. Nestorians want to say there are two persons in Christ that were somehow united by a kind of uniting principle.

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That's what Nestorians thought. Instead what was affirmed completely contrary to that, his idea that she was the Christotokos the

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Christ being the unifying principle. No, no, no. They wanted to say that Our Lord is fully man, fully

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God united in one person and that therefore what can be said about him is that he is God.

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And because of that Our Lady the God -bearer didn't just bear a human nature, didn't just bear a unifying principle, she bared the one who is

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God. So she is the Theotokos, the Mother of God. What is also then as a lesser doctrine, but nonetheless a sure doctrine, a sentense certa, as we would say, or certa, is the idea that Our Lady the

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Mother of God is entitled to the praise of Hyperdulia as Our Mother and Our Queen we can ask for her intercession.

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Also related to that is another idea that she is the Mediatrix because she gave the Redeemer the source of all graces to the world.

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In this way by her cooperation in the redemption she is the Mediatrix and channel of all graces in that sense.

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So because she gave birth to the Saviour she can be said in that sense in an honorary way to be the Mediatrix of all graces.

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And we see this through lots of different scriptures as well. When we say, again, Wise has gone to me that the Mother of my

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Lord, the Merta Ticurio Mu should come to me. She is the Mother of the Lord. Our Lady is also the

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Daughter of the New Zion, the Daughter Mother. Our Lady is the Ark of the New Covenant who contains the New Law, the Bread of Life, the

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Eternal High Priest. All of these support the idea of Our Lady as Theotokos, as Theotokos.

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And then also the fact that she is Queen Mother and also Mother in a broader sense for us is the reason why we can trust in her intercession.

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If she is the Queen Mother and the people of Israel could come to the Queen Mother to intercede for the King then

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I think much more can we come to our own Mother, our Mother Mary as is accepted in tradition.

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But don't believe me when I say that. Believe, again, what we see in Christian history. This is the Subterran Presidium. This is the

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John Rylands Papyrus 470 which is in a collection at the University of Manchester. It contains the oldest prayer to Our Lady written between 250 to 280.

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Well, the oldest one we have on record anyway. And that's called the Subterran Presidium. And this is it. Beneath your compassion we take refuge,

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O Mother of God. Do not despise our petitions in time of trouble, but rescue us from dangers, only pure, only blessed one.

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Just remember those phrases. Because now the second doctrine would be Our Lady is a Parthenon. The idea that Our Lady was a virgin before, during and after the birth of Our Lord.

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That she was conceived by the Holy Ghost without the cooperation of man, she remained a virgin during birth and she was a virgin thereafter as well.

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This follows again from the parallels that I was mentioning before. Our Lady's Ark of the New Covenant. Just as one would not use the

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Ark of the New Covenant for, let's say, ordinary storage, they caved it for the most sacred things in the

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Jewish religion. Nor would one use the Ark of the New Covenant ordinarily. She was reserved in her status as a

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Theotokos. And this isn't because we think that somehow sex is a bad thing. It's simply an ordinary thing.

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It's a profane thing that Our Lady was preserved from for the sake of her role as a Theotokos.

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We compare this with liturgical instruments. We wouldn't use a vessel we'd be containing with communion wine, sitting down, vegging before Netflix.

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We would use it only for sacred things. We wouldn't use a Bible as a desktop. We wouldn't use a church.

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Well, we feel very sad when churches are turned into nightclubs. These are things where we see the profaning of something which is in fact sacred.

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Not because those things are bad. Dancing is good. Netflix is great. Tabletops are great, wonderful too.

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But we use sacred things for sacred things. We use profane things for profane things. We have an evidence of this early

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Christian belief in things like the Protoevangelium of James, which even though is maybe not a perfect text, nonetheless is still one which was found within the

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Christian milieu. We also have Origen, St. Heriot Poitiers, St. Athanasius, St. Epiphanius, St. Salamis, St.

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Jerome, many others who affirm the continual virginity of Our Lady. We also see here as Panagia that she was conceived without stain of original sin.

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That is again a de fide, but actually the more universal doctrine is that she had, in consequence of a special privilege of grace from God, she was free from every personal sin during her whole life.

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And this again follows from the idea of her as Theotokos. Is it really consistent to see Our Lady, the Theotokos, as someone who would be compromised, dominated by the dominion of Satan, in a state of original sin, during her time as the

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Mother of God? I think it is inconsistent with that. We see again these beliefs in the Ascension of Isaiah and the Holiness of Solomon.

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This is evidence of early belief, even though these are, as Dr. White would say, tinged with Gnosticism. Hippolytus again also affirms this, as do many other patristic writers.

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Now I'm coming up to the end of my speech and I don't want to try your patience, so I may continue this in my second period. But we see,

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I think, with both the doctrine of original sin being developed later. There's also the doctrine of the

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Immaculate Conception being developed later, from clear premises within Scripture. This is not something which is made up on the hoof.

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This is not a new doctrine. This is something consistent with that. I will continue the rest later when

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I talk about also the Assumption. But what I would just simply establish in closing, ladies and gentlemen, with my opening statement, simply is this.

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That the doctrines of Our Lady, that the Catholic Church holds to, are not simply doctrines made up on the hoof.

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They are not merely things that we come within the very limited data within Luke 1 and 2. They are things that we find within the depth of Scripture, the breadth of Scripture, and also within the patristic sources themselves.

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There's much more to say about that but I will now close for Dr. White's opening statement. Thank you very much. And people at the back, are we hearing okay at the back?

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Everything's all right at the back? Brilliant. Thank you very much. And I'll hand over to Dr.

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James White when you're ready. Well, good evening.

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Thank you for being here this evening. We managed to pack everybody in here. That worked out really well. I was a little scared for a while, to be honest with you.

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It's good to be here in London. We have a lot to talk about, and we've already begun that.

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The fundamental issue is the issue of authority this evening. That has already been noted.

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If a person who had never heard the Bible picked it up and read it and was asked, does this book teach that Jesus' mother is the sinless queen of heaven who was bodily in heaven at the end of her life, conceived without the stain of original sin, and never had other children, the look of confusion on the face of the reader would be fully understandable.

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And if you are not familiar with Roman Catholic teachings on this subject, then you might be a little bit confused as well.

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But this illustrates the central issue this evening. We are not debating it, but we are in essence. That is sola scriptura.

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If one believes in sola scriptura, one will never embrace the Roman Catholic dogmas on Mary for the simple reason that no meaningful form of exegesis would ever lead you to those particular conclusions.

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The interpretation Roman Catholic apologists use to drive the Marian dogmas differs markedly from that used to defend the

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Trinity, for example. I would ask you to compare what was just presented with any meaningful definition and defense of the

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Trinity by a Roman Catholic apologist, and you'll see a fundamental difference in how these things are approached, and there is a reason for that.

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So tonight's debate is not specifically on sola scriptura, but it is anyways. For me, no topic more clearly demonstrates the absolute necessity of holding the scripture as the sole infallible rule of faith in the

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Roman Catholic dogmas and doctrines that are now taught 2 ,000 years after the birth of Christ.

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Now, before looking at the facts biblically and historically, let's ask a question. What constitutes authentic Christian teaching?

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That's a part of our thesis statement. I'd like to submit to you that the New Testament does, in fact, give us an answer to that inquiry.

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First, Jesus plainly held men accountable not to unwritten traditions, but to revealed truths of scripture.

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In Matthew chapter 22, verse 31, Jesus said, Have you not read what God spoke to you saying?

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He viewed God's written word as if God spoke to the individuals alive in his day and held them accountable for the things that he said 1 ,400 years earlier.

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Jesus plainly placed that over any unwritten tradition, including those written traditions that claim to have

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God as their origin, their source. We know, of course, what Paul said about this. He said,

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All scripture is God breathed. And this evening, the question will be, What else is God breathed? What else can be placed in the same level?

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Is there anything else that is God breathed and is therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be proficient, that is, qualified, equipped, or sufficient for performing every good work.

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If the teaching of these doctrines and dogmas is a good work, the question is, does the Bible actually sufficiently prepare you to do so?

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And I suggest to you that, especially as we look at the dogmas, the most recent dogma, the dogma defined in 1950 of the bodily assumption of Mary.

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Not only did no one ever teach that as Christian doctrine for a thousand years after Christ, but there is absolutely no evidence that no apostle, that any apostle of Jesus Christ ever dreamed of such a belief.

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So how could the scriptures, how could that which is theognostos, sufficiently equip you to teach that as a good work?

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That is a question that we will have to deal with this evening. If a belief is based in that which is not

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God breathed, it is not binding upon Christians and is therefore not authentic Christian teaching, that is something that will be illustrated this evening.

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I'd like to state to you, not a single bishop who met the council of Nicaea in AD 325 believed what modern

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Roman Catholicism defines as dogmatically true about Mary today. Not a one. Not a single one.

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If modern Roman Catholic teachings are true, then God allowed many centuries to pass without anyone believing the full truth about those doctrines.

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Why would that be the case? That is a question we must think about this evening. In fact, I think it is indisputable that no one in the first 1 ,500 years of church history believed as dogma what modern

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Roman Catholicism has defined to be true. And in fact, I was listening very carefully, every single early church father that was cited earlier denied or gave absolutely no evidence of believing numerous other

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Marian dogmas that Rome has now defined in what was just presented by my opponent this evening. Keep that in mind.

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Ask yourself what that actually means. Yet despite this reality, Rome claims her teachings are true and ancient and she condemns of the anathema those who reject her claims.

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We didn't have the anathemas read, the definitions, the bodily assumption, macular conception, these very recent defined dogmas.

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Well, I think 1854 is fairly recent, relatively speaking. We didn't have those read in our hearing, but they are there.

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We will look at them if we have time to do so. And so in those statements, the claim is made that this is what the ancient church believed.

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No one who studies church history can actually state that with a straight face. You have to embrace a development concept to be able to come up with that.

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That means this is not a matter of possibilities. We cannot have, well, it's possible that this typology might mean this, and it doesn't matter if it breaks down here because, you see, it could possibly mean that when you say something is de fide, dogmatically definitional of what it must be, what you must believe to be in true fellowship with Christ's church, that can't be mere possibilities.

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That has to be revealed fact. That has to be revealed fact. Rome makes eternity rest upon these teachings.

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Now, I want to read to you the words of Bishop Fulgentius of Rusp. He said these words.

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This is the grace whereby it came to pass that God, who came to take away sins, because sin was not in him, was conceived and born a man in the similitude of sinful flesh.

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The flesh of Mary forsooth, which had been conceived in iniquities after the manner of men was indeed sinful flesh, which bore the

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Son of God in the similitude of sinful flesh. We must believe that the only begotten God did not derive the defilement of sin from the mortal flesh of the virgin.

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Truly, therefore, Mary conceived God the word which she bore in sinful flesh, which

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God received. Now, Bishop Fulgentius was a very learned bishop.

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He was well acquainted with Augustine's writings. He was one of the leading theological lights of his day, right about halfway through, a little over halfway through the first millennium.

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Yet, plainly, he had no concept of the immaculate conception whatsoever. Never breathed a word about the bodily assumption.

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No evidence of any belief in such concepts of Mary as queen of heaven or Mary as co -redemptrix, mediatrix of all graces, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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Was Fulgentius just ignorant of the apostolic tradition, or is the real fact that there was no such apostolic tradition at this period in time?

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There are many like Bishop Fulgentius that we could look at this evening. Facts of Scripture.

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No meaningful exegetical approach to Scripture will ever lead one to believe the Marian dogmas.

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Mary is presented as a blessed servant of God, but one who is a redeemed woman, not immaculately conceived.

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She even refers to God as her savior, using the same language that the psalmists used a number of times, straight out of the

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Greek Septuagint. And we're told, oh, no, no, no. You need to understand, Mary did have a savior. It was a it was an application of the merits of Christ, so that she was protected from the stain of original sin.

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And I'm sure that's exactly what Mary meant when she said those words. That is a dogma developed over 1 ,500 years after the days of Mary.

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To read that back into her words is the height of anachronism. And that's what I mean when I say that Mary is presented as the blessed servant of God, but one who even identifies herself as a redeemed woman, not immaculately conceived.

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While Theotokos, as a Christological title, is biblical. That is, the term God -bearer.

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And initially, its focus was upon who Christ was, not who Mary was. When used as an exaltative of Mary, it is not biblical.

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It becomes highly unbiblical at that particular point in time. The allegorical methods used to find fitting parallels to Mary, or to say there is at least nothing in opposition to various Marian beliefs, is insufficient for the grounding of positive dogmatic beliefs.

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We just had some of those presented, and even the parallel to the Queen Mother and the fact she didn't get what she wanted from Solomon was dismissed as, well, these are just types, they're just shadows.

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You can prove anything this way. All you have to do is say, well, if it breaks down, it's just because it's a type or a shadow, but we'll just go with what does actually hold, and then the things that don't fit, we just won't worry about those things.

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Believe me, if we were debating the Mormons tonight, we could be talking about how they use that type of interpretation to find

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Joseph Smith. I just debated a group called INC. They find their founder in typological interpretation too.

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Everybody is invited to that party because there are no rules. You can prove anything with that kind of interpretation.

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Ark of the Covenant, Queen Mother parallels, are not only exceedingly weak, they are further damaged by simply asking how many centuries it took for any

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Christian writer to see them, or to especially place them in the context that modern Roman Catholicism places them in.

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I mean, if you have an early church father that sees one of these parallels, and then he says that Mary was born with sinful flesh, and there's no such thing as bodily assumption, et cetera, et cetera, exactly where does that fit into your scheme?

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That really becomes a question that we would have to be asking. Unlike the arguments for true Christian teachings, such as the

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Trinity, the Resurrection, the Atonement, the Virgin Birth, are the arguments for the Marian dogmas that I was once asked by a

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Roman Catholic apologist if I could provide a single text in the Bible that specifically said

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Mary had committed a particular sin, or that Mary had specifically born other children. Now, of course, the

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Bible does not specifically note by name 99 .999 % of all who have committed acts of sin.

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I note the Bible does not name me of ever having committed an act of sin, and if anyone thinks that's relevant, well,

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I'm not sure what you're doing here this evening at all. But that's the kind of argumentation that I have been faced with in the past, over against the kind of argumentation that we have for the

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Trinity, the Resurrection, the Atonement, the Virgin Birth, all these things which are based upon direct theanustos,

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God -breathed revelation from God, hence we can know their truth. Fact, the modern complex of Marian dogmas and doctrines shows that Rome's claim to function on the basis of Scripture and tradition is utterly fallacious.

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The two most modern Roman teachings, the doctrine of Mary as Queen of Heaven, Mediatrix of All Graces, Co -Redemptrix of Christ, doctrine taught by popes for over 100 years now, and the dogma of the bodily assumption defined in 1950 are simply unknown in either

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Scripture or tradition, whether you have a small t or a capital T at that particular point in time.

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One can search tens of thousands of pages of sermons and books in the first millennia of Christian writings without finding these teachings to having any sound evidence of having an apostolic origin.

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Even when exalted hyperbolic language is used of Mary in this period, it lacks the foundational context to be made even slightly relevant to the full definition of these doctrines as they are used within Roman Catholicism today.

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As we work backwards, we find the next dogma, the Immaculate Conception, finding its first formulation in a

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British monk named Edmer at the beginning of the 12th century. Even then it was opposed in its modern dogmatic form as an innovation by Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura, Albert the

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Great, and Thomas Aquinas. They all viewed it as an innovation, and this is over a thousand years after the time of the apostles.

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Going back further, we find a consistent universal teaching that Jesus and Jesus alone was conceived without original sin and born sinless in this world.

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This includes not only the great theologians, despite numerous later forgeries misrepresenting such luminaries as Augustine, but numerous bishops of Rome as well.

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Roman Catholic writers list numerous patristic writers who had no problem seeing the biblical narrative indicating acts of sin on Mary's part.

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This includes some men such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, and Basil, sometimes called

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Basil the Great. Eamon Carroll has written regarding the period of Augustine, many more centuries of thought and prayer were required before the church would realize that the

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Immaculate Conception was among the gifts God provided for his mother. Centuries after this time period.

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Apostolic? Not in the least. Now finally we come to what may be the most troubling, even though the most ancient of the

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Marian doctrines, the perpetual virginity of Mary. The natural reading of the text of Scripture speaks of Jesus' brothers and sisters and the family of Joseph, Mary, Jesus, and his brothers and sisters living in Nazareth.

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The biblical narrative of the birth of Christ contains not a hint of the concept of the birth being painless or unnatural.

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The Greek term ticto that is used of the giving of birth of Christ is a normative word that is used of the birth of children in any other narrative that we have, scripturally speaking.

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The prophecy of the birth of the Son given to us in Isaiah 9 -6 likewise uses natural language of birth.

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The root yalad in Hebrew is exactly what would be used of the birth of any child and that is described of Jesus.

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For Jesus to be our sin bearer his humanity had to be real. If Jesus is not truly born as we are born, then he has no true human nature.

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His sacrifice is not a true human sacrifice. The Roman Catholic concept of perpetual virginity is unknown to scripture, so where did it come from?

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The earliest sources to promote the idea of a natural birth of Jesus are not orthodox, but are instead tinged with Gnostic concepts as was just mentioned in the presentation in regards to the protevangelium of James.

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These include the protevangelium of James, the ascension of Isaiah, and the odes of Solomon, but very rarely do you ever hear what those things actually say.

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Indeed, when Clement of Alexandria defends the idea of the perpetual virginity of Mary, he makes specific reference to the protevangelium of James, which he evidently accepts as a valid, trustworthy source.

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I'll let you judge as to whether it is. But just here we see the danger of abandoning sola scriptura.

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Let me read you from the Odes of Solomon. Here's Odes 19. A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the

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Lord's kindness. The son is the cup, and the father is he who was milked. And the Holy Spirit is she who milked him, because his breasts were full, and it was undesirable that his milk should be ineffectually released.

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The Holy Spirit opened her bosom and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the father.

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It's not just hinge with Gnosticism, by the way. Then she gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, and those who have received it are in the perfection of the right hand.

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The womb of the virgin took it, and she received conception and gave birth. So the virgin became a mother with great mercies, and she labored and bore the son but without pain, because it did not occur without purpose.

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And she did not require a midwife, because he caused her to give life. She brought forth like a strong man with desire, and she bore according to the manifestation, and she acquired according to the great power.

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And she loved with redemption, and guarded with kindness, and declared with grandeur. Hallelujah. There's the Odes of Solomon.

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Sound a little bit different than the Bible, for some not overly odd and strange reason. How about the

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Ascension of Isaiah? After two months of days while Joseph was in his house and Mary his wife, but both alone, it came about when they were alone that Mary then looked with her eyes and saw a small infant, and she was astounded.

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And after astonishment had worn off, her womb was found as it was at first, before she had conceived.

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And when her husband Joseph said to her, What has made you astounded? His eyes were opened, and he saw the infant, and praised the

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Lord, because the Lord had come in his lot. So Jesus just appears.

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Mothers generally when they see their babies don't go, What happened? They know what happened. But Mary, there's no birth, there's no pain.

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And here we have the Protevangelium of James, and I don't have time to go through all of it. And immediately the cloud disappeared out of the cave, and a great light shone the cave, so that the eyes could not bear it, and in little that light gradually decreased until the infant appeared, and went and took the breast from his mother

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Mary. So, I won't even go into what the rest of it says, because it goes into a very graphic description of examining

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Mary to make sure she's still a virgin. These are the earliest sources of these beliefs. They are not

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Orthodox sources. They are not Biblical sources. And when you don't believe in Sola Scriptura, they become sources of dogma that you then force upon the text of Scripture.

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The Trinity is authentic Christian teaching. It is based upon sound principles of pan -canonical

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Biblical interpretation. You can go from Genesis to Revelation and find the

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Biblical teaching consistent with the doctrine of the Trinity. It is necessarily contained in the very words of Scripture.

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You cannot make sense out of what the Bible teaches if you don't understand the doctrine of the

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Trinity. It is found in the most ancient Christian sources after the New Testament period. Ignatius of Antioch, high

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Christology about the one physician of God and of flesh born of Mary, so on and so forth.

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There is authentic Christian teaching. In contrast to that, the Marian doctrines of Rome are not authentic Christian teaching.

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No meaningful form of exegesis leads us to conclude these doctrines are true, and we will see that as we go through this evening.

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History shows these doctrines developed either from non -Orthodox sources, as the Odes of Solomon, or developed centuries and even a millennia after the time of the

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Apostles, where you start putting together all these definitions where you've got this doctrine, this doctrine, this doctrine. You put them together.

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Oh, that must mean this, and that must mean this. And you build this huge edifice based upon nothing that is

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Theanistos, nothing that is God -breathed whatsoever. So, my friends, this evening, as we consider what is authentic Christian doctrine, we have to ask ourselves the question, how do you know what that is?

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I say to you, we have what God has given to us, and that which is Theanistos, that which is

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God -breathed. And it is clear and publicly known. Rome says, well, we have this tradition.

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We have these two sources. And if you ask me to define for you what tradition is,

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I can't. Because nobody knows. These doctrines were not known for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

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Men lived and died preaching the word of God. Never said a word about these things. How can that be authentic Christian teaching?

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Oh, but that's Theanistos as well, but you can't tell us what it is. You can't show us this alleged revelation.

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This tradition. You see, we have sola scriptura, and we have sola ecclesia.

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The church tells us what scripture is, and what it means, what tradition is, and what tradition means, and fundamentally, when you boil it all down, it's because the church says so.

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That's the issue we're facing this evening. Thank you for your attention. Give me a second,

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I've got a... Somebody didn't get all of his work done in his 20 minutes.

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It's true. Not as experienced as you, Dr. White. You've got 30 years on me. And he's using my computer too.

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Well, thank you, Sonny, I appreciate that. Excuse me while I do this and adjust my dentures, okay?

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Which one is it again here? Oh, by the way, don't just pull it straight out, because it left your file in my thing, it almost crashed it.

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Which one is it? So while I sort that out, what's coming next is the rebuttal period, so they're each going to have 15 minutes to respond to the unobserving presentation, so when we've got that one loaded up,

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Peter P. Williams will then come and give the rebuttal. Did I...?

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I think I survived. Well, ladies and gentlemen,

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I'm just going to quickly finish off, as I said, the ending of my beginning presentation. We see the idea of Our Lady as Panagia, as the all -holy.

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That's something which we very much see in, as I say, the Ascension of Isaiah, Odes of Solomon. Now, these are evidences of early belief.

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They are not evidences of orthodox writing. They don't claim that they're orthodox writings. All they are are basically like fan fiction in the early church.

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They are tinged with some dodgy ideas, as we saw. But these are Gnosticistic texts. They're not ever in any way expounding doctrines that are formally

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Gnostic as they became later on. That really would be anachronistic to read that into. They are Gnosticistic, but they are evidence not only of the ideas that are around in the

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Christian milieu, some of which are Gnosticistic and some of which are orthodox, but because of that we have to analyse them and show, hang on, which ones are in continuity with what came later, later belief by the later

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Christians, or what was rejected as heretical. The Gnostic stuff was rejected as heretical. The ideas about Our Lady as ever virgin and the idea of her as panagia, as all holy, which leads on to the

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Immaculate Conception, those are things that are very much accepted. And again, this is something which has gone through a magisterial development.

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Now, Dr White made very much great hay about the idea of the Immaculate Conception being a later development. I admit it.

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It certainly is a later development. And I have not the foggiest problem with that. Because as a

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Christian, as a Catholic, I don't believe that every true doctrine needs to have come to us from the earlier sources.

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The earlier sources are by definition scanty. We have less and less evidence as we go back through time. What interests me are two things.

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Is this continually believed by the early church? Is it believed as a consistent build -up?

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And is it something that becomes part of what's called the census fidelium? In other words, the census of the faithful. Is it accepted by the church

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Catholic overall? And it is. Now, with regards to the Immaculate Conception, that is an exception to the church

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Catholic bit for the first thousand years. Mainly because it develops in the West. Why does it develop in the

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West? Well, it develops in the West because we're the ones who developed the idea of original sin. In the East, they have an idea of ancestral sin.

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They define the idea of the false somewhat differently. So for them, it doesn't really come up as to whether or not Our Lady was ever pure from her conception onwards or was preserved from original sin in her conception.

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That's a debate that comes up in the West. But it's a debate that comes up through true premises. The true premise of original sin, which

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Dr. White and I would largely agree on. The true development of the idea that Our Lady is panagia is something which all

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Christians are sexually, apart from the Assyrians, as we will see, believe. So these are things that do build up over time, but they are legitimate developments from true premises.

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If they're true premises, then the doctrine itself is true. I'll very briefly mention this. The idea of the comese teis peotikou, which includes the anapese.

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Sorry, but that is all come together because that's what happens to Greek when you transfer it from computer to computer. The idea that Our Lady was assumed body and soul into heaven is something which we probably find about 350

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AD by St. Apophanius of Salamis in his Panarion, when he mentions that he compares Our Lady to Elijah, and he says that she was taken up.

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This was around 350 AD. But yes, this is not something which we see a great deal of detail about, right up until about the 6th century.

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Then, what we see are liturgical developments. We see in the East particularly, there is a growing consensus of the idea that Our Lady is indeed assumed as part of her coimesis, as part of her dormition, or going to sleep, which includes her death in the

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East, and it's more debated later on in the West. None of this, none of what

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I've just said, both in my beginning speech and my speech now, my rebuttal, none of this is specifically

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Roman. This is universal. The Eastern, that is the Greek and descended Eastern European churches, the

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Eastern Orthodox as we would say, and the Oriental Orthodox, the Coptics, the Syriacs, the Armenians, the

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Ethiopians, all these non -Catholic particular churches all accept Our Lady as Theotokos.

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They give her Hyperdulia. They accept her as a Parthenos, that is to say, ever -virgin.

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They accept her as Panagia, that is to say that they believe that she is a sinless, that she never sinned, though they don't, again, believe in the

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Immaculate Conception, because that's a Western development later on. And they affirm the Epnepsis Theotokos.

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So, in other words, they accept the assumption. The assumption is something they don't debate at all. They don't see that as heresy, they don't see it as an error, they don't see it as a

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Western development or as a later innovation. They just accept it. And this is all despite the schisms that happen in these cases.

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The Oriental Orthodox break away from the Church Catholic in 451 AD, and yet they accept, they have no reason to accept

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Catholic Mariology for any other reason, but they do. They accept every single part of it, apart from, again, the

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Immaculate Conception, which I happily admit is a Western development. And then 1054 AD, again, the Eastern Orthodox break away.

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They actually don't like the fact that we Latins define things too much, but it doesn't stop them from believing pretty much the whole content of what we do believe.

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Now, in my remaining time I want to deal with what Dr. White has just said. He was absolutely right to point out, as I pointed out at the very beginning of my speech, that the key issue here is one of epistemology.

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He believes in Sola Scriptura, that Scripture is the sole, ultimate, and sufficient rule of faith.

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Well, I don't. And again, I would show why that is false, simply by looking at the canon illustration, which

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I will now call the canon argument. First premise, the canon is a necessary theological datum.

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We need to know what the canon is. After all, the Scriptures are necessary. We need to know what the Scriptures are. We need the

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Scriptures. If we need the Scriptures, we need to know what constitutes the Scriptures. So it's a necessary theological datum.

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If it's a necessary theological datum, then if the Scriptures are sufficient, they should be sufficient to give us this necessary theological datum.

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Can they give us this necessary theological datum? No, they can not. There is nowhere in the

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Scriptures where you have an inspired contents page, or a golden index. What instead you find is that the canon is, again, a tradition.

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It is one accepted. It's debated within the early church. Of course, they debated the text at the very back of your

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Bible that's more or less known as the Antilogomenus, or Hebrews onwards. That's why they're at the back of your Bible, by the way.

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The reason why they debated them is because some of them didn't know whether or not they were entirely consistent or apostolic in origin.

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In fact, Syriac Orthodox had a very limited canon up until quite a while ago. So the idea is that the canon is not something that we find in Scripture, but it's a necessary theological datum.

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So therefore, I think that proves that Scripture is not sufficient. You need to go further than it. You need to accept the true apostolic, or indeed just early, traditions that come from the apostolic church than the early church itself.

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Sola Ecclesiae. We have heard this claim of, oh, you believe in Sola Ecclesiae. In other words, you just believe that Rome defines what the

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Scriptures are. Rome defines what the Scripture says. Well, if that's true, then Dr.

55:28

White doesn't believe in Sola Ecclesiae, Sola Scripturae, any more than I do. He believes in Sola Alba. Dr. White defines what the

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Scriptures are. Dr. White defines what the Scriptures say. He leaves it up to his own tradition and his own understanding, his own permanuity.

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He just rejects the one of the church catholic. So again, if that's true, then none of us believe in Sola Scripturae.

55:48

Actually, as it happens, what the church catholic does is it accepts passively what we know from the early church, what we know through history, and what we know from the census of Delia, what we know is defined by the census of Delia over time.

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The idea that, oh, well, dogmas like the Immaculate Conception, they only come up in the 1850s and the 1950s for the assumption, so how can this be the apostolic doctrine?

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Well, there again, developments, not insofar as with the assumption, something which is developed later by working out the logic of the data of revelation, the data of Scripture and tradition, which is what the

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Immaculate Conception is, but rather they are things that we know more certainly in the future than we do in the past.

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That's exactly what happens in the accounts of Nicaea. When we have the definition of the Trinity, I'm not saying that the

56:34

Trinity was defined at 325 AD and nobody believed it before then, but in specific articulation at that point, that was when it became higher than what it was before, as a dogmatic definition, something that you could definitionally not believe in, unless you subscribed, definitely not be a

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Christian, unless you subscribed to that specific definition. That's what the Church does over time. As it encounters error, it defines more and more and more and more of the deposit of faith.

57:02

That's all it really means. To say that something is a dogmatic definition doesn't mean, okay, we didn't believe this before, but now we are, now we are going to believe it.

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It's the idea that no, we did believe this before, or at least we had some doubts about it. Maculate Conception, very much debated between the

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Franciscans and the Dominicans. Franciscans, very much in favour of the Dominicans think, well, how does this work with the idea that Our Lady is saved by Our Lord?

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This was the legitimate Catholic debate a thousand years ago. But over time, the Church becomes more and more convinced of a particular conclusion.

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So does the Census Vidalian. So do the average Christians. It becomes a feast, it becomes something which is liturgically celebrated more and more, and after that, when the

57:38

Church accepts that this has just become the consensus now, then, she says, the Holy Spirit has guided the

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Church, through the Census Vidalian, to accept this over time. And that was precisely the argument that was had.

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The early Church Fathers disagreed over many of these doctrines, by the way. Of course they did, Dr White's point there.

57:55

Absolutely. Had me to admit that. Specifically, there were some early

58:02

Church Fathers who did not believe that Our Lady was entirely sinless. That's very early. That then becomes a debate that's settled later on, until it becomes very much a consensus in the second half of the first millennium.

58:12

Again, the Amatriconception and Western Development. The Assumption is something which is steadily more and more.

58:17

It's actually not particularly disagreed over in the late first millennium, but then it's accepted. It becomes liturgical consensus, and then it becomes doctrinal consensus, as it is now in the three

58:26

Apostolic Churches, the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox, all independently of each other.

58:34

We were told that typological interpretations can deliver us anything. No, they can't.

58:41

That which can be asserted gratuitously may be denied gratuitously. You can't get anything from typological interpretation, ladies and gentlemen.

58:49

And I do wonder what people like Dr White would say to Our Lord. Well, you know, Jonah, really, the whale, really, that's a type of the

58:58

Resurrection, really? I mean, it's a bit weak, isn't it, Our Lord? No, I don't think he would want to say that.

59:04

But I think that what I did show in my opening presentation is that the parallels with Our Lady within 2

59:10

Samuel 6 to Luke 2 are so clear that you really have to do a bit more work to actually try to say, no, no, no, this can't be true.

59:19

It's either true, or it's a complete coincidence. I guess that's the only conclusion you could otherwise come to. We also heard that there are

59:27

Orthodox sources that condemned this, or that contradicted it. Again, very much debated within the early church.

59:34

I don't have a problem with that at all. But nonetheless, these are things that become the census fidelium over time, as I've already pointed out.

59:41

True doctrine is not something that we see purely in the apostolic age. It's not something that we only see explicitly defined from the early church onwards.

59:49

We don't find a totally set idea of church teaching throughout the entire first millennium and the second millennium.

59:55

For some things, we do. The Trinity is a great example. Dr. White very handily went to the highest possible form of doctrine before comparing it to a lower form of doctrine, which is

01:00:03

Mariology. In fact, Mariology depends entirely on Christology. Mariology is the handmaid to Christology.

01:00:08

In fact, it was developed, indeed, to affirm Christology. Mariology is Christocentric in that sense.

01:00:16

We're very happy to affirm that. But so was. Again, what I'm saying is, I don't need to find everything in the scripture.

01:00:23

That's his epistemology, not mine, and it's one that we've just seen is completely false. Only one thing

01:00:28

I'll bring up before I... Maybe two or three things I'll bring up before I end. Dr. White mentioned 2 Timothy 3 16 17 as affirming the idea of self -scripture.

01:00:36

I don't think it does. It says, all scripture is God -breathed, yes, and is what?

01:00:43

Profitable. Profitable. Not sufficient. Profitable for what? Teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness.

01:00:50

It's profitable for those things, and it's those things that make you complete and fully equipped. It doesn't say all scripture is

01:00:56

God -breathed and makes you complete and fully equipped. It says, all scripture is profitable for these things, and it's these things that make you complete and fully equipped.

01:01:03

So yes, absolutely. But as we've seen with the canon, clearly, being fully equipped and complete means you have all necessary theological data.

01:01:12

Clearly not. Clearly the scriptures aren't. And if reason is going to be used in the interpretation of scripture, as I think it must, then we cannot see the doctrine of soul scripture being derived from 2

01:01:22

Timothy 3, 16 to 17. We simply can't. I think that's about it.

01:01:30

So what I want to say simply is simply this, in conclusion. When we take into account all that holy scripture has to say, tota scriptura, when we actually take into account the entire depth of scripture, including its typological interpretations, which

01:01:44

Dr. Wyke has effectively ignored and dismissed without actually critically examining, when we accept the harmony between this and the consistent

01:01:51

Christian tradition, one which is debated absolutely, but which has a consensus eventually, including the legitimate development of the data of revelation, the truth of the doctrine of original sin, versus the truth that Our Lady is in fact saved by Our Lord, again something debated in the early church, in the medieval church, and then finally decided over time, we see that the

01:02:13

Catholic doctrines on Mary are indeed authentic Christian teaching because it is only that triumvirate, it is only by seeing holy scripture and sacred tradition, holy scripture in the light of sacred tradition and sacred tradition in the light of holy scripture, and then seeing the church catholic over time develop a sense of spadalia of what is in fact true doctrine.

01:02:33

That is exactly what we see with the canon, that is exactly what we see with the Trinity, that is exactly what we see with mariological truths.

01:02:39

All of those things together bring us authentic Christian doctrine. Demonstrably, scripture alone cannot, and it is for that reason, for all the things that we see within scripture, tradition, and the magisterium itself, over time, that we can affirm the catholic doctrines on Mary as authentic Christian doctrine.

01:02:56

Regina Sanctissima Rosaria Fitami, Oropronis. Thank you.

01:03:03

Just a second.

01:03:23

There you go. Could we turn the projector off?

01:03:55

Now since he used my computer, I get five extra minutes, right? No, I'm sorry. It's just value added tax.

01:04:02

You all know about that. The consensus fidelium.

01:04:10

What Rome teaches you to believe. What Rome says to believe. Rome's defined it, and therefore it's decided.

01:04:19

That's what you just heard. I hope you're listening very, very carefully, because it's coming at you pretty fast and heavy, but only in a debate with Roman Catholicism can you come to the point where in debating doctrines and dogmas unknown for a thousand years in the church that the primary defense is to try to say you can't know what the canon is unless we tell you.

01:04:44

And remember something, folks. Rome did not give a dogmatic definition of the canon until the council of Trent in the middle of the 16th century.

01:04:54

Until the middle of the 16th century. There was no finalized dogmatic canon.

01:05:00

And even then she got it wrong. Especially in regards to the apocryphal books. Just go back and ask

01:05:05

Jerome and a few other people about where they messed up on that one. And so you're left with this amazing situation where we're talking about dogmas that when the by the way,

01:05:18

Epiphanius had nothing to do, had no concept of the idea of bodily assumption as it's defined by Rome today. What happens is once you've got these dogmas, you start looking at the early church and you start reading everything they said in light of what you're told they should have believed.

01:05:32

And you start seeing things in them that were never there in the first place. The first, even according to Roman Catholic writers, the first genuine appearance of any kind of assumption narrative is in the

01:05:42

Transylvian Maria literature of the 5th and 6th centuries which was placed upon what would be called today the index prohibitorum, the index of prohibited books by the

01:05:51

Pope as heretical. That's the first place it appears. And yet today we were just told, well this is a lesser theology.

01:05:59

Lesser theology, that's very, very interesting. What is a lesser theology dogma?

01:06:06

Because the dogma is de fide, by faith to be in communion with the one holy apostolic church, you have to believe these things.

01:06:16

Now I realize a lot of Roman Catholics today don't actually believe these things. But that's what the

01:06:21

Pope said in defining these things, in defining the immaculate conception, defining the bodily assumption. These are dogmas.

01:06:28

So they are lesser dogmas. They are lesser definitional things. That's a new one on me.

01:06:35

I've debated this subject a few times before and one of my previous Roman Catholic debate opponents said that we have the same epistological warrant for believing the bodily assumption as the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

01:06:45

It came from the church. The church tells you to believe it, so you believe it. Well, okay. If that's the case, then we need to have a very firm foundation for these things.

01:06:55

So we were told, well, you see, Sola Scriptura can't work because of the canon. Well, the problem with that is that it assumes the canon is a tradition.

01:07:03

It's not. The canon is an artifact of revelation. As long as God inspires one book and not all books, the canon will automatically exist.

01:07:10

And the early church fathers did not believe that they had the power to define these things. They passively received what God had done.

01:07:16

Not some type of tradition. Which of the apostles? Was it John? Was it John that came up with the canon?

01:07:21

No one knows. The Roman Catholic Church doesn't know. They can't tell you these things. They'll say, well, it's a tradition.

01:07:27

Don't tell us who passed it down. We can't answer any of those questions. Just believe us when we tell you that this is what the tradition was.

01:07:34

And yet, I can show you all sorts of people, including popes that contradicted what the Council of Trent said about the canon. So much for that being the example.

01:07:42

The Trinity is a tradition passed down? No, the Trinity is the direct absolute revelation of Scripture itself.

01:07:50

It's exactly what the doctrine of the Trinity is. Some of us have even written entire books defining and defending the doctrine of the

01:07:56

Trinity from the Bible. Because you can do that. You can't do that with the

01:08:01

Marian dogmas. It's not possible to do. Now, we heard an attempted refutation of my claim of sola ecclesia.

01:08:10

Let me explain to you. And if you listen very carefully, here's my assertion. The more the

01:08:16

Roman Catholic tries to deny sola ecclesia, the more they prove it. And you just heard that.

01:08:23

At the end, you were just told, well, in reality, once you have Scripture in light of tradition, and tradition in light of Scripture, and the magisterium, and the church, and the consensus, what is that?

01:08:35

What is being said there? You see, to go after the canon is to admit that you cannot prove these doctrines and these teachings from Scripture.

01:08:48

That the apostles evidently, in writing that which is God breathed, never thought it important enough to give us this information.

01:08:56

And century after century after century of men and women of God passed by without anybody thinking that, well, you know, we really need to know these things.

01:09:04

It was only just recently that there became, that people started disputing these things?

01:09:10

No, people didn't believe these things before this time period. I've given you citations.

01:09:15

What about those early church fathers that said, Mary sinned? Do you believe in the

01:09:21

Immaculate Conception? If you believe, Mary sinned? Why was there even a debate about Jesus' brothers and sisters, or people saying they were cousins, or something like that?

01:09:33

Why was there even a debate? Because there were different views. And what was the real motivation?

01:09:38

Was it deeper study of Scripture? Or was it the rise of monasticism and unbiblical view of sexuality that became a real problem in the medieval ages?

01:09:48

That's what it was. It was the pressure of the rise of monasticism that was the primary motivating factor in all these things.

01:09:56

But there were still, there were early church fathers, well -known early church fathers that plainly taught contrary.

01:10:03

There were bishops of Rome that plainly taught contrary against what has now become the defined dogma of the church.

01:10:11

That creates a contradiction. And when the church claims to be infallible, then what does the church have to do?

01:10:19

Well, if she now teaches X, and it's very plain in the past that not X was taught, then now the church has to define what

01:10:27

Scripture is, what it teaches, and what tradition is, and what is not tradition. So those people who said those things, yeah, okay, they had debates, but it eventually got worked out.

01:10:37

Well, that means it's not apostolic, right? I mean, I'm going to have to ask during the cross -examination, but I've been told over and over and over again in my debates with Roman Catholics that we need to be obeying what

01:10:49

Paul said when he said, hold to the traditions which are taught to you by word of mouth or by letter.

01:10:55

That's Scripture and the oral tradition. That's not what I've heard this evening.

01:11:01

That's not what I'm hearing right now. Because if that's your presentation, and that's what's been presented to me,

01:11:06

I can name names. People who said, see, you Protestants, you're not doing that.

01:11:12

And I simply turn around and say, you Roman Catholics, if you claim that the apostles taught these things, then prove it.

01:11:21

Give me the lineage. Give me the documentation in history. And you can't do it.

01:11:28

And so now it's almost like I'm hearing, well, no, the apostles didn't teach these things. But it's come about over time where, you know, it's reflection.

01:11:38

Reflection on what? Personally, I don't want to reflect on the Odes of Solomon. I don't want to reflect on the

01:11:44

Protevangelium of James or the Ascension of Isaiah. I've had to read them because I teach church history.

01:11:50

I've had to read a lot of stuff that I didn't want to read. But I don't want to reflect upon These doctrines do not come about by reflection upon Scripture.

01:12:03

They do not come about by reflection upon an exegesis of the depth of Scripture. Let me read a couple things to you.

01:12:13

Pope Pius XII said, He, the Son of God, reflects on His Heavenly Mother the glory, the majesty, and the dominion of His kingship.

01:12:24

For having been associated with the king of martyrs in the ineffable work of human redemption as mother and co -operative, she remains forever associated with Him with an almost unlimited power in the distribution of the graces which flow from redemption.

01:12:38

Jesus is King throughout all eternity by nature and by right of conquest. Through Him, with Him, and subordinate to Him, Mary is

01:12:45

Queen by grace, by divine relationship, by right of conquest, and by singular election. And her kingdom is as vast as that of her

01:12:53

Son and God, since nothing is excluded from her dominion. And this queenship of hers is essentially maternal, exclusively beneficent.

01:13:02

John Paul II said, Mary is the Mother of Mercy because it is to her that Jesus entrusts His Church and all humanity.

01:13:11

Now, my friends, if you take the time to consider what was just happening this past weekend, if you take the time to listen to what

01:13:22

Roman Catholicism is saying when it talks about Mary, if you take the time to read the prayers, then you discover this is not just simply some kind of lesser theology.

01:13:34

This impacts the very Gospel itself because there is a very purposeful paralleling in Mary of the unique offices of Jesus.

01:13:46

I want to read you a prayer. I read it, some of you heard me read it on Unbelievable recently.

01:13:52

Let me see if I can find it. This is why this is important, my friends. O Mother of perpetual help,

01:13:58

Thou art the dispenser of all the goods which God grants to us miserable sinners, and for this reason He has made Thee so powerful, so rich and so bountiful, that Thou mayest help us in our misery.

01:14:07

Thou art the advocate of the most wretched and abandoned sinners who have recourse to Thee. Come then to my help, dearest Mother, for I recommend myself to Thee.

01:14:14

In Thy hands I place my eternal salvation. To Thee I do entrust my soul. Count me among Thy most devoted servants.

01:14:20

Take me under Thy protection, and it is enough for me. For if Thou protect me, dear Mother, I fear nothing, not from my sins, because Thou wilt obtain for me the pardon of them, nor from the devils, because Thou art more powerful than all hell together, nor even from Jesus, my judge himself, because by one prayer from Thee he will be appeased.

01:14:38

But one thing I fear, that in the hour of temptation I may neglect to call on Thee, and thus perish miserably.

01:14:43

Obtain for me then the pardon of my sins, love for Jesus, final perseverance in the grace, always to have recourse to Thee, O Mother of perpetual help."

01:14:51

This reflects a belief about Mary that is not

01:14:57

Christian teaching and Christian doctrine. It is fundamentally corrosive to a proper understanding of the centrality of Jesus Christ.

01:15:09

If you can pray that prayer and think that you need to be protected from Jesus as your judge, you do not know the

01:15:15

Jesus of the Bible. That's why this is important. That's why this cannot just simply be, well, you know, there's this development over time and, you know, it's not that they didn't believe this before.

01:15:25

No, they didn't believe it before. They taught opposite to it before. But things have changed.

01:15:32

And it wasn't due to reflection upon passages of Scripture. There aren't any passages of Scripture to reflect upon.

01:15:40

The sources and origins, not Biblical. The forces that brought these things about did not come about from the

01:15:49

Scripture. The rise of monasticism, the concept of priestly abstinence and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

01:15:56

Again, nothing that could be identified as actually being apostolic. So you must, you must come to the point of saying, well, then the

01:16:06

Scriptures just must not be enough because we know these things are true. I truly am heartbroken when

01:16:16

I see the division that exists between us today represented this evening.

01:16:23

I truly am. I happen to like that guy. That's a bummer. Believe me, some of the guys are debated.

01:16:30

I didn't really know. I wish we had unity.

01:16:38

We believe a lot of the same things. We recognize the horrific plague upon our culture of the murder of unborn children and we recognize that God made us male and female and that's a good thing.

01:16:51

Can we still say that here? I'm not sure. There are some European countries. I'm not so sure about that.

01:16:59

But we don't have unity and tonight shows it. We don't have unity because we don't have the same source of authority.

01:17:06

We don't have unity because when I read words like this I recognize that there is something fundamentally in contradiction about what we believe, about how we have peace with God.

01:17:17

If we were debating the mass and transubstantiation and priestly evolution and all the rest of those things, those things would come out clearly and it would all keep coming back to the same thing.

01:17:27

It would all keep coming back to can you hold the Roman Catholic Church accountable for what is found in the exegesis of Scripture?

01:17:35

That's what it always comes back to. Many of my fellow Protestants have decided that the pressures of society are enough to decide that these things are just no -go areas where I can talk about this anymore.

01:17:49

In fact, we're wasting our time. There's a lot of people who think we're wasting our time tonight, on both sides. We really do. What I like about this guy is he recognizes this isn't a waste of time because we can't ignore this.

01:18:02

We can't pretend that this division does not exist. It does exist and the only way to deal with it is to talk about it firmly without compromise but I hope in love,

01:18:16

I hope you recognize that I'm not here with anger in my heart. My heart is broken that we have this division and I care about Peter and I care about the

01:18:27

Roman Catholics in this audience but if I really do care for you, then I will not take from you the one thing you really need to know and that is that Scripture is sufficient and its message is clear and I want to call you to understand what it says this evening in this subject and the subject of the

01:18:44

Gospel in a broader sense as well. Thank you very much. Keep one and he can have one.

01:18:58

Let's have him. Dr. White, I like you too by the way.

01:19:07

Before we get too soppy however, is

01:19:12

Scripture necessary? Necessary for what? For man's life, faith, hope and salvation in the words of the

01:19:22

London Baptist Confession of Faith. Yes, I obviously believe Scripture is necessary in God's sovereign providence as to how he wants to bring about his own glory, yes.

01:19:31

So if we need the Scripture then we need to know what the Scripture is, right? Yes. Okay. Where in Scripture does it give us that information?

01:19:38

If Scripture is indeed sufficient to give us all that we need? Well again, you're assuming that the canon is a tradition and I, whoops

01:19:46

I didn't start my timer, I'm sorry, and as I just pointed out very briefly I think you're misunderstanding what the canon is.

01:19:53

It's a theological data though, right? The canon is an artifact of inspiration because God inspired at least one book and not all books, the canon exists of necessity.

01:20:06

And as I explained in my book, then God reveals to his church passively, not through some divine revelation, that which is necessary for us to be able to possess what

01:20:17

God wants us to have. So Jesus could hold men accountable to Scripture because it was given with enough clarity to do so.

01:20:25

Yeah, but it's still a datum of revelation nonetheless. I see, I'll do this little prelude to my question which is that I see the canon -object -artifact distinction as a distinction without a difference.

01:20:36

We're still talking about information that we need, and the claim of Sola Scriptura is that everything that we need, in terms of theological data, can be found within Scripture.

01:20:45

So whether it's an artifact, what you're giving me in other words is an ontological answer to an epistemological question.

01:20:51

No, I'm just pointing out that your epistemological question ignores the ontological nature of the canon. Well, the ontological nature isn't relevant to the fact that it's an epistemological question, and that's the problem.

01:21:02

So, okay, well I'll go on from that because we might hear a little bit more in the rebuttal period on that point then.

01:21:08

Does it not strike you as odd that after 1500 years, the entire church pretty much, apart from the

01:21:16

Assyrians, I'll give you the Assyrian Church of the East. The Assyrian Church of the East denied that Our Lady was

01:21:21

Theodokos, and for that reason their development of Mariology is extremely limited. So that's the only other ancient parallel that Protestants probably have.

01:21:28

Is it not odd to you though that in the rest of the in other words Chalcedonian world in every single church they developed this idea of a high

01:21:37

Mariology, in other words the idea of Hyperdulia, the idea that Our Lady is Theodokos and therefore to be praised and to be asked for intercession.

01:21:46

How is that possible when the entire Christian world does this? Well again, you're assuming a uniformity that I just don't see in existence.

01:21:56

You can talk in rather vague generalities about a high Mariology and there certainly was, but it did develop over time.

01:22:04

It was not something that was universal and you're not including things that have been defined dogmatically by Rome since that point in time, which

01:22:12

I don't know if you, when you say these are minor or less major theology,

01:22:17

I don't even understand what that means to be very honest with you, but I think that the entire corpus of the

01:22:24

Marian dogmas has to be seen as a whole. It can't be taken in just little bits and pieces.

01:22:31

Bodily assumption, who in the days of the Reformation, no reformer ever mentions it, because it wasn't being promoted.

01:22:38

Are you as certain of your views on say, morality as you are on your views on the

01:22:44

Trinity? I'm not sure, morality of what?

01:22:51

Morality of supporting certain London football teams, that would be one area. Well that's a very high dogma

01:22:57

I give you. But if you mean morality as in revelation of God's law, no.

01:23:08

So you don't know as far as you're concerned the teachings against murder as certainly as you know the teaching on the

01:23:16

Trinity? No, I would not say that. Well, God revealed thou shalt not murder before the revelation of the

01:23:24

Trinity took place. Right, so if it's revealed, and it's certainly revealed, then you know it with equal certainty.

01:23:30

You do the Trinity, right? Surely? That's what I just said. So you're saying that you know the ethics that are there within Scripture very clearly on an equal basis with the

01:23:40

Trinity. There's an equal epistemic warrant, right? Right. Okay, good. Would you say that the Trinity is, that those moral issues are as important as the doctrine of the

01:23:49

Trinity? Important to God's self -revelation or to his working out of his glory in this world?

01:23:58

I see category problems there. Because obviously the doctrine of the Trinity is on one level more important than anything that takes place within this world.

01:24:06

Because God didn't have to create this world. So it's not a necessary thing. The Trinity is. So I see a category problem with the question.

01:24:14

Okay. With regards to the typology that we saw, when we see the, for example, a parallel of how can the

01:24:21

Ark of the Lord come unto me that David says with how is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me, when you find that the

01:24:29

Ark of the Lord remains in the house of David in the Gittite for three months, Mary remains with the house of Zechariah for three months, things like this.

01:24:36

You think this is all sheer coincidence? This is all just meh. No, even if Luke is, and by the way, there's a lot of presentations out there that say similar language is used, and in fact it wasn't.

01:24:46

But even if it was Luke's intention to draw these parallels, the conclusions would have to be brought out by Luke and the apostles.

01:24:55

And the conclusions that have been derived from these things, hundreds or even thousands of years later, that's the problem.

01:25:03

It's not, well look, it's the New Testament's intention to indicate something, by the way, all of those would be about Jesus, not about Mary.

01:25:13

And yet, I was just reading you stuff about Mary as Queen of Heaven, whose kingdom is as vast as the universe, and you really think that those parallels are meant to communicate that?

01:25:23

I say, that's where the problem is. Because for me, when Mary is called, for example, how many

01:25:30

Protestants have you talked with and debated who plainly confess that Mary is

01:25:37

Theotokos? I'm not asking, it's a rhetorical question. I recognize the propriety of the utilization of that terminology, but I recognize that that initially was about Jesus.

01:25:50

It was not an exaltative about Mary. So I'm saying the same thing with Luke or anything else.

01:26:00

So why do you think Luke did include these allusions within the text? Well, if he were attempting to draw any type of parallel, it would be to exalt

01:26:11

Jesus. Just as Matthew, for example, in his genealogies, he plays the genealogies to break them into sections of seven.

01:26:21

Well, why was he doing that? Because his audience would find that to be relevant. But it was about Jesus. It wasn't about Mary.

01:26:27

There's no follow -up by Luke. There's no follow -up in Acts. If that was his intention to do what

01:26:35

Rome has done with that, why don't we see Mary in Acts? Well, we do. We see her in Acts 1.

01:26:42

I know, but then she disappears. Yeah. There's the very expansion of the church, and Mary is nowhere to be found.

01:26:50

Why would that be? Does that not presuppose solid scripture? In other words, you're presupposing that if they want to communicate these things, they would be explicitly giving them all throughout the whole scripture.

01:26:58

No, it doesn't. The point is, you're asking me to speculate about Luke's intentions. The only way

01:27:04

I can speculate about Luke's intentions is to look at what Luke wrote. We only know two things Luke wrote. If it's

01:27:11

Luke's intention at the beginning of Luke to say these magnificent things about Mary, did he just sort of forget to finish the story up?

01:27:19

Or just what? Surely he gave us typological foundations therein that he knew the readers would pick up on.

01:27:25

He assumed that the readers were going to know the Old Testament really well. One assumes, right? So therefore, they'll pick out these parallels, and they will unpack them.

01:27:33

Is that a question? Yeah. I'm asking you to comment on what I just said. I don't really talk as if I'm asking a question.

01:27:41

I'm not really. Just put a question mark at the end so I can say something. Obviously, you're now assuming what

01:27:49

Luke was intending to do. My point is, when you determine that, I think that the canon of scripture determines what

01:27:57

Luke's intentions were, not a council from 1950 years later. Why do you think it is that the early church fathers do unpack this stuff?

01:28:07

They have a higher Mariology than you do, at the very least. I grant, by the way, that yes, they do debate the doctrine of Panagia.

01:28:14

I grant that they don't believe in the Immaculate Conception. That's a later development. I grant that they debate the

01:28:20

Petral Virginity of Our Lady, although I have to say, much less than the Panagia stuff. There's a huge consensus for the upper virginity.

01:28:26

Nonetheless, why is it that you think the early church across the entire Christian diaspora, east and west, not localized in certain areas, like heresies generally tend to be, why do you think that came up?

01:28:39

Monasticism. Really? You would just assume it's all monasticism? I don't think you can underestimate the impact of the desert fathers and the rise of monasticism.

01:28:50

I don't think any church historian would ever be able to say that you can underestimate the impact of the rise of monasticism.

01:28:57

We're not debating that tonight, but if we were, it would be an interesting topic to debate because I've never heard anyone debate it.

01:29:05

The role of monasticism? I've actually never heard one. I've done one on the priesthood, but I've not done one on that.

01:29:11

As one who has taught church history, it does seem to me that that is one of the major influences, especially in regards to the rise of the dedication to the

01:29:21

Virgin Mary as the perfect example of the perfect woman, sexual purity, etc.

01:29:28

I think that's one of the primary issues. I could talk about external stuff that I would theorize was likewise part of it, but that to me is one of the most important issues.

01:29:38

What support, I guess, would you derive for your assertion of the role of monasticism?

01:29:44

There are so many fathers that do deal with these questions, these different dogmas. I've not read a necessary connection.

01:29:52

I just wonder if you... For example, when Philip Schaff goes through Jerome versus Helvidius in regards to hyparthenon, so on and so forth, he even says that the fundamental argument that Jerome presents is the impulse toward monasticism, that that is the primary thing that is at the heart of his argument.

01:30:13

So when you ask where these things come from, and you look at the early church fathers, you look at what their argumentation is, they're arguing from the propriety.

01:30:24

And that propriety is a scary argument, because I've seen it used and abused over and over and over again.

01:30:32

But they're arguing from the propriety based upon the concept of monastic impulse. With regards to these early texts, which

01:30:41

I don't base my argument firmly upon, by the way, the idea of the ascension of Isaiah or the oaths of Solomon and pre -evangelium of James, you think these are completely gnostic texts?

01:30:50

No, of course not. So you recognize that these are in fact within the Christian milieu, then? Well, milieu is just a wonderful word, especially when you say it.

01:30:59

It's such a wonderfully vague term. I mean, obviously it is being written within the context of someone who is attempting to say something about Jesus and say something nice about Jesus.

01:31:12

But personally, when you have phrases like great spirit and the

01:31:18

Holy Spirit is a she with a womb and the Father's breasts need to be milked, yeah,

01:31:23

I see some serious issues with stuff like that. So would I, just to put your mind at rest. But would you agree also, or would you agree, rather, that this is in fact because it is found within the

01:31:35

Christian milieu, it is evidence not only of the influences that were heretical at the time, but also other things.

01:31:40

So in other words, this is not a pure heretical treatise. This is in fact something which descriptively gives us something like fanfiction within that time that tells us, okay, here are the kind of beliefs that are going around that time.

01:31:53

Not simply a heretical tract written by a formal heresia. Yeah, I would say it's similar to Joel Osteen or something, yeah.

01:32:02

Well, that's just mean. Touché, huh? Well, look, if I actually think it's worse than Joel Osteen, to be fair to Joel Osteen.

01:32:12

That's true. Let's give Joel a shot there, yeah. In those bits that you cited. Yeah, that's quite true.

01:32:18

But no, look, here's my problem. If the idea is, well, yeah, but couldn't there be something true in there?

01:32:26

No, no, no, it's not about true insofar as, I don't think it's giving anything prescriptively. I think it's describing what we see, the ideas around there within the

01:32:34

Christian Review of its time. And it seems, therefore, to be evidence that, okay, here's this belief in that time.

01:32:40

I don't really see why, though, you would say, well, because there are also Gnostic beliefs in there, therefore it must just be damned by association.

01:32:47

Peter, Docetism. Docetism. Why does Jesus have to beam out of Mary?

01:32:54

Because he doesn't really have a physical body. Sure. That's not, though, the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.

01:33:02

The formal doctrine, as later explicated by Jerome and others, it has nothing to do with the beaming out of the womb.

01:33:08

But the idea that, actually, I don't really see that as a direct evidence of the perpetual virginity.

01:33:13

But nonetheless, my question in the last 50 seconds is surely these are nonetheless evidences that these are earlier ideas that are then later given much more explicit erudition when they're challenged in heretical thinking.

01:33:26

But the source of those ideas is the dualism that would allow

01:33:33

Jesus to be this, well, someone who the Gospels do not present him to be.

01:33:39

Quickly, why do you think that's a source? Why do you get the source as the dualism? Well, if I'm looking at a source that is talking about the

01:33:48

Great Spirit and the Father's breasts and the Holy Spirit as female, knowing what Gnosticism is about, then

01:33:55

I know they're going to have a problem with the reality of Jesus' true birth and his true humanity. And so they don't allow him to have a real birth.

01:34:03

And that's the problem. That's my time. Yes, I see that.

01:34:18

15 minutes for James to ask the questions. Alright, here we go. Alright, Peter.

01:34:26

Do I have to believe in the bodily assumption of Mary de

01:34:32

Fide to be in proper relationship with Christ, one and only true Church? If you know that that is true and you definitely disagree with it, or rather if you know that it's proposed for belief by the

01:34:42

Church and you definitely disagree with it, then you are making an act of formal heresy. So it's not the believing in and of itself that you need to have.

01:34:49

It's the act of believing in all these different doctrines is not a necessary minimum for salvation, such that unless you pass a theology exam, you're going to hell.

01:34:57

There are babies who have no conception of any of the developed doctrines of Christianity who were baptized and therefore will go to heaven by virtue of their baptism.

01:35:06

In Catholic theology, ergo, no, in that sense, but yes, insofar as if you're an intelligent adult and you've done the research and you know that this is proposed for belief and you reject it, then you are a formal heretic and that is a mortal sin.

01:35:20

Okay, so in the debate this evening, we are debating an issue of formal heresy if we disagree with this is going to sound almost like paperly pretentious, but with you.

01:35:32

With me? Yes. No, with the Church Catholic over time. I like to think that, you know,

01:35:37

I'm not that arrogant. Okay. That's why I said it sounds a little bit strange, but alright, so when you talk about these as you don't object to my calling them dogmas.

01:35:48

Yeah. They are dogmas of the Christian faith. Yes. Okay, so the foundation of these dogmas.

01:35:55

Dogmata strictly. Okay, dogmata. The foundation of this dogmata are not found in Scripture alone.

01:36:06

No. And yet when we look at tradition, we find numerous authors and writers writing in contradiction to these things.

01:36:19

So, how can you escape the accusation that I made of sola ecclesia, when you are saying it's not found in Scripture in the sense of we find parallels that we find convincing, but it's not derived from that, and we get to choose which of the early church fathers are actually carrying this tradition and which are not.

01:36:41

How can you avoid that this is fundamentally an argument in finality of hey,

01:36:47

Rome says so, just believe it. Well, very easily. For one thing, Rome alone doesn't say so. In fact, this is something which was believed by the church

01:36:54

Catholic. By the church Catholic, I mean the United Church prior to the schisms in 431 -451.

01:37:00

By the assumption, Immaculate Conception? No. No, I'm not saying that the Immaculate Conception is believed. I'm saying that certainly Apartheid certainly is.

01:37:08

Theotokos certainly is. The foundations of these various doctrines certainly are, and I would certainly say that the assumption is probably believed beginning around the 4th century, the

01:37:18

Immaculate Conception. That's a definite later development, but it's a true later development. What I'm saying is the church

01:37:24

Catholic believes these things either implicitly or explicitly over time, and Rome doesn't define them. These are things that are believed as much by the

01:37:31

Eastern Orthodox as much by the Oriental Orthodox who broke away from us and couldn't care less what the magisterium of the

01:37:36

Catholic Church in terms of the Pope and the bishops of the Catholic Church, Rome as you would call it, say.

01:37:41

These are things believed by them very consistently, and we accept that tradition developed over time as a passive process.

01:37:49

With Solus Ecclesiae, this is the way I see it, you seem to define Solus Ecclesiae as we or rather Rome, the current group of people within Rome, the bishops and the

01:37:58

Pope, etc., decide, right, I want to believe this, that, and the other, and I want to accept these, that, and those sources, and therefore that's what we're going to do.

01:38:05

As if there's total, immediate, revolutionary power within the Vatican right now. That's simply not the case.

01:38:11

What the church does is accept passively by tradition over time that which has been built up, developed, or simply is there straightforwardly in scripture and the sacred tradition on a consistent basis.

01:38:20

Okay, but we just shift the topics because, for example, you just said Eastern Orthodox believe in bodily assumption of marriage. No, they don't.

01:38:26

Yeah, they don't. They reject Rome's authority to have defined that as a dogma. So you're making the error of mixing dogma with belief.

01:38:37

Dogma is not... Yeah, one says it's a hell, the other one doesn't, so there is a little bit of difference. Dogma is not new belief.

01:38:43

What dogma is is the formalisation on an absolute level of that which we've already believed. I don't think that you said earlier on, as an illustration, as an answer to your question, that the

01:38:53

Catholic church only defined the canon in the Council of Trent. Well, if by that you mean that was the first extraordinary definition, yeah, okay, well actually

01:39:01

I think the Council of Farrara -Florence actually had that distinction, which was a century earlier, but nonetheless, even let's say it is in the

01:39:08

Council of Trent, that's not the first time we certainly believe in the Scriptures, or certainly that we first believe in the canon, it's simply the first time that it is, right, we've had people disagree with this, end of any debate, end of any potential for discussion on this level, we're now closing the door on that whole discussion.

01:39:24

Which Orthodoxy has not done with the assumption, right? The Eastern Orthodoxy doesn't define things dogmatically, generally speaking.

01:39:29

It doesn't like... Eastern Orthodox do not like to define things per se. They like to believe things as a mystery, as you probably know.

01:39:35

Whereas in the West, we generally like to define things very specifically, and actually that's something that Catholics and Protestants have in common.

01:39:40

So, yeah, I agree, the Eastern Orthodox have not dogmatically defined the assumption, but they definitely believe it, and if you go up to any

01:39:46

Eastern Orthodox church, on the Feast of the Quaimasis, they will tell you, yes, we believe that she was assumed into heaven.

01:39:53

What evidence, you just said that you actually believe that that was generally believed in the 4th or 5th century.

01:39:59

No, I don't think it's generally believed, I think we find the earliest example in the Panarian, and then I think what we find later is it becomes more and more popular.

01:40:06

Generally, through liturgical development, the Transtis Mariae is an example of beliefs that, again, much like the

01:40:12

Ascension of Isaiah, etc., these are essentially forms of developed very pious fiction that develop at that time, and they give us an insight into what, descriptively, was believed in the

01:40:23

General Meliora. So, would it be fair for me to say that the earliest indications of basically all these dogmas are found in pious fiction rather than exegesis?

01:40:32

No, I would say that those are simply reflections of prior traditions that already were hold. Why would it be the case?

01:40:38

I mean, it would be an amazing coincidence if every single author of all the various Transtis Mariae documents, that they all came up with it all at the same time.

01:40:47

That would be a huge coincidence. What I think they're doing is they're drawing upon beliefs that are already around, which is why, for example, we have the

01:40:53

Feast of the Dormition being developed in the East around the same time of their development. So, there's already this belief there, and they are drawing upon that common, pious idea, and they're saying, okay, now

01:41:03

I'm going to make a story about it. So, you're comfortable saying that these beliefs, which develop not from the exegesis, the text of Scripture, but from at least the earliest sources we have are pious fan fiction, that that approximately 1 ,400 years later, those beliefs unknown in the first 500 years, can now determine whether you are in right relationship with Christ Church.

01:41:29

No, I think you're begging the question as to thinking that it's unknown in the first 500 years. Just because we don't have a source for it doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't belief.

01:41:35

That's an argument from silence. So, I could actually say that the early church believed anything they didn't address, and that's just an argument from silence, don't you?

01:41:45

No. If you're making a positive statement, don't you have to provide the positive evidence? I have already, and I provide the evidence not only from the fact that it is a growing consensus within the early

01:41:53

Christian church, even if they don't find an explicit argument in favour of or defence of it. I mean, after all, why wouldn't they?

01:42:00

There's no debate about the assumption of Mary simply because no one ever challenges it. No one's going to do that from the docetic end.

01:42:06

No one's ever going to do that from the gnostic end. It's in fact an anti -gnostic and an anti -docetic argument, in many ways.

01:42:13

But regardless, you're going to have this belief. We only find it come up in its fullest form in the about, yeah, 6th or 7th century.

01:42:21

But it's because it becomes consensus over time that it becomes part of the census for Dalian, that it has its power as something which we say, yes, no, we really should believe this.

01:42:30

We should define this as true. It follows on from the foundations we find in scripture. It's something which we then find the early

01:42:36

Christian church for no apparent reason other than they think it's true, developing a real belief in, a real confessional belief in, in the

01:42:44

East and in the West, so not in only one localised area. We can just dismiss it as a local heresy. Because we find all those things coming together, that's why we can say, yes, this is genuine belief.

01:42:54

This is genuine truth. So, you're comfortable in saying that the kind of piety and language we hear today about Mary as Queen of Heaven and do you support the definition of the 5th

01:43:08

Marian dogma, for example? I suspect I would, yeah. So, based upon what you just said, if people are listening carefully,

01:43:16

I don't want to misrepresent you, but you basically said that when I point out that there is no positive evidence, you don't have anyone preaching sermons, there were lots of sermons preached.

01:43:27

Ambrose, my goodness, he could hardly turn around without saying something about Mary. Not a word. And yet, that's an argument from silence and it was actually generally believed at that time and it just hadn't been challenged and so no one felt the need to actually define it.

01:43:42

I think it's a better explanation, I think the fact that it is believed is a better explanation of its entrance into the general belief of the church than the idea of, oh, well, it was just invented by some transvestite literature and then we happen to accept it.

01:43:55

I don't think the early Christians were that stupid. I think that they genuinely only believed things because they genuinely believed them to be true.

01:44:00

They were radically conservative, as you know. They were radically against innovation. They even have an argument over the dating of Easter because they consider it so important to keep earlier forms.

01:44:10

So I think that the early Christians in the first millennium, the whole first millennium, I think they genuinely are interested in making clear, yes, actually we're going to conserve belief, we're going to believe in those things which we genuinely believe are authentic traditions and I, on faith, certainly accept the decisions of those

01:44:25

Christians because I think the census for Dalium is infallible. The census for Dalium is infallible. So why isn't

01:44:32

Fulgentius a representation of that? No, I think that there are disagreements over many of the doctrines, including, as I've said before, the

01:44:40

Act of Conceptions is not believed because it's a later development. The Doctrine of Aparthenos, Aparthenos of Ever Virgin.

01:44:46

But wait, why isn't that the consensus for Dalium? Sorry? Why isn't that? Why can't

01:44:53

I argue that the majority, because I can put Augustine with Fulgentius, those are two big names.

01:44:59

Why isn't that, at that time, the majority viewpoint and why doesn't that become infallible?

01:45:04

Because one belief, one belief comes over time and stays.

01:45:11

In other words, it is accepted by the census for Dalium over time, the other is not. So the error, essentially, is debated, challenged, and after a while it dies off because the

01:45:20

Holy Spirit guides the Church into all truth. The whole Church was misled, literally, the whole

01:45:26

Church, across all the West and the East, in all these different areas, and I think that that means that whilst you would say that God cares enough about His Word to preserve it over time, for example, in the manuscript tradition, but you don't appear to think that He cared enough to preserve

01:45:40

His Church from error again throughout time. We don't define the Church in the same way. So Fulgentius and Augustine, their beliefs were errors that just passed away over time.

01:45:53

How do you know that 2 ,000 years from now we won't look back and see this in Rome's teaching as an error that just will pass away over time?

01:46:01

Because the Church never changes its teaching as in fully reverses a teaching. It develops over time consistently, and that's exactly what we see with Catholic doctrine over 2 ,000 years.

01:46:10

So when I listen to Pope Francis and I go back and and I go back and read the papal syllabus of errors,

01:46:20

I go back to Innocent and Boniface and I go back to Unum Sanctum, you're telling me that hasn't changed?

01:46:28

I'm saying that if Pope Francis ever says something in contradiction to what has gone before, then he's making an error.

01:46:34

How would you know that? By looking at what he says and comparing with what went before. But you don't have the right to interpret that.

01:46:39

He does. No, he doesn't. You could conceivably define something erroneously, and there's a debate as to whether you could, yeah,

01:46:48

I think that if you have a Pope who formally teaches heresy, the understanding within the Catholic tradition would be he ceases to be

01:46:54

Pope. So Honorius ceased to be Pope? Sorry? Honorius? Honorius didn't teach it formally.

01:47:00

Is that why he was... It was his personal opinion. So, I mean, for example, Pope Benedict XVI brought out a book called

01:47:05

Jesus of Nazareth. Well, he had three volumes, but he brought out a book called Jesus of Nazareth. He made very clear, this is my personal opinion.

01:47:10

This is not papal teaching. I'm not teaching this from the chair. I'm not teaching this as part of the magisterium of the church. This is me, as a scholar, teaching...

01:47:18

This is what I think basically is true. But that is not something I would hold to and say, well, if you've got an error in there, he's no longer

01:47:23

Pope. He didn't teach it formally from the chair as the Pope of Rome. Consequently, yes, you can have

01:47:30

Popes throughout history who did say things that were bad or that were erroneous. And I think there were some who thought things that were erroneous.

01:47:36

But they never formally taught them as Pope. So, for 400 years, when you took the oath of becoming the

01:47:44

Bishop of Rome, and you anathematized Honorius as a heretic, that was just for a personal opinion?

01:47:51

Yeah. Okay. Alright. Well, I just... I feel really sorry for Honorius for that reason. So, finally, do you pray?

01:48:02

I do. I didn't finish the question. I was suggesting you're an atheist or something.

01:48:12

It was a very long pause. Do you pray to Mary to protect you from your sins, the devil, and Jesus?

01:48:20

Not from Jesus, no. But you don't think it's wrong to do that? I'm personally uncomfortable by the prayer that you read out.

01:48:28

I think that that's over piety. I would have a real problem with the idea of fearing our

01:48:35

Lord in that way. Now, having said that, it is true that our Lord is our judge. But I don't think it's necessarily helpful, and I certainly wouldn't defend every single example of Marian piety that's ever existed.

01:48:47

I mean, there are certainly people who go overboard. But there's always abuse. But abuse does not disqualify proper use.

01:48:53

It's like I was saying, because there are some Christians out there who go around thinking, as one guy does that you've debated, who thinks that homosexuals should be murdered, who should be subject to capital punishment.

01:49:05

People would say, oh, that's because you Christians believe that homosexual sex is wrong. No, it's an abuse, and abuse does not disqualify proper use.

01:49:11

But isn't the giving of indulgences done under the papal keys? Yes. He said stop.

01:49:19

Okay. Oh, really? Okay. Thank you very much.

01:49:35

And let me just stop my time. Now, what we heard from Dr. White in the first rebuttal was that I got this idea from him that, oh, this is you,

01:49:47

Rome. Rome is defining these things. Rome is having these dogmatic definitions. Well, I don't think

01:49:52

Rome is alone. Like I said, it's actually something which we see in the East as well as in the West. It's something we see in the

01:49:58

Oriental Orthodox, something we see in the Eastern Orthodox. So, Rome alone is misleading.

01:50:03

I hope you realise how misleading, potentially, that idea is. Now, I did not say that you need to look at us in order to find the canon.

01:50:11

The point I was making with the canon is that this is something which is something we find transmitted over time.

01:50:16

In the little interchange I mentioned that the dogma of the canon as an artifact, the artifact object distinction, is a distinction without a difference.

01:50:25

Because, ultimately, this is not an ontological question. It's an epistemological question. The question is this. How do you know the canon?

01:50:34

It is a data of revelation. It is a datum of revelation. It is something you need to know, in other words.

01:50:40

It is something which is necessary. And, therefore, if it's necessary, it comes under the definition of, under psalm scriptura, things

01:50:46

I need to know, things that the scripture should be sufficient to tell me. If it cannot be told by the scriptures, it is not.

01:50:54

The scriptures, therefore, are not sufficient. That's the disproof. That's the canon argument. I think the object artifact distinction is a distinction without a difference.

01:51:03

It is not an ontological question. It is an epistemological question. And the ontology doesn't make any difference as to whether or not it is a datum of revelation that you need to know.

01:51:12

I would not agree that we have the same epistemic warrant to know the resurrection or the trinity as we need to know the assumption or the

01:51:20

Immaculate Conception. I think that that's confusing a lot of things. The reason I brought up higher and lower dogmas is because there is a hierarchy of truth.

01:51:27

There are certain dogmas, there are certain truths, which, even though we know them certainly, or we can say that we know them certainly, are nonetheless less important than others.

01:51:34

The trinity is much more at the core of Christianity than the mariological dogmas are. I think the mariological dogmas are nonetheless important, but they are not as important as the trinity.

01:51:45

So that's what I mean. I'm not saying that we know them with any less certainty. What I'm saying is that we have more epistemic warrant within the tradition of Scripture to know the trinity, and that we have decided more importance to doctrines like the trinity than we do to the mariological doctrines.

01:52:03

Dogma is not new knowledge. Dogma is the increased confidence unto certainty of things that we already believed.

01:52:12

Christians were not flailing around saying, well, I wonder what the Scriptures are, prior to the 1540s or later.

01:52:18

What they were saying is there are certain questions here that are still open, and in the middle of the 16th century, because that was being challenged by the nascent

01:52:26

Protestant revolution, that is why we say, or revolutions, I should say, that is why we said the canon now is something we're going to fix.

01:52:33

We're not going to have any more debate about the anti -Legomena. We're not going to have any more debate about the Old Testament texts that are genuinely, authentically

01:52:40

Scripture in those 73 -book canon. No, no, no. We are going to say this is final.

01:52:46

We're not admitting any more debate about this. That's what the Church does over time. So this is not as if, oh, we didn't believe this until the 1540s and 60s.

01:52:53

No, we did believe it. It's at this point that it became certain. That's what dogma is. Dogmata are simply those things that we know certainly, that the

01:53:02

Church proposes to us as definition of the faith that we can know by certainty. It doesn't mean, however, that we didn't believe those things until that point.

01:53:10

So the dating of the Immaculate Conception, the dating of the Assumption, are simply irrelevant to that point.

01:53:17

We said that there were texts that Translucemaria were to put on an Index Prohibitorum.

01:53:22

Well, I think that's a little... I'm not sure that there was an Index Prohibitorum strictly speaking in those days, but let's say yes, we have the

01:53:28

Galatian Decretal. The Galatian Decretal tells us that this is something which was anathematised. These are books that were...

01:53:34

Some were anathematised. Generally, the Galatian Decretal tells us that there are books that were declared to be apocryphal.

01:53:41

In other words, they are known not to be seen as scripture. Again, you see the Church exercising her magisterial duty to actually say, no, these are authentic scriptures and these are not authentic scriptures over here.

01:53:52

But that doesn't tell me anything about whether or not these are things. These are documents which have historical value insofar as they are describing the beliefs that were there at the time.

01:54:03

They aren't preaching formal heresy necessarily. So many of those documents that are listed within the Galatian Decretal, which

01:54:09

I should also point out, is probably not written by Pope Galatius. The general scholarly consensus of the

01:54:15

Galatian Decretal is not originally a papal text. It comes later than Pope Galatius. Nonetheless, even accepting it as having true magisterial value at the time, not all the texts that are on there are formally heretical, but they do contain, many of them contain errors, and others contain just general descriptions of beliefs that were there around the time.

01:54:34

So insofar as they are evidence of anything, insofar as they have any historical value, they are descriptive purely.

01:54:40

I don't think, however, this is proof that because this is the first time that we see a formal exposition of a doctrine, that therefore these are the sources of that doctrine.

01:54:53

I'll just mention one more thing, which is about the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception is not or is an illustration, the

01:55:01

Immaculate Conception is a good illustration that what the Catholic Church believes is not that every single doctrine that she believes has come from the earliest sources in an explicit form.

01:55:11

No. We recognise that dogma and doctrine have developed over time. There are certain things, like the

01:55:16

Immaculate Conception, which we did not believe in the first thousand years, or at least we had an implicit belief in by virtue of the fact that we accepted

01:55:24

Our Lady as Panagia, that we accepted that she was sinless. The Immaculate Conception is simply the settling of a debate.

01:55:30

What was the debate? The debate was over this. Okay, we accept that Our Lady is sinless. That is the consensus of Christendom.

01:55:35

Eastern Orthodox accept that, the Oriental Orthodox not that we cared at the time. Church accepted. This is clearly just the accepted census for David.

01:55:43

Okay. What about, however, the question as to when exactly she became sinless?

01:55:49

Was it something that she became by virtue of a special action of God after her conception? That's the debate.

01:55:54

Or is it something that she had in her conception? Both are possibilities. If you accept the sinlessness of Mary as a tradition, which is much more certainly based, which is certainly there within the historical record, then you simply ask yourself, okay, following on from that, logically, was she conserved from original sin entirely or was she saved insofar as she was cleansed from sin after her conception?

01:56:17

That was the debate between the Dominicans and the Franciscans. And it went on and on throughout the early second millennium and then eventually over time the

01:56:24

Dominicans lost the debate. Franciscans won the debate. They came to the conclusion that, yes, actually we can say that Our Lady was saved by God, that this did not contradict the idea that she needed a saviour.

01:56:35

She was saved in a passive sense rather than the active sense that all of us are saved by virtue of faith and baptism.

01:56:41

And that's what led to an increasing confidence in the doctrine and then eventually the idea that, yes, this is something which was so pervasive, so widespread within, it became a liturgical feast, it became part of the devotional life of the church and finally, of course, we have

01:56:55

Our Lady of Lourdes as well to confirm that this is true doctrine. So that's the way the doctrine developed.

01:57:01

And I absolutely am happy to say all of that to you without any embarrassment at all because I don't necessarily, I don't need to believe what

01:57:07

Dr. White needs to believe. I don't need to believe in Sola Scriptura. I don't need to find every single doctrine explicitly stated within the text of Holy Scripture.

01:57:14

I don't even need to find every single thing explicitly stated in the early parts of the tradition. I can admit that all of Scripture and all of Revelation is implicitly there within the

01:57:24

Scripture tradition and it is developed and unpacked over time in greater degrees of certitude, in greater degrees of confidence and greater degrees of detail because the

01:57:32

Holy Spirit leads to the church into whole truth. And this, I think, is something that challenges, or should challenge

01:57:39

Dr. White. Because Dr. White, one of the things I admire about him, actually, in his apologetic work, is his debates in favour of the veracity of the

01:57:48

New Testament and the authenticity and the tenacity of the Scripture over time and how we can rely upon those works.

01:57:54

And we can rely on the texts that we have within the manuscript tradition. And Dr. White, as I said before, he believes that God cares enough about his word to conserve his word throughout time by the fact that it is just copied and copied and copied across the

01:58:08

Christian diaspora and by virtue of that copying and by virtue of the tenacity that we see in the manuscript tradition throughout the

01:58:14

Christian diaspora, we can have great confidence in the Holy Scriptures. Well, it seems to me that if you've got a doctrine which develops, again, over the entire

01:58:24

Christian diaspora, not in a limited way, you find lots of heresies like Coloridianism. Coloridianism is a great example. Coloridians were true

01:58:31

Mary worshippers. They were a group of women who got together and treated Mary as a goddess and offered little cakes in her behalf.

01:58:37

That is a very localised heresy. It occurs in the Arabian world and we can know it's a heresy because it came up, it was clearly contrary to the sources of revelation of faith that we have and then it died off.

01:58:49

That's what heresies do, generally speaking. I mean, a lot of them come back as we see, we certainly see Gnosticism coming back in our world today.

01:58:56

But regardless, what we see with true doctrine is that across the Christian diaspora, this belief develops independently and it becomes more and more certain within the liturgical life and the faith of the

01:59:08

Church and then all Christians, over time, accept it. That's what happens. That is how

01:59:13

I can say with certainty that Our Lady was assumed into Heaven because it develops over time with greater certainty through the senses for daily.

01:59:21

You have to believe, alternatively to that, if you want to reject that, that the entire Christian world, well up until the 16th century when a guy called

01:59:28

Martin Luther came along, you have to believe that the entire Christian world was duped, was fooled. I don't think that is a compelling explanation of the

01:59:38

Mariological dogmas as the explanation that yes, actually, the Holy Spirit has heard such a truth over time, truly and authentically.

01:59:45

Thank you.

02:00:08

Well, for me, anyways, I think you just heard the debate.

02:00:15

That is, the statement was made, yes, I admit, this didn't come from ex -Jesus of Scripture, this didn't come in the early centuries, this came from reflection, this came from development and that's the whole problem because for the man of God to do what he's been called to do, teaching, reproving, rebuking, correcting, training in righteousness, he has to turn to that which is theanustos because that's what defines what doing a good work is.

02:00:43

And if you end up teaching as dogma things that the apostles never dreamed of, that the first centuries of the church never dreamed of, that's not a good work, not biblically speaking.

02:00:53

And there are no parameters of correction there. He said, well, you know, Dr. White, you believe in God preserving the

02:01:00

Scriptures but not the church. I recognize the difference between the Scriptures and the church. I look at the Old Testament and recognize

02:01:06

God gave his people the Scriptures. Remember what happened in the days of Josiah? They found him and went, oh no, look at how far we've fallen.

02:01:14

And there was a reason why God allowed that to happen. And there was a reason why God has allowed what has happened in our experience to happen.

02:01:21

To focus our attention on the fact that we always need to stand firm upon that which truly comes from God, not that which we are told to believe came from God on the authority of someone, whether they be in Rome, Constantinople, I don't care where they might be, they are not theonistos in any way, shape, or form.

02:01:37

I want to read you something. Accordingly, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, for the honor of the holy and undivided

02:01:43

Trinity, for the glory and adornment of the virgin Mother of God, for the exaltation of the Catholic faith, and for the furtherance of the

02:01:48

Catholic religion, by the authority of Jesus Christ our Lord, the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own we declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds the most blessed

02:01:57

Virgin Mary in the first instance of her conception by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the

02:02:04

Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God, and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.

02:02:17

That's in Ephebelus Deus, that is the definition of the Immaculate Conception. It's a revelation from God, folks.

02:02:24

Not just simply something we thought of, and we, you know, there's this deepening, and yeah we realize for a thousand years didn't really believe this, but you know, we got around to defining it eventually.

02:02:33

This says it was a revelation from God. A doctrine revealed by God. Hence if anyone shall dare which

02:02:40

God forbid to think otherwise than has been defined by us, let him know and understand that he is condemned by his own judgment, that he has suffered shipwreck in the faith, that he is separated from the unity of the church, and that furthermore by his own action he incurs the penalties established by law if he should dare to express in words or writing or by any other outward means the errors he thinks in his heart.

02:03:04

That's what Rome actually teaches. That's the infallible definition, and the penalty that comes from it.

02:03:11

And yet no one the first thousand years believed this. Popes taught against it. Early church fathers taught against it.

02:03:19

But now we have to believe it as revelation from God? How does that give you a firm foundation for the things we do agree on?

02:03:27

And that's what bugs me here. Because the foundations that we have for defending human life cannot be changed by this kind of development over time.

02:03:42

They are revelation from God and they don't change. This did. This absolutely positively did.

02:03:51

Again we had the issue of the canon brought up. I just want to point something out to you. I asked a question of this, and I should have done it during the cross -examination.

02:03:59

There's never enough time. I asked a Roman Catholic apologist this question, oh 1993

02:04:05

I think it was. How many of you were not alive in 1993? Okay, alright, thank you very much.

02:04:12

Can I have a chair to sit in? I'm getting a little tired. 1993

02:04:17

I asked a Roman Catholic apologist this question. How did the believing Jewish man 50 years before Jesus was born know that Isaiah and 2

02:04:27

Chronicles were scripture? How did the believing Jewish man know 50 years before Jesus was born

02:04:34

Isaiah and 2 Chronicles were scripture? He didn't have an answer for me.

02:04:40

He really struggled. Because he can't say the Jewish Magisterium because the Jewish Magisterium rejected

02:04:45

Rome's eventual canon of the Old Testament. They didn't believe in the apocryphal books, and that's an established fact.

02:04:53

You can't say, well they didn't know because Jesus held them accountable. How many times did

02:04:59

Jesus say to people is it not written? Does it not stand written? You're hypocrites because this is what the scriptures say, and you know that.

02:05:06

So Jesus did hold them accountable. So how do you know? There was no infallible counsel. 50 years before Christ there was no infallible counsel, so how did the believing

02:05:16

Jewish man know? Evidently God has a way of communicating with sufficient clarity what is and what is not scripture without relying upon the counsel of Trent.

02:05:29

He had a way to do that. And so whatever you want to do as far as the argumentation is concerned, you can't get around the reality that we've heard the admission.

02:05:38

Yeah, some of these dogmas, some of them are early, some of them are later, there was arguments, there was disagreements, so it's not an apostolic tradition.

02:05:47

I keep being told by Roman Catholics, well, you're disagreeing with apostolic tradition. I go, no I'm not.

02:05:53

There is no apostolic tradition of Mary being bodily assumed into heaven. There is no apostolic tradition about the

02:06:02

Immaculate Conception, or the perpetual virginity. And when we look at the actual sources,

02:06:08

I'm sorry folks, but fan literature? That's the first place we find these things?

02:06:15

Well, yeah, but that's an argument for silence. No, I'm on that side, he's on this side. You've got to give positive evidence if you're going to win the debate and promote the idea this is

02:06:25

Christian teaching. And I simply point to you, where did the apostles ever tell us to engage in the epistemology we've heard this evening?

02:06:33

They didn't. They didn't. Instead, we did have a way,

02:06:38

I think, around what Paul said to Timothy. He said, oh, no, no, no, you're misunderstanding 2

02:06:43

Timothy. No, I don't think I am because in context, what's going on in 2 Timothy chapter 3? Paul says to Timothy, my son, tough times are coming.

02:06:53

Many are going to be deceivers and being deceived. It's the same scenario when he's talking to the elders of the

02:06:58

Church of Ephesus in Acts chapter 20. In both situations, when he warns there's going to be tough times coming, there's going to be false teachers coming, what does he do?

02:07:06

Does he say, look to the bishop of Rome? Look to the successors of Peter? No. In both situations, he commits

02:07:13

Timothy and the elders of Ephesus to the written word of Theanistos.

02:07:19

The sources of the Marian dogmas are not Theanistos. The source of the

02:07:25

Trinity is Theanistos. The source of the resurrection, Theanistos. The source of all the real

02:07:30

Christian doctrine and theology, Theanistos. And can we grow in our knowledge of those things? Yeah. There's a great discovery of a rule of Greek grammar right here in the good old

02:07:40

United Kingdom toward the end of the 18th century. It's called Granville -Sharpe's rule. It helps us to understand even more clearly the testimony of the deity of Christ in Titus 2 .13

02:07:49

and 2 Peter 1 .1. Great thing! But that's because it's based upon what? That which is Theanistos.

02:07:55

It wasn't, well, you know, we had these arguments and we had a British monk named Edmer that came up with this idea and we're thinking these things through and there were people arguing and he came up with something new.

02:08:05

That's the difference between true doctrinal development that goes deeper into that which is revealed and this which goes farther and farther and farther away because when you can hear what is said about Mary today, when you can read

02:08:19

Alphonsus Liguria's book, The Glories of Mary, who is a doctor of the church and whose book has gone through 800 editions, when you can read what's in that book, with all due respect to all my

02:08:34

Roman Catholic friends here, to me it is absolutely blasphemous. Absolutely blasphemous.

02:08:41

That's the difference. That's the difference. So in 2 Timothy chapter 3 what Paul is saying is, you man of God, you want to do what

02:08:49

God has called you to do? You want to do that which is good work? The term, not artios, but ex artidso does mean sufficient, fully equipped.

02:09:00

And Paul says, Timothy, you want to be fully equipped to do what God has called you to do? You want to be fully equipped as a man of God to lead in the church of God?

02:09:09

Then there's one source you turn to and it's not the Odes of Solomon and it's not the

02:09:15

Protoevangelium of James and it's not the Consensus Fideli. It is that which

02:09:23

God has revealed in His Word. That's why the Lord Jesus could hold men accountable and say, have you not read what

02:09:32

God spoke to you saying? This issue divides us and I think we have gotten farther than most debates

02:09:43

I've ever heard on this subject in laying out exactly why it does. I hope you have listened carefully to both sides.

02:09:51

I hope the recording went well so that you'll have an opportunity because both of us tend to speak rather quickly.

02:09:58

Thank you for being here this evening, but I hope you hear my heart. This is important stuff. Let's consider it together.

02:10:04

Thank you for being here this evening. God bless. Oops, sorry.

02:10:18

Here you go. Well now we come to the period of Q &A.

02:10:29

So it's your opportunity to ask questions. I believe there is going to be a microphone traveling around.

02:10:35

Is that right? Have we got somebody on that? Brilliant. Okay. Good. Alright.

02:10:40

We're going to Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. Right.

02:10:49

Where's the other one gone? Oh yeah. So how are we going to do this? Should we keep that one closer to this

02:10:57

I guess because it doesn't seem to transmit as well. Okay. Yeah. So let's have a go at using that one.

02:11:03

I'll hand that back and forth between the two of you and you can take care of the handing around.

02:11:08

Yeah. Okay. So what we'll do is we'll have the microphone around.

02:11:15

This is a question period. It's not a period for giving a speech or a preach or a rebuke or trying to miraculously change their mind.

02:11:28

If there's something that is really on your mind that you really want to grill them about, go for it but make sure that it's a question.

02:11:36

Make sure it's clear who it's addressed to. They'll answer the question and then we'll have a quick comment from the opponent as well.

02:11:42

There we go. Take it away. Hi. Is Jesus Mary's saviour?

02:12:01

And if he is what is she saved from?

02:12:13

Yes, he clearly is. It's very much learned in scripture and consistently by the church. What is she saved from?

02:12:19

She's saved from exactly the same thing that beheld all of us in our conception which was falling into original sin and so that we are deprived of that original righteousness that Adam and Eve both had before their fall and therefore all the consequence that falls from that which is in fact not only the fact that we are separated from God but also that our inner nature is disordered that we no longer have total rational control over our own over our own bodies and desires that we suffer from the very thing that causes us to sin as well because we are so separate from God.

02:12:55

So yes, she was saved by a singular act of grace but in this case she was saved passively from falling into that state of affairs rather than actively through baptism in faith as everyone else is, if they are.

02:13:14

Well I think the problem is clearly Mary recognises her own need of a saviour and recognises that God was her saviour.

02:13:21

The idea that she understood that this was a pre -emptive application of the merits of Christ to her I think is just absolutely beyond belief.

02:13:29

She identifies as one of the saved. She knew her own sinful heart. That's the only way to read

02:13:35

Luke 1 .47. To read it otherwise is to allow the very meaning of the text of scripture to be changed by later development.

02:13:49

Thank you very much. A question for Dr. White. By the way, thank you both very much for your excellent talks.

02:13:54

I think everybody enjoyed them very much. I'm going to assume if I may, Dr. White, that you're taking your lead from the

02:14:00

Protestant reformers. So you'll forgive me if I've got that wrong. You'll correct me if in fact you're taking it from somewhere else.

02:14:07

Because I'm going to read, if I may, very briefly from Philip Schapp who's a Protestant theologian who says this about the second canon, the so -called

02:14:15

Deuteronomicus, which you said the Council of Trent included in scripture wrongly, you said.

02:14:22

They got it wrong. The Council of Hippo in 393, not 1540, and the third, according to another reckoning, the sixth

02:14:31

Council of Carthage in 397, under the influence of Augustine, a theologian much favoured by Protestants as well as Catholics, who attended both, fixed the

02:14:43

Catholic canon of Holy Scriptures including the Deuteronomicals of the Old Testament. The decision of the transferee in church was at that time and then later says this, few are found to unequivocally deny their canonicity.

02:15:00

Countless manuscripts and copies of the Vulgate produced by these ages, that's the scripture of St Jerome in the fourth century, the

02:15:09

Vulgate, with a slight exception, very tiny, uniformly embrace the complete

02:15:16

Roman Catholic Old Testament. Here's my question for you. In relation not only to that issue, but also the issue you have been debating for a considerable length, which is the question of the

02:15:29

Immaculate Conception. Almost all the Protestant reformers, that's

02:15:34

Luther, Calvin, Ulrich, Zwingli, and I think also Philip Lincoln, believed in and accepted the

02:15:41

Immaculate Conception. Modern day Protestants do not. Let's have the question. It's a very important question.

02:15:49

You have confused the Immaculate Conception. You just did. You've been going quite some time.

02:15:55

Do you accept what Protestant reformers believe about the Immaculate Conception? You're an error.

02:16:01

Aren't you in fact saying that you too have developed Darwinism? Many errors will take me quite some time to correct.

02:16:07

You did. Everybody knows what your question is. You are confusing Perpetual Virginity with Immaculate Conception.

02:16:13

They did not believe in Immaculate Conception. You're an error on that. I'm sorry.

02:16:21

No, Philip Schaaf does not say that. Everyone look it up. Perpetual Virginity is not Immaculate Conception.

02:16:27

They're not the same thing. Look it up, folks. Be free to do that. Secondly, you've obviously not seen the debates

02:16:32

I've done on the subject of the Apocrypha because you're an error on a number of issues there. Carthage and Hippo were not ecumenical councils.

02:16:39

The first ecumenical council to define the canon from a Roman Catholic perspective is the Council of Trent. There's no question about that. Pope Gregory the

02:16:45

Great said that the Book of Maccabees was not canonical after councils of Hippo and Carthage. The individual who interviewed

02:16:53

Martin Luther, Cardinal Jimenez, had written a commentary rejecting the canonicity of those particular books.

02:16:59

Jerome himself, the reason that Guston believed what he did about those was because he could not read, he was under the impression that the

02:17:07

Hebrew canon included them. It did not. And it never did. I would recommend anyone who really wants to dig deeply into that see the book by Roger Beckwith called

02:17:15

The Old Testament Canon, The New Testament Church. You will see the deep and abiding evidence of the reality of the fact that those books were never accepted by the

02:17:23

Jews as Scripture, and they should not be accepted by us either. Again, the

02:17:28

Reformers did not believe in the Immaculate Conception. Perpetual virginity is a different issue. You have to differentiate between the two.

02:17:35

Peter Williams, what do you make of that? I don't think it matters to Dr.

02:17:41

White or I whether or not the Protestant Reformers believed any of this stuff. I couldn't care less because I see them as heresiarchs.

02:17:47

I don't think Dr. White cares at all because he doesn't accept the authority of even Protestant tradition.

02:17:53

He accepts only the idea of what he can derive directly from the written Scriptures.

02:17:58

Now, as I say, that's erroneous, that's nonsense, but nonetheless it's what he believes and I think that bringing up the tradition of Protestantism doesn't work with him.

02:18:06

I think, however, when you get to things like the Jewish canonical texts, this is not actually a debate on Jewish canonical texts, so really

02:18:13

I'm not going to debate that, but I'd be happy to on a later point. I will simply point anyone who's interested to the last book by Gary Matusa, which dealt with much of what

02:18:23

Dr. White has presented in his own debates on that subject. Thank you.

02:18:32

Question for Dr. White. My question is this. How can we...

02:18:39

How is true Scripture defined from simple biographical detail on Christ?

02:18:47

How do we know what is Scripture and what authority should we trust to agree what is

02:18:54

Scripture? Are you asking about the canon again? No, I'm asking the question...

02:19:01

Because you said something about the biography of Jesus, and I was lost there. I'm asking a question on Sola Scriptura. How do we know...

02:19:09

How can we differentiate the first century source of Jesus from what is accepted now as Scripture, and what authority should we trust?

02:19:18

Well, if you gave me some examples of first century materials, that would make things easier, because we all recognize that the only first century materials we could be looking at would be something like possibly the

02:19:30

Didache, possibly Clement, something along those lines, which were never accepted as Scripture by almost anybody, except maybe in a small area.

02:19:41

My answer is going to be the exact same answer that a Roman Catholic is going to give to the question that I asked.

02:19:48

How did the believing Jewish person 50 years before Christ know that Isaiah and 2 Chronicles are Scripture? You're either going to believe that God has the ability to reveal

02:19:57

Scripture and hold men accountable to it without the utilization of councils and any type of external angelic visitation, or you're not.

02:20:07

So, I would like to ask maybe if that question could be answered, then maybe we could then have an even basis upon which to discuss the issue.

02:20:17

But, other than that, if we want to have a debate on Sola Scriptura or something like that, it's funny, it keeps coming up only in the context of, well, now that we've actually talked about one subject, let's change the subject to something else, rather than allowing a full discussion to really take place.

02:20:34

I don't know if that really helps a lot of people. Yeah. We'll keep on going upon coming back to Sola Scriptura because it's at the very core of this whole discussion.

02:20:47

In fact, Bismarck in Hermeneutics is, as I said at the very beginning. Now, the problem with what Dr. White is saying is that there isn't a good answer to the question.

02:20:53

I mean, how do we know, or if the question is asking how do we know what is authentic Scripture, we know what is authentic Scripture by the fact that the

02:21:00

Church used it and recommended it and accepted it as such over time.

02:21:05

It is a magisterial and traditional act. It's a traditional act because it's a datum which is passed on by definition.

02:21:13

It is not found in Scripture at all. At all. There's nothing in Scripture that tells you that Titus or Philemon are in Scripture.

02:21:19

Secondly, Is there a closing statement? When we talk about certain things, Dr. White continually confuses the idea that, oh well, you're not saying that we needed there to be an extraordinary definition.

02:21:31

No, I'm not. I've never suggested that we needed an extraordinary definition of any of these dogmas, any of the

02:21:36

Marian dogmas, or indeed the canon. I don't think we needed Trent to define that for us, to know what is authentic Scripture.

02:21:44

The reason why they do that, the reason why the Church ever defines something as dogma is because a group of heretics come up and they challenge the dogma, and to make sure that the heresy is finally put down or is finally certainly put down as much as it can be, the

02:21:59

Church defines it dogmatically. That is not the same thing as believing this thing for the first time.

02:22:05

So, the answer to the question, for example, how does the Jewish guy, prior to the Church, know what is authentic Scripture was a tradition that he literally accepted the

02:22:18

Bible. You've done that because someone gave you a copy, right? That's tradition by definition. And that is something which was recognised in the

02:22:25

Jewish context by the Jewish community. The Jewish community, over time, would recognise certain texts as wholly inspired

02:22:31

Scripture and certain texts as not, and therefore they would, just as the Church did, not recognise them, basically condemn as apocryphal, or just reject, or just ignore those texts which were not, as far as they were concerned, genuinely their own stuff.

02:22:44

In other words, the answer to the question that Dr White put to us is, to the question, how does the Jewish person know what is

02:22:50

Scripture, the answer is tradition and then a form, a proto -form, of magisterium.

02:22:56

Not an infallible form, I'm not saying infallible, I'm saying it is something which is decided by the community. That's a magisterial act, whether it's infallible or not.

02:23:04

In the Church's case, it's something which we know certainly and infallibly, because we know the Holy Spirit guides the

02:23:10

Church throughout time, which is why prior to the Reformation, yes, you have the consensus of Christendom. And again,

02:23:15

I have to say, like the Marian dogmas, both in the West, in the Catholic Church, and the East, the East Orthodox, they accept the

02:23:22

Jewish or Chronicle texts, they accept the Anti -Legomena, which Dr White didn't mention, the books at the end of the New Testament, which were considered disagreeable over in the early

02:23:29

Church. And what made the difference? It was the continual acceptance of the census pedanium.

02:23:35

So the answer to all these questions is the same. The way that Christendom has always worked is the same. It is Scripture, it is sacred tradition, and it's finally that which is accepted by the

02:23:44

Church Catholic over time. Hi, my question is to Dr Williams.

02:23:56

I'm not a dog drivers, just confess that. Thank you. It's regarding, we talked about how you'd hope that a belief would be seen over the 400 years, so for example some of these early texts might not state a belief outright, they might be describing something that was believed.

02:24:17

But my question would be, back in the time of the Bible, even when Peter was around the pool, you had things which were commonly believed, like people could say

02:24:26

Jesus is a curse, and they thought they were speaking in the Spirit of God. And Corinthians, or people in Galatia believed in, you know, you had to be circumcised to be saved.

02:24:35

So my question is, just because something's widely believed by the Church, that surely doesn't mean that that's true teaching.

02:24:44

So how do you guys get around that? How do you well, yeah. Okay, so I'm not saying,

02:24:51

I don't think that those were beliefs that were believed by, as it were, the Church. I think they were believed by a small group of believers, that then comes up against the

02:24:58

Church which says, hang on, this is not right, and the Church condemns it. That's what's happened. So you see, in the

02:25:06

Apostolic Age it's going to work slightly differently because we actually had the Apostles. What we have now is their successors and we have the census of the daily over time.

02:25:12

So of course, me and Dr. White and I would both agree that things were lived. Now of course we can completely disagree on how things right now has changed.

02:25:23

We see in the early period, and in any example of heresies, we find a localized error, like the

02:25:30

Coleridians, or like a group I was going to mention, the Anti -Deco -Morionites. The Anti -Deco -Morionites were people who did not believe that Our Lady was worthy of praise.

02:25:38

They did not accept the perpetual virginity of Mary. They rejected, in other words, all the Mariological dogmas at the time, which would have been a

02:25:44

Parthenos Panagia Theotokos. And they are now condemned, they were historically condemned as heretics, and they died off.

02:25:51

Now what we're seeing in Protestantism is the recapitulation of that error, which is exactly what we see a lot with heresies.

02:25:57

Like I said, Gnosticism, if you want to talk about male and female, and we agree on that, well, the reason why we've got people out there who don't agree with that is because Gnosticism has made a comeback.

02:26:07

They want to make themselves along abstract lines. They think that these are not realities.

02:26:13

These are Gnostic realities in some way. This is Gnosticism come back. Heresies do that. So the answer to your question, very directly, is the

02:26:20

Church recognizes error when it happens, it condemns it, and that becomes just part of the long heresiology that we see throughout the

02:26:27

Christian tradition. So we were just told that if you actually believe the documented views of all those early

02:26:37

Church Fathers that I read to you, all the names, they were heretics. And the consensus is what

02:26:48

Rome says it is. There was no consensus on the Immaculate Conception. There was no consensus on the

02:26:54

Assumption. There was no consensus on these things. Gregory specifically says that Maccabees is not inspired

02:27:02

Scripture. Don't tell me there's a consensus on the canon. The facts of history are in your face, and you can ignore it if you want.

02:27:11

And then define everybody as a heretic who disagrees with you, but all this is is demonstrating what? The Church says it.

02:27:18

It's the final thing. There is no way of testing, in regards to what the man was saying, there is no way of testing these things.

02:27:28

Majority rule is not and that's why you need to have an objective standard that does not change, and I think that's what the gentleman was trying to get at.

02:27:39

Majority rule is not how you determine these things. Consensus is not how you determine these things. That is based upon an idea of the consensus fidelium in the churches in Galatia was an anti -gospel.

02:27:58

Anti -gospel. Think about that. And Paul anathematized the majority view.

02:28:06

Oh, I'm sorry. How long do we have? I hope this question is a good one.

02:28:12

I'm not repeating myself in questions to Dr. Williams. You said earlier in your...

02:28:18

Just roll with it, man. Congratulations. No, no, no, no.

02:28:23

You called him Dr. Williams. All in favor of an honorary doctorate this evening, say aye.

02:28:30

Aye. Aye. Aye. You should give me an honorary doctorate. I'm not talking about Simon Coffey. Sorry.

02:28:36

Sir Peter Williams. In your rebuttal, correct me if I'm wrong, you mentioned something about dogmas being on certain levels.

02:28:51

Levels of dogmas. Right, so certain... Sorry, certain dogmas are more than others.

02:28:58

And I just want to understand your position. It's you. Earlier you said, I think, in the crossfire, that an intellectual person could be anathema if they rejected their dogmas or their dogmas.

02:29:16

If that was the case, help me to understand your position. Why is that not taught by Christ or the apostles in the scripture?

02:29:25

Because therefore it leads to my mind that it's insufficient. I hope that's a good question and you're not repeating yourself.

02:29:32

Thanks. So I think I got three points from that. I'll go backwards if I may. Now I think in one case you're begging the question of soul scriptura.

02:29:40

I don't believe that everything that is true is found in the scripture. So I don't expect our Lord and the apostles to say everything that I must believe is true.

02:29:47

They don't give me the great example, right? They don't give me a lot of things that I would otherwise believe is true as well.

02:29:53

These are later developments into things that are already implicitly or explicitly there within the data of revelation unpacked over time.

02:30:00

So I don't expect to find everything within scripture. The question as to can an intelligent person be anathematised, just to define things.

02:30:08

Anathema is not a condemnation on those who are outside the church. Anathema is a pronouncement of excommunication to those who are inside the church who choose nonetheless knowing that they are rebelling against what the church's magistrate proposes them to believe, they reject it.

02:30:23

So therefore they are no longer orthodox. They have chosen heresy. They've made a deliberate choice to accept error and therefore they're outside the communion of the church.

02:30:31

It's a form of excommunication. And excommunication is there for a very good reason. It's there to show a person you have gone seriously wrong, sunshine, and you need to change.

02:30:41

Now, what was the other point? Right. Well, yeah, as I say,

02:30:56

I don't think the text of scripture is formally or even I would say materially sufficient. There are things that you will not, that you need that you will not find within the holy scriptures.

02:31:05

That doesn't denigrate the holy scriptures. The holy scriptures are there for a very important purpose. They are revelation. They are that which is, oh, it stops.

02:31:11

They are fundamental to our belief. But they don't pretend to be, nor are they claimed within the early church to be, formally or even materially

02:31:19

I would say, sufficient. We need other things. We need the tradition. And that's precisely, I would say, I think that the reason why

02:31:24

God ordered it that way is precisely so that we don't have people just taking the holy scriptures and saying, well, I can basically go and interpret this myself and just go off and do what

02:31:33

I want. Which is essentially what has happened. Now, that's partly due to a poor ecclesiology.

02:31:39

And that's actually, part of this is not just epistemology, actually, I have to say. What we've found today is not that we are simply disagreeing on epistemology.

02:31:45

It's actually we're disagreeing on ecclesiology very centrally. I think that's the thing we're bringing out here. But when you have a bad ecclesiology combined with an unworkable epistemology, you're going to see abuse.

02:31:55

And that's exactly what we have seen, I think, in the history of Protestantism. Whereas in Catholicism, what we've seen rather than that is,

02:32:00

I think, a consistency and a safeguarding from error. And a development that is consistent with the earliest sources.

02:32:07

Not one which has gone out into wild -eyed speculation or wild -eyed silliness, but ones that follow logically and carefully across time.

02:32:15

And that's what the census for Dalian accomplishes. So we have such unbiblical things as the papacy, the

02:32:26

College of Cardinals, priests who are called alter Christus, and this is the proper ecclesiology.

02:32:32

You actually go to the Testament and ask what the Apostles taught about the Ecclesia, the Church, and it's not what Rome teaches today, by any stretch of the imagination.

02:32:39

But if you don't believe in Solus or Turin, why do you need to worry about what the Apostles taught about the Church? Well, because they were the ones that the

02:32:45

Lord Jesus established to teach us what the truth of the Church was to be. And when we go to that, we discover

02:32:53

I'm sorry, but Peter just said that the abuses of Protestantism, pornography, the papacy at the time of the

02:33:02

Reformation, the Inquisition, what? What Protestants have done?

02:33:11

Okay, let's be honest. There's all sorts of things we can point to where there have been excesses and all sorts of things where people weren't even living according to their own standards.

02:33:19

But when it comes to the actual reality of what the Church is to be, that's an easy one to debate, because the

02:33:26

Apostles did give us very clear guidance as to what the Church is to be. And you simply have to reject apostolic written documentation as to what the

02:33:34

Church is to be to embrace what you have in modern Roman Catholicism. And it all goes back to, again, yeah, wouldn't there be an insufficiency in the

02:33:41

Scriptures for that to be the case? Exactly. You can't believe in the sufficiencies of Scripture. You cannot believe that the

02:33:47

Apostles gave the Churches what they needed to know to be able to continue to be the Church of Christ in the future.

02:33:54

And that goes against Acts chapter 20, that goes against 2 Timothy chapter 3, etc., etc. How much longer?

02:34:02

Question for Dr. Wyke. When was the doctrine of Scripture established?

02:34:10

And was the doctrine of Scripture a revelation, like Scripture is a revelation?

02:34:18

When was it established and is it a revelation or is it something that was reasoned?

02:34:25

And where was it, and obviously it has a particular reference which you keep mentioning, but when was it established?

02:34:33

Was it purely from the Scriptures or was revelation involved in any way at all? It's fascinating that in the debate on the

02:34:40

Marian dogmas, which have been admitted to have developed in some instances over a thousand years after the time of Christ, the question comes back to Sola Scriptura and when it allegedly developed.

02:34:52

It didn't develop over time. I can provide you with numerous of the early fathers who specifically assert that the

02:35:00

Scriptures are sufficient to do all the things that we've been told they're not sufficient to do this evening. And we can specifically provide all sorts of information in regards to the reality that all

02:35:11

Sola Scriptura says is this, the sole infallible rule of faith of the

02:35:17

Church is that which is Theanostos. It's that which is God -breathed.

02:35:23

And so if you want to deny that, then show me something else that's God -breathed. I read to you from Ineffabilis Deus.

02:35:31

It identified a doctrine that Peter has admitted was not believed for a thousand years is actually a revelation from God.

02:35:39

So is the canon. But how could it not be? I believe that Christ speaks to his sheep and his sheep hear his voice.

02:35:52

The Church hears the voice of Christ and is reformed and changed by that.

02:36:00

Once you proclaim the Church infallible, she is now stuck in a monologue with herself.

02:36:06

And that's why she can't be reformed. And that's why these dogmas and these doctrines which are utterly disconnected from the

02:36:13

Gospel and utterly disconnected from anything apostolic cannot be changed. Once the

02:36:18

Church says, I am irreformable, I am infallible, she's now in an echo chamber with herself.

02:36:24

The true Church of Jesus Christ always is reforming because it's always hearing the voice of her husband in the

02:36:32

Scriptures, because she's put nothing above that. What Dr.

02:36:41

White and I do agree on is that yes, the sheep hear the Master's voice and they obey him.

02:36:46

And that's exactly what we see in Christian history. We don't find that the Church, and again not just the Catholic Church, not just that which is those who are in communion with Rome, but also again the

02:36:56

Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox, for some reason, come to exactly the same conclusions, apart from on one the actual conception due to the specific eccentricities of the doctrine of original sin.

02:37:07

This is what we see. This is what it means to listen to the Master's voice. It means listening not only to Holy Scripture and being in, as the

02:37:15

Church is, the dialogue, because she's the handmaid of Scripture and tradition, listening to the whole witness of God throughout history.

02:37:24

Not just reading the Scriptures, reading them in their breadth, reading them in their depth, listening to the firm foundations within typology which we have not heard dealt with.

02:37:32

Also listening to the witness of the early fathers, and yes the early fathers disagree on certain issues, but then after a while the debate ends.

02:37:40

The Magisterium, whether it be by the ordinary Magisterium, whereby there just simply is a consensus that develops, or whether it be by an extraordinary definition, in those rare cases where it is needed for it to happen.

02:37:51

We see the Church accepting the Master's voice, and that's why we see this whole tradition grow up over time.

02:37:58

This is why you have a priesthood, in again, Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox. This is why you see them all have a

02:38:04

Mariology. This is why you see them all believe in baptismal regeneration. This is why you all see them believe in a Mass, even if they call it a

02:38:09

Divine Liturgy rather than a Mass. This is why you see them all believe in the Real Presence. This is why you see them all believe in all these doctrines which

02:38:16

Dr. White rejects because he has artificially limited himself to the Scriptures alone according to his traditions and understanding of what the

02:38:24

Scriptures are supposed to mean. The fact that you don't see anyone even remotely like a Reformed Baptist in the first 1 ,500 years, in fact, more than that, of the

02:38:32

Church's history, well, that's very awkward, I think, and it should be very awkward to you, ladies and gentlemen, considering what is credible in what is believed.

02:38:40

However, if I go back 1 ,500 years, or 1 ,700 years, and I go to a Church service in the early

02:38:46

Church, I am going to find them have investments, and yes, I am going to find them believing in the Real Presence, and yes, I am going to find them believing in baptismal regeneration, and whilst there are going to be a few people who are going to divert from that consensus, because guess what?

02:38:58

In the early Church, they didn't have Modem, they didn't have email, they didn't have Netflix, they weren't able necessarily to have total consensus on everything because they weren't in perfect communication with each other.

02:39:08

That's just a historical reality, which is why, yes, you do have debates about certain ideological doctrines. That is what we see as the witness, and the consistent witness of history.

02:39:17

And just to very simply answer the question that Ed has just asked, the Doctrine of Sola Scriptura, no, you will not find formally found in the early

02:39:24

Church Adore. I'd be very happy to debate Dr Weiss on that. What you will find is people referring to the importance of Scripture.

02:39:30

You'll find them making very high claims about Scripture. You'll find them claiming, like Sid Athanasius does, that all

02:39:36

I need to do if I'm debating with an Arian is go to the Scripture. That's a matter of apologetic methodology. That's not a matter of epistemology.

02:39:42

So what you'll find is that no, Sola Scriptura is finely defined, and actually even now in differential forms because Anglicans don't agree with Presbyterians on this point, you find them developing the idea of Sola Scriptura from the

02:39:54

Reformation onwards. So that's the answer to your question. It is not a historic belief. It is not something

02:40:00

I feel at all bound to believe. And it is not something which coheres with basic reason, as we've seen with the still as yet unanswered canon question.

02:40:08

We can have one more question and then it'll be time for the closing statements. So let's wrap up. Let's make one on Mary, right?

02:40:16

Hi. My question is mainly for Mr. Williams. It's mainly an epistemological question.

02:40:23

It was slightly touched upon just now. But in this debate there's been quite a strong association between Revelation and Scripture and Tradition.

02:40:35

And I'm just... I understand Revelation to be synonymous with God himself.

02:40:43

God reveals himself, hence Christ. He is the

02:40:49

Revelation of God and he is perfect. So do you not think there could be a flaw in so closely associating doctrine with Revelation?

02:41:04

And if not, because I assume that you won't think that, how does the

02:41:10

Roman Catholic Church deal with... Is there any possibility for an erroneous doctrine or for something similar to, for example, the

02:41:21

Islamic doctrine of abrogation? Because the Koran in Islam is perfect if you like.

02:41:27

And if church dogma is so similar, is there some kind of doctrine where you can discount something?

02:41:37

Is that possible? And I was just wondering what your view on that is. Okay, let's just discern,

02:41:43

I think, a few important category distinctions here. Revelation is that which God has revealed. So it is

02:41:49

Holy Scripture and it's sacred tradition. God has revealed to us certain doctrines within Scripture but Scripture itself is a revelation.

02:41:56

Scripture is entirely revelation. Tradition, it all depends on which things you're talking about, but there are certain traditions with a small t that are simply things that have grown up, that are associated with doctrine.

02:42:06

There are other things that are formal revelations like for example the canon. It's pure revelation. So we've got

02:42:12

Scripture, we've got tradition, that's revelation. Doctrine is that which is developed from those two sources.

02:42:17

You mine the data essentially from the sources of revelation and you come up with a synthesis which is doctrine and what you're trying to be is faithful to what

02:42:25

God has truly revealed. That's both true in Protestantism as it is in Catholic Christianity.

02:42:31

Now, do I think that that so how does that work out with, could we have errors and things like that?

02:42:38

No, it's not like abrogation. I mean, there is in a sense a principle of abrogation in Scripture. I suppose you could say by the virtue of the fact that we view the

02:42:45

Old Testament through the lens of Christ. Christ says I came not to abolish the law, I came to fulfil it.

02:42:51

And we, for example, view the Old Testament law through the lens of well okay how has Christ fulfilled the law?

02:42:56

Do I need to, can I eat shellfish? Yes, I can because God has declared all foods clean. Christ has declared all foods clean as well as God the

02:43:04

Father in Acts 15 I suppose. But that's the way we work. We work through a consistency. We look at tradition and Scripture in the lens of each other and we look at both in the consistent lens of Christian history and we discern through the senses of daily and again that which has come up, that which the

02:43:19

Christian church has accepted as true over time because she is guided by the

02:43:25

Holy Spirit himself we can know that that is true. And so no I don't think there is a possibility of the church ever coming into error.

02:43:33

I don't think that there is a church the matter of the church ever developing error because what the church always does is goes in consistency with what has gone before and I don't think that's a monologue at all with herself.

02:43:46

Rather it's a dialogue consistently with what has gone before. The church listens to Scripture, the church listens to tradition and she reflects back what both have spoken to her.

02:43:57

And that's why we have the beliefs that we have today and unfortunately that's not a listening exercise consistently that the

02:44:03

Protestant tradition has been able to engage in. We were just told that the church is listening to Scripture and tradition.

02:44:14

If you can derive these Marian beliefs from either after discussion this evening then what do those words even mean?

02:44:22

There's no listening to Scripture and tradition here. Scripture and tradition do not teach these things. This is development over time based upon something that is not

02:44:32

Theanistos. There is no promise in Scripture for some organization that calls itself the one true church based upon a bishop of one particular church ruling over the entire world that the

02:44:43

Holy Spirit is going to guide that particular organization. When 1 Timothy chapter 3 says the church is pillar and foundation of the truth it's talking about the local church.

02:44:50

Look at it in context. Look at it in context. That which guides the church she recognizes she is not equal to those things.

02:45:00

She does not define Christ's voice. She does not define that which is Theanistos. She has received this as a gift from God and who can listen and be reformed today by the

02:45:11

Scriptures? Can Rome? Can Rome admit it's errors of the past?

02:45:16

Oh no it can't. Irreformable. So who's really listening? Where is the monologue really taking place?

02:45:22

I think it's pretty obvious in light of tonight's discussion. Thank you and thank you all for your questions.

02:45:29

We will now wrap up with a 10 minute closing statement from each speaker bringing all the threads together.

02:45:37

So Peter Williams takes away 10 minute closing statement.

02:45:56

Well ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for coming and thank you again to Dr. White for debating and thank you to Peter and indeed the videographer for doing the videography and all those who have helped in any way shape or form.

02:46:07

It's been a very interesting discussion. I just want to say I'm really glad that we've been able to do this. I am a true admirer of Dr.

02:46:14

White not for the things that he teaches on Catholicism obviously. I think he's in dire and indeed quite deadly error on that and as he knows that I know that he believes that about me.

02:46:24

But nonetheless what you've seen tonight is a dialogue or a debate which has been based on reason and charity and in a culture where we see that far too seldomly far too often we see in fact emotions brought in far too often we hear people not hearing each other not listening at all.

02:46:41

What we've seen tonight is the attempt to seriously engage with what another has said and I think that's truly valuable.

02:46:46

I hope it serves as a witness to how you can engage in real ecumenism because this was real ecumenism this evening.

02:46:52

You've just heard that. We both care about the other we both want each other to come into truth and we are both taking seriously the disagreements that we have.

02:47:00

We're not passing them over. We're not engaging in a false irenicism where we all drink tea and say how wonderful each other is. No no.

02:47:06

This has been an active attempt to engage in that controversy that is very necessary. And yes I agree with Dr.

02:47:12

White this is important stuff. This touches upon the nature of how we know true doctrine itself.

02:47:18

In fact that's what the debate turned into. I'm slightly annoyed that we didn't talk more about Mary to be honest in the debate about Mary.

02:47:25

But this is what we have to discuss if we're going to come to a joint understanding of what true doctrine really is.

02:47:32

And as we've seen I don't think we have had any answer or any account that deals with not only the clear illusions and parallels of Mariology within the scripture itself we've heard nothing really seriously

02:47:42

I think dealing with that. We've not heard a meaningful defence of the idea of Sol Scriptura in light of the canon.

02:47:47

We've heard a distinction without a difference that answers an epistemological question with an ontological answer that bears no relation to the question that's truly being asked.

02:47:56

We have heard the idea that well yes scripture can make you fully equipped and complete. Well actually it's those things which were passed on to Timothy if you look at 3 .16

02:48:06

to 3 .17 in the context of 3 .40 and 3 .15 it's those things he was given and he knows from whom he was given them.

02:48:13

And then it begins to talk about scripture. And scripture is profitable for those things. Teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training in righteousness.

02:48:19

Those things that make you complete and fully equipped. Not scripture alone. Because scripture alone cannot give you all the necessary and essential data.

02:48:28

So how do we know what is authentic scripture? We know through authentic doctrine. We know it's scripture we know it through tradition and we know it through the fact that the church listens to her master's voice and accepts it over time.

02:48:39

Which is why even in those communions as I've pointed out time and again which don't accept Roman magisterial authority.

02:48:46

They nonetheless, listening by themselves to the same witness of scripture and tradition, come to pretty much the exact same conclusions.

02:48:55

The only again distinction being the Immaculate Conception because there is a difference on the idea of original sin between East and West.

02:49:03

I did not say that this stuff doesn't come from exegesis or that it doesn't come from scripture at all or that I've made it up.

02:49:11

What I've said very clearly is that there are firm foundations, mariological foundations within the scriptures themselves.

02:49:18

I showed them to you and that from that and from listening to the early church fathers and the consistent ending of the debates that were had between them on Aparthnos and on Panagia from the consensus that came.

02:49:29

Not a matter of majority rule. Not a matter of oh we're all going to have a vote now and impose by democracy what we're going to believe.

02:49:36

No. By an organic process by which the church catholic listened to revelation and eventually came to the same conclusion.

02:49:45

That's a fundamentally different thing than majority rule. If you don't believe that the church has that determining voice, that determining idea of understanding and listening to her master's voice and coming to the truth and what you're saying is that you accept that revelation can be conserved by God but not the church itself.

02:50:04

That for at least a thousand years the church went into not just error, dire error, idolatry.

02:50:10

That's something where we did something which was dishonouring Christ, which was blasphemous. You can believe that.

02:50:16

You can believe that the Lord would let the church be misconstrued in that way and misled in that way.

02:50:24

You can also believe concurrently that in fact the real truth is that the anti -deacon Marianites and the

02:50:30

Helvidians and the other minority heretics, they were right. They just died off and so the church was lost in error for a very, very, very long time until not even at the

02:50:39

Reformation, the Protestant Revolution, until much later we come back to realise, well actually Helvidius was right and the anti -deacon

02:50:45

Marianites were right. I'm sorry I don't find that a credible view of Christian history.

02:50:51

This is why I don't find Protestantism credible as a view either of scripture or of tradition.

02:50:57

What I find much more credible is the view taken by the historic Christian church and the consensus thereof, the census, the daily.

02:51:05

And ladies and gentlemen, I want to finish this, not simply by pointing out the truth of these things, not simply by pointing out that we've had unanswered arguments, that we haven't heard the true foundations dealt with, but I also want to just point out that these are not doctrines you should consider with deep suspicion.

02:51:19

These are ones which I really would encourage you to explore for yourself and to think about and pray about with an open mind because these are beautiful doctrines.

02:51:30

The facts and the reality of Our Lady as Theotokos, the fact of her perpetual virginity, of her being a

02:51:36

Parthenos, the fact of her being Panagia, the fact of her assumption, the fact that she is Our Mother who intercedes for us in heaven is a beautiful doctrine.

02:51:44

Sometimes, perhaps, it's only something you will know by the sheer wonderful experience of praying the Rosary or maybe having been to Lourdes or having been to Fatima.

02:51:53

But this is a beautiful doctrine because it shows the love that God has for us in the communion of saints.

02:51:58

He's given us His Son and through His Son He's given us the church, both militant on the earth that guarantees what is truth but also triumphant in heaven who are able to intercede for us to Jesus before the throne of grace.

02:52:15

That all of that makes a difference. Just as much as all of you praying for each other makes a difference except in this case we're talking about those who have been truly perfected in Christ in heaven and in this case we're also talking about the one woman who was preserved from original sin, who is truly uniquely blessed by God, who is

02:52:33

His Mother who has the most intimate relationship possible with her Son and who can intercede on your behalf and in a way that brings you closer to Jesus.

02:52:41

There has been a full stichotomy and a full separation between Jesus and Mary or the doctrines of Mary taught by the

02:52:47

Catholic Church and indeed historic Christianity and our Lord this evening. There is no such division at all.

02:52:53

Our Lady only ever brings you closer to our Lord. She only ever brings you closer to the true doctrine about Him which is exactly what we see in the definition of the

02:53:02

Theotokos, which is exactly what we see in all the Mariological doctrines to glorify Mary quote unquote really isn't glorifying

02:53:09

Mary it's glorifying what God has done in her in order that she might be the woman who bore the one who is

02:53:17

God and it's through that through that realisation that you'll come to a truth synthesis, historical synthesis of what has been revealed over time in Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition and what has been recognised authoritatively by the

02:53:31

Church Catholic or rather by the Holy Spirit through the means of His Church. That glorious reality that beautiful spirituality that you will find if you read

02:53:41

St. Louis -Marie de Montfort who is as far as Dr. Wise can say worse than anyone else you might cite, but if you read these doctrines, if you read these texts you will find a relationship with our

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Blessed Lady possible to you in His Church, in Christ's Church that will bring you true joy and true fulfilment and the true peace of Christ and I really recommend it to you.

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So thank you very much ladies and gentlemen may God bless you and I hope you will consider seriously the beautiful truth you've presented this evening.

02:54:12

Thank you. You've really seen the joy this evening in this debate.

02:54:38

Indeed thank you all for being here, we didn't even take a break most of you are going, please talk fast, I understand, so I am going to talk fast because I have to talk fast too.

02:54:47

I'd like to begin by once again thanking Peter for being here this evening, I brought a book all the way across the pond for him,

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I don't know if he has it, if he does well I can give it to somebody else I guess but it's an excellent book called The Heresy of Orthodoxy it's an excellent work on undercutting people like Bart Ehrman and others that attack the early history of the

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Christian faith and stuff hopefully if you haven't read it you'll find it to be very useful. Thank you, God bless you. I do appreciate his being here this evening, a lot of people cannot understand how

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I can really truly like someone with whom I have such massive disagreement and who has called me a formal heretic this evening but he knows that I feel the exact same way about him so we can try, at least this is not like many times in church history where we could not have had these discussions there are times in Protestant lands where he would have been imprisoned and died maybe even here in the

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United Kingdom and there are certainly many times where I wouldn't have survived very long in a Roman Catholic country and so I'm glad that anyways we can have these conversations without that kind of problem facing us.

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I want to point out that in Matthew chapter 15 the Lord Jesus addressed individuals who believed on the basis of tradition from their people and by the way if you accept what

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I said about how someone knew that Isaiah in 2 Chronicles was scripture based upon Jewish tradition, Jewish tradition does not include in the canon of scripture the books that Rome included in the

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Council of Trent so now you've got a contradiction between two different traditions but anyway they believed on the basis of tradition that God had given something called the

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Corban rule and they believed it was passed down outside of scripture through the rabbis.

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Sound familiar? What did Jesus do? He held those men accountable to testing those traditions based upon what?

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Some census fidelium? Because the census fidelium in his day said the Corban rule was great! Jesus said it was wrong and there were hypocrites for believing it.

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Jesus said you should have looked to the scriptures and that's what you and I must do this evening as well.

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Hopefully I can bring this up I don't know if I'm going to be able to multitask this way but let me read you some words.

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What more shall I teach you than what we read in the Apostle? For holy scripture fixes the rule of our doctrine lest we dare to be wiser than we ought therefore

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I expound to you the words of the teacher. Calvin?

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Luther? No, that's Augustine. And when Augustine wrote to Maximum the Arian about something as important as the deity of Christ listen to what he said.

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I must not press the authority of Nicaea against you nor you that of Ariminem against me.

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I do not acknowledge the one as you do not the other. Well, now you've got two contradictory councils, what are we going to do?

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No one can know now, right? No, what did he say? But let us come to the ground that is common to both.

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Guess what it is? The testimony of the holy scriptures. Yes there is a long and deep testimony to that very belief amongst the early church fathers.

02:58:02

Philip Schaff the very same Philip Schaff that was quoted earlier said these words.

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After the middle of the fourth century it overstepped the wholesome biblical limit and transformed the mother of the

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Lord into a mother of God. The humble handmaid of the Lord into a queen of heaven. The highly favored into a dispenser of favors.

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The blessed among women into an intercessor above all women. Nay, we may almost say the redeemed daughter of Father Adam who is nowhere in holy scriptures excepted from the universal sinfulness into a sinlessly holy co -redeemer.

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Thus the veneration of Mary gradually degenerated into the worship of Mary and this took so deep hold upon the popular religious life in the middle ages that in spite of all scholastic distinctions between Latria and Dulia and Hyperdulia Mariolatry practically prevailed over the worship of Christ.

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The Romish devotions scarily utter a Pater Noster without an Ave Maria and turn even more frequently and naturally to the compassionate tender hearted mother for her intercessions than to the eternal son of God.

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Thinking that in this indirect way the desired gift is more sure to be obtained. To this day the worship of Mary is one of the principal points of separation between Greco -Roman,

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Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism. It is one of the human factors or instruments of redemption and obscuring or rendering needless the immediate access of believers to Christ by thrusting in subordinate mediators.

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Nor can we but agree with nearly all unbiased historians regarding the worship of Mary as an echo of ancient heathenism.

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It brings plainly to mind the worship of Saris of Isaiah and other ancient mothers of the gods as the worship of saints and angels recalls the hero worship of Greece and Rome.

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That's what Philip Schaff had to say. You might say those are hard words. I imagine that after 1950, of course he lived long before that, his words would have been even more harsh after the definition of the bodily assumption of Mary.

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I know that Peter believes that what he's presented to you this evening is a beautiful doctrine. But I simply want you to understand that when your sole focus is upon the perfection and sufficiency of the work of Jesus Christ, you do not find something like the

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Mass to be beautiful because it robs us of a finished work. When your focus is upon the perfection, beauty, preservation, sufficiency of God's Holy Word, you do not find man's traditions unknown for a thousand years in church history to be beautiful when they become the lens through which the

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Bible is then to be reviewed and seen and interpreted. And when you understand the fact that Jesus Christ himself came down from heaven, the second person of the

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Trinity, and this is laid out for us in Philippians chapter 2, for us and for our salvation, came down, laid aside the privileges that were his, died the death, even the death on the cross, the one time death on the cross, never to be repeated, and understand that he is the very essence and source of mercy and love.

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He is the demonstration that the Father, Son, and Spirit love God's people, and that he is described as the mediator between God and man.

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When you then read Alphonsus Liguri quoting

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Saint Bernard in saying that men needed a mediator with the mediator, you do not find that beautiful.

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When I see people bowing in front of statues of Mary, call it Hyper Julia all you want, there is no biblical distinction between Latria and Julia.

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None! It is a fiction. When I see someone bowing before a statue of Mary, thinking that they will find in her the solace and encouragement that they need, while they fear

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Jesus, my heart is broken because clearly the simple, plain,

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God -breathed gospel that is found on every page of Scripture is not understood by that person.

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They've been given something else. Peter and I recognize that if we were to be doing abortion ministry,

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I just saw a video happen while I was traveling over here. My daughter was with her church outside an abortion mill.

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She was speaking to the people and having back and forth with the escorts. We call them death escorts.

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They call them death escorts over here too? They will now. Laughter If we were to be doing the same thing, and someone were to come up to Peter and I and say, what must

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I do to be saved? The tragedy is Peter and I would have to, if we're honest, there are some people that say, nope, can't talk about divisions.

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Let's just all come up with the same thing. Can't do that. If we're honest, we're going to answer that question differently.

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A lot of pressure upon both of us not to do that. Believe me, I'd be much more accepted in a lot of places.

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You want to keep your ministry small? Debate Muslims and Roman Catholics, my goodness. How can you become more unpopular than that?

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Laughter But I have to, because I love Muslims. I want them to hear the gospel. And I love

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Roman Catholics too. And in spite of all the things we share in common, if we don't share the gospel in common, then

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I need to evangelize you. And so I hope none of us this evening will just simply dismiss what's been said.

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I hope you'll listen again. I hope you'll when we get these things up on YouTube and wherever else they end up, you'll listen, look up the references, think these things through for yourself.

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You've done the right thing in being here this evening. Thank you for being here. And God bless you. Good night.