Christian / Mormon Debate, White vs. Potter II

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If, hypothetically, if Paul's statement in 2

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Timothy 3 .16 -17 is true and that it is Scripture, not the Scripture writers, but the result of their writing, that is

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God breathed, would it not follow that if the author is God, that the philosophical foundation of what is said would transcend anything that a non -inspired writing could ever even approach to being able to present?

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I don't think that it, it's not my view of God that it would matter to God what kinds of precise philosophical positions we hold.

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What would matter is whether we are willing to affirm Jesus as our Savior and Lord or not. What would matter is whether when we pass someone on the street who's a beggar, if we stop to help him or not.

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What would matter if, what would matter is if we're willing to, to accept the good news and to have hope for salvation and redemption in the end.

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Those are the kinds of things that matter, whether, I mean, whether we're Arminians or Calvinists or LDS theologians, it seems to me that that doesn't matter.

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And I think that that's, I don't want, again, I don't want to present myself as representing the LDS position, but I think that this is the central reason why the

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LDS church is non -credal and you will not find official statements of doctrine, because I think that the

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LDS, we emphasize the fact that it doesn't, the precise philosophical content of belief does not matter as much as the, the way that those beliefs function in, in constructing a community of Christ.

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Dr. Potter, you said in one of the papers on, on your website, finitism, the problem of evil.

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I don't know what to say about redemptive sovereignty. I'm inclined to think that God is redemptively sovereign, but I am also tempted by the idea that God's plan is like James says it is, a wonderful one with great results should succeed, but also a risky one with a real chance for failure if we do not cooperate.

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You recognize those? Yeah. Okay. Could you, in the closing moment that we have here, comment in light of assuming, if, if you assume that this is the case, assuming that the presentation that I made in regards to the statements from scripture, that it was

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God's intention to bring us to God, that God's intention that we have the righteousness of Christ because of the sacrifice of Christ.

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Those are Hinnok clauses in the Greek. If that is in fact true, then could you comment on what seems to be a major contradiction between what you said there about our need for, it could fail without our cooperation and the stated intention that the sacrifice of Christ was indeed to bring us into the presence of God?

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Yeah, well, this is, I think, a really interesting philosophical issue and I can't do justice to it in just a couple of minutes, but I'll just try to say something about it that will gesture.

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Even 45 seconds is even worse. Okay. But, you know, I think that it's, the point of my, that part of that paper was to argue actually that the idea that God will be,

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God's plan will be successful is consistent with the Mormon view that God is not omnipotent in the classical sense and I mean by that only that God can't, it is not the case that God can do anything that is logically possible.

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God is certainly all powerful in a broader sense, but I think that the,

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I, it is perfectly consistent with the LDS position to say that we, or God's plan will succeed.

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However, I have to admit in my own views a certain temptation by the idea that it really does matter what we do.

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It really is in the end up to us and after all, if it is, then we could all just decide not to accept it.

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And I think that, I don't think that's necessarily a, there's nothing contradictory in being willing to entertain two different possible positions.

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I, yeah, oh sorry. I'm not used to doing this. I feel like a lawyer or something.

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The only, I ask, I ask, well most LDS, I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of LDS theologians are lawyers, right?

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Blake Osler and... I'm sorry, oh yeah, sorry.

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Probably the first question I would have is this. What is it, if you don't mean what

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I said you mean by the claim that works are a necessary result of being elect,

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I mean they follow necessarily, if you are elect, you will do good works. If you don't mean that, what

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I claimed I mean by that, and you don't mean what I claimed you mean by the claim that they are not necessary to the gaining of salvation, those are quotes from the text, right?

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Could you maybe explain the precise philosophical claim that you're making there? Sure. In fact, that was during the break, someone brought over your paper so I could look at it a little bit more carefully, and I think that was one of the equivocations that I noticed there is that you seem to confuse the statement that works are a necessary result of saving faith with the idea of works being a necessary grounds of justification.

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Those are two very different things, at least as I define them, and that was my statement of faith, so let me explain what the difference is.

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The one is a denial of the idea that God's forensic declaration, which

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I believe is what justification is, God's forensic declaration that I am right with him based upon the merits of Jesus Christ, upon his atonement in my place, that that declaration on the part of God cannot be based upon anything that I do in and of myself.

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It cannot be based upon any merits that I have, anything that I bring. The terminology we frequently use is we bring the empty hand of faith, and only the empty hand of faith can fit into the hand of God's grace.

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The other statement that I made, however, was that since saving faith is the gift of God, that it is described in scripture,

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Philippians 1 .29, it has been granted to you to believe, since it's described as the gift of God, then one of the things that differentiates saving faith from non -saving faith or hypocrisy, those who, as in Jesus' parable, the soils that spring up but there is no ground in them, et cetera, et cetera, one of the things that separates those kinds of faith is that saving faith is a part of the whole work of God in the life, which includes, obviously, first regeneration, bringing a spiritual life, sanctification, the whole nine yards, and as a result, as James teaches, it will result in the fact that we are new creatures in Christ, and as Paul put it in Ephesians 2 .10,

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since we are created by Christ Jesus unto good works. And so it becomes as natural for the

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Christian to do good works once justified, regenerated by God, given saving faith, justified in peace with God, it becomes as natural for that person to do good works as it is for, as my good friend

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Wally Tope used to say, you don't go baa baa to become a sheep, you go baa baa because you are a sheep. A sheep goes baa baa because it's its nature to do so.

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A Christian does good works because it's his nature to do so. Not that that becomes the ground of what

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God did, but the result. So the difference is as fundamental as the difference between, which you would certainly recognize in any propositional statement, there's a difference between the grounds of an action and the result of that action.

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And so I think it was just a matter of misconstruing the relationship between the two statements that results in the equivocation.