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00:32

Greetings, welcome to the dividing line. We are going to be taking zoom calls today, even though we're here on the road doing a road trip dividing line, and we already have three folks lined up.

00:45

I someone asked just asked on Twitter about a code or something. I don't have a clue. But Rich says he's posted everything.

00:53

So I don't know. I don't call him. So there you go. Before we start going to our callers, two quick things.

01:03

Chris Arnzen contacted me today, actually contacted Rich, but we texted about it briefly.

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There's some King James only group out there that has put together a some kind of a audio or something where they took a portion where I was talking about way back in the, oh, good grief, 1980s.

01:33

Yeah, 1980s because he, Dennis McKenzie was an atheist, put out a, it was a three, three pieces of paper printed on both sides on a mimeograph machine.

01:46

Anyone remember mimeograph machines? At least originally. And every month he would put this, so a total of six pages, he would put out a publication called

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Biblical Errancy. Biblical Errancy. And it was just a collection of what he considered to be contradictions in the

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Bible. And I don't know someone sent one to me, brought one to me at church or something.

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I don't remember, but I subscribed. You had to subscribe to get this thing. And then I would use it, even on the dividing line we were doing back then on a local radio station.

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And I wrote responses and demonstrated. In fact, some of his stuff ended up in letters to a

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Mormon elder, some of the alleged contradictions that he brought up. And if I recall correctly, didn't we have him on the program once?

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Long, long ago, we did an atheist series that, which I was like 21 or something like that.

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But anyway, so, you know, I have subscribed to Watchtower and Awake Magazines and the

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Ensign, the LDS Church. And I used to joke that my postman must think

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I was a religious nut, because I had all sorts of stuff coming.

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Because you got to use primary sources. You've got to do your homework. You've got to research to respond to stuff.

03:23

Well, evidently there's a King James Only group out there that took a segment where I was talking about biblical errancy.

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Dennis McKenzie, he eventually put a book out. It's on Amazon. I think he died, I think Rich said 2004, 2009, something like that.

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I don't know. Anyway, and they just took the little, 2009, they just took the little segment where I said, when

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I subscribed to biblical errancy and cut it off, didn't give you anything else, and are presenting to people as if that's me denying biblical inerrancy.

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Wow, you've got to be massively desperate and massively dishonest to pull a stunt like that.

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Because it's so easy for someone to, you know, wow, just astonishing.

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Absolutely astonishing. But there's, you know, the internet has given opportunity to many, many people to just lie through their teeth.

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And there you have a King James Onlyists who, you know, the cult of King James Onlyism is one of the most dishonest movements you'll ever encounter.

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And there you go. And the other thing, real quickly, I had this morning,

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I commented on a, where'd it go? I had it right there.

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Where did it go? Well, how weird is that? You have something sitting there, and then it just disappears into the ether.

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There it is anyways. I made the comment this morning,

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I am not sure I have seen a more deceptive abuse of church history than this one. This isn't just ignorance, this is purposely deceptive.

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And I was referring to, I was comment tweeting on something from Catholic Answers, catholic .com.

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Catholic Answers should be ashamed of themselves. Trent Horn, you know better. I mean,

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I don't think Trent did this. They've got somebody, one of your guys in the Twitter department needs to be slapped around a bit.

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Because here's the statement. There is zero disagreement in the early church over whether Mary was assumed into heaven.

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Zero disagreement in the early church over whether Mary was assumed into heaven. There is also zero disagreement in the early church over whether the

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Cowboys were Joseph's favorite football team. Zero disagreement, none whatsoever.

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There is zero disagreement in the early church over whether the Apostle Paul and the

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Apostle Peter argued of whether Skittles and M &Ms were their favorite snack food.

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There's no disagreement in early church about any of that. Because those were all irrelevancies that didn't have any meaning in the early church.

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The same thing with the bodily assumption of Mary. And so to throw out the statement, there is zero disagreement in the early church over whether Mary was assumed into heaven, is asserting that there is agreement when there is nothing.

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Absolutely not. So far I've only had one

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Roman Catholic who had the courage of his own convictions,

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Robert St. Genes, who was willing to debate that topic. Catholic answers never will. Put it out there,

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Jimmy Aitken wanted to defend bodily assumption of Mary, okay. As an apostolic doctrine, okay, you know, it's not going to happen.

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Because they know, they know the truth of how completely non -apostolic that actually is.

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So amazing, amazing stuff. Wow, we've got a bunch of folks here, and I don't have anything.

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Well, okay, there's the chat thing. 2009, I think it's on sermon audio.

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Oh, yeah, the discussion with Dennis McKenzie, yeah. So I'm not sure who came in first or anything.

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If you want to put that on signal or something, so I can see it.

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The chat thing just gets buried behind other stuff. So I see that one,

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I didn't know that one. So let's get to our callers here. And talk to Waona on the subject of the canon,

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I think. Waona. Yes. Yes.

08:18

Hello. Okay. Good evening. So I wanted to ask, yes, on the canon.

08:26

So I've often heard you state that since God inspired some books, and not all books, that the canon automatically exists as an artifact of revelation.

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Sorry if I phrased that wrong. So my question is more concerned with how we can have certainty that the

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Protestant canon is correct. Because I've watched your debate with Gary Michuta, and my understanding was, the argument there was,

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God led the Jews to correctly identify the Old Testament canon, and leave those books up in the temple.

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So I wanted clarity on whether our certainty is based solely on that precedent, and whether the

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Old Testament canon was decided before the incarnation. Well, of course the

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Old Testament canon was. Well, when you say decided, again, to make sure that the standard confusion doesn't take place, and that is when people confuse the historical recognition in time with the theological reality of what

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God has done in inspiration. That's the main problem. If you don't make that distinction, then the canon becomes something that is necessarily human -oriented, and human -discovered.

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And that can't be at the same time when you affirm and assert that scripture is the

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Anustos, and that God holds men accountable to those scriptures.

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So you have to make that distinction, or absolute chaos ensues.

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So if what you're asking is, did Jesus and the

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New Testament apostles function with an understandable and recognizable canon of the

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Tanakh, then yes, clearly they did. How else could Jesus say, you are ignorant, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God?

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Because the Sadducee's response to that would have been, how are we supposed to know the scriptures without an infallible canon, or something along those lines?

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But he didn't do that, and if what you're asking is, and I didn't catch what debate you were referring to, but if what you're asking is, do we use the same methodology in the

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New Testament as the Old Testament? Well, both in the sense that God is the author of scripture, and therefore he determines the canon by inspiring certain books and not others, and then there is a very similar period of time involved in the people of God coming to recognize what

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God has done. Yeah, but that's not what makes it scripture. That's the important part. What makes something scripture is inspiration, and what people confuse is, well,

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I want certainty on the canon. When people ask that,

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I normally say, so what specifically do you think needs to be added?

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And there aren't any candidates. There just aren't. I mean, I know every single possible ancient writing that had ever been viewed as canonical by anybody, and I don't know of anyone today who is trying to make the argument that the

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Shepherd of Hermas, or the Epistle of Barnabas, should be canon scripture.

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I don't know anybody. And the only place where there's disagreement here, obviously, ever since April of 1546, is in regards to the

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Apocryphal Books. And those books, you know, we can get into that if that's what you're going for, but those books in so many instances are so self -evidently secondary that I have to agree with Pope Gregory the

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Great, and Jerome, and Cardinal Jimenez, and all sorts of other people down through history that recognize, as the

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Jews did, that they were not a part of what God had given to them. So, if the issue is, how do

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I have certainty based upon historical analysis of which

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Church Fathers said this, and which Church Fathers said that, and even dealing with the problems that Rome has in regards to the listing of books, because there is some confusion as to the comparison of which

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Apocryphal Books are being referred to because of Greek and stuff like that. If you're talking about that, or if you are talking about, how can

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I have certainty that God has spoken, and that he has just as much of an intention of making sure that I can know what it is he has said, as he had in inspiring it in the first place?

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Those are two different things. One comes from accepting the promises of God, and the other comes from saying,

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I need to have some kind of external infallible authority that I can place my faith in.

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So, if for certainty you mean, what am I going to place my faith in? You can either place your faith in contradictory councils, early

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Church Fathers that had different understandings and made errors, or you can put your faith in whatever it was that Jesus felt that even the

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Sadducees had sufficient revelation to be able to know what God had said, and that in essence, as Jesus said, have you not read what

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God spoke to you? And that is, have you not read what God spoke to you?

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And he spoke that 1400 years earlier, and held men accountable in that day for what

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God has spoken to them. I would rather put my faith in that than in any type of reconstructed historical process that had all sorts of other things involved in that reconstruction.

14:58

Rich, you did something to me there. All of a sudden,

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I'm big on my screen. I'm not sure. Oh, okay.

15:17

Well, hopefully that was helpful. You said we've got someone who only has a few moments? Okay, so let's grab

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Michael real quick. Michael, go ahead. Hey, James, huge, huge fan, long -time listener.

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I've been listening to a bunch of your debates, and I'm a full five -pointer, but a lot of people on the

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Arminian side keep posing this question, such as, if total brevity is true, why would God have to harden people's hearts?

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I understand in the situation of, for example, Pharaoh, it was more for preventing him from doing what his flesh would have wanted to do for preserving

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Egypt, but maybe, for example, Matthew 13 or John 12, where it's fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah, where it seems to be that had not

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Jesus hardened their hearts, they would have believed the gospel. So I'm just curious what your explanation for that is, because I do have a lot of Arminian friends who love to hammer home that point.

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I'm just curious. Well, hammer on that point. It's an incredibly weak point when you think about it, because they say, well, total depravity isn't true, which means man always has the ability to do all the things that scripture says he doesn't have the ability to do.

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And then you get to a point where you have the relatively few places,

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I mean, there are places, there's judgment passages in the

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Old Testament where God hardens the hearts of kings so that they and their people are destroyed.

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Well, what does that have to do with total depravity? Is the idea that, well,

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God had to do that because they were actually just so good, they would have done the right thing. No, they're already under judgment, and God wants to bring about their judgment in a particular fashion.

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In Isaiah 6, when Isaiah is commissioned to go to people,

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I'm going to make their hearts fat and their eyes dull. And that's when Isaiah says, how long,

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O Lord? And the only way that that's an issue is if you're a full -blown

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Pelagian that thinks that people just have the capacity in and of themselves to do the good and the right things.

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They're not the fallen sons and daughters of Adam. And all the places where scripture says they are not able to fulfill the law of God, and they are not able to do what is right before, all that stuff, you just throw that out and just assume that, well, without this hardening, then they could have done the right thing.

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Well, when you have specific judgment texts, we don't have judgment texts about the vast majority of times when

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God brought His judgment to bear. And in those instances, we all go, I guess the

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Arminian goes, well, yeah, they didn't choose to repent.

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They didn't choose to do what was right before God or whatever else. No, we're just not given divine revelation as to when

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God began the process of bringing judgment upon this people or whatever else it is.

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We're just simply not told. But we see example after example after example in the prophets, for example, of nations that are judged by God for their sin, but there's no discussion about what their capacities were or anything along those lines.

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So I just find it a really, I know the provisionists use it all the time, but I find it a really, it just seems like people who use that argument are not thinking about what they themselves are assuming.

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Because unless they're just going to go to the ultimate point of saying no, does that somehow mean that pagan

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Pilate had some kind of inherent goodness in him?

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Maybe some prevenient grace. Maybe they're throwing a prevenient grace concept out. I have no idea.

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But the fact remains that just because you, in some instances, are given the specifics of why

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God is hardening for a specific purpose, it doesn't then jump to the other side.

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And when he doesn't, then that means people have these abilities. We're just simply not told what

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God's purpose in the judgment of those people in that context is. But we are told that...

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Anybody who makes that argument, I just want to say, could you just spend a little time in Jeremiah?

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Just a few minutes. Because if you really want to know the depth of man's sin, can the leopard change his spots?

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Those who are accustomed to doing evil do good. There's just so much. And I don't even have to get into Romans 1.

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I don't even have to get into Romans 8 and stuff like that. It was the constant theme of the prophets as well.

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So it just seems to me like a cover to sneak some type of Pelagianism in, just for the fun of it.

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Yes, that's where I would go. Someone trying to say, are you saying that men do have the capacity to do what is pleasing in God's sight?

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They do have the capacity to submit themselves to God's law in opposition to Romans chapter 8. Is that what you're saying?

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Because that's the assumption that they want to work on. And on a very practical level, by the way, just in passing, you can see how

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George Bryson tried this in our debate in 2001. It's very easy to utilize that emotionally with people.

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Because we all want to believe that we have those levels of capacity and things like that.

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So on an emotional level, that works out for them real well too. So that's how

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I respond to that. Lost internet here. Lost internet here?

23:06

I can hear you now. There you go.

23:25

Well, we press on because we can put out there what we can put out there.

23:32

So sorry about that, whoever that was. I'm sorry guys, but it's a little bit difficult for me to see who everybody is and stuff with what

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I've got in front of me. It's the first time we've tried doing it this way. So you got to tell me who's next. I can't figure any of that out.

23:59

Okay, Lucas Roberts, which means, by the way, when I'm talking to all of you, I have no earthly idea what your question is, topic is.

24:10

So I'm flying by the seat of my pants. So there we go. And we're waiting for Lucas.

24:20

There we go. Sorry about that. Hey, Dr. White. Hi. I'm on Twitter.

24:26

I see a lot of Eastern Orthodox. I know you've kind of talked about Eastern Orthodox when

24:32

Hank the Bible man went Orthodox and you were lamenting the fact that there isn't a lot of, we don't have a lot of apologists working on Eastern Orthodoxy.

24:43

I was curious if you're aware of anybody who is in that field. I know like Sola Scriptura is like a big difference between Reformers and Eastern Orthodox, but is there anything else you can add to that?

24:59

Well, yeah. I had the opportunity recently and I could pull this up, but again, if you don't know what's coming and take too much time, people are watching live.

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I had the opportunity recently in teaching church history to the church in Germany that actually

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I'll be doing again Friday. They had, when the

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Ukrainian war started, they requested some information on that particular subject because they're very evangelistic.

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So they were going out and they were helping people and they wanted to know how to interact with maybe Ukrainian refugees who might be

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Orthodox in their understanding and things like that. We spent a couple weeks going over the primary issues.

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Again, it's a huge topic. Yes, Sola Scriptura is a key issue, but I'll just basically say once again that the challenge that you have in dealing with...

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Now Orthodox Twitter is different than Orthodoxy. Anything in Twitter almost is different than what it would be in real life.

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So you have all sorts of different kinds of Orthodox people and sadly many are nominal

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Orthodox. There's forms of Orthodoxy that are very cultural, magical almost.

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Many Orthodox feel that there are places of Energia, energy, and that worship and doing those types of things is really tapping into a form of divine energy, that kind of a concept.

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And so there's lots of negatives along those lines and lots of legalism and everything else that goes along with it.

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But the best... This is interesting. I've never expressed it this way before.

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Let me see if I can do this. The best of Orthodoxy is very, very different than the best of Roman Catholicism.

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What I mean by that... My introduction to Orthodoxy years and years ago, and if this fellow is still around because the name has escaped me and I don't have archives or don't know where the archives would be to go back far enough to find them.

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My introduction to Orthodoxy was some in -depth conversations with an

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Orthodox man who also understood Reformed theology. That always helps. Those types of individuals that have a very, very serious faith are very different from those that have the highest commitment to the papacy, the

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Roman Catholic sacramental system, stuff like that. Real Orthodoxy is not simply popeless

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Catholicism, which is what most people in the West think. They think it's the same thing as Catholicism, but without a pope.

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That's just not the case. Real Orthodox people just don't even think in the same categories as we do in the

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West. Hence, that's the real difficulty in trying to help people in the

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West to even understand what the concerns are of real

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Orthodox individuals. You're dealing with a liturgy -based system that answers most theological questions with forms of prayer and how we've always done things, tradition, rather than reference to some kind of creedal authority or issues along those lines.

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They don't think forensically like we think in the West. They think much more mystically, and that's what makes trying to write on the subject and even trying to engage those issues very, very difficult.

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Now, in my experience, Orthodox apologists tend, out of necessity, to become less consistently

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Orthodox and more like Rome as their means of defense.

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Especially Orthodox in the United States, who didn't grow up in it, they're not a part of Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox, etc.,

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etc., and tend to be more culturally Western.

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They're going to be very, very different than dealing with like the gentleman that I was talking with, where I could have serious conversations and we were able to actually,

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I think, come to understanding of one another. That was a positive thing.

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There are all sorts of issues about Mary. There are all sorts of issues, obviously, on the gospel, but remember,

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I want to have hope for people who name the name of Christ, whatever the name of the door of the church they go into,

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I want to have hope that they're actually trusting in Christ and in Christ alone, and that they are just desperately inconsistent with the system that they are a part of.

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In fact, I would say that nominalism, whether it's Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or anything else, is the greatest danger to all souls.

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People have said, well, don't you believe Roman Catholic can be saved? Of course, I believe Roman Catholic can be saved, and I believe that there will be people who will be saved who lived their entire life in the

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Roman Catholic system, but they are saved in spite of the

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Roman Catholic system, not because of it. Their faith is a simple faith in Christ, and they're as sheep starving in the midst of that type of a situation, and I would say

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I have even more hope in regards to the

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Orthodox along those lines, because I've met Orthodox who, because of the freedom to focus upon, again, we don't even have the right words, but because of almost the freedom, and mysticism has certain meanings that I'm not even trying to tap into here, but because there's a little less of the dogmatic element attached to particular creeds, confessions, things like that within Orthodoxy, I think that opens the door for people to focus upon Christ, and His righteousness, and union with Him, and all the rest of that kind of stuff, and hence there's a broader possibility there that you'll have people who don't then, unfortunately, grab hold of the very common works oriented, and it doesn't matter what branch you're looking at.

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That's the big danger. We want to be in control of our own salvation, and whether you're a Protestant, or Roman Catholic, or an

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Eastern Orthodox, there's ways to do that, and that's the tendency of everyone those directions, so there's just so much more.

33:27

It's a language thing. It is really, really, really a language, and thought thing, and that's really where the challenges are.

33:36

I'm being attacked by my sorry about that. I'm not sure if this is a, when

33:42

I hear things like this, yes. Okay, so hopefully that was helpful, and we continue on.

33:50

We do want to get to everybody, so I see a lot, a lot of people in here. I'm not sure how. I have got to be done at five.

33:56

Well, five o 'clock my time, whatever time. I've got to be done in 27 minutes, so it's gonna be an hour long.

34:17

Well, I can see some little things, but I don't know what you mean by slide the box. I don't see that.

34:26

Yeah, no. All right, so who's next? Okay, Jaden.

34:35

Hi, Jaden. Hi, God bless you, Dr. White. Hi. Just briefly, I just want to thank you for your ministry.

34:41

You probably had the greatest impact on my journey the past three years. I'm a mailman, so I've spent countless hours listening to your debates, and going through your church history, your lecture series, and all of that, so I'm very grateful.

34:55

Thank you. Thank you for delivering that mail accurately. Definitely, so my question is basically this.

35:04

I've been following your discussion on Aquinas and the great tradition, and I think it's rather simple.

35:12

I see all the red flags that you're trying to call out. I see the concerns as far as from a hermeneutical standpoint.

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What would your advice be, or how would you go about, if you were going to share with someone who, let's say, is in RTS Orlando, and might have direct connections with people such as the president and those who are in there, what would your advice be on how to navigate this conversation with those who, from my standpoint as a student, would seem like they're not so caught up in the highly intellectual aspect, and might be savable?

35:52

How would you go about sharing? Well, historically, this is not the first time that there has been this kind of development of neo -scholasticism amongst the

36:07

Reformed. It's not the first time. It won't be the last time. Generally, it ends up, as is always the case amongst the

36:16

Reformed, with various forms of division and creation of new denominational patterns and stuff like that.

36:26

Sort of like at the end of the 19th century, well, late 19th century, with the controversy in England, in the

36:34

Church of England, and Newman, and Salmon, and all those people are involved with all that kind of...

36:41

It's happened over and over again, and it will continue happening. My concern is not the

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Christianity of any of these individuals. If they make the profession of faith,

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I accept that profession of faith, and on 99 .5 % of everything else, we would probably answer questions in almost the exact same fashion.

37:08

What I am concerned about is that eventually, individuals influenced by this perspective will encounter those who will be seeking to move them farther.

37:26

Now, there may be... I have my suspicions about certain of the main leaders going much farther themselves eventually.

37:37

But even if they don't, even if the major names pretty much stay where they are, what happens is people that have been influenced by a perspective that invests an imbalanced amount of authority in a source outside of Scripture, whether that is the concept that to have meaningful exegesis, you need to start with the

38:18

Council of Nicaea, rather than meaningful exegesis will lead you to the conclusions of the

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Council of Nicaea. People that influence along those lines will encounter people who will push them farther outside of Reformed Baptist, outside of Presbyterian, into other forms of not just liturgical churches, but churches that have a lesser commitment to the full sufficiency of the

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Scriptures. And I could see us losing a portion of the next generation of what could have been strong leaders in our own group to that kind of thing.

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It happens all the time. So if you're talking with individuals, I'm not worried about, quote -unquote, losing them for eternity.

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But what I would like to do is raise questions in their minds about the relationship of the authority of Scripture to anything outside of that.

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And just to make sure in my conversations that the many straw men, and there are a lot of them, are not putting off so much smoke that they can't really see what the actual issues are.

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So in other words, if they make some comment about, well, I'm just so glad that I'm being taught that it's more than just me and my

39:59

Bible under a tree. If anyone said that to me, I would say, did you ever actually think it was that?

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I mean, no one is denying the importance of the church, of the spirit, of confessionalism, any of these things.

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But what we are saying is that anything that is going to be actually sanctifying, edifying, and beneficial to the church in her understanding of Scripture was already delivered to the apostles.

40:41

Mm -hmm. Because, you see, that's really the dividing line. Because if people are saying, no, the apostles didn't have everything that we actually need today, that the spirit has been active in giving us something more.

41:00

If what you mean by something more is that we can benefit from the conclusions of the battles that have been fought before.

41:12

Well, obviously, we're not talking about reinventing the wheel every single generation.

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But when you look at the results of those battles, do the results themselves take a quasi or, in reality, religious authority position that exists now alongside

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Scripture? If someone says to me, Thomas is the final leg in a 1 ,200 -year period of development, and now we have the real orthodox doctrine of the

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Trinity in Thomas, and Augustine didn't have that,

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Athanasius didn't have that, Tertullian didn't have that, Paul didn't have that. Now we've got a problem.

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Now we have a serious, serious, serious problem. Because we are basically saying that the once -for -all delivered to the saints faith wasn't really delivered apostolically, but a process of development started.

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And now it's starting to sound a little bit like John Henry Cardinal Newman at that point.

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And that's where the real issue, I think, comes in. So encouraging someone to be a strong student of Scripture and encouraging someone to recognize what these key issues are, that, to me, would be the primary thing to keep in mind.

42:53

Got it. Yeah, and that's what I had noticed, too, because I haven't heard you ever say

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Nazarene Aquinas. It's been more so when you get interaction from the other side. Why are you quoting

43:05

Aquinas rather than saying Aquinas' conclusions are derived from and aligned with Scripture?

43:13

Right. That's not coming from what they're saying. That's my concern, too. I hope when you watch the video, if you don't mind, that I had to turn around and close the screen.

43:25

But no, yeah, these are times to be thinking very, very clearly.

43:31

And when we think clearly on that subject, that's really what it's going to boil down to. But stay firm, stay focused, and God will get us all through this.

43:44

From my perspective, I continue to pray that God will keep me from viewing even the leaders on the other side the way they clearly already view me.

44:00

Yeah. Only by His grace. All righty. Absolutely. Thank you very much.

44:05

I look forward to seeing you at the conference. All righty. God bless. God bless. So I think from what

44:14

I'm seeing here, hola. Are you there?

44:20

Hola. And if I just jump up and disappear out of the screen, there are a couple of the windows that are open, and we've got a rainstorm coming in.

44:29

We're live. We're on the road. We press forward. Hola.

44:34

Are you there? Hola, hola, hola.

44:43

Anybody? Okay.

44:53

Okay. Yeah, it still looks like it's muted, at least according to mine.

45:02

There. Unmuted. Hola. Are you there? All right.

45:11

Well, okay. How about Paul? Could I talk to why?

45:20

How are you going? Oh, I think I know who this is. Hey, that's a privilege that you know my voice.

45:28

Well, not so much your voice. It's just when you post every

45:34

Saturday that it's the Lord's Day, holding up your Bible on public transport, and you demonstrate that you can clean up well.

45:46

You're not wearing just a t -shirt or something like that. You're looking pretty spiffy. Then, yeah, that's how

45:53

I remember. Doug, that is an honor to hear from you. Thank you very much. I do try to put my best effort into observing the

46:00

Lord's Day, every morning prayer on Sundays, which it is objectively Sunday, because the

46:05

Australian time zones are in fact canonical across the world. Sorry to everyone else who keeps accusing me of being a

46:12

Seventh -day Adventist. Anyway, I shared your dismay about that Catholic Answers article on how the whole church did not dispute the assumption of Mary.

46:22

I think you saw my tweet where I said, well, no one disputed that Mary had a Pokemon collection either, which has about the same power.

46:29

That's about the same way. All of us were sitting there going, well, what example can I use to demonstrate the foolishness of this?

46:37

I teach church history, and to hear someone say that just makes me go, you don't respect church history.

46:49

You don't respect those who came before us to try to cram into, for some of them, voluminous writings, a belief that plainly they did not operate on and did not share and did not have.

47:04

That's abusive, and it's something that should be repented of. Yeah, I have to agree to an extent.

47:13

I think there's a good degree where some of them are genuinely, honestly mistaken, but I think it is getting to a point where they've seriously got to see, at least in the back of their mind, that this is special pleading.

47:24

But I wanted to ask that, given the scale of this special pleading, and especially in recent days and weeks, because I think ever since Dr Gavin Altman's video on the assumption, this stuff has really started to kick off even further, a lot more, because it's kind of like waves that happen every few months of certain topics and discussions on Protestants, Roman Catholics, all of those that get popularity.

47:45

And this latest one in the Assumption Mary has really just shown the greatest display yet of this amazing special pleading, where they'll say, on one hand, copious patristic citations against, say,

48:00

Icon of Dulia. Oh, those don't count, and this later Council does. But then, on the other hand, this barely nothing before, say, the 4th or 5th century and the

48:10

Assumption. Oh yeah, we can still establish a consensus. And it is getting to the point with me as well, that really is starting to drive my head in.

48:16

I like to think I'm well learned on this, but even then, I'd like to ask your very long -aged wisdom of what do you think are the best ways of countering, whether it be rhetorical tactics or intellectual, but I guess particularly rhetorical, because that is where a lot of this goes, such tactics of getting back to and really clearly exposing the nature of this kind of special pleading, especially as it relates to certain issues of presuppositions and consistency with that.

48:46

What do you think are the best ways to really just make it clear to everyone, perhaps even the interlocutor, the

48:52

Roman Catholic themselves, that, look, you're making up standards as you go? I'll be honest,

48:59

I don't know that there is any particularly efficient way to deal with any particular person who starts off with full submission of their mind to the ultimate authority of the

49:16

Roman Magisterium. I know that over the years,

49:22

I will encounter people who will say, you know, 15 years ago,

49:31

I just hated you, and I hated you because I listened to your debates on Roman Catholicism.

49:39

I just thought you were so wrong, and you're leading people astray, but that was 15 years ago, and since then, this is what has happened.

49:53

I wasn't necessarily central to what caused them to start realizing what was going on, but the seed had been planted.

50:05

They always knew that there were other people out there who were providing an answer, and what that would mean is they wouldn't have to jettison the

50:19

Christian faith. There were Christians out there that have been saying this stuff for a long, long time, and so I'm not nearly as interested these days in the never -ending dialogues.

50:37

I don't know if it's just simply age, or my focus is elsewhere, but I would just simply say that I have demonstrated for many

50:53

Roman Catholics that you must deal with church history, and this is what

51:01

I was saying to the other guy. You must deal with church history in a fair fashion, and so I just give examples.

51:12

We do story time with Uncle Jimmy once in a while. We go through all sorts of stuff. We've walked through the ascension of Isaiah, and we've read this stuff, and the protevangelium of James, and instead of just doing the, let's be honest, surface -level

51:29

Catholic answer stuff where, you know, jurgens -level type stuff, you actually read it, and you actually put it in its context, and you actually demonstrate its connections to proto -gnosticism and stuff like that.

51:44

We've also done stuff where we've walked through the epistle of Diognetus, and Clement, and Ignatius, and demonstrated we can allow the early church fathers to be the early church fathers, and then you combine that with all sorts of seeking to handle the text of Scripture rightly.

52:04

I mean, let's face it, the vast majority of Roman Catholics who go to Mass get a 10 -15 minute little sermonette that wouldn't be enough to provide a true sheep of Christ, you know, a single sip of water as far as nutrition goes, and so they hear.

52:26

I'll give an example. What year was that? It was one of the years,

52:33

I think it was the year that I debated Mitch Pacwa on the priesthood, and I did a debate with a

52:43

Muslim, I think, that year. Who was it? Chris Arnson, we remember. Anyway, before the debate's going to start,

52:51

I look down, and here's a whole row right down on the front of little

52:57

Roman Catholic ladies that were at the debate with Mitch Pacwa, and they've come to my debate with a

53:05

Muslim or whoever it was, and somebody went up to them and said, so what are you doing here?

53:15

You know, you were against this guy at the last debate.

53:20

Oh, but we just love to hear him speak, and he knows the Bible so well.

53:27

The fact is, a lot of Roman Catholics recognize that the apologetics that we do is significantly different than the apologetics that they hear, and the way we handle

53:40

Scripture is so much more in -depth than what they get within the

53:47

Roman Communion, and so if we believe that the Lord has his people, and that he has his elect people, and he's with, and trust the

54:03

Lord from there, and I've seen so many people who've come to faith, and found peace, and so on and so forth.

54:12

So I'm not saying that the dialogues are necessarily wrong or something like that.

54:19

I just think that very often they end up pandering toward our desire to feel like we're right, and they're wrong, and I've proved it, and so on and so forth.

54:36

I guess I'm kind of thinking of the lay person who's listening as well, like the people who really get caught up in this stuff, really trying to get to them, those who are really important to reach, not simply, you know, just other apologists and that.

54:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don't want to say that I'm not concerned about Roman Catholic apologists, and in the past I probably wasn't nearly as much as I should have been, and I've tried to fix some of that.

55:06

I think once I started especially meeting with the Muslims I was going to be debating, I saw the real value of that, the necessity of that.

55:14

It makes for a different debate, but at the same time, if we're looking at who we're trying to reach in the debate itself,

55:21

I have to keep the whole audience in mind and not just the single individual person to them that I'm talking to, and it should always, that engagement should never be something that ends up creating spiritual damage in our own lives, and unfortunately

55:44

I've seen lots of people that that does happen. It becomes imbalanced, and we have to be really careful about that, we really do.

55:55

So brother, I appreciate that. I've got one more here.

56:04

Are we going to try for Ola again? I think his mic's out.

56:11

Okay, so where are we going? All right, Rob, you're probably gonna be the last one in.

56:17

We got about three and a half minutes, so go for it. Hi, Dr.

56:23

Whyte, can you hear me? I can, yes sir. Well, thank you very much. You were here in Montana in Frenchtown last year, if you can remember that.

56:32

It was really hot. Yeah, we met. Yes, yes, it was ridiculously hot on that trip, especially for Montana.

56:41

I also wanted to tell you that I'm the one who told you I'm one of the candidates to be the next Algo, because I've listened to every single divide and line.

56:48

Okay, I do remember that, yes. Okay, so my question is, and I don't know if it's a clear question or not, but it's based upon the last sermon you did on covenant theology or baptism.

56:58

Baptism, mainly, you started to touch upon Jeremiah 31, and so my question is an objection that usually is raised from the other side, the paedo -baptist side.

57:12

Essentially, it goes like this. Jeremiah 31 is putting the

57:18

New Covenant and the Mosaic Covenant in contrast, not the

57:23

New Covenant with the Abrahamic Covenant in contrast, because the context of Jeremiah 31 says that the covenant that he will make is not the covenant that he made with the people when he led them by the hand out of the land of Egypt.

57:40

So it's clearly, in the context of Jeremiah 31, it's the Mosaic Covenant. So then, for the paedo -baptism, the

57:47

Abrahamic Covenant becomes a paradigm for the New Covenant, and that's why they can say that the

57:52

New Covenant includes your children, because the Abrahamic Covenant was the covenant of grace. I don't know what the answer is.

58:00

But that doesn't change the key issue of Hebrews 8 and its apologetic application to the

58:09

Hebrews at that time, and that is the supremacy of what they have in Christ is a supremacy that God brings about by the reality that all those that are in the

58:25

New Covenant, and if the point is baptism is a sign of the New Covenant, so who's in the

58:31

New Covenant? So whether they're contrasting with Moses or Abraham or whatever, the reality is that in the

58:37

New Covenant, which we're in now, all of them, from the least to the greatest of them, know

58:44

God. There is not a priest class that's telling them this is how you're supposed to know God.

58:50

All their sins have been forgiven. So what the people are being called back to,

59:00

Hebrews is an apologetic book, what the people are being called back to no longer has any validity to it.

59:09

Under what these persecuted Christians now have, the New Covenant, their sins are forgiven, they all know

59:16

God, that's the nature of the New Covenant, and therefore the sign of that New Covenant is to be given to those who experience all those things.

59:28

So it's not meant to be given in hope that someday they might experience this.

59:34

It is given to those who are in the New Covenant who have experienced this. And so it's not just a matter of, well, no, yeah, mosaic, but we've got the

59:44

Abrahamic. Again, these are all categories that the New Testament writers know absolutely nothing of.

59:52

My argument has been that Calvin developed this concept for other reasons, and if you apply the same exegetical standards that he utilizes on so many other issues to this issue, his position does not stand firm, and that's the issue.

01:00:17

But it's not just a matter of what it's being contrasted with. It's what it actually says of itself.

01:00:24

And if you practice paedo -baptism, then you in essence are saying that for this person, we're going to give them the sign of a covenant.

01:00:33

And this is why consistently a lot of Presbyterians go this direction, well, a lot of people have gone this direction in the past, and that is you sort of have to believe that if you've given that sign, this child is going to be saved.

01:00:50

You are by that insisting that your child is a covenant child and is in the

01:00:57

New Covenant and therefore is going to be saved. And that's why they will say, and that's why we have to excommunicate them afterwards.

01:01:04

The problem is they were never truly saved in the first place, unless you try to grab hold of an

01:01:11

Augustinian understanding or something like that, of a temporary justification without the gift of perseverance, and it gets quite complicated after that point.

01:01:20

And us silly Baptists, we go, you know, you would really avoid a lot of problems here if you just started with the

01:01:27

New Testament and thanked God for Brother John Calvin, but recognized that he lived in a particular period of time, and there was a particular reason why he wanted to maintain infant baptism, which had been brought over from the previous system, shall we say.

01:01:46

So anyway, so that's the issue. The issue is Hebrews 8, they all know all their sins are forgiven.

01:01:53

Those are the people that receive, those are the people in the New Covenant. So thank you very much. You're most welcome.

01:01:59

Thank you very much. Well, that didn't work too badly. We've got to figure out some way. I mean,

01:02:05

I can see it happened more than once.

01:02:13

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. I mean,

01:02:18

I'm literally doing this through my phone, but I've got a 5G signal here. So there you go.

01:02:24

I mean, when I put my cursor on people's things up here, I can see a little bit more, but we'll figure it out.

01:02:32

We'll figure it out. It worked well. So indeed.

01:02:38

Thank you. Thank you very, very much. The plan right now, let's see, what is today? Today is

01:02:43

Tuesday. I think Thursday is going to work out.

01:02:51

We'll figure it out from there. Everybody will let you know on the app and heading home next week and only home for less than two weeks.

01:03:02

Hopefully my daughter will have my grandson during that time period.

01:03:08

And then back out on the road. We've seen a lot of you folks heading back to Washington, D .C.

01:03:14

Sneak in, sneak out. Hope I survive. And the G3 conference. And then on the way back, teaching early church history at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, and all sorts of fun stuff along the way.

01:03:29

So your continued prayer support needed. Thank you for watching the program today. Great questions. We'll see you next time.