Vanishing Freedoms and More Interaction with Trent Horn on Church History

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May 3, 2021

First half an hour or so we talked about Covid and passports and freedoms and the like, then we moved into looking at Trent Horn’s response to a small portion of our discussion of his 2019 Catholic Answers talk on Protestant “distortions” of church history, focusing upon the idea of “the argument from silence.” Almost an hour and 45 minutes today! Visit the store at https://doctrineandlife.co/

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00:45: Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. We're in the AOMAX studio today. I'm James White, along with Rich Pierre.
00:50: Did you know that Rich has seen every single movie about Napoleon Bonaparte? He's really hoping that Napoleon's going to make a comeback someday, and France will reign supreme.
01:02: No one in France believes that, but there's a small remnant in Prescott that still believes that. So, he's contradicting me back there already.
01:11: See, it's already started. It's a tough day. Welcome to The Dividing Line today. On the way in,
01:18: I was listening to various news sources, and I do not want to be the constant
01:27: Debbie Downer person. The fact of the matter is, I understand how people who want power, how they function.
01:38: I understand how their minds work, and part of that comes from having studied despots and dictators from the past.
01:48: In the Christian worldview, you look at those dictators in the past, and you combine that with Romans 1, 1
01:56: Corinthians 2, Isaiah, and of course, the in -depth anthropology that can be derived from reading the prophet
02:04: Jeremiah with regularity. You discover that mankind repeats things and does things.
02:12: So, as I listen, as I see what has been happening over the past number of years, and especially over the past year now, with the speed at which political power and massive amounts of money have changed hands and have flowed into various parts of the economy and in the world, it just seems to me too obvious that there are things going on.
02:42: So, we now have, even as places are quote -unquote opening up, a friend of mine last night, a friend of mine in Apologia, mentioned going to,
02:59: I think it was Trader Joe's, because all these Trader Joe's, Sprouts places are just run by inveterate communists.
03:11: He said that he went to one and said he had an exemption, and so they gave him the scarlet cart.
03:21: And I'm like, what? His name's Mike Hendrickson, and he's a good guy, and he has a very well -named son, by the way, just thought
03:31: I'd mention that in passing. But I'm like, the scarlet what?
03:37: And so he sent me a picture, and there is a red cart with a sign on it that says,
03:45: Face mask exemption accepted. And that's what you have to get your groceries in.
03:51: It's like a little yellow star. Now, I'm sure the thinking, the thought in somebody's mind was, we do this so that all the
04:03: Karens, who are our primary audience and constituency, do not attack this poor person as they are attempting to buy groceries.
04:16: But anyway, could anyone in December of 2019, remember
04:25: December of 2019? It seems like another lifetime ago. Could anyone in December of 2019 have imagined that in that brief period of time, you would be, all
04:37: HIPAA laws would be, without having actually been rescinded by the federal government, would have been rescinded by something you call the
04:49: Karen cult. And if you don't know what a HIPAA law is, I remember, do you remember,
04:55: Rich, who was it? Was it Mel? Who was it that when we were flying Southwest?
05:02: Okay, it was Mel. Back in the day, when we were flying up to Salt Lake City to the
05:08: General Conference, this was decades ago, when they would say, if you have any special needs, need more time boarding the plane, would you please come forward now?
05:23: And Mel, one of our volunteers, would always get up, and he's perfectly healthy, has no problems, but he wanted to get on the plane first.
05:32: And I always wondered, if you're not
05:37: Walker, if you don't look as old as Rich, or something like that, then how do you know?
05:48: And my wife informed me, who used to work for American Airlines, my wife informed me that according to HIPAA law, federal law, you cannot inquire as to someone's medical condition.
06:02: So if someone comes up and says, I have a medical condition, I require more time to get on the plane, you let them on the plane.
06:08: It doesn't matter if they just ran a marathon. It doesn't matter if they're Bruce Jenner, wherever he is these days.
06:18: Well, he's, yeah, that's, no, that's not him. That person doesn't exist any longer.
06:24: That's the weirdness of the whole world today. Anyway, you're not allowed to ask these questions, and all that's gone.
06:32: It disappeared sometime between April and June of last year, as did all medical exemptions, and freedom of religion, and speech, and everything else, it all disappeared.
06:44: So I'm hearing people talking about the new Indian variant, I think it's
06:50: BC -1617C, or something like that. And I'm hearing a lot of people going, the vaccines may not cover this.
06:59: And other people saying, oh, it probably will, you know, just take a little while to, you know, specifically check this out, and so on and so forth.
07:08: The conversation going on globally is functioning on the assumption that it is within medical possibility to completely wipe out
07:23: COVID -19. Now, there are certain kinds of diseases you can completely wipe out.
07:31: Respiratory viruses are not amongst them, which is why, up until 2020, we had something called the flu season.
07:40: And you could go and get your flu shot, and when I worked at a major hospital,
07:46: I felt like a pincushion. You were forced, working at a hospital, to get hit with everything.
07:55: But you would think that you'd be able to get rid of these things, but you can't.
08:01: It's not possible. But we are now functioning on the foundational idea that yes, you can.
08:08: That we have to, everybody has to get vaccinated so we can completely get rid of COVID -19.
08:14: Well, we'll never get rid of COVID -19. And therefore, and any variants that come,
08:21: COVID -21, I'm still expecting COVID -21 sometime in the future. Maybe it's this Indian variant, who knows what it'll be.
08:29: There has simply been such a massive creation of political power and capital in the control of the economy, the destruction of business, the creation of mega business, and the destruction of mom -and -pop business.
08:48: And, well, Rich and I were watching a little thing a little while ago.
08:55: There was a guy in, I think it was in Florida, saying he can't get people to work in his kitchen for his restaurant.
09:04: Because when you look at what the state government and the federal government will give you to not work, it's more than he can pay people.
09:13: And since you no longer have the Protestant work ethic within the United States, people don't want to work.
09:21: And so businesses can't do what businesses are supposed to be doing. And so we're just printing money right and left.
09:28: And anybody with a brain knows that can't go on forever, but there's no one with a brain in politics anymore.
09:35: And so you just spend money, not like a drunken sailor, but like an entire aircraft carrier full of drunken sailors, is how you're doing it now.
09:46: And so what I'm hearing people saying is, if you don't get the vaccine, then it's your fault if there's a new variant.
09:59: That was never true before 2019. It's not true now. It's a scientific joke, but scientific facts are irrelevant in our current situation.
10:12: And like I said, I got a bunch of shots before I went to Zambia a couple years ago, and I'm not an anti -vaxxer.
10:21: I do have a lot of concerns about how it's been handled in the past, but not all those folks.
10:27: But in this situation, given the politicalization of medicine based upon an anti -Christian worldview, that's where the issue comes up.
10:37: These are emergency vaccines. They have not been approved. They've been approved for emergency use only.
10:46: There are no long -term studies, and I can guarantee you there will be the need for a new vaccine very, very quickly.
10:55: And billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars will flow into these areas.
11:02: And folks, once you've created a way for billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars to keep flowing into an area, guess what?
11:08: That area doesn't want the billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars to stop flowing into that area.
11:15: And the naive, simplistic people that just sit around going, but it's just all for the children.
11:21: And that's the other thing. I hope I didn't cue it up, but did you see that poor young lady collapse across the finish line?
11:32: I have many faults and failures. Anger at the simple morons in that state, that was
11:43: Oregon, mandating that teenagers wear masks while running races, playing tennis, playing anything.
11:57: It must be easier for people who never took biology. I majored in biology.
12:04: I was a department fellow in anatomy and physiology. I just know too much about this stuff. And you can see the abject stupidity of this stuff.
12:14: Running in the 800 meters in a mask and passes out and literally wins by her head falling.
12:22: She goes out. Thankfully, her head fell across the finish line. And she won.
12:29: She set a school record or something. Could have done a whole lot better if she'd been able to breathe. And now, of course, we're vaxxing the six -year -olds.
12:40: Oh, my goodness. The very people who are in zippity -dippity doo -dah danger, now you're going to vax them too.
12:48: And I'm just sitting here going, if you can't see this, if you can't see what's going on here, if you cannot see that if anyone questions this, if you say right now you will not be able to continue your education in almost any institution of higher learning, which these days is lower learning, but you will not be able to go to school in the fall without submitting to the insertion of genetic therapies into your body that have no long -term testing values whatsoever.
13:23: That's all there is to it. That's all there is to it. You're not going to be able to fly again.
13:30: You're not going to be able to eventually be able to do almost anything. And you will have to wear not only push the scarlet cart, but you're going to have to wear special clothing or something like that.
13:44: You're going, that would never. Yes, it will. Yes, it will. It's coming right now.
13:49: It's coming right now. It's amazing, absolutely amazing the world we live in. The speed is astonishing, but the preparation had to be done for years before this.
13:58: And it was in the destruction of a Christian worldview that would not allow you to do these types of things.
14:05: And if you don't know why the Christian worldview would not allow these types of things, then maybe you need to be working on what your
14:13: Christian worldview actually is. The Southern Baptist Convention is coming up, the annual meeting.
14:24: And I think it's going to be a bellwether of what is to come for the ostensibly largest
14:35: Protestant denomination in the United States. I say ostensibly. The fact is,
14:46: Southern Baptists have known for a long time. In fact, Tom Askell has said for decades that the
14:52: Southern Baptist Convention had to become serious about church discipline. Because the fact that, and I remember this so very, very clearly.
15:03: Rich does too. But we met at a
15:08: Southern Baptist megachurch. I think 20 ,000 members qualifies as a megachurch, especially back in the 1980s.
15:18: And I saw then the impact of the idea that if you were going to be a leader in the
15:29: Southern Baptist Convention, your church had to be amongst the top in baptizing people. And so, big emphasis getting people down the aisle and get them through that Baptistry.
15:39: Now, where they would be a year from then, the back door was just as big as the front door.
15:49: 20 ,000 members on the roll, but to be honest with you, functionally,
15:55: I would say there were about 7 ,000 that actually attended the church at least half the time.
16:06: And I think there was probably 7 ,000 you could never find. And when
16:11: I joked, as I've joked often in the past, that you had to submit your own death certificate personally in triplicate to get off the membership rolls, that was only a slight exaggeration.
16:24: It was meant to communicate something. So the SBC has, in many ways, created its own problems in filling its pews with unbelievers.
16:36: And as a result, when you build buildings and you take out loans dependent upon how many people you have attending, then you have to be very, very careful about what you say.
16:47: Let's just be honest. That's how it has worked in the past. I am not a person that has been spending a whole lot of time focused upon the presidential race.
17:04: My understanding is that there are three candidates that Albert Mueller is running, that there is a candidate to his right who would basically say that they are stronger in denouncing certain of the things that are happening within the
17:28: Southern Baptist Convention. And then on the left side is Ed Litton, I understand.
17:36: And on the 29th of April, Ed Litton tweeted the following, When we become advocates of a creed, something dies.
17:46: We do not believe God, we only believe our belief about him. Now, my experience has been that, especially when you make a statement like that on Twitter, when people push back, it's real easy to find a way of orthodoxizing a statement like that, in essence, and saying,
18:13: Well, I wasn't saying we shouldn't have a statement of faith. We do. We have the
18:18: Baptist faith and message, and I stand with the Baptist faith and message. I was going to say, the day will come, possibly, when someone will run on a platform of dismantling the
18:33: Baptist faith and message. But that would be after the Southern Baptist Convention splinters into various and sundry other groups.
18:40: And then the groups on the left would definitely want to fundamentally alter the
18:46: Baptist faith and message in regards to women in ministry and issues along those lines.
18:51: Probably get rid of the open theism thing, too, and then Leighton Flowers can go whole hog if he goes that direction.
19:00: But, look, I know people who have become advocates of a creed and have elevated a statement of faith, a creedal statement.
19:19: I have criticized some of my own tribe in becoming what
19:25: I would call hyper -confessionalists, where more time is spent arguing about and worrying about the perspectives of people who died hundreds of years ago than anything in regards to exegesis and anything that goes along with it.
19:54: So, certainly, you can have imbalance. But when we talk about creeds, we talk about, for example, the
20:02: Nicene Creed. We all need to be advocates of the Nicene Creed.
20:09: And if we're not advocates of the Nicene Creed, the something that dies is Christian Orthodoxy. What should have been said is, when we become only advocates of a creed and are unconcerned about its biblical faithfulness, something might die.
20:32: We do not believe God. We only believe our belief about Him. I'm not even sure what that means. I mean,
20:37: I suppose you can try to say that there are people who have beliefs about God without knowing
20:44: God. If you're talking about nominalism, but I don't think that's what's being referred to here.
20:50: It was just a very muddled statement that I think was specifically designed and intended to reach out to a particular community, but it certainly concerned me.
21:05: I mean, I've been told that Ed Linton's a wonderfully nice guy, and maybe he is.
21:11: But that particular statement really concerned me. There was a thread that I saw this morning on Twitter that I want to just briefly mention before we get to some church history stuff.
21:27: There's a fellow, That Brian, which
21:32: I always see as That Brain. I'm not sure why that is. Yeah, you see how I see it? That Brain.
21:38: It's That Brian, and it's the monk guy that he uses his picture. But it's
21:44: That Brian, which I think you should just change it to That Brain, because everybody sees it that way anyways.
21:51: He had a conversation back and forth with someone, WRF3, and I just want to sort of comment on it.
22:04: That Brian says, Neo -Marxism has infected the hearts and minds of church leaders and conservative seminary faculty members.
22:11: It's far too late to fight this. WRF3 said,
22:18: How is fighting the Neo -Marxist Party any different than fighting the Circumcision Party or the Sabbatarianism Party or the fill -in -the -heresy party?
22:26: With a little graphic that says, We have met the enemy and he is us. That Brian says,
22:32: How? They write the books. They speak at the conferences. They have the microphone. And WRF3 says,
22:39: We have the resurrection. 1 Corinthians 2, verses 14 through 16. And That Brian says,
22:47: Yes, all else is lost. And a fellow by the name of Robert S.
22:53: said, Depends on what you mean. There are many churches and pastors who are not compromised. That Brian says, I'm well aware.
22:59: They also have no to little influence. Todd, repent and believe the gospel, said,
23:06: I don't know that it's too late. We have to start fighting it first. That Brian says, It is too late. Stage four of metastasized cancer.
23:14: Todd says, And the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Don't be alarmed. That Brian says, What do you think that verse means?
23:21: Does it mean the PCA doesn't allow an openly homosexual pastor? Not alarmed, just stating a fact.
23:28: To which Todd said, I think the verse means, no matter how badly we created beings try to muck it up,
23:38: Jesus will preserve his church in exactly the way he intends to. And so apostate churches will get cleaned up in his time and in his way.
23:48: That's all. I agree. We're failing. To which that Brian said,
23:53: The text is not about preserving the church. The text is about the defensive power or lack thereof of hell. The gates of hell won't stand.
24:00: And that was where it stood when I left this morning. I think a lot of us find ourselves on both sides of this conversation.
24:12: There are some days when you're that brain. And there are some days when you're all the other guys saying, don't be such a curmudgeon.
24:24: And there is truth in the realization that there has been a deep infection.
24:34: And that in reality, there are many institutions and churches that will not recover from this stage four cancer of neomarxism.
24:49: And what really brought that about. And that is a fundamental abandonment of central key tenants of the faith in regards to the sufficiency of Scripture and the message of the gospel.
25:02: And the unity of the church, what that's based upon, the sufficiency of Scripture and the danger of bringing in outside sources.
25:15: But at the same time, the other people are speaking the truth as well. And I just simply wanted to comment that while we can honestly recognize how far this has gone in many places, and we should be honest in recognizing that there are people that 15 years ago.
25:46: Now, as we look back, we can see what was going on with them.
25:53: We can see what's happening with them and come to understand that they were preparing the ground.
26:07: That they were already compromised, but we just didn't have the vocabulary to see it at that particular point in time.
26:14: All those things are true. And then
26:19: I had another friend who said yesterday, said, okay, we see all of this, but what do we do now?
26:29: Where can we put our energies? It just seems like we're going backwards. It seems like it's getting worse and worse and worse.
26:37: So are we just observing? Well, a couple of things. Even if the
26:45: CCP is successful in taking over the Internet, which Xi Jinping wants to take over the
26:52: Internet, and he's doing a good job of it. Even if the
26:58: CCP succeeds in establishing the Ministry of Truth and doing virtually what
27:06: Winston did in 1984, where you don't need to have a tube deliver an old newspaper article to you, so that you can edit it and remove people and put new pictures in and rewrite history.
27:23: That was old and slow. AI can do it much, much faster.
27:31: Even if that were to be the case here on earth, it can't be the case in heaven.
27:40: And the fundamental final judgment will not be rendered by Xi Jinping or any of his sycophantic followers, nor by Google, nor by Facebook, nor by Twitter, Apple, or anybody else.
28:00: There will be a day of judgment. And the question is going to be, at that judgment, will it be clearly said that you spoke the truth, no matter what cost you?
28:15: I don't know if y 'all saw, I haven't watched it yet because I haven't subscribed to the
28:21: Tucker Carlson thing, but he had Jordan Peterson on. And I've seen
28:28: Peterson in person, I met him once. Some of you know that back in November of 2017,
28:36: Sovereign Nations had a conference, and it was right after the Reformation stuff, so I spoke on Reformation topics, so nobody remembers what in the world
28:44: I said. But my daughter Summer spoke, that was really her first public speaking gig.
28:51: And she spoke right before Jordan Peterson did. That's called having a little bit of pressure on you, just a tiny bit.
29:02: And I was, of course, so excited that, was it three or five times?
29:08: Probably ended up being four times. And Jordan Peterson, when he did speak, said, as the previous speaker said, and then made reference to something that Summer said.
29:18: And so I thought that was great. But he's a very interesting person.
29:24: I mean, I hope you're praying for him. I hope you saw the video clip from a couple of months ago.
29:30: You know he's had a difficult life and tremendous challenges. And I noticed in the clip that was played on Tucker last night that he starts off like this, and he's always talking like this.
29:48: And you know when he's starting to get to his point when all of a sudden he looks up and he looks at you. And that's how he was when he was speaking in Washington that time.
30:01: Man, it seems like a lifetime ago because I went running down by the Capitol. And boy, they're going to arrest me now for having run by the
30:08: Capitol in 2017. It's possible. Yeah. Rich just locked the door.
30:13: That'll do a lot. But it does seem like a lifetime ago.
30:22: He doesn't start off real strongly. It's almost like he has to build up a head of steam, and then off he goes.
30:33: And you could tell that that was what was going on. But at the same time, what he was talking about, he was talking about why it is worthwhile to suffer for speaking the truth.
30:50: That's basically what he was talking about. Do you want your life to be based upon having stood for the truth or something else?
30:59: And I'm sitting here going, the struggles that I see going on in him are of a man who has been exposed to so much truth about the truth.
31:13: And yet his training and a lot of his scholarship and stuff is sort of standing in the way of submitting to him who is the truth and the struggles that are his result.
31:32: And when he was talking about the resurrection and things like that, just absolutely an amazing, amazing thing to watch and to know what's going on there.
31:48: But the point was, here's a man that, as far as I can tell, has not made a public profession of faith in Christ, has not submitted himself to the lordship of Christ.
31:59: And yet, through common grace or the work of the Spirit in him drawing him to himself, maybe over a period of time,
32:05: I don't know what's going on in his life, recognizes that to be a real human being is to be about truth.
32:16: And we remember the people who spoke the truth, even though they paid with their life for so doing.
32:27: And so you may be in a compromised institution.
32:33: Speak the truth. Speak the truth and get fired. But speak the truth with clarity so that people will remember that you spoke the truth.
32:44: I mean, I don't know what the future holds, and there's a lot of people saying you need to flesh out a little bit more some of the stuff you've been talking about regarding what could be your darkest idea of what might be right in front of us in light of the reality that Christ will put all of his enemies under his feet, and the last to be defeated will be death.
33:18: If you don't believe that, you don't believe in the resurrection. I mean, that's the resurrection chapter.
33:25: That's part of the promise. We may not make application in this world and put it off to the spiritual realm and stuff like that.
33:32: Okay, some people do that. But the point is, if you accept that to be the case, then there are some people who say, well, that just means things are going to get better and better and better.
33:42: No, that's not the case at all. And if secular humanism, if secularism, if this, there is no
33:51: God, you are, and I saw it again over the weekend, another video, and this is for kids, teaching kids that they're nothing but startup.
34:02: They're nothing but startup. And they think it's cool. They really think it's cool to tell, you know, some of the molecules in your body came from a dying star, billions and billions of light years away.
34:15: Isn't that neat? The problem is, it comes the worldview that says, and that's all you are. And when you die, that's it.
34:22: There's nothing more. There's no judgment. There's no nothing. Nothing you do in this life is ever going to make one witted difference in this big, wide, pitiless, merciless universe, which is just going to die a heat death, and that's it.
34:39: That's all they've got. That's a huge enemy, and it has to be crushed under the feet of Jesus.
34:50: Could it require allowing this insanity? And it is insanity.
34:58: The poor girl falling across the finish line. The only thing worse than her falling across the finish line because of the stupidity of people making her wear a mask is if she was beaten to the finish line by a dude.
35:11: That would have been worse. Who didn't have to wear a mask because maybe he claimed something,
35:18: I don't know, who knows. But that kind of worldview, we keep thinking, have we gotten to the bottom yet?
35:31: And then the next day we find out there's another level to descend into. Could it be that it needs to burn the place down?
35:44: Worse than the Soviets did. Worse than the Chinese have done. So that it forever stands as a monument to all of mankind.
35:58: Never even entertain this idea ever again.
36:05: Never entertain the idea that you're nothing but stardust. Never entertain the idea that you can genetically manipulate mankind as if you're
36:15: God. Is it possible? The point is, if it were to happen.
36:25: If all these institutions that Brian's talking about, they all go apostate.
36:31: So, what are you supposed to do? Our duty is to communicate the faith to the next generation.
36:40: To proclaim the lordship of Christ and to die. That's it.
36:47: That's it. So, you stand firm. You speak the truth.
36:54: Knowing who you're serving. And knowing that he will be glorified. It reminds me, honestly, reminds me of back when we were passing out tracts to the
37:03: Mormons and stuff like that. You knew the vast majority of those tracts that you were folding and carrying around.
37:10: And I wrote them and we got them printed and all the rest of it. There we go in the garbage can. It was those precious few that were stuck in the back of a quad someplace.
37:22: And five years later somebody pulled it out and the Lord used that to bring them to Christ. We have so many stories like that.
37:31: So many stories like that. Remain faithful. From the perspective of the time, there are many times we'd walk away from a general conference.
37:41: We'd walk away from an Easter pageant and it's like, Wow, there was some real opposition.
37:48: Wow, you know, those were tough conversations. But you don't know what the future is going to bring. You're called to be faithful.
37:55: And you testify. And you do so with grace and yet with firmness.
38:02: And that's really the challenge today. I mean, I'm not going to claim that I always get it right, but you have to try to somehow find that balance.
38:14: It's going to be a little bit different for different people. And I find it easier to be gracious towards certain kinds of people than other kinds of people.
38:23: And then there are others, it's reversed. The people that I'm gracious to, they can't even talk to them.
38:30: And the people that I just give them a right fist, they're the ones that somehow can communicate with them.
38:38: So there you go. The body works in that way.
38:43: So there you go. All right.
38:52: Now, completely shifting gears here.
39:04: Moving to the subject of church history yet once again.
39:09: And hoping I don't mess everything up. I'm trying to get rid of the little creature that just decided to land on the keyboard.
39:17: Over the past week or so, I have listened to a response that was offered to a small portion of our response to Trent Horn.
39:33: Trent Horn did a webcast for about 40 minutes or so where he responded to just a few elements.
39:43: He did not respond to the lengthiest portion that we did. He said he might do that later, might not. Where we dug into Augustine and Zosimus and Pelagius and all those related issues.
39:59: We dug into the quotation of Augustine that he said you should use and things like that.
40:05: And so we've provided a number of hours of response. And as those of you who like the church history portions, and I realize there are people who don't, but we try to make this program provide information and discussion that wouldn't necessarily be something that would be a normal part of podcasts and things like that.
40:32: So we try to do that. And so I listened to Trent's response and listened to it more than once, always while writing, but I listened to it.
40:51: And I want to comment on a few things. As most of you know, we try to teach church history.
41:00: When I respond to Wilson, for example, we spent hours going over how you do church history, how you study the early documents, how to be fair in not demanding that earlier decades, they should not be judged on the basis of our current controversies, our current level of knowledge.
41:42: They need to be judged on the basis of when they lived, what information they had, and how faithful they were to the truth as it had been provided to them.
41:54: And that this gracious means of approaching church history is what we will ask of future generations.
42:04: I honestly think, again, but I have to admit that your eschatology will impact how you view church history.
42:20: In other words, if you are convinced that we are right there at the end, and I would say that's where the majority of evangelicals are, thinking about what the next generations are going to think of you is not going to be the first thing you're going to think of.
42:41: You're not concerned about what future generations are going to think about you. And hence, you don't really have much of a real strong reason to extend that kind of courtesy to those who've come before you, because you're not going to be judged by those who've come after you, because there's not going to be anybody after you anyways.
42:59: You're the last generation. And that's why, and I mentioned in my sermon where I laid out a hope for the future, that's why
43:13: I can remember the first time I heard someone say, it was probably
43:18: Doug Wilson, we might be in the early church. And that's like punching you in the gut.
43:28: It really is like punching you in the gut. And as soon as I heard it, the church history professor in me went, don't you realize, everyone you've ever read, going all the way back, it could be in what we would call the modern period, it could be in Edwards, it could be some of the
43:54: Puritans, it could be the Reformers. Obviously around the period of the
43:59: Black Death, the turn of the millennium, all the way back to the
44:05: Justinian period and into the early church, every time they talked about eschatology, that was an opportunity for them to think that they're right at the end.
44:17: And every generation thinks that. But they weren't. From our perspective, we read
44:24: Melito Sardis, we read even going out to Augustine, from our perspective, they're in the early church.
44:32: They didn't view themselves that way. But they were. And so our experiences and our looking at the world around us, if anything you've learned from church history, it should be that's not how you do eschatology.
44:51: And so it just strikes me that this necessity to extend grace to those who came before us so that we can at least now hope that they will be gracious toward us when they look at what we said and did, if they even see what we said and did.
45:12: I mean, you would think, I mean, I was going to ask, do you happen just off the top of your head to know how many dividing lines are on sermon audio?
45:23: Have we passed 2 ,000? I'd be interested in knowing. Because all these guys, and I love them, but there's all these guys, you know who you are.
45:34: You sit there going, hey, we've had 100 webcasts, we've had 200, we're at 300.
45:41: And us old folks are going, nice start, guys. Some of us have been doing this since the 1980s and webcasting since about 2000.
45:54: So over 20 years. You got a number? Not yet. OK. All right.
45:59: Just wave at me or something. Don't just make a smirk on your face, which is sometimes how you think
46:05: I'm supposed to understand what you're saying. But French smirks. French people smirk about everything.
46:12: So what can I say? Anyway, yeah, we've been doing this for a very, very, very, very long time.
46:25: And we have over and over and over again. You would think it'd be really easy with the thousands of programs we've done to know exactly where we're coming from.
46:40: I'm not so sure. I mean, you would think it'd be easier to accurately represent where I'm coming from in the future, given the amount of data that you would have.
46:52: Can you imagine if we had audio recordings of Augustine's sermons? It's sort of like,
47:00: I've always thought it strange that the Mormon Church so little relies upon the
47:08: Journal of Discourse. Because can you imagine having 28 volumes of the early sermons of the early apostles in the
47:16: New Testament? How vitally important that would be? And you have that for the
47:23: Mormon Church and what's called the Journal of Discourse. And yet they're afraid of them because there's a lot of stuff in there that they don't really believe anymore and don't want people to know they ever did believe, especially about the priesthood and the blacks and things like that.
47:39: So it's fascinating to recognize where we are in church history and how that impacts things.
47:46: Anyways, that was a little bit of a going off the rails there a second.
47:52: So what I want to try to address today, and I may pop over to, if we have time,
48:01: I mean, it's already getting up toward an hour that we've been going, but I may pop over to looking at some things that Jimmy Akin has written on solo scriptura too, since that keeps coming up.
48:12: But it's interesting that the main thing I want to respond to in the response that Trent Horn did ties in with the very next section of his 2019 talk.
48:23: Now, I found it a little bit interesting that Trent didn't seem to remember when he gave this talk and seemed to think it was like 2018 or maybe even older, when in point of fact, one of the reasons that I chose to do it is it was one of the last major meetings that you could have before COVID.
48:49: So it was in 2019. So I thought I was responding to fairly new, up -to -date stuff, and it didn't really seem...
49:00: And the title that Trent used was, James White didn't like one of my talks. No, you know, I would think that most people would realize that we have not responded to this talk the way that a lot of people do.
49:21: I've let the other side speak. You can go watch it for yourself.
49:27: There has been more than once that I've either complimented Trent on what he said or said, now, okay, you know,
49:33: I'm going to disagree with this, but look, he's under time pressure. He's probably going fast.
49:39: I've tried to... But I don't seem to get that kind of kindness from the other side.
49:49: For some reason, not sure why, I'm not going to stop extending it just because of that, just because it's not given to me.
49:55: Okay, fine, whatever. You got a number back there? Oh. So on Sermon Audio, God bless
50:11: Sermon Audio. When did we move over there? Do you remember? Because we had been doing...
50:18: Really, that long ago? Wow. 2240, you said?
50:27: But that would include the debates. Okay. I'm sorry? That's everything.
50:33: So all of our stuff, including seminars and stuff like that, but...
50:39: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, we've been doing it for a while. 2240, and that does not then include the radio programs that we did,
50:54: I think, prior to 99 or 98, but none of the old station stuff we did in the 80s.
51:02: We have no recordings of any of that stuff. Oh, okay. So, yeah, yeah.
51:11: So easily 2500. And if you figure the average is minimally an hour, that's a lot of talking, a lot of talking going on there that you can look at.
51:24: So I don't know what history is going to do, but hopefully, well, we won't go there.
51:31: Anyways, so what I'm going to do is I just want to look at a portion from the original presentation with Trenthorne, where he talks about absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
51:49: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, because one of the key arguments that he will present in his rebuttal is that I am depending upon arguments from silence.
52:10: And as I listened to this, I just could not help but experience a tinge of frustration because it is the
52:23: Roman Catholic Church that is claiming, making a positive theological and epistemological and historical claim to be the singular in its purest essence, the singular continuation of the church that Jesus founded 2000 years ago.
52:57: And it is the Roman Catholic Church that used the anathema.
53:05: And I realize most modern Roman Catholics today don't mean by anathema what Roman Catholics meant only 70 years ago.
53:13: But if words have meaning, when
53:19: I read the papal syllabus of errors, when I read the medieval popes, and then
53:26: I see what their actions were, I know what they meant. And anybody else can know too.
53:35: And it is Rome that makes the claim that her teachings are apostolic.
53:46: And so when we look at the historical record, it is just amazing to me that a
53:57: Roman Catholic apologist doesn't just break into hilarious laughter when they themselves say to me, well, you're arguing from silence.
54:09: You're the one making the positive claims about history. You're the one saying we are the apostolic church.
54:21: And it's frustrating me that you all just seem to not be willing to bear the weight that that claim requires.
54:33: And I know why you can't do it right now, because you have a pope that does not believe what the popes before him believed. You know it. I know it.
54:38: It's a given. The fact that you all won't touch him with a 10 -foot pole, that you won't even use his name, demonstrates to everybody, we all know, we get it.
54:51: You can't defend him. You won't defend him. And you will use any argument in the world to deflect from the reality that your ultimate source of authority.
55:02: It's fascinating to me. When we play what Trent says here, this is so different than when
55:11: I first started debating Catholic answers. So different. Back then, it was
55:17: Pope John Paul. We have the Pope. The Pope speaks with clarity.
55:22: We can go to the Pope. The Pope can interpret these things. Now, all of a sudden, it's this, well, we have apostolic succession.
55:29: Well, you and I both know who embodies apostolic succession in classical
55:35: Roman Catholic theology. You and I both know that. And it's Francis, and you and I both know he does not even believe what you believe.
55:44: You are more, Trenthorne is more Catholic than Francis is. No question about that.
55:51: None. And don't get me wrong, I have more respect for Roman Catholics who have remained faithful to Roman Catholic orthodoxy than those who have gone trotting off after Francis, or whoever his successor is going to be.
56:11: The problem is, it demonstrates that your system really doesn't work. And I know you're in a tough spot.
56:17: But don't try to hide that by deflecting stuff and saying, it's up to double standards here.
56:23: No. You're making the positive claim. I don't have a satis cognitum document.
56:33: That's not a part of my beliefs. I don't have a document that says, these are the constant faith of the church.
56:44: That's the claim you've made. So, let's take a look.
56:51: Let's demonstrate this here and see what we're talking about. And let's hope the audio...
56:58: The audio worked just perfectly approximately an hour ago. Let's see how it goes.
57:06: All right, so that is rule number one. Check your sources. Let's try rule number two for the fathers.
57:12: This is still under the subset that the fathers didn't believe Doctrine X and that Catholics invented such doctrine in the
57:20: Middle Ages. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Not necessarily evidence of absence.
57:28: This is an article by a Protestant author, Wayne Jackson and the Christian Courier. False teaching regarding Mary.
57:34: It's your standard anti -Maryan tropes. I think we have a book on Mary. I'm not sure, but you might want to check that out.
57:41: I think we do. And he writes in there, the concept of Mary's immaculate conception was wholly unknown to the early church.
57:52: First, that's correct. You won't find the phrase, the immaculate conception, in the first several centuries of the church's history.
58:00: You won't find that explicitly. But then again, you won't find church fathers writing explicitly about the celibacy of Christ, that Christ was not married.
58:10: You won't find them writing about the fact. Okay. Now, thankfully, at this point, and I'm not sure where it's going to go from here, but I've admitted this.
58:23: I've admitted this personal failing for decades. When Roman Catholic apologists try to defend their indefensible statements about early church teachings by connecting their teachings to the
58:44: Trinity, I really get angry. I really do. It's extremely offensive to me. I have to try to control that so I can channel that energy into the utter destruction of the stupidity of the statement.
58:56: But I want you to think for a second. Is there a meaningful corollary between these two things that were just presented here?
59:12: Because what you're... Remember, the immaculate conception is defined as a dogma de fide.
59:21: Now, I don't know if Trent Horn would say this. I don't know how he could avoid it. But Jerry Matitix, who used to work for the same organization many, many years ago and was once the darling of Catholic Answers, Jerry Matitix said in a debate that the bodily assumption of Mary, we have as much certainty of the bodily assumption of Mary as we have of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
59:50: Why? Because it's been dogmatically defined by the Roman Catholic Church and there can be no higher authority.
59:55: So if the immaculate conception has been dogmatically defined by the authority of the teaching magisterium of the
01:00:02: Roman Catholic Church, infallibly as dogma, then does it not follow that we have just as much evidence of the immaculate conception as we have the bodily resurrection of Jesus?
01:00:19: Now, it is a given from Scripture that Jesus fulfilled the law of God.
01:00:28: Jesus was not married and therefore Jesus did not engage in a violation of God's law.
01:00:36: And so he was celibate. That's just a given. The Bible doesn't have to say that. But the claim of the immaculate conception is a positive claim.
01:00:46: There is a positive element to it that does not derive from any meaningful reading of any scriptural text whatsoever.
01:00:55: What. So. Ever. So there's no parallel. So why bring it up?
01:01:04: This is Roman Catholic distortion of church history.
01:01:11: This is how you defend a historical teaching. But you do it by proffering to the audience argumentation that is really invalid on any level.
01:01:30: It really is. But I hope you caught that. And didn't just go, oh, well, yeah, okay.
01:01:38: I hadn't thought about it that way. Because that's how they get away with, hey, they're right. There is nobody.
01:01:45: I should have queued it up. But it's still one of the classics. One of the classic moments in my debates with Jerry Matitix, that first debate on Long Island on the
01:01:56: Marian dogmas, when it was becoming very obvious to everybody in the crowd that Jerry was operating on a double standard.
01:02:10: We had gone through these various doctrines, and I would keep going, okay, what about this early church father?
01:02:17: This early church father said that. What about this? What early church fathers believed this? Well, we don't have to have any specific early church fathers.
01:02:25: It's a concept that comes down to us from tradition. Yeah, but you have to have some evidence that tradition actually existed.
01:02:32: And so when we got to the bodily assumption of Mary, I was like, was there anybody in the first century? Was there anybody in the second century?
01:02:38: Mr. White, you don't have to have a quotation from every century. And my response was,
01:02:44: Jerry, I'll take just one. And the whole place erupted in applause.
01:02:49: Because by then, everybody was at the same point. It's like, come on.
01:02:55: You keep claiming this is some positive apostolic tradition, but you don't give us anything that's actually meaningful.
01:03:06: Why is that? So, but go look at it.
01:03:13: I think we actually posted that as a separate thing from the debate itself.
01:03:19: But anyway. Christ has two wills, a human and divine will. The heresy of monothelitism, the idea that Christ had...
01:03:27: The heresy of monothelitism, which was taught by the Bishop of Rome, Honorius. And that bishops for 400 years, upon becoming the
01:03:41: Bishop of Rome, had to anathematize him as a heretic for having taught monothelitism.
01:03:48: Right? That belief. Okay? Now, the issue of...
01:03:55: At this point, this is where the Roman Catholic wants to go. Okay, so the church struggled with all sorts of difficult questions in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, which included the great
01:04:17: Christological controversies. So you had Nestorianism, and you had
01:04:25: Eutychianism, and you had Apollinarianism. And there had to be a discussion and argument of how to remain within biblical parameters as to the person of Christ.
01:04:46: What's interesting to me is that there was never a claim that there was an apostolic tradition passed down orally outside of Scripture that answered this particular question.
01:05:03: Is that what Rome claims today? How were those questions answered?
01:05:09: By reference to Scripture. Nobody came along and said,
01:05:15: Well, actually, the Apostle Thomas passed on to this person, who passed on to this person, and here's why monothelitism is not true.
01:05:27: No, that became the argument based upon Jesus having to be a true man.
01:05:36: That you couldn't have Eutychianism where the Logos takes a part, instead of having two complete natures,
01:05:42: Logos takes a part, and the human nature becomes more of just a human body. It's not really there.
01:05:49: And so that's where you have that issue. And that comes from looking at what
01:05:55: Scripture said, not, well, yeah, you know, Scripture's not enough to actually answer that, but there were these traditions, and the
01:06:00: Pope of Rome says such and so. But, sorry,
01:06:07: I wasn't going to spend that time, but anyway. Only one will, and so it wasn't really truly human, wasn't settled until the
01:06:16: Third Council of Constantinople, several centuries later, about 600 years after Christ lived.
01:06:22: So the fathers oftentimes will not write about everything that the church believes at that time. Usually when they write, they're writing to combat some kind of heresy, and that's where their attention is focused.
01:06:33: If someone is not critiquing a doctrine, the doctrine often doesn't get written about, because there's only so much parchment and ink, and there's so many heresies.
01:06:42: St. Irenaeus has a five -volume work on heresies in his age. There's always so many to deal with.
01:06:49: However, let me just point something out. Catholic Answers and the
01:06:57: EWTN, let's just say the EWTN network, how often is the Immaculate Conception of Mary mentioned?
01:07:03: In a day of broadcasting, how often? How often is it mentioned in every single collected sermon and book of the entire third century of the
01:07:13: Christian era? Never. Never. Not once.
01:07:20: Not in any meaningful sense. I mean, there's a few really sad folks out there that if anyone ever says anything nice about Mary, it must mean they believe this.
01:07:30: They are so wedded to their tradition that they cannot even begin to do serious history.
01:07:36: It's sad to observe, but there's not even much reason to try to talk to those folks, because honestly, their defective handling of church history is on the exact same level as when
01:07:49: Mormons tried to fend the book of Abraham. You know, well, Joseph Smith did get the word the right.
01:07:58: Oh, okay. So, you know, if there's someone ever says anything nice about Mary, that must mean they had this entire thing to develop a thousand years later.
01:08:08: Well, okay. Really not much sense dealing with that. But hear what he's saying.
01:08:13: Well, they didn't have to be talking about all this stuff. We talk about all now.
01:08:20: EWTN every single day. We're going to have the bodily assumption of Mary. We're going to have the Immaculate Conception. We're going to have sacerdotal priests.
01:08:26: We're saying all that was back then, but they just weren't talking about it. They had other things to talk about at that particular point in time.
01:08:33: You know, I would think that these things that the Roman Catholic Church has determined to be so important that they would dogmatize it.
01:08:41: There's only been a certain number of things that Rome has decided has to be dogmatized.
01:08:50: Boy, I would think there'd be much more important things than the Immaculate Conception, bodily assumption of Mary.
01:08:57: But that's what they did. That's what they pulled out of apostolic tradition, passed down orally outside of Scripture.
01:09:05: It's funny because we will hear
01:09:11: Trent Horn and Jimmy Akin and all these folks. They love to grab hold of the formal material sufficiency of Scripture distinction, which, by the way, was not a part of the beginning of Catholic Answers stuff.
01:09:23: That came up, really, I think the first time that appeared in their stuff was after we started debating.
01:09:29: Then all of a sudden, oh, Yves Congar, look at this. Let's talk about this. But what's interesting is you will frequently catch them functioning on the basis of what's called partum partum, but when challenged, immediately dropping back to the other because it's more defensible.
01:09:49: What am I talking about? The first draft on Divine Revelation at the
01:09:56: Council of Trent, the real Council of Trent, the one in the middle of the 16th century, the first draft said that the divine tradition is found partly in Scripture and partly in the oral tradition.
01:10:08: So partum partum was terminology that was used. That's not used in the final draft, but what it means was there were people who believed that, that there is divine revelation outside of Scripture.
01:10:23: Much easier to defend the idea that Scripture is materially sufficient, everything's in it, but it's not formally sufficient, so you have to have the authority of the
01:10:34: Roman Church to discern what's found in sacred tradition in Scripture.
01:10:44: But you will find them sort of falling into that because especially when you get to these doctrines, that's really what they believe.
01:10:53: I'm sorry, there is no material sufficiency basis for the
01:10:58: Immaculate Conception, Baha 'i Assumption, and Marian Scripture. It's just not there. You are twisting
01:11:04: Scripture to come up with these things. This is all there is to it. I feel sometimes, every day
01:11:10: I get on the Internet and find something that's wrong, and I want to stay up late and deal with it, and there's this great cartoon of a stick -figure man looking at the computer screen like this, and his wife says,
01:11:21: Honey, come to bed, and he says, I can't, there's someone wrong on the Internet. That's how
01:11:28: I feel sometimes. Okay, so there's the, remember on the screen it said,
01:11:40: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. All right, let me move over to the other, oh, please, there it is.
01:12:00: Thank you, there you go. So here's the response. So this is the Council of Trent webcast, and I want to listen to the last section because he addressed some of the debate issues, and before this there was stuff about argument for silence and criticizing that, but I want to try to put all this together because we can't go on forever today, but let's dive into where we,
01:12:30: I just happen to have it here. This is what is strange from White's position, that if the Church Fathers don't seem to endorse a view like the
01:12:39: Immaculate Conception or the Mass is a sacrifice, then that counts against Catholicism, but if Calvinist doctrine,
01:12:46: Okay, so if they don't endorse this, what's the assumption? That it was there.
01:12:53: I am challenging that it has any historical foundation as having, it's not in Scripture, we can do that part of the debate, it's not in Scripture, and it's not a part of the faith of the early
01:13:05: Church. It is a development over time, and it's a development based upon other issues that came in.
01:13:11: For example, I have demonstrated clearly the influence of what sources?
01:13:18: Well, especially the Protevangelium of James. We've taken the time to look at these sources, look where they came from, provide meaningful scholarly evidence that these are not
01:13:31: Orthodox Christian sources, yet that's where this stuff came from, and it's
01:13:37: Rome making the claim. So this is sophistry. This is how you get away from having to defend your positive claim.
01:13:48: This man is saying the Apostles taught this. Now, there are Roman Catholics, they will not say that.
01:13:55: I get that. I get that there are Roman Catholic scholars that would say no, no, as Newman pointed out, it's the acorn in the tree, and there was clearly development over time and with the
01:14:12: Desert Fathers and monasticism, and then those other sources come in and it becomes popular, and then the
01:14:19: Church discerning tradition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and centuries and centuries later, this is what you get, and it didn't come from the
01:14:26: Apostles. So I realize that's much more defensible, but it demonstrates that this whole concept of apostolic succession is hooey because it didn't come from the
01:14:44: Apostles. It came from other sources. That's all there is to it. That's the reality.
01:14:50: We get it. So you've got to figure out which position you're going to take.
01:14:56: Or a New Testament canon of Scripture are totally absent from the Fathers. That doesn't matter because people...
01:15:03: So let's catch what we're doing here. So your
01:15:10: Calvinist beliefs are absent from the Fathers, and the canon is absent.
01:15:16: First of all, on any meaningful scholarly level, those are two completely different things.
01:15:24: The issue of the canon of Scripture, not only highly complex, but a real problem for Rome because you don't have a dogmatic definition of the canon, not even the
01:15:39: Council of Rome, whatever you call that, whatever that is, until 1546. Okay?
01:15:46: So you don't have your canon, and you know that there are differences between Hippo and Carthage, which are not ecumenical councils, and what you have in 1546.
01:15:56: You know there are differences. So you're playing games when you go here and say, well, you can't come up with the canon of Scripture.
01:16:08: Well, you are claiming to have the authority to come up with the canon of Scripture. Where you get that authority, we don't know.
01:16:15: But all you're doing is you're just moving the line back one and then sort of wiping out the evidence that took a step backwards because you're saying, well, we have the authority to do it, but we didn't do it until 1546.
01:16:29: And all the key issues about the very nature of God were determined and argued through without anyone having an infallible canon of Scripture because we didn't have one until 1546.
01:16:44: And yes, there's evidence. Jerome didn't have our canon of Scripture, and Melito Sardis didn't have our canon of Scripture, and good grief,
01:16:52: Gregory the Great did not have your canon of Scripture, and Cardinal Cayetan did not have your canon of Scripture.
01:16:59: So there were competing perspectives in the history of the church on the issue of the canon.
01:17:05: There's no question about that. So I don't see why you think this is such a slam dunk idea.
01:17:14: Secondly, my Calvinist beliefs. I suppose that's why we've spent so much time looking at those tremendous texts in Clement, in the
01:17:28: Epistle to Diognetus, looking at the incredible Christology in Ignatius, talking about the elect, imputed righteousness, substitutionary atonement.
01:17:40: But you see, I don't believe those things because they're in those sources.
01:17:46: They're in those sources because they're apostolic, and they're in what is theanoustos.
01:17:53: They're in that which is God -breathed. And so I'm not saying that the early church fathers were
01:18:01: Reformed Baptists, but you're saying they were Roman Catholics. I'm not making the claim you are.
01:18:09: So you want to turn around and say, well, you have to do the same thing you're demanding of us. No, you're making the positive claim.
01:18:15: You are making the positive claim that yours is the one true church and all others are derivative therefrom, and your church claims to be able to say this is what was taught from the beginning.
01:18:31: Your church claims to possess that apostolic tradition. I understand why you guys do not want to back that up.
01:18:39: I get it. It's impossible to do, but I'm not going to let you just sit there and say, well, you need to find your
01:18:47: Calvinistic beliefs. No, I don't. I get my Calvinistic beliefs from the New Testament, and yes,
01:18:53: I can demonstrate that there were people who believed that after the New Testament, but that's not why
01:18:58: I believe it. I know that whoever wrote The Shepherd of Hermas didn't believe that, but I know
01:19:05: Clement did, and I know the, clearly, the author, we call him
01:19:10: Matthew Tate, but the author of The Epistle of Diagnosis, I know he did. Does that make it true?
01:19:16: No, but it makes it consistent with what's found in the New Testament. So, he's going to complain here, well, you know, there's, we've got two different foundations.
01:19:27: Yes, you're right. We do. Because we have an absolute claim from Rome's side, and it used to be that people defended that, and I understand why now that's a little bit challenging to do.
01:19:46: James White only believed in Sola Scriptura. That is why, when White here talks soon about the issue of debates, about what, in fact, let me address that point now, and then
01:19:57: I'll show you White's response about this. That is why, ultimately, if James White and I were going to debate this, he has said online, let's have a debate about the sacerdotal priesthood.
01:20:07: You know, did the apostles establish a sacerdotal priesthood? But we're not going to be coming at it on equal terms, because White is going to say, when we look at all the evidence, the church fathers, even if I show the church fathers all believe in this, that won't matter to him, because his standard for determining what the apostles did is
01:20:25: Sola Scriptura. Now, let's think about this for a second. We won't be coming at it from an equal perspective.
01:20:36: I am going to allow the early church fathers to be the early church fathers, and so we're going to look at Cyprian's use of sacerdos, and we're going to look at all of the 1st and 2nd century sources, and everything they said about the worship of the early church, and I'm going to let
01:21:03: Roman Catholic historians who admit that the sacerdotal priesthood developed over time, that it was not a part of the 2nd century church,
01:21:13: I'm going to let them speak, and I'm going to present that evidence and I'm going to say, look, here's what the apostles gave us, no sacerdotal priesthood.
01:21:24: Here's what we have in the 1st century, Didache, maybe Clement, depending on the dating.
01:21:31: Here's what we have in the 2nd century, and here it is in the 3rd century. Not as fully developed as it's going to be, but this is where it begins.
01:21:43: The Roman Catholic, and this is the point, the Roman Catholic has the dogmatic authority of the church telling him, this is what church history is to tell you.
01:21:54: Find it. Read it into it. Interpret it in the light of what we say.
01:22:00: In the debate, I just exposed that, because it's clearly circular. It's just simply untrue.
01:22:09: I understand why you might not want to do that. I get it, but to say, well, but you're only going to believe what's found in scripture anyways.
01:22:22: Yes, I'm going to believe what Isteanus does. When you can show me something Isteanus does.
01:22:28: Do you disagree with Mitch Pacwa? When I asked Mitch Pacwa in our debate in 1999, when
01:22:36: I asked him, is there a single word of Jesus that has been infallibly defined by the
01:22:44: Roman Catholic church that is not found in scripture? He said, no. I said, is there a single word of any of the apostles that is not found in scripture that has been defined infallibly by the
01:22:56: Roman Catholic church as having come from the apostles? He said, no. Do you disagree with him? If so, why?
01:23:05: What words do you have that are theanoustos outside of scripture? And so, yes, we have been given everything needed for life and godliness.
01:23:19: The man of God has been given everything to become ex artidso, to be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
01:23:27: And the argument I made against Patrick Madrid is still valuable today, these many, many years later.
01:23:34: If you think it is a good work to preach the immaculate conception of Mary, then you show me how scripture prepares you to do so.
01:23:42: It doesn't. It doesn't. But you're making the positive claim.
01:23:49: Rome's making the positive claim, but Rome does not want to back it up.
01:23:56: Because once you start putting it out there, I can go, okay, now let's examine the validity of this claim.
01:24:02: Because for the Roman Catholic, well, it's true because Rome says so. I'm reminded of what
01:24:08: I said to Jerry Matitix when we were debating the papacy once. I said, isn't it convenient, Jerry, that when you quote early church fathers, that's the tradition of the church.
01:24:18: When I quote early church fathers, that's not the tradition of the church. Who gets to determine that? The church.
01:24:24: Oh, how convenient. See, what's going to happen no matter what is that even in the examination of history, sola ecclesiae will be demonstrated.
01:24:34: That the church is the final authority. The church is the final authority. That's why years ago when
01:24:39: I think it was still, yeah, it was John Paul II said something, and I contrasted it with, it may have been something he himself said, but no,
01:24:48: I contrasted it with an earlier pope. Roberts and Janus had said to me, but James, only the church gets to determine what the church has ever meant by anything it ever said.
01:25:03: Sola ecclesiae. Big fat circle. Big, big, big fat circle. He says so himself in this presentation because I offered instead, well, why don't you debate
01:25:15: Jimmy Akin on sola scriptura? And he says, well, I've already done those debates a lot. But I looked online,
01:25:20: I think he's done it like four times over 30 years. I think it's okay to do it again. It's a pretty fundamental issue.
01:25:27: And I offered to debate him on apostolic succession. You know, are there teachers in the church?
01:25:34: Are there people in the church who have... Catch that? Are there people?
01:25:41: Are there teachers? What would that have been when I first started dealing with Catholic answers in the 1980s?
01:25:49: The Pope. The Pope. Specific, clear.
01:25:55: The Pope. Now it's a nebulous teacher. Well, who is the teacher today?
01:26:03: Who gets to define for Roman Catholicism today? The teacher. What tradition is? His name would be
01:26:11: Francis. His name would be Francis. Something tells me if you asked him to decide a lot of things, he would say, who am
01:26:18: I to judge? Like he said about homosexuality. Who am I to judge?
01:26:23: Well, you know, any Christian with the Bible in his hand actually at that point. But anyway. Authority.
01:26:29: Pastoral authority. Unique pastoral authority that other Christians do not have in virtue of them being successors of the apostles.
01:26:36: So before we can figure out sacerdotal priesthood, Marian dogmas, we have to figure out what is our authority?
01:26:41: Is it Scripture alone? And if it's not Scripture alone, if that is false, where does the authority lie?
01:26:47: If it lies in successors of the apostles? So this is an admission. Let me tell you a story.
01:26:56: Little inside story here. At the end of the debate with Jerry Matitix at the
01:27:01: City of the Lord in December of 1990 on the papacy, moderated by none other than the eminent
01:27:13: Catholic apologist and professor Dr. Scott Hahn. Hahn came up to me and Jerry.
01:27:22: We had just stood up. I think we maybe shook hands. People were rushing forward.
01:27:29: And Hahn angrily says to me, you blew it because you brought up infallibility of the
01:27:37: Pope and that wasn't part of this debate. And then right in front of me, he turns to his good friend
01:27:46: Jerry Matitix and you listen to all of their conversion stories. Matitix and Hahn were like this, okay?
01:27:55: Peas in a pod. Went through the whole conversion thing together. He says to Jerry in front of me, he said, and you used the
01:28:06: Bible as your only source and you can't do that. And turned around and stormed out and left
01:28:14: Jerry alone facing a room full of very happy Protestants. You can't do that.
01:28:23: That's what Trent is saying right now. We can't do that. We reject
01:28:29: Sola Scriptura and the reason we reject Sola Scriptura is we teach all sorts of things that are nowhere to be found in Scripture at all.
01:28:38: And the only way that we can shoehorn them in there is we gotta come up with an authority system that allows us to do so.
01:28:46: That's the fact. That's the reality. Apostles, how do we locate these individuals?
01:28:53: That is, that was what we needed to debate and it's interesting actually to see White's comments in this episode on the nature of apostolic succession.
01:29:04: Because see, from a Bible perspective, the successor of an
01:29:10: Apostle is a person who teaches what an Apostle taught. We have only one example of what the
01:29:19: Apostles taught. It's called the New Testament. Irenaeus would be central to any discussion that would be had about apostolic succession.
01:29:32: He does have a belief in a charism of teaching ability that is given to the bishops which is what makes them different from the
01:29:44: Gnostics. Irenaeus is a step in what would be the final argument of Trent Horne on apostolic succession.
01:29:55: Let's put it that way. And see, I as a Protestant go, I see that. Augustines could be another step later on.
01:30:02: And there's development over here and there's development over there. Because it's all, you know, I've said over and over again, if you read these books where you have this doctrine developed in this year and this one in that year, those are wrong.
01:30:19: You don't just have a new thing that develops. I was really interested to see what
01:30:25: White's conclusion was about apostolic succession because he seemed to be admitting that many of the church fathers held to the basic thesis that I would defend in a debate with him, which is that there are certain individuals, this does not apply to every
01:30:38: Christian in the body of Christ, but certain individuals within the church have a special charism of teaching or pastoring or leading the church in virtue of being successors of the apostles.
01:30:48: He seems to admit that the early church fathers did believe this and he can accept that they believe that, but he doesn't have to believe that himself.
01:30:56: But he had to, he lost his train of thought because he had a technical difficulty and he never came back to the issue.
01:31:02: So, well, I think I'm going to stop. Okay, so, and he's going to stop there and so are we.
01:31:09: What I was saying, obviously, is that any honest reading of Irenaeus shows that part of his argumentation against the
01:31:25: Gnostics and in defense of his understandings and his position, the
01:31:32: Catholics, as understood at that time, not Roman Catholics, versus the Gnostics, he made argumentation in relationship to a concept of apostolic tradition and authority.
01:31:46: He did. No question about it. There is no completed New Testament canon at the time and unfortunately, some of the claims he made were wrong.
01:31:56: They were historically wrong. He claimed, Irenaeus claimed, that the earliest, this is the earliest time this is found in history, he claimed that the apostles passed on an apostolic tradition that Jesus was an old man when he died and it was a part of his recapitulation theory.
01:32:17: Trenthorne doesn't believe that. How dare he not believe that? Why doesn't Trenthorne believe what
01:32:23: Irenaeus said is the earliest apostolic tradition recorded for us anywhere? Is he being inconsistent?
01:32:30: No, he's actually being consistent because Rome hasn't defined that as being true and Trent can only believe in early church history what
01:32:39: Rome tells him to believe in early church history. That's the whole point. One of us can look at Irenaeus and say, he used bad arguments there.
01:32:49: Gnosticism is still wrong. He used bad arguments there. But Trenthorne has to say, hey, look, he believed in apostolic succession.
01:32:58: He must have been right about that. Was he right about apostolic tradition? Well, no, but he was right about apostolic succession.
01:33:05: Why? Because Rome tells me so. And I say, no, he's wrong about that because that which is theanustos tells me so.
01:33:14: So you can go with Rome, I'll go with theanustos. How's that? And he'll turn around and say, but you can't know what's theanustos about Rome.
01:33:21: And I'll go, well, the problem is Christians do that long before 1546. So there you go.
01:33:28: And round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. Okay, so real quickly,
01:33:36: I realize it's 333, our time anyways. But let me just tell you where I'm, one of the things
01:33:43: I want to do in the future is I want to look at the claims,
01:33:54: I was going to get to it today, but we just didn't get to it. But I want to utilize
01:34:02: Jimmy Akin's book, the Bible is a Catholic book, and look at his claims and arguments in regards to the subject of solo scriptura because, again,
01:34:14: I apologize for forgetting who said it, but somebody told me that Jimmy Akin believes that the arguments he's presented in this book are new.
01:34:31: What was that? Do you think I was Trent that said that? I could be too.
01:34:38: Someone said it, and I'll just be honest with you, they're not, by any stretch of the imagination.
01:34:44: There's nothing new here, there are no new arguments, nothing has not been said and argued over and over again before.
01:34:54: The canon stuff, it's all old stuff. But, we'll go through it and point out where the problems are, because the thing with dealing with this is that we're dealing with someone, when
01:35:11: I first encountered Jimmy Akin, he had just converted and had been a
01:35:17: Presbyterian. So, I'll just be honest with you, if you claimed to have been a
01:35:22: Presbyterian, unless you were PCUSA and even that wouldn't be the case, it would be the super liberal
01:35:29: Presbyterians, at least back in the 80s, I expect you to know a little something about Reformed Theology and that doesn't come through here, in the significantly less than in -depth definition of solo scriptura that is used.
01:35:47: And so, I want to look at these things, for example, this citation from the
01:35:54: Catechism of the Catholic Church. So, Rome specifically says, no more public revelation, there's not going to be another book of scripture, there's not going to be a book added after revelation, et cetera, et cetera.
01:36:17: The canon is technically closed. All right?
01:36:23: I think that's extremely important. But then, how was doctrine determined?
01:36:30: Well, the claim that is made, as the in Universal Catholic Catechism, in order that the full and living gospel might always be preserved in the church, the apostles left bishops as their successors.
01:36:45: They gave them their own position of teaching authority. the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved in a continuous line of succession until the end of time.
01:36:54: And so, notice, apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books.
01:37:04: That's a very interesting way of expressing it. The inspired books preserve in a special way.
01:37:16: That almost leaves the door open for some other way of preserving, but, anyway, but notice the focus is the apostolic preaching, not on the nature of the inspired books.
01:37:29: And this is one of the fundamental differences. I don't believe the vast majority of Roman Catholic prelates today have nearly as high a view of inspiration as is found in the
01:37:48: Reformers. Really don't. In fact,
01:37:53: I would say that the current bishop of Rome has filled the College of Cardinals with people who have a significantly degraded view of the authority of Scripture, and there are a bunch of you
01:38:06: Roman Catholics sitting out there right now. You know what I just said was true. You know what
01:38:11: I just said was true. You can't refute it. You know it.
01:38:19: You're sitting there going, yeah, we have to live with it. I get it. I'm going to look at this and we're going to spend a lot more time on it.
01:38:26: I was going to try to get to it today. We've already gone well over our time as it is.
01:38:32: I will pick up with this as a part of our continuing stuff.
01:38:39: Go on from there. Thanks for watching the program today. Once again, you know, just as we're closing, yesterday morning,
01:38:53: Pastor Coates was on the witness stand in his trial.
01:39:02: I will be perfectly honest with you. I am very concerned about what's going to happen there.
01:39:08: I am very concerned about the nature of the legal proceedings. We need to be praying for that.
01:39:15: We need to be praying for the fact that the Canadian government has shut down more churches. They showed up at one church with a bunch of cops.
01:39:24: Instead of a fencing company, they showed up at a locksmith, changed all the locks on the building.
01:39:30: The pastor wrote an excellent article. We lost the building and they saved the church.
01:39:37: Which is a good way of looking at it. These stories are developing and they're developing at a rapid pace.
01:39:48: But I'm going to tell you what is amazing to me, is to look at the comments from ostensible
01:39:55: Christians supporting what the state is doing. They are just so naive.
01:40:05: They're really naive, or really deceived, or a combination of all these things. They just don't see what's coming.
01:40:13: They just don't get it. And it's gonna be too late for them once it happens. Once they come for them, there's not gonna be anybody to protest.
01:40:21: So identify, say, people say, well what do we do?
01:40:28: Say to the magistrates, say to the police, you will be judged for what you're doing.
01:40:36: The police that arrested the pastor in London, I think it was
01:40:41: Uxbridge Station, I've been there. I've walked out those doors. It wasn't far from there just two years ago.
01:40:49: I was doing street preaching and evangelism myself. And the man is arrested for quoting the
01:40:58: Bible in England. Spurgeon is spinning his grave.
01:41:05: The thing is, you walk down those streets and there are scripture quotations chiseled in the walls everywhere.
01:41:12: If you just know what you're looking for. This is what's going on around us.
01:41:19: Speak to those police officers. You will be judged for what you are doing.
01:41:25: You are not just stardust. You will be judged. Tell your superiors not to be unjust.
01:41:35: You want justice? Let's start talking justice. Real justice. The justice as it's defined by God. Because that's the standard we're all gonna be held to.
01:41:43: Every one of us. It doesn't end here. There is a day of judgment. And according to Acts chapter 17, the resurrection of Jesus proves it's gonna happen.
01:41:54: Proves it's gonna happen. So tell the magistrates, you will be judged for what you are doing.
01:42:02: Step back. Restrain yourselves. Listen to what the law of God says.
01:42:07: You can't say that to us. As the representative in the
01:42:13: House representative said, God's will has nothing to do with this Congress. That's an elderly man.
01:42:21: He may be a matter of days from standing before God. Someone needs to tell him.
01:42:28: And oops ain't gonna cut it at all. That's exactly right. Anyways, speak the truth.