A Theological Discussion at Southern Evangelical Seminary

Well, one of the things I'd like to start out with is basically a little bit of my testimony, because how

God has worked in my life is probably not unlike how He's worked in your life. It's integral to shaping the trajectory of your life and what kind of values you've embraced and decisions you've made.

And since we're wanting to keep this short, I'll give you the short version. I was born, and then I was born again, and then

I came on faculty at SES, and then I had the privilege to sit down with James White and discuss theology one night.

That's the short version. Now, let me flesh it out just a little bit.

To my embarrassment, I was actually born naked. It's like the preacher who was railing against pornography, and he said,

If God wanted us to go around naked, we would have been both. It's like, wait a minute, reel that one back in.

My testimony is kind of sort of anomalous in some respects, because I was born and reared in the southeast

United States, and the sort of conventional wisdom and if not running joke about the southeast, for those of you who aren't indigenous to this part of the country, perhaps you've used this cliché before, it's like the

Bible Belt, where there's such a strong concentration of fundamentalist slash evangelical

Christians as a percentage of the population. I was born and reared in Mississippi.

There are actually more Baptists in Mississippi than there are people. So just to give you a little idea of the ratio there.

But what's odd about my experience having been born and reared in Mississippi was I was not born into a church family.

Going to church was not part of our routine. I don't know if I can even remember any of my friends.

That is, I never noticed people going to church. It didn't seem to be a part of the culture.

This would be in the 50s and 60s. And as a consequence, I can clearly remember a period in my life as a child where I didn't understand who

Jesus was, what he did for me, my need for a Savior, anything like that. Although I can tell you that I can never remember a time in my life where I didn't believe that there was a

God. So I don't know where that came from, except we all, quote it, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know where it came from.

But humanly speaking, I'm saying, I didn't have any human explanation as to why I would have known there was a God. So, you know, very stable, loving home, despite the fact that it was irreligious.

My dad, actually by the time I got old enough to really know what these kind of concepts meant, my dad was an atheist.

I don't know that he was that way all of his life, but he certainly seemed to be that. And then when I queried him directly as a teenager, he explicitly claimed being an atheist.

He wasn't militant, he wasn't like a Dawkins. He wasn't interested in disabusing Christians of their beliefs.

It's just something that he didn't hold. And just as an aside, he trusted Christ on his 60th birthday and went to be with the

Lord on his 65th, in the 65th year of his life. So praise God for that. But what happened to me, the short version,

I promise, is that God began to deal with me as a teenager, and I just started worrying about the things of God, who

God was, what his calling on my life was, what that meant. I didn't understand sin, I didn't understand my need for a

Savior, but a lot of this is sort of a retrospective interpretation. Perhaps you've done that.

Whereas you've grown older in the Lord, you're able to maybe better understand how God was working in retrospect.

And so I look back on it now and I see God drawing me to himself over the course of a few years from about age 14 to about the age 16.

And I happened to be just kind of a big chicken about life. I wasn't really attracted to anything that would put me at risk.

When I was in high school, the drug of choice was alcohol, so most of my friends, in fact, I was a designated driver before that word was even used because I drove around my friends every weekend illegally drinking alcohol because they weren't even 18, and they would get drunk and I would stay sober and drive them around.

They were my friends, this was kind of cool. But eventually that sort of lifestyle, it just wasn't something that I felt comfortable with, so I became more attracted to the high school kids whose lives were fairly free of those kind of trappings.

They weren't into drugs and alcohol. What I didn't realize at the time is the reason they were that way was primarily because of their

Christian walk. Most of them were perhaps church kids and they had been reared in a way that wasn't the lifestyle they had chosen for themselves.

So I'm attracted to them because they're fairly chaste or tame because I was a big chicken. And so it was through their influence

I came to understand that I needed a savior, that I was going to be judged for my sins and I needed salvation and I needed to trust

Christ for what he did for me. So at 16, I trusted Christ. We had an event at our high school, public high school, it was an evangelism event every

Tuesday night, sort of like a discipleship slash evangelism event. It was through one of those that I trusted

Christ. So, you know, okay, that's cool. I'm now involved in church as a 16-, 17 -year -old.

I was an old rock and roll drummer. So, you know, I'm playing drums in the folk group with the youth and those kind of things and that's all kind of cool.

And time to go to college, graduating high school. And the situation facing me was basically you either go on to college and postpone the real life or you sort of go to work in the factories or something like that.

So, okay, I'll go to college. We went to what was then called junior college.

Now they call it community college. It sounds more grown up, I guess. So my best friend was going, he goes, where are you going?

I said, I'm going to Northeast. I said, okay, I'll go to Northeast. We'll go to Northeast together. He said, what are you majoring in?

I said, I'm majoring in music. All right, I'll major in music. I mean, I was a drummer. What did

I know about music, right? That's what you're thinking. I mean, I thought a treble clef was something you'd need oral surgery to correct.

Treble clefs, I knew a guy who had one of those. But he's leading a productive life today.

He's overcome his treble clef. So I go off to community college.

I learned just enough music to come to discover two things. One, how to annoy people around me.

I learned just enough music to do that. The second, I learned just enough about music to know I didn't want to do it as a full -time career, either as a performing artist or as a teacher of music.

So it's time to leave community college, junior college, and go off to senior college. Well, all my friends are going to, well, many of my friends were, let me back up.

One of my friends informed me one day, said, you know, you can go to college and study the Bible. Now, I had developed a love for the

Bible. I mean, I just love to carry it around and read it. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, the newness of it.

You're just so, and so, man, go to college and study the Bible. That's just incredible. I had never heard of such a thing.

So they were all going off to the flagship Baptist College in Mississippi called

Mississippi College. This isn't being recorded, is it? Yes. Okay, we'll dub that out. No, I'm being silly.

So I'm going to go off to Mississippi College and major in Bible, basically religious studies.

I was totally unprepared for what I was about to encounter. My church didn't even broach the subject.

But I go to college. Now, you understand, I've only been saved now three or four years, and I'm only growing as much as a teenager can grow in a fairly small town in Mississippi.

And I go to college, and my professors, who are Ph .D .s in my denomination as Southern Baptist, they didn't believe the

Bible. They were skeptical about the Bible, didn't believe in inerrancy. Some of them were perhaps dabbling in neo -Orthodoxy, perhaps some little forms of liberalism.

I know one of my professors was a – similar to the discussion tomorrow night with Dr. Tabor.

He was of this idea that Paul had sort of hijacked the religion of Jesus, that Jesus was a social revolutionary.

And this notion of forensic justification and imputed righteousness, these were sort of accretions that had come on through the influence, this illicit influence of Paul.

And it really wasn't the trajectory that Jesus had intended for whatever he was trying to do in the world.

So to make a short story long, I lost my faith in college. So I'm one of these – you hear these statistics touted where church kids, 70 % –

I don't know what it is up to now, Simon – but 70 -something percent of church kids who go off to college walk away from the faith.

Now I don't know how many of those 70 % come back to the faith, but – and I wasn't even a church kid, strictly speaking.

I'd only been saved just a few short years. So I lost my faith in college pretty much.

I didn't go so far as to embrace atheism, but I do remember just the horrors of being in suspension of belief about who

Jesus was. I just wasn't sure, and it was a pretty dark time for somebody that age.

So what God began to do in my life, as I look back over it, is that – in fact,

I met some of the students from RTS and some of the faculty from RTS and maybe some of you are here tonight.

Back in the mid -70s, the main campus – I think the only campus that RTS had was in Jackson, Mississippi.

And Mississippi College is in Clinton, and they're just adjacent municipalities.

So as I'm struggling with this stuff, I'm going up to the RTS bookstore just to find – try to find morsels of something that wasn't toxic.

And I remember standing in the bookstore looking for a particular book, and this very distinguished -looking gentleman obviously wasn't a bookstore employee.

He didn't look like to me. Tall, thin, gray hair, fairly sophisticated, trench coat.

And he said, can I help you? And I said, I'm looking for a book on inerrancies, titled

Inerrancy. He said, I know the book you're talking about. He says, not out yet, but it's coming. And what it was was the book that we all know now as the first of this series of books that the

International Council on Biblical Inerrancy published. The first one that – there were really a few before that, but this was sort of the first real hardcore position -takers type book, and it was titled

Inerrancy. Because that was really the thing for me was the inerrancy of scriptures. So God began to bring apologists into my life.

I didn't know what that term meant, but people like Norm Geisler or Josh McDowell or R .C. Sproul. I have a

Ph .D. in philosophy, but I think I learned probably as much philosophy from R .C. Sproul as I did almost all my courses in college, just devouring his cassette tapes.

Cassette tapes are these little plastic things. People talk.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they didn't have the 8 -tracks. My 8 -track player broke, so I had to upgrade to a cassette player.

So God began to bring these apologists into my life through their books and through their tape ministries and things like that, and other people too.

I'm one of five halvoids. So some of you who are – all of you,

I suppose, the students here know Tom. So he's number two in a series of four. I'm number four in a series of four. So I have a brother older than Tom, and Don had gotten saved during this time.

And being that he's already an adult and much more emotionally stable and mature than I as a teenager and a college student, he grew in the

Lord really quickly and began to disciple me. So that was sort of a converging.

And then six months after I was saved, Tom was saved. And even though he lived in Florida and I'm living in Mississippi, still he's able to sort of, through distance education – no, that's not true – disciple me in so many ways.

So there were a lot of converging forces. So I'm thinking, this is great. My faith is getting pieced back together.

And, of course, the punchline to this, when I talk to crowds that aren't particularly aficionados and apologetics, the punchline you're supposed to take away from it is how much apologetics can service somebody who's already saved.

Because I'm convinced I actually was saved when I trusted Christ at 16, but I had gone through this period of failure, intellectual failure more or less, and the

Lord was going to bring me through that. And it was apologetics that enabled me to get to this point that you're at as well now, where you know what you believe, but now you know why you believe it.

Or at least you're on the way of learning that, to say, well, I believe now, just like I did before, that Jesus died for my sins or that he rose from the dead or there's a

God or whatever. But now I'm beginning to understand why I believe that. And far from it being something as a tool that I could go out and try to reach others with any kind of ministry.

It was something I just needed myself. I needed rescue. And I'm reminded of what happened to Apollos in Acts 18.

When it – remember with Apollos' teaching, and the part that jumps out at me about his teaching in Achaia says that he greatly helped those who believed, for he vigorously refuted the

Jews publicly, showing that Jesus was the Christ. And you can see – I can just imagine the

Jewish Christians were being outgunned by the sophisticated, unbelieving

Pharisees. Isaiah 53 is not even talking about Jesus. That's not the Messiah. And they're – I'm wondering if they're thinking, wow, did we just get sold a bill of goods with this

Jesus is the Jewish Messiah? And so here comes Apollos up and he's got a big A on his shirt with a cape.

What's the problem here? Well, he said – metaphorically speaking. He didn't actually do that.

And so he greatly helped those who believed through faith, for he vigorously refuted the Jews. So you can imagine these

Jewish Christians are seeing Apollos refute these skeptics, and then it strengthens them, and that's what happened to me.

So God had brought a lot of Apolli – is that the plural of Apollos? I don't know what the plural of Apolli – into my life, as I said.

So now you think, okay, great. I'm on my way trying to figure out –

I changed my major. I'm not doing music. I'm studying theology. It's becoming intact.

I decided to do seminary. I went to RTS for a semester and just hated it.

Now, how could you hate seminary? Because you figure, hey, I'm in civil engineering. I decided

I hate my major. Okay, well, you can change your major soon. Well, I'm studying the truths of God. Well, I hate my major.

Well, you're going to hell. You hate your major. How could you hate your major during seminary?

That doesn't make any sense. Eternal damnation for you, pal. And there are no transfer of credits, so it's even worse.

Can I at least get credit for that time? So I didn't understand at the time why

I was miserable there. It was nothing about the quality of education. In fact, I'll have to tell you this in honor of our

RTS friends here. I mean I can't tell you. I'm not just saying this because it sounds like the kind of stuff you would preach.

I can't tell you the chasm of difference in terms of quality of scholarship and depth of knowledge between my professors at this back -to -school and the professors

I got to meet at RTS. I didn't realize you could be, until I started hearing R .C.

Scrolls or Norm Geisler, I didn't think you could be a scholar and an evangelical

Christian. And I saw it modeled for me by these giants of theology. But still, what am

I miserable about? So I have a little hiatus. I'm working in some churches, trying to figure out what to do, and I have an opportunity to go to Dallas Seminary.

Now, in the circles in which I ran, for reasons that won't interest us tonight, Dallas Seminary was sort of considered the apex of theological studies, evangelical studies.

That may make some of you break out in a rash, but nevertheless, that was where I was coming from.

So yeah, he moves over a few. So I go to Dallas Seminary.

I hated it. It's like this is the cool thing. Yeah, so what did

I hate about it? I didn't understand. I mean, I'm able to study under Norm Geisler. He was like a hero to me.

Actually, he's like a rock star to me, more than a hero, as others were.

So I didn't understand. So I languished, failed classes in seminary and just sort of just fizzled out, ended up working full time in Dallas and kind of aimless,

I think. So the best advice I ever got at that time was what

Norm Geisler suggested I do because I was thwarted in my studies at Dallas Seminary.

And the advice he gave me then, if he had been giving me the same advice in 2013,

I think would be different, but I think you'll understand why. What he suggested, because what he had discovered was

I had this intense interest in apologetics, but I wasn't getting the apologetics that I desired at RTS, and I wasn't getting, even if it was more of the apologetics to my liking at DTS, it wasn't.

Like I took all, both classes at Geisler Tall, and that was it, apologetics, introduction to apologetics and apologetic systems.

That's it. So he said what you need to do is go back and go back to the university and do philosophy because so much, though not everything, but there's so much in apologetics that are philosophical issues.

So that's what I did. I went back to, and I won't go into details, but it's just amazing how God took care of me.

I went to Ole Miss for my MA in philosophy. There were four graduate students in philosophy when

I started my degree. All four of us were evangelical Christians in the graduate school in a secular state university.

That's how the Lord took care of me. So I squeezed a two -year master's degree into four years there at Ole Miss, got a master's in philosophy, and then went on to have the opportunity to do a doctorate in philosophy.

So what's the takeaway for this? Not the earlier cash value or punchline

I stated earlier that I might say to general audiences who don't have a lot of exposure to apologetics, which is not you, but rather what

I want you to take away from this, and maybe this can segue into Dr. White's comments or you can go off in a totally different direction if you choose, is that I began to see more and more not only philosophy's integral role it plays in doing apologetics, but its integral role it plays in doing theology.

In fact, I do a presentation, and I wouldn't do this to you tonight. The modest version is titled

How Philosophy Can Help Your Theology. But what I really mean, and I do have another version of it with a different title, same content, is called

How Theology Needs Philosophy, because I'm of the opinion that there are salient theological and hermeneutical issues that cannot be broached properly without sound philosophy.

And everybody does philosophy to some extent. You just either do it deliberately or you've absorbed philosophical concepts and procedures and things from whatever source relatively unconsciously.

One of that's going to do. So that's why the seminary – in fact, I may give a pitch for the school, and then I'll give it over to Dr.

White – that's why the seminary is so top -heavy in philosophy, because we feel like philosophy affects your view of the nature of language, and language is a relationship to reality.

That's hermeneutics. It affects how you understand the nature of truth and our ability to intersect with things like postmodernism, especially postmodernism as it's expressed itself in the literature realms of the humanities and the

American academy. Philosophy has much to do with a lot of things obviously in philosophy –

I'm sorry, in apologetics in terms of how the case for the Christian faith is formulated and offered to challenge the skeptics and such.

I think philosophy is integral into a proper understanding of the nature of God. And it came up last night, and Dr.

White made a number of direct – and I was so glad he did this – direct acknowledgments of the bankruptcy of open theism.

This is something evangelicals are fighting. I'm not surprised what liberals do. I mean I regret what liberals might do, liberal

Christians and skeptics, but that doesn't surprise me. But what really grieves me is seeing what evangelicals are starting to do, and we're fighting now the attributes of God, and God's omniscience is not the first one attempted to be thrown overboard as the open theist is trying to do.

Clark Pinnock said just before he died, when he was dealing with the issue of impassibility,

Clark Pinnock said maybe the time has come where we might need to reconsider a sense in which God has a body because he saw how passability and corporeality were tethered.

He understood that. So at any rate, what I try to urge with my friends and students is these attributes of God, if they mean anything to you, this is especially what

I say to people at church because I know they care about the attributes of God. I said we're throwing – they're being thrown overboard, but I think they're linked.

They're tethered together, and when things like simplicity gets thrown overboard and aseity or impassibility, well then immutability starts going.

Now omniscience, these things are just tethered and they're pulling the others off. I think philosophy is absolutely necessary, not just a good idea, but it can't be done without sound philosophy.

So my approach to theology, and I'm not a theologian, it's not my formal training in graduate school, and I'm not a

Bible scholar, will become probably progressively more evident as the night goes. James would be over there nodding.

He says, you're right, there's two things I do agree with you. You're not a theologian and you're not a Bible scholar.

I say, yeah, well, touche. But anyway, my approach to theology is trying to emphasize the integral role that philosophy needs to play in doing sound theology.

We can get in maybe into the weeds a little bit as we continue the discussion, but I defer to my esteemed colleague.

Well, one of my first memories is in fourth grade

I was sent to the principal's office. It was the first time I had ever been sent there. I was sent to the principal's office because I had been passing out gospel tracts in the playground.

And I recall that they were the cartoon kind. Yeah, you know who was behind that.

Same guy who now says I'm the Antichrist. But anyways, and my fourth grade teacher,

Mrs. Gamble, was very upset that I was doing this, so she sent me to the principal. And so I walked into the principal's office and I walked up to his desk and I handed him a tract.

And he sat me down and he explained to me that that was fine,

I could do that, but I couldn't force anyone to take them. And I was not the biggest kid on the playground, so all

I could remember thinking was, how could I force them to take one of the first ones. But a few years right around that time,

I also remember my mom taking me to her work. She worked at a print shop. And I remember being back in this dark room with these huge machines and it was loud and there were these huge men.

And all I remember is somehow, don't ask me how, I ended up arguing with these men about whether God existed.

And I was in fourth grade. Where was you when I needed help?

Well, I was an unusual one. And as far back as we've been able to trace on my father's side, we have been ministers back to Scotland, Scottish Presbyterians back then, came to the

United States and were converted to the truth and Baptist. But anyways, actually

I think it was my great -grandfather, the Presbyterians wouldn't license him, so he became a Baptist and preached anyways. So that's sort of how that worked.

But anyway, I was raised in a Christian family. My earliest memories are of the

Bible and flannel boards. Anyone have flannel boards? Oh, yeah, flannel board.

We still use them in our home. I didn't see any in the Ph .D.

cubicles, whatever you call those. Why do you call them those things, by the way? What do we call them? Chambers. Chambers. It sounds like a torture chamber.

I mean, seriously. We have it underground, in fact. Dr. Bridges can probably attest how much of a torture chamber that was.

The Morlocks. Oh, the Morlocks. Okay, all right. I wondered about that. But anyway, all tied to the faith.

And, yeah, there was a brief period in time in my life where you wouldn't have been able to tell that. But between my sophomore and junior years in high school, the

Lord really, really got hold of my life. I was converted at a very young age. And I was class valedictorian in high school.

I didn't get a B in high school. I was never tardy. Yeah, I was that guy. I'm sorry. But I always carried the

Bible on top of my books and had opportunity back then of bearing witness to the gospel in my graduation.

You'd never get away with that now in most places. But be it as it may, I had actually intended to go into medicine when about three months after I was married.

And when we got married, I was 19. She was 18. Though I'm not sure how that works now because we've been married 31 years, and she still says she's 29.

So I'm not really sure how that works. But two more missionaries showed up at my sister -in -law's house.

And we met on a Monday and a Thursday for about three hours. And in between that time,

I read two or three books on Mormonism. And I went away from those conversations with two deep convictions.

The first was even though I was raised, I had, starting my junior year in high school,

I started memorizing scripture, read through the Bible, the whole nine yards.

I still have a great New Schofield reference Bible all marked up. It still has the greatest cover on it of any

Bible I've ever owned. It moves at night. I mean it's just that soft, awesome thing.

But I came away with a conviction that I did not know enough about what I believed to communicate to these people.

And I knew the most about what I believed than anybody in my age and my church. I went to a huge Southern Baptist church, 20 ,000 members.

We could never find more than 7 ,000 at the time, but there were 20 ,000 members on the roll. And I learned later that to get off the rolls, you had to personally present your death certificate and triplicate.

But anyway, I really came away with that conviction.

And I also came away with the conviction that I needed to know what they believed.

And so I began reading every book I could on Mormonism. And it didn't take long until I realized, wow, there's these certain books that are being mentioned here.

The Journal of Discourses, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Mars, Work, and Wonder, Mormon Doctrine, Bruce O. McConkie. I need to get these books.

And no one told me to do this. I was at that time a student at Grand Canyon College, which is a

Southern Baptist school. But I was a biology major, and I was going to become a doctor and maybe do medical missions or something like that.

And no one just took me aside. I didn't even know what an apologist was. I never even heard the term. But I just had this strong conviction that if you're going to talk to the

Mormons, you need to understand how the Mormons think. You need to read their stuff. And so I started going to the

LDS bookstore and buying books. And, well, that was a creepy experience the first time in there.

I just expected demons to jump out of the books and get me. I think there are more demons hiding in the

Christian bookstore than there are in the LDS bookstore. At least more subtly speaking. But I started studying

Mormonism, and I didn't have anybody to guide me. Thankfully, I had a job at the time. I was a full -time student, but I had a job as a radio announcer.

That's why I'm not afraid of microphones and stuff like that. I grew up doing radio, live radio, back with these things that are called records.

They're made of vinyl, and you spin them around. You put a needle on it. It's just great. It's a wonderful way of doing things.

So I'd have plenty of time, especially when the

California Angels were playing. We carried them. So I'd have three hours where every half hour I had to go, okay, back to work.

And so it was great for doing study and stuff like that. But I really started diving into it, and I didn't have anybody to guide me.

But I came to a lot of the convictions that have really guided me ever since then in that period of time.

We started taking every opportunity we could to witness to Mormons. We started going up to Salt Lake City to the

General Conference, the Mormon Church, which is every April and October. They had the Mesa Easter pageant out in Mesa, Arizona.

They'd have 150 ,000 to 200 ,000 people attend over six nights, and we started tracking that in 1984.

We did that for 18 years. The only reason we stopped doing it was King James' only fundamentalist Baptist destroyed the outreach of both places, actually.

Don't get me on that. That would get us off our topic this evening. But I came to a lot of real strong conclusions from that initial study of Mormonism very quickly.

Once I started teaching on that, people started asking questions about Jehovah's Witnesses. I followed the same pattern there.

Soon I was challenged by a friend, hey, if you say that Mormonism's gospel is false, look at what

Rome teaches here. And I started dealing with that and recognized, especially when I did that, that I was going to be really keeping us unpopular for a long time in the future.

Because if you want to make sure your ministry is microscopic and small forever, take on Roman Catholicism, be reformed, and then talk about Islam.

You're doomed. That's why there's only two of us in the ministry, and the ministry has existed for 30 years now.

But one of the things that really came home to me in those early years and that I've come to understand later on in doing theology,

I think we're far enough south of the Mason -Dixon line for me to make reference to the

War of Northern Aggression, right? Wow, I expected a little more. Well, we've got a lot of transplants.

Oh, okay, all right. We've got people like Frank Turek from Jersey. I mean, what are you going to do? Yeah, well, that's – anyways.

I think it's pretty inarguable that probably one of the greatest – well, the greatest general that America's ever produced is probably

Robert E. Lee. And if you went to General Lee and said defend, his first question to you would be defend what?

He lost at Gettysburg because he didn't know the ground, and he had won numerous battles against much larger forces because he knew the ground.

He knew what he was defending. He knew how to defend it. I'm afraid that in much of Christian apologetics

I see people who are very good at defending, but if you ask them what, they're not all that clear about that.

In other words, I became very convicted and very convinced that, first and foremost, you have to know what you believe before you ride off to start defending it.

You have to know the object of defense, and it is your theology that determines your apologetics.

And it's, I think, very dangerous when your apologetics determines your theology. And so I became very convicted of the fact that –

I said to people who wanted to go up with us to Salt Lake City. I said, look, I'd rather have five people with me in Salt Lake City who know their faith and know it well and can give testimony of that than 50 people up there with me who can rip and shred

Joseph Smith but have nothing positive to give in his place. The idea of doing apologetics is just pull your sword out and get it bloodied and then not have any type of follow -up or any type of positive gospel witness or consistency.

That's the big thing. I've probably become known for a couple of phrases, but one of the phrases is, inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.

And I used that when I first debated Shabir Ali at Biola University in 2006 because my

Muslim friends will use one standard to approach the New Testament and Christianity and a completely different standard in defending the

Quran. And they'll do it without – with a grin on their face and without a bit of concern.

And unfortunately, I encounter a lot of Christians who do the same thing, just in reverse. And I don't see how we can speak of truth, and yet we're using different standards.

And so consistency to me is just absolutely vital. And from – as I understand the scriptures, you start with God's revelation.

You start with what the gospel is. And then your apologetics should flow naturally from the positive outlines of the gospel itself.

And so very early on, that showed me that – I have a webcast called

The Dividing Line. A couple of you have probably heard it. And where did that come from? Well, it came from the fact that there are dividing lines.

And one of the clearest dividing lines is between those people who believe that God has spoken in scripture and those who do not.

And there's all sorts of variants on the other side, but it is a clear dividing line. And it's a line that I saw amongst the

Mormons, that I see amongst Jehovah's Witnesses and Roman Catholics and Muslims. It all comes back down to has

God spoken? How can we know what he has said and so on and so forth? So the other thing that then came into all of this is

I became very convinced in my studies of scripture that the highest calling

I find in the New Testament is to be an elder in the

Church of Jesus Christ. I don't see any other higher calling than that. I know some may have a different ecclesiology than I do, but there's a book out for views or five views on church government.

I did the Plurality of Elders chapter. Robert Raymond did the Presbyterian view, and we pretty much just debated each other on that one.

But I'm convinced that one of the most important – one of the things

I am most thankful for in my ministry, which is coming up on 30 years now, is that God has always made me a churchman.

An apologist who is disconnected from the local church is a dangerous thing, and I think

I can substantiate that from scripture. One of the things that has helped me to maintain my balance – and that's something you have to have in apologetics.

I hope you haven't seen it, but I certainly have seen people who have become – they're so used to pulling this direction that they've lost their actual balance as far as their

Christian life. I'm so thankful that at my church I had to teach – I had to teach the junior high schoolers.

Let me tell you something. I'd rather debate in the East London mosque than to teach junior high schoolers. Because, you see, you're born – here's the level of humanity.

You're born, you go up, you go up, and then you hit the junior high school level. You go below the level of humanity, then somewhere on your junior year in high school you come back into the level of humanity.

I'm not sure what that is down there, but it's just a bad time. It's Morlocks. Morlocks, yeah, it really is.

And I had to explain the Trinity. I had to explain justification.

I had to – if you – I teach Sunday school every Sunday when

I'm at church if I'm not preaching, and sometimes when I am preaching. And not just to young people, but to adults as well.

There's a danger – and I say this to my fellow folks who teach in academia – there's a danger that we can become disconnected from the life of the church, living in an ivory tower someplace.

And the Lord just never allowed me to do that. I have always been involved in serving in churches, and I'm a churchman first and foremost.

I'm an elder in the church now. And someone was asking, are you always traveling? I am always traveling right now, and I feel guilty about it.

I try to limit myself to no more than two weeks in a month away from the church.

In March, the only two Sundays I'm going to be in church is when I'm preaching. That's not good. I try to avoid that because that balance is absolutely necessary for a proper spiritual life.

And so I guess if I was going to mention a scripture, for me,

I keep coming back to 1 Corinthians chapters 1 and 2, especially as I speak to those of you who have a love of learning and a love of Christian scholarship.

I have deep concern, especially in light of what's going on in our society. I was shocked when

I was at RTS yesterday. When I sat down with the president and Dr. Anderson, I was the oldest person in the room.

You really know you're getting older when you're the oldest person in the room and you're meeting the president of the seminary.

Combine that with the fact that I just had my first grandchild, and I'm really feeling my age at the moment.

But over the years, as I look at what is happening right now and the seismic changes in our society here in the

United States, the speed, things are changing so quickly. The younger generation, change is the norm for them.

For me, it wasn't. One year was like the next. Now, for the young people in high school, change is the norm.

It would make them uncomfortable if things were the same. And we have some tremendous challenges.

And as institutions of higher learning, let me tell you something. If we stand for what the

Bible teaches in regards to life, marriage, human sexuality, and things like that, we are going to see persecution coming in the next decade.

We're going to see it. I can't see how anyone can argue that. There are many people in our government right now that would love to see our freedom of expression of what we believe.

If you believe what Jesus taught in Matthew chapter 19 about what marriage is, there are many people who would like to see you punished for expressing that kind of thing.

The homosexual movement does not – I've said this for years. They do not want equal rights. They want Uber rights.

They want to force people to celebrate their lifestyle. And you see this in California right now.

There's already a Harvey Milk Day that you have to celebrate in California. Oh, my goodness. If you know anything about Harvey Milk, it's amazing.

That's coming. And so the question that I have for all of us who are involved in teaching and in doing the work of educating others is who are we doing this for?

Who are we doing this for? We're going to have to make very strong decisions about that because I think the day is coming when the attitude that exists amongst some that we, in essence, need to be embarrassed by the lordship of Christ in our scholarship will be wiped away externally.

In other words, by the pressures placed upon us by the government and society. We won't have to – we won't even have the luxury to worry about that anymore.

We will only have an audience of one. We will only be able to please the one that we should have been pleasing all along. And the word had told us from the beginning how many churches in our land have lost sight of the fact that the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but to us who are being saved.

It is the power of God. Do we really believe that? Do we really believe that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world?

Do we really believe what Paul says later on when he says, for since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know

God, God is well pleased to the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. The wisdom, the

Sophia that we share together, that he talks about in chapter 2, that he preaches amongst those who are telios, those who are mature, is a wisdom that goes directly against the fallen nature of man.

It's a wisdom that first and foremost bows the knee before the creator. And folks, we have an amazing message to this world.

We've got to understand to the unregenerate mind what we say is abject, well the term here is more on us, foolishness.

We actually are telling the world that we are going to live our lives based upon believing that not only there's a creator

God but that he actually entered his own creation as a

Jew 2 ,000 years ago. And then let himself be crucified by Roman soldiers and that that's why

I'm going to make the decisions about who I marry and what my career is and what I'm going to do in life. And to the rest of the world, folks, that's foolishness.

And one of the greatest capitulations that we've seen in evangelical circles is when we stop allowing that to be foolishness and try to turn it into worldly wisdom.

I think it's an evident distrust in the spirit of God to make the gospel come alive in people's hearts when we try to, in essence, we show that we are ashamed of the gospel.

And we try to make it sound less offensive to the natural man. The natural man needs to be offended by the lordship of Christ because how was

Christ described? He's a stone of stumbling and rock of offense. The apostle Paul, he even says, he says, you know,

I know my audience. Jews seek for signs and Greeks search for wisdom.

So he knew how he could have gotten himself popular with them. But he says, but we preach the

Messiah crucified. That phrase, that term was so offensive that there were certain ancient writers that wouldn't even mention it because it was like something you wouldn't mention in proper culture.

It was such a horrible way to die. I know what the Jews want. I know what the Greeks want. But we preach

Christ crucified the Jews, a stumbling block into Gentiles foolishness. And how many people today would say,

Paul, you've got it all wrong. You're putting a stumbling block in front of people. Well, God's truth is a stumbling block to self -righteous people.

God's truth is not a stumbling block to the repentant heart, but it's a stumbling block to self -righteous people. And then you have the promise.

But to those who are the called, and that was the subject last night. But to those who are the called, both

Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. I may have stolen this from somebody.

If I did, I don't remember who it was. But I've said for a long time, the gospel is ours to proclaim, not to edit.

God has already determined what the parameters of the gospel are to be. That's the power of God in salvation.

We are to proclaim it. We can't edit it. And it just seems to me that one of the biggest challenges we're going to have in the future.

Well, let me just ask you this, and I'll stop the sermon. Think of some of the large megachurches down here, even in the south.

What would happen next Sunday if at each of the entrances to those churches there was a bureaucrat from the administration with, oh, let's say an iPad.

And when you walk through that door, he takes your information, maybe your Social Security number, your driver's license, some information.

And you knew that by walking through that door, when you file your taxes that coming year, your taxes would double.

What would happen to church membership and attendance across the United States if that were to happen?

What would happen? See, my studies of church history long before I even met my

Muslim friends showed that you pull the sword and put it to a Christian's throat, and they're likely to say,

I will not deny Christ. Deny them the opportunities of advancement, of education, hit them in the everyday, keep them down, and, well, some of you know church history.

During the days of Augustine, there were over 750 Donatist churches in North Africa. After the time of the invasion from Islam, there weren't.

And yeah, there have been some who've stayed strong, the Coptics, but they are not anywhere near the size they once were.

It's that everyday grind. That was the way that people have found is the best way.

And that's what the society is going to be doing to us. Already, every one of you,

I bet you Frank has experienced this, but I've written on the subject of homosexuality. Mike Brown has written on the subject of homosexuality.

I'm supposed to go to Canada later in this year to speak. It crosses my mind that there are places

I could go that I may end up waiting to try to get a flight back home because they're not going to let me in because of what

I've said. That kind of pressure is only going to increase, and the question for all of us is going to be, are we ready to pay the price?

Are we ready to pay the price to be consistent in our profession of faith?

That really speaks to me. So anyways, didn't mean to preach, but it happens.

Who's moderating this thing? Go ahead, Simon. I'll ask the second question.

They speak directly to the heart of evangelism.

In an ever -darkening culture, staying strong, trying to be attractive in worldly terms.

I understand all that, but I agree with it. What about aspects of apologetics that trade more in natural theology, say the existence of God, that are ways in which they're avenged?

The answer to a fool before he was fallen, save some.

I wonder if you can speak a little bit more directly to the philosophical aspect, that don't engage directly with the heart of evangelism, but they are certainly throwaways to you.

Well, you know, it's interesting. The Muslims do not differentiate between evangelism and apologetics.

They have one thing called dawah. And dawah is a calling to Islam, but it's also a vindication of Islam, and hence it's apologetics.

So for them, apologetics and evangelism are the same thing.

Now, I can see an appropriate distinction between the two, in the sense that if I'm speaking to someone and they don't have objections based upon some type of postmodern theology or philosophy,

I don't need to bring those things up. I can just go directly to a presentation of the gospel with that type of a person.

But at the same time, I probably take a different perspective than many here when it comes to the foundation of when you're doing apologetics to the unbeliever, the person who does not believe in the existence of God, what is the point of contact?

I firmly reject the idea there's any such thing as neutral ground.

And I reject any apologetic method that says let's go to the neutral ground in the middle and let's reason from here.

I have frequently, as I've taught apologetics for various seminaries, used as my example of this.

I will play the opening statement when William Lane Craig debated Frank Zindler.

Anybody familiar with that one? Yeah, okay. And the assertion that is made there that the preponderance of the evidence points to the greater probability of the existence of a

God. Then I will play the opening sections of the debate between Greg Bonson and Gordon Stein.

And Greg Bonson's argument that without the Christian God, not a

God, but the Christian triune God, you cannot explain why we are even here this evening, you cannot ground human predication or anything else.

Two completely different approaches. And then we analyze them from there. And here's my argument.

I appreciate the question because it helps flesh out one of the very things that I said. My theology determines my apologetics.

My theology is that for by Him were all things made, whether in heaven or on earth, visible or invisible, principalities, powers, dominions, or authorities.

All things are created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things. In Him, all things, sunestekon, they consist or hold together.

That's the description of Jesus in Colossians chapter 1. If that's the case, then there is nothing in this universe, there is no fact in this universe, that was not defined by my

Savior, by His creative act. And that means there's no such thing as neutral ground.

That person I'm talking to, according to Romans chapter 1, is engaged in katakanton, suppressing the knowledge of God.

Now, if he is actively suppressing the knowledge of God, and if God has already revealed Himself to him through the created order, if I come along and give him more knowledge of God, what's he going to do with it?

I see my job as an apologist to come along and start prying up his fingers.

It's sort of like when you take the beach ball when you're in the swimming pool and you hold the thing down.

It takes a lot of effort to do that, and if you become distracted for even a moment, what's going to happen? Here it comes.

Well, that's what the knowledge of God is like. And so I don't believe that there is a neutral ground out here that I can step onto, because my entire epistemology is based upon the fact that I have a creator who made everything.

And I just feel like it's quite honestly dishonest for me to pretend I can walk out there and then go walking with you for a while and say, well, let's reason this, let's reason this, and maybe we'll eventually try to get down maybe to the resurrection or something like that, and I'll get you into the

Christian camp somehow, step by step in an incremental way. Somewhere down that road, I'm going to have to look at you and go, by the way, back at the start,

I really wasn't honest with you, because I pretended that I could actually function without the recognition of what

I actually believe my worldview is. I hope you don't mind. I just don't see the apostles doing that.

I don't see the apostles ever did that. And so that's why

I am one of those dreaded, horrid, execrated presuppositionalists, which causes the evidentialists to run for the hills.

I'm not an evidentialist. Okay, good. But you did run behind the hills.

I was actually a cow. I will never forget what

I saw, but that's okay. You understand what I'm saying. It strikes me that what this illustrates is

I'm trying to be consistent with what I said. My theology of man, well, my theology of God and my theology of man must determine my apologetic methodology, not the other way around.

And I'm concerned when people find something that looks like it works on a pragmatic level and then you adopt or adapt theology to mix that.

That concerns me. Might have what?

I was going to make sure what it was I was committing myself to that I actually have. Richard Howe might have a toupee.

He might. I didn't know. That's what I was waiting to hear. Well, yeah,

I mean, the subject that Dr. White's touching on is known in the curriculum as apologetic systems, or you might think of it as various methods, and if I may shamelessly plug our conference this

October, God willing, is Eric in here, by the way? Okay. God willing, if this all works out the way it looks like it's going to, we're going to be able to have a panel discussion between myself and K.

Scott Olyphant from Westminster Seminary and Jason Weil from,

I think he's with ICR now, because one of the concerns I've had over the past couple of years was, besides the fact that I would have concerns about presuppositionalism, and perhaps we can discuss that as we go, but just as a sort of ancillary point,

Eric, the reason I asked if he was here, is our director of development at the seminary, and he's also a student.

He came to me a couple of years ago because he knew I was a young earth creationist. The seminary doesn't take a stand on age of the earth, so we've got faculty who are young earth, the

Old Testament professor being one of them, by the way, I think, literal 24 -hour, and he's the

Old Testament and Hebrew professor, so whatever that's worth. But we have other faculty who are older, so it's not part of our doctoral statements.

But at any rate, Eric, but we are classical in our apologetic method, which I prefer that term over evidentialism, if we want to explore why.

I think it's a critical distinction to be drawn. He came to me because he thought he had noticed that presuppositionalism was grabbing the market share among young earth creations.

Most of the homeschooling curriculum that's young earth is Ken Ham type approach.

So he thought, he's not a young earther, Eric's not, so it doesn't bother him, but he knew it might bother me, so I started looking into this, and providentially,

Ken came to Atlanta, where I actually live in Atlanta, and commute to Charlotte every

Monday and teach during the week and then go home the weekends. And Ken came to a church in the

Atlanta area, and I went to hear, because he did four lectures that Sunday, and I got to go to the third one, which was on how should the

Christian defend the faith. And I was so grieved by what

I heard, that I had almost a visceral reaction. I came home, I blogged in my mind all the way home, and then just vomited all over my keyboard trying to get this all out, because I was so grieved by it, and the title of the blog was

It's Worse Than I Thought, because I thought he had just basically abrogated the responsibility to defend the faith by the methods that he thought he was defending.

Now, Ken's not here to defend himself, and I wouldn't even presume to attribute to Dr. White the same methods that I was critical of in Ken, because in all fairness to people, esteemed presuppositionalists like Greg Bonson, what

Ken was doing, you can barely see Bonson from where Ken Ham stands as far as sophistication and thoughtfulness.

I can't comment on it either. Yeah, no, trust me. You might agree with some of it in principle, but I think it doesn't make it look good, so I wouldn't blame

Bonson or Van Til or anything on what I heard from Ken, but be that as it may, that started this cascade of events that culminated last

October in our conference where I did a workshop on Young Earth presuppositionalism and what

I thought was the problems there. This is sort of now expanding out, so now Jason Lyle is probably the premier

Young Earth presuppositionalist. He's a disciple of Greg Bonson. So I think Jason, his version of it is quite a bit more sophisticated than Ken's is, and maybe that's just because Ken's, that's not his area, so he's picking out what he thinks he knows.

I don't want to be too critical of him because he's not here to defend himself. So this has become an area of intense interest to me, and so I always love the opportunity to engage.

Just a couple of thoughts I had while you were talking. I'm not sure what neutral ground would be, so I may agree with Dr.

White that there is no neutral ground. I do believe there is common ground, however. Neutral seems to carry some connotations of it being sort of amoral or whatever, and I certainly don't think that's the case.

I certainly do believe that there is no ground that isn't the ground that God made, metaphorically or otherwise.

So everyone, no one can escape reality of which

God is the supreme being of, and he created this world. So maybe that's the difference between us perhaps, the nuanced difference between neutral versus common.

I think what I meant by neutral was allowing for some fact or truth to exist that is not defined by my

God. In other words, I'm not making a claim of the lordship of Christ.

I'm saying I can function epistemologically and philosophically and theologically apart from that foundation is what

I was referring to as far as neutral ground. You know, he mentioned the

Bonson -Stein debate. The course that I teach on apologetic systems, if I may continue to shamelessly bug

SES, the course I teach on apologetic systems here, we listen to three debates that Greg Bonson does.

The debate he had with Gordon Stein that he mentioned. No, the debate he did with R .C.

Sproul. Oh, yes. And the debate he did with George Smith. The debate with George Smith is a radio debate, and I also teach a course on contemporary atheism, and among popular atheists, not academic atheists, but popular,

I think there's no more sophisticated and articulate and cogent atheist thinker and writer than George Smith.

So I was delighted to see the two of them because sometimes you get disappointed when one side or the other has a real lame representative.

You know, it's a lame Christian or a lame atheist. You don't get to hear the rigors of it. So that one is a great one, and it's also a radio exchange, so it's quite a bit more sculptured and honed with short sound bites.

It's really elegant, I guess I should say, so I highly recommend you listen to that. And I appreciate

Dr. White's characterization of the difference between how William Lane Craig framed the issues with respect to Frank Zimler and how

Greg Bonson framed the issues with Gordon Stein, but I defy anybody to listen to the whole debate between Greg Bonson and Gordon Stein and find anywhere in there where Greg Bonson proved the

Christian God. I defy anybody to do that, and I've gone over this debate over and over again with classes, discussing, and I would just,

I mean, maybe we can get into it later, but I defy anybody to show me anywhere in what he said that night with Gordon Stein that entails the

God of the Bible. I do think it is the God of the Bible, and I know

Greg believed that it was the God of the Bible too, but I'm saying the actual debate that they did did not entail that.

It only entailed some minimal commitments about God being the ontological precondition for logic and for the uniformity of nature.

But it didn't tell you why 3 John figured into that or the book of Nahum. So it doesn't give you the 66 books of the

Protestant Bible and five -point Dordian Calvinism, which Van Til said, this is what you've got to have.

It's all or nothing. It just simply doesn't do that. I don't know. I don't mean to,

I don't want to ascribe that if that's what you thought it is. Well, I don't think that Greg would actually have claimed that he was bringing in Dordian Calvinism and the book of Nahum, but what he was saying was that the only

God that can ground the preconditions for the intelligibility of the dialogue is the triune

God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ over against the incoherence of a

Unitarian perspective say from the Islamic perspective, etc., etc., or the polytheism of Mormonism or the

God, the 330 million gods of the Hindus or whatever you understand the Buddhist God to be or whatever else it might be.

I don't think that his claim is that he is demonstrating the inspiration of Nahum. Well, I must have misunderstood how you characterized,

I thought you said that it was, I forget exactly what your words were, but it sounded to me like... Without the

Christian God. Okay. So you don't think the Christian God includes the book of Nahum then? Well, the

Christian God inspired the book of Nahum, but the book of Nahum is not a part of the Christian God. No, I understand that.

I just thought that taking my cues from what I've read in Van Til and Bonson and other places that it really was the full -orbed

Christian faith with the scriptures. In fact, Van Til actually says that probably more often.

Well, certainly in the sense that we only know this triune God as he has revealed himself in inspired scripture, yes.

Special revelation absolutely necessary because general revelation reveals to us that we are to honor him as God and give thanks, but I don't believe the doctrine of the

Trinity is revealed in natural revelation. I agree with that. But the argument from Greg Bonson, I knew him,

I'm not going to claim to have been chums with him, if any of you have appreciated the debates he did with homosexuals, if you've heard any of them.

He got to do those debates. They were on one weekend because I took one of his debates for him.

I debated Gerry Matitick's up in Omaha about Froze to Death. He was supposed to do that debate. I took that for him so he could do those homosexual debates.

So we knew each other and shortly before his death, he actually spoke in Phoenix and I was going to be debating the host pastor of the church on paedo -baptism actually and he made a joke about who he knew was going to win that one.

But anyway, I do not believe that he was in any way asserting in any of the lectures

I've heard him give in the books that I've read that it would be necessary to bring in Nahum or five -point

Calvinism as part of the transcendental proof of the existence of God. The idea is that it is the

Christian God that is the only solid ground, the only basis for human predication and for explanation of the laws of logic, why we're communicated beings, all the rest of those things.

I think what you may be saying is that those other aspects are part of a single divine whole but I don't see that you would even try to bring those in in a debate with an individual along those lines.

Okay, that's fine. I mean, I'm being sort of facetious when I say Nahum but my point was that there was nothing in the debate with Gordon Stein that would have entailed that the

God that Craig Bonson believes in is the Christian God. Well, I think there is. He certainly did believe in the

Christian God and he was explicit. But what I'm saying is the actual arguments he makes don't entail the

Christian, something distinctive about the Christian God like the Trinity. Actually, I think they do because of the fact that he grounds human personality and our ability to communicate in the inter -Trinitarian relationships of Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Now, in that particular debate, given the fact that Gordon Stein evidently Google didn't exist back then so that he hadn't even bothered to Google what his opponent was going to be saying, there was a lot of distraction on secondary issues.

But if you read what he said and listen to his debates, that is part and parcel of where he's going is that it is the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, the triune

God that becomes the model for our ability to communicate with God. I'm not suggesting that he couldn't do all these other things if he had enough time or it wasn't the constraint.

You had just brought up, you were making a point juxtaposing Bill Craig's debate with Frank Zindler and Greg's debate with Gordon.

And I was just saying, well, in Greg's debate with Gordon, it didn't do the very points you were making to distinguish the two.

Look what Greg did with the debate and he's still arguing for this. I go, but he actually didn't do that in that debate.

The distinguishing between the two positions, though, is between the idea that the preponderance of the evidence points to the greater probability of the existence of a

God over against saying that the Christian approach is the assertion of the one true

God and not leaving to the man who is suppressing knowledge of God the right to then judge what the preponderance of evidence points to and then even making your final goal not the

Christian proclamation because if it's just a God, my question is, who is our example for apologetics?

Well, I want to be careful here because I don't want to put myself in that awkward position of having to really defend Craig's method because ultimately

I think I would depart and I think the seminary would from him once we got in the weeds about the philosophical truths that inform our conclusions about the nature of God and consequently the ways in which we would formulate our arguments.

He's not a classical realist like we would be so I want to be careful.

I'm not trying to defend Craig's method as you formulated it against his end because I probably again would have had a different approach anyway.

I was just trying to jump on the opportunity to beat up on Greg Fonsi. And given that he's dead, that's easier to do.

Never put it past me to beat up on a dead guy. Well, you did it to Aquinas today too so I guess he can feel good about that.

But my point was that from my perspective what is absolutely vital here is that my doctrine of God, my doctrine of Christ as creator of all things and my doctrine of man as a sinful rebel who is suppressing the knowledge of God has to determine the methodology that I use in approaching that man.

That is what I was attempting to communicate. And I think that the direction has to be from divine revelation about who

God is and who man is to the apologetic methodology. That to me is absolutely central.

My question then would be so if you have someone who is atheistic let's say they seem to be genuine convinced by the evidence which

I would agree they are actually suppressing. So are they genuine or not?

Well... Because the foundation of your question has to do with whatever that word means. I'll just describe that and I'll just say it.

So if there's... Well, I didn't get a chance to actually well,

I just forgot to actually but I do believe that there is a point of contact.

And I guess I can answer that by just briefly narrating an encounter I had that I've talked about many times.

I was speaking at a secular university outside Chicago. For some reason it's named after somebody and I can never remember what the name of it is.

It's like I have a bad sector in my hard drive and it keeps trying to write to that sector. It's because it's a Mac. Oh, it's terrible. It's horrible.

It's just horrible. But there's a university outside of Chicago and they had a

Christian group on campus asking me to come speak while I was speaking at a local church. Okay, fine. I get there and they show me the flyer.

Just imagine yourself in this situation. Here's the flyer. Stump the chump. You don't think

God exists? Do you like to argue? Free pizza. Wow, really?

Nothing like having some preparation, you know? So, you know, this place fills up pretty quick and I know

I'm not going to have much time here because I can smell the pizza. You know, you're talking college students. Their brains are already shut off at this point.

But this guy comes in, sits down in the second row and he's dressed in all red clothes with blue hair and he is a sophomore philosophy student.

Now that combination right there. Oh my goodness. And his name is

Eric and so we start going back and forth and we eventually, after my talk, we sit down and of course

I never got to eat a piece of pizza. But what I did is I just let him talk.

I was in essence reeling the rope out and I'm just letting him express himself.

Why? Because I believe I do have a point of contact with him and I have a point of contact with every Mormon and Muslim and atheist and it's what?

The Bible says we're all created in the imago dei, the image of God. And sin can mar that but it does not destroy that.

Some people say Calvinists think, well you've lost it. No, that's not the case at all. It's marred but it's not destroyed and that's the point of contact.

And obviously my belief because of that is that he cannot live consistently in the worldview he has constructed for himself.

He's going to have to steal from mine. He's going to have to borrow from mine. And so eventually he made a comment about how he knew he should do better and I knew

I had him. And so I jumped on him. He had made some wonderful philosophical observation. It's cold out there.

It's like 21 degrees with wind blowing outside. It's sort of like it's going to be tomorrow morning here, I guess. And he had this leather jacket on the chair and he had made some comment about,

I don't even know if this actually exists. We can't even know if that actually exists. I said, you know what, Eric?

I said, I'll tell you what. When you leave here, you're going to take that with you because it's 21 degrees outside and you know it's cold.

And when you walk down the street, if you're going to walk down the street, you are not going to walk down the middle of the street.

You're going to walk down the sidewalk because you know the laws of physics are real. And when that bus runs over you, you're probably going to be over it.

If you're going to be driving a car, you're not going to drive down the left side of the road. You're going to drive down the right side of the road because you can't live according to your worldview consistently.

And Eric, what I'm going to ask my God to do is my prayer for you is that every time you steal from God's worldview to prop up your own act of rebellion, he'll convict you.

He got eyes as big as pie plates. He's looking at me and he says, no one's ever said anything like that to me.

And I said, I'm sorry, no one did. And he said, thank you. And guess what?

He took his jacket. And I knew he would. So I'm not saying that there isn't a point in place, but what

I'm saying is there's more than one way to do this. I'm not trying to say, I've never said to someone, there is a programmatic way of doing this.

We mentioned last night, I think, at dinner or something like that, I've debated a pretty well -known atheist by the name of Barker.

And yeah, with the Freedom from Religion Foundation. And Dan's an interesting fellow.

He and I debated at the University of Illinois. And if you can get hold of it, that was my

Greg Bonson imitation, but not quite. Because in the middle of that,

I presented the FTPase molecule in the mitochondria of the cells.

Now you might say, wait a minute, that sounds like you were presenting evidence. The way I presented it and the context

I put it in, I felt was consistent with my understanding of how I do apologetics.

I was not saying to the audience, you are the autonomous judges and you can judge whether God exists.

What I said to the audience was, you already know God exists, you're in rebellion, and here is evidence of it because every one of us in this room knows there is evidence, there is his fingerprint right in front of you.

And that's how I presented it. And let's put it this way, Dan Barker hadn't Googled me either.

You could tell by the response. Even though we had actually encountered each other back when I was about 22.

Many, many years ago when he first made his little conversion stuff. But that's another story. I didn't want to assume that you didn't think there was going to happen.

Well again, it's going to depend upon the person. I mean, because I'm in the exact same situation, honestly, with a

Muslim. I mean, his way of doing this is religious, but it's no less this.

I mean, atheism is, in most of its forms, at least virulent atheism, is just a form of idolatry.

It really is. It's giving to the creation that which belongs to God alone. And so there are many different ways of doing this.

My concern, though, is when I try to not do this, but try to ignore the fact that this person is actively involved in doing that kind of suppression.

There's many different ways in which suppression is expressed. I think all false religion is an act of suppression.

But that means there's going to be a lot of different ways of prying up those fingers. But I purposefully avoid handing to that person the position of being judge.

Because if they are put in the position of being judge, they're already denying.

They've already climbed up onto the judge's throne and put on the robes unrighteously in the first place.

I'm not going to affirm that they have the right to continue to sit up there. I'm going to drag them down off of that and put them where they need to be in the chair of the accused, not in the position of being judge.

And I just go, if the apostles are an example of that, that seems to be how they did things.

These are some random thoughts. Something you said earlier, I was going to see if I could regather.

I don't know why he has this computer here. I was playing solitaire.

I was wondering. I've got my computer set up here and he's got an old pen and pencil and a yellow pad of paper.

You're defaulting back to the old ways. In case they ask me some scripture verse,

I'd have to look it up since I left my Bible. I'm not sure how to take some of your comments earlier because I thought you were taking a swipe at the notion that there was some viable sense in which philosophy would function antecedent to scripture, that you were more or less dismissive of that.

I might have misunderstood that. Well, from an epistemological perspective, I believe that the fact that we are creating the image of God and that the first revelation to Adam was sufficient to hold him accountable

I would see Christian philosophy as a handmade to scriptural revelation, but I do believe that scripture is antecedent to any philosophical concept.

I was talking to a friend of mine at church. Probably a lot of you who study apologetics and perhaps you've had disciples that have encountered this in their own growth in apologetics is you find yourself having to do an apologetic for apologetics among your fellow churchmen.

They think that there's really no need. So I asked one of the adults in my church, a good friend of mine,

I said, you know, it says in Genesis 3, and if this verse ends up not being the proper illustration for my point because we have another way of the finesse of interpretation, fine,

I can shift to another example, but this happened to be the one I used with Wyatt. I said, it says that Adam heard the sound of God walking in the cool of the garden.

I said, now, if God's walking in the cool of the garden, if he hears this sound of God walking in the cool of the garden, the idea is that God was walking around looking for Adam.

That's the sense of the Hebrew. Then God must have legs. I mean, you can't walk around if you don't have legs.

But I knew Wyatt didn't believe that God had legs, so how do you deal with that verse?

Well, he more or less just said, I take it as a figure of speech. I said, well, how do you know it's a figure of speech?

He said, well, we know from John 4 that God is spirit. I said, how do you know that's not the figure of speech?

Maybe when it says God is spirit, that's speaking metaphorically, but when it says that God has eyes and arms and hair and teeth and a nose and a mouth and a backside, that those are literally true.

So what do you do to adjudicate because they're all scripture? And I would suggest, and I tried to suggest to him, it was not just an apologetic for apologetics, but more narrowly, it was an apologetic for doing what we rightly or wrongly refer to as doing philosophy.

I said, you would have to know some things are true about reality before you even read your scriptures, or you wouldn't even be able to understand what they're saying.

If you don't know what the difference is between a subject and an object and a direct object and a gerund and an infinitive, we don't learn those from the

Bible. The Bible doesn't teach you grammar. You've got to know grammar. But what I think is a place where people can misunderstand is that where we learn these things, like these truths about the nature of God that help us know that when the

Bible speaks of Him in physical terms, they can't be speaking literal. It must be metaphorical. Or where we learn other things that are,

I would say, antecedent to scriptures. We learn them from reality. Reality, of course, is what it is because God is who

He is and He's created the world before it is. And, of course, God is who He is and the world is what it was before there was even scriptures in the fullest sense of the term in which we mean the scriptures.

So I think one of the ways in which the classical approach in apologetics is misunderstood is we think we are described as if we think that we're trying to find a neutral ground, as if there was ground that was apart from God and His reality.

No, that's where you start. You can't not start with reality. But the reality you start with isn't the scriptures.

That's just part of reality. Scriptures are not coextensive with God Himself and they're not coextensive with reality.

But they are nested in a creation that God has made as an expression of His truth propositionally through His prophets and apostles and ultimately through His son

Jesus Christ. So what I have discovered and this may sound like unfair,

I'm just telling you this is what it looks like from where I'm sitting. When Greg Bonson shines in debates and really knocks it out of the ballpark, he's doing classical apologetics.

He doesn't realize what he's doing. That's exactly the method we've been trying to defend. That's not presuppositionalism.

You're confusing in philosophical terms a transcendental argument from a demonstratio quia argument.

What's that? What was that, Greg? I've got to call Greg. I hope it wasn't reverse terms.

No kidding. I heard harps in the background. So anyway. Well, I don't make that accusation lightly.

I'm prepared to defend it in a different context. But that's how it looks from all the things

I've read of him, from all the arguments I've heard him make with Gordon Stein. I go, that's exactly what we do.

We show that you can't make your moral pronouncements on how you think

God behaves in the Old Testament as being evil without you already having some kind of objective morality that's grounded in the nature of God.

So that's just classical apologetics. That's the moral argument we've been making for centuries.

Albeit, I will say, and I know this is being recorded, so I'll have to edit some of this.

One of the things... No, no. Sorry. No, no. One of the things, if I can put a finer point on it here, it's not just a classical method in some kind of broad stroke of whatever classical might mean, like classic rock or something.

It's really Thomistic metaphysics, the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. And there's a lot of things about Aquinas' theology

I wouldn't concur with as his Roman Catholicism, but I think his metaphysics are spot on.

So there are instances that I have to admit, this is a part I was going to edit, where I think we at the seminary sort of cringe, if not lament, the direction that other classical apologists take in terms of their metaphysics.

So we're sort of shoulder to shoulder and then all of a sudden they go off on a different metaphysical tangent that we think is essential.

And then we would admit some of the failings of that trajectory that maybe even the presuppositionalist rightfully points out, we would probably say, yeah, we think it's a failing of it too.

That's the reason why you don't want to be anomalous or that's why you don't want to be a Platonist. You need to be Aristotelian Thomas.

It doesn't have those failings. Now we don't want to get under the hood and in the weeds and all that kind of stuff necessarily tonight.

But Tom was on, Tom Howell that teaches hermeneutics and Old Testament and Hebrew, was on a radio show in Chicago.

And the show was titled Can You Understand the Bible? Kind of a take off on his dissertation on objectivity in biblical interpretation, which by the way, when he did his research in the 90s for his doctoral dissertation at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, he could not find one hermeneutics textbook or one hermeneutics book written by an evangelical.

Maybe he found one that believed in objectivity in biblical interpretation, that there was objective meaning to be had.

These were evangelicals. Now he researched about a hundred of them and probably a lot of those didn't even talk about the issue, so it's hard to know whether it's not that they would have rejected it.

But even still, just the fact that they don't even acknowledge objectivity when they're talking about understanding your

Bible already begins to tell you something has terribly gone askew. So he's given this, it's a call in apologetic show with Don Vino.

Some of you may know Don out of Midwest Christian Outreach in Chicago.

So Tom's painting this picture that if you're listening closely, it sounds like he's talking philosophy, that we need philosophy to understand our

Bible, at least as we delve into the deeper. It doesn't mean a child can't understand his Bible for the most part without doing academic philosophy.

He wasn't saying that, but nevertheless, philosophy was lurking around, waiting to kind of jump in as soon as, you know.

So this caller calls in, I don't know why I did that because it probably wasn't a phone that was that big, and said, well, if we don't get our hermeneutics from the inerrant word of God, we'll be lost in relativism.

That's what he said, something to that effect. Now I would submit to you that that sounds exactly like what a lot of Christians would think is the pious thing to say, that there's something amiss if we try to ground our hermeneutics in something other than inerrant scripture.

Well, Don, being the host, before he gave it to Tom to respond, figured, okay, this is a fungo here.

I'm going to just write out to the outfield or a slow one across the plate or whatever.

So I'll knock, see if I can knock this out of the ball. Could I ask for a translation, please?

You know, in baseball, a fungo is when you throw the ball up and hit it, and that's how the outfielders would practice.

You never heard that expression? Yeah. That's what that's called. I normally would have been able to interpret it, but I've been working so hard with Simon that my brain is just He's got a deeper problem than hermeneutics.

Exactly. He speaks the queen's English or king's English or whomever it was. I speak the court jester's

English. So Don, you know, before he gives it back to Tom to answer, he's like, you know,

I'm going to see if I can get a picture. He said, well, let me ask you a question. Suppose it's true that you've got to get your principles of hermeneutics from the

Bible. He said, how are you going to get those principles? How are you going to understand your Bible to know what the principles you need to get from your

Bible in order to use those principles to understand your Bible? If you understand the Bible in order to get your principles of hermeneutics, then you don't need, you already understand your

Bible, then you don't need your principles to understand your Bible. So the guy was flummoxed because he felt like,

I'm not supposed to say that I'm not, I can't get it from Scripture. That doesn't sound like the pious thing. And so he, you know, so where do you get them?

That's what he was more or less asked. And I think he was probably underwhelmed by Tom's answer because it wasn't, you get them from Thomistic metaphysics, you know, or you get them from epistemology.

It wasn't that. He said, you get them from reality. Now, that doesn't tease out, well, exactly what does that look like?

But as a matter of principle, they're grounded in the real. And the real, I think, is the undeniable presupposition of all and preconditions of intelligibility.

That's what you can't not start with. And so something that you said reminded me of something other people say.

Laughter An illustration I use in my class,

I said, look, I mean, a toddler, you know, will know what a flower is.

I mean, if you said, go pick mommy a flower, you know, they're old enough to understand what you say.

They walk out and they know what a flower is. They don't have to do Thomistic metaphysics to figure out what a flower is. They just know that because of their experience of reality.

But if you want to understand the quantum states inside that flower, it's going to take a quantum physicist to do that.

So there's a depth to physical reality that you would have to have the expertise to deal with if that's what you want to deal with.

You don't want to get into a dispute about the physical makeup of the flower. All right? So no one is suggesting you have to be a quantum physicist to know what a flower is.

Or a child knowing the difference between mommy and the pet dog or whatever. But if you want to delve into the depths of human nature and what makes a human being different than an animal in some respects at a metaphysical level, you might need to do academic philosophy.

You might need to do metaphysics. So I don't want anyone to think that I'm suggesting that if there are these antecedents to scripture that they are anything other than just reality itself that we all experience.

And I liked your characterization of how you dealt with the atheists because that's actually what the classical method argues, that philosophy is not there in order to invent some blue -haired or whatever color his hair was.

Listen, I'll take hair whatever color I can get it. If you've got some blue hair for me, then

I'm willing to work with it. Am I going to change my wardrobe? Definitely against nature.

Katafousis. Sounds about right. Who knows?

No. Yeah, so philosophy is not there in order to try to convince a college sophomore of philosophy that his jacket's on the table.

That's not a philosophical question, whether there's a jacket there. How do I know there's a...

I would tell my students, look, if you're standing in front of a wall and you think philosophy is going to be able to prove to you there's a wall there,

I say, look, if the wall doesn't prove to you there's a wall there, then how could an argument about the wall prove to you that the argument is one step removed from the wall?

So the problem with, I think, a lot of modern and contemporary philosophy is it has amputated itself from reality as a principal starting point for speculative knowledge.

And if I could put an even finer point in that, it's going to be sensible reality, rocks and trees and flowers and mommy and daddy, that we just start with these basic experiences of reality.

And by the way, it's not doing an end run around some kind of way in which God has worked.

This is the way he created us, I would argue. This is exactly what he's made us in his image. He's made us as creatures with intellects that know reality as he's made it.

Now, James would, I think, be quick to point out, rightly so, and I would defer to his expertise in this regard.

Isn't that what Marco Rubio did? Yes, no, actually, I need to do this. Shut up.

He didn't do that part. I think I just ruined my hearing aid. Was that effective or what?

Man, I'll tell you, that was easy. You guys don't even know what I was saying.

They fell asleep 15 minutes ago. Yeah, I would defer to his expertise in this regard.

I don't want to make it sound like that I think that our intersection with reality is morally neutral and that we don't have a vested interest in trying to conclude there isn't a

God. And I especially appreciate what he said. It reminded me of something I heard from R .C.

Sproul, and I've used this in my world religions class, in defiance of the conventional wisdom about world religions and new religious movements.

R .C. said, the presence of world religions is not an indication of man's search for God.

It is an indication of man's flight from God. And I wholeheartedly agree with that.

So I don't want to make it sound like these things don't become a little bit more dicey as far as parsing out, okay, what do we do from this point on?

Because people are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. What do we do with that? That's all fine.

I don't want to negate that. And someone may say, well, you're not being consistent. That's fine too. We can have that debate.

But I still think it's undeniable that there are these philosophical antecedents to doing theology and even understanding your

Bible. Knowing what a figure of speech is versus literal. Where do we get that knowledge?

Where do we get our principles of hermeneutics? We get them from the real. What is our study of the real? Well, if it's deep enough, the study of the real is metaphysics.

At least, the philosophical side of it. If it's deeper than that, it actually becomes theology. But you're right.

Yes. If you leave, we're going to stay here and talk about you.

That is unquestionable. And another thing. That's exactly right. You can arrange a debate with Yusuf Ismail on there.

You're talking about Michael? About Michael. Okay. What's a tea cozy?

We got things underneath it to keep it hot.

It's called an eye on an oven on a stove. Stove top. Was it where we were exegeting texts or just having a conversation?

So, it was on his. Then we did two days on mine, 90 minutes each.

We actually did more on my program than we did last night. Time -wise.

He had said that someone had approached him. We had been looking for a place. He had talked about a church in Atlanta that possibly would be interested.

But we knew that we needed to do something more than just simply on the phone. We're glad it happened that way.

We're glad you came. I'm not sure how many people were here. There's a lot of folks on my side that think

I'm crazy to have such respect for Mike Brown. We disagree about a lot of things.

Especially the Brownsville Revival stuff and certain aspects of his view of modern day

Israel. Is King James only? No, he's not King James only. That's a joke. That would be a difficulty to get over with.

He's an NIV only. He's normally quoting

Hebrew as he's doing it. I really hope that what we've done in the now,

I don't know what we've done now, five, eight, eight, nine hours or something like that of dialogue is to demonstrate that you can do this on that subject without hurling anathemas at one another.

Unfortunately, that's not normally how it's done. It needs to be done that way more often. If we can see that happening more often, we might learn more about where each other is coming from and that we're not quite as far apart as we thought or at least to clarify the areas where we really are.

I've done that with my Presbyterian brothers. I've done three debates on paedo -baptism. Every time,

I was challenged to do it. I never challenged anybody else to do it. I did a debate on Long Island with Pastor Bill Shishko of the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church who had moderated a number of my debates there. He's a debate coach. We did a debate on paedo -baptism a few years ago.

Again, I think it's demonstrated that you can... There are some people who say Christians shouldn't debate

Christians. I go, if we're not debating each other, that means we're not...

We're telling the world we have a source that is our final authority, but we're chicken to go to it and argue about what it says.

I'm not saying that we should debate each other just simply for the sake of debate, but last night wasn't for the sake of debate.

It was because he and I really do disagree and where did we go? We went to the Word. That's saying to the world we really do believe that that's the final court of authority.

The same thing with Bill Shishko. It was done in Christian charity, in Christian love, and I think it's really important.

Thank you for allowing us to do that. Absolutely. It was a rich evening. How long are you going to be here?

He doesn't know what I had to say. My concern here is that instead of talking to folks about how we do theology, it's turned into a little bit of a mini debate.

I'm not sure that I think we've both laid out what we're saying. I agree. When you talk about reality, what

I'm hearing you saying is that we are created in the image of God. We are created so that we function to think

His thoughts after Him and that the only way we can function as true human beings is to function in the light of the way that our

Creator made us. And if that's what you're talking about as reality, that just to me is the creative decree of God that gives form and function to everything and gives meaning and definition to everything.

Absolutely. It's not presuppositional. Here's what I mean by that.

In Greg's debate with R .C., it was an explicit point that Greg made that his presuppositionalist method was not an ontological point.

In other words, he was saying I'm not merely saying that ontologically speaking

God is the precondition for intelligibility because nobody denies that.

If there wasn't God, there wouldn't be anything existing. So there would have to be God and He would have to be the

God He is and He would have to create in order for us to be there. So as an ontological point, it doesn't distinguish presuppositional and classical to make that ontological point.

He's making an epistemological point. So the point I made just then that you rightfully characterized it sounds like you're saying that we are creating

God's image and we're thinking is an ontological point. That's all. But I think it has massive epistemological ramifications as well.

Oh sure, absolutely. Of course it does. The presuppositionalist is saying you have to approach the issue of apologetics with a clear vision of who

God is and who man is and the fundamental issue is handing over to man the ability to judge.

No, that's not the distinction between... Well, that's what I'm saying as a presuppositionalist. As we listen to the...

As I listen to... Let's use the illustration I used. As I listen to someone saying the preponderance of the evidence...

Yeah, I'm not defending Craig. Okay, well I'm using that as my counterpoint though. What we're saying is...

Yes, Bill. Yeah, sure. Bill, Bill, Bill. Bill, about that debate

I've been wanting to do with you for a long time, bro. I think I've proven we can do this respectfully, okay?

What do you want to debate him about? I would love to debate Bill Craig on apologetic methodology and especially...

See, he's not the guy to debate. That's the point. ...and especially Molinism. You and I should debate. I would love to debate him on Molinism. You should...

Well, that might be... I would love to hear that. But if you want to debate... But you see, I don't see those as separate issues for him.

They may not be. What I'm saying is... This is just my own partisanship. If you want to debate on apologetic methodology in terms of the presuppositional classical, don't debate

Bill Craig. Debate me. Except he's the... But you're not on the Unbelievable Radio broadcast in London and having the impact over there...

I saw a picture of London once, though. So I'm not a total chump.

Okay. I have a British phone and an

Oyster pass for the underground. So I'm almost a Londoner. But my point is that unfortunately the issue really is the popularity of that particular perspective.

And I'm glad that you make the distinction. Oh, absolutely. All Thomists make that distinction.

Okay. But my concern is that I do hear the presentation being made, the preponderance of the evidence, therefore you judge, points to the existence of...

the greater probability of the existence of... I understand. The corrective to that is Thomistic philosophy.

That would be what I would say. The Roman Catholic apologist in me is breaking out in hives right now.

Have you read Arvid Voss's book? Are you familiar with that? Arvid Voss is a Reformed Protestant Christian who wrote a book called

Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought where he tries to argue that pretty early on after the

Protestant Reformation their repudiation of Aquinas was for reasons that weren't even grounded in Aquinas.

It's a misunderstanding. I think a lot of people who think they don't like Aquinas have never read

Aquinas and they don't understand what he's saying or they probably wouldn't disagree with him. Maybe metaphysically, but certainly not...

That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the metaphysics. Yeah. The metaphysics is completely divorced from his theology.

He gets his theology from his allegorical interpretation from the Magisterium. Some of us are a little uncomfortable with the idea that you can completely divorce those two things.

Well, what I mean is for the purpose of what we're talking about I can be committed to a form, matter, metaphysics in the primacy of essay without believing in the bodily assumption of Mary.

Well, actually he didn't believe in that. That's the fun part. In fact, he didn't believe in a number of things.

Or transubstantiation. By the way, did you ever see my debate with John Sanders?

Yes. Okay, you have. Do you all know who John Sanders is? He's one of the three leading open theists.

No one's ever heard of this debate before. But, yeah. We debated it.

We debated at RTS Orlando in 2001 and he got fired for doing the debate.

He didn't realize that one of the board members of the school he was teaching at was in the audience. And so he went back and said,

I can't believe this guy is teaching this stuff. And the sad thing is they fired him but they didn't fire the other staff people that were teaching the same things because they hadn't gone out and said it publicly, which sort of saddened me because John's a nice guy and he's got a killer 15 -foot jump shot.

So be careful if you ever play him in basketball. Now you're talking my language. Thanks, Kareem.

But anyways, yes, open theism. I interrupted you. I apologize. By the way, you know the guy that plays

Buckwheat on the old Our Gang comedies? Remember that character? He converted to Islam and changed his name to Kareem -a -wheat.

Let me tell you, he's got a million of them, right? Wow. What were we talking about again?

It's hard to transition because I have seen lives ruined.

I've seen lives ruined. My own family has been touched by this. My sister converted to Catholicism.

A lot of my opponents have used that against me even though she never read any of my books or talked to me about it as if it was relevant.

But I've seen the results of this and I see this happening. There's a program called

Come Home to Rome and the Coming Home Network and all these things.

It's amazing, these conversion stories, and they're all the same thing. They're not about conversion to Christ. They're about conversion to Roman Catholicism.

I know the convert syndrome very well. Most of the people I've debated, and until just the past few years, well, still, the majority of my debates are still with Roman Catholics.

I've done about 40 out of the 125 I've done. So you put all the other groups in there and it's still the largest of the groups that I've done.

I know the converts really well. It's interesting, a lot of them don't last. You know,

Jerry Matitick is the first man I debated who was all but dissertation at Westminster Seminary, the first ordained

PCA minister to convert to Roman Catholicism. He's now running around going to holiday inns doing talks on the

Illuminati and stuff like that. He's gone off and no one's been a true priest since 1965 or something like that, and there's no true pope and all the rest of that stuff.

And so he's gone off into the weeds, shall we say. But the majority of the people

I've debated have been converts, actually, except for Mitch Pacwa, of course, and maybe that explains why those debates have been really good.

But the convert syndrome, it's pretty easy to understand. If someone has, well, if someone looks at the evangelical church and sees a divided body, no mystery of the gospel in the sense of a deep appreciation of the atoning work of Christ, Christ's intercessory work, has more of an emotional view of the cross than a biblical view of the cross.

Karl Truman from Westminster put it rather well. If you don't wake up every morning and make the decision to be a

Protestant, you probably should be a Roman Catholic. And what he meant by that was there are reasons why we are what we are, but most

Protestants are Protestants of tradition themselves. They're not Protestants of conviction. And if it does not ring the bell of your heart that the reason you have peace with God is because you have been justified by faith alone, if you don't get up every morning and realize that it's the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ that alone causes me to have peace with God and that this is my greatest possession and the world can't take it away from me, if that's not the way you think, boy,

Rome has a lot to offer. You've got the 2 ,000 -year -old church. Well, that's actually not true historically, but hey, you can make it sound that way.

And over the next few weeks, you're going to hear that as a drumbeat on Fox News because when the

Pope resigns on the 28th and then the conclave meets and all the rest of this stuff, you're going to be hearing all about the 2 ,000 -year -old church.

Baloney. There is not a single person at the Council of Nicaea that believed everything you have to believe as a Roman Catholic today dogmatically.

Not a one. So don't talk to me about the 2 ,000 -year -old church. But anyway, you're going to have the church shrouded in mystery in the midst of time, and you've got the liturgy, and it just sounds so wonderful, and there's not all those divisions.

Oh, yes, there are. If you really know it, if you really go to Boston College and listen to the people they allow teach there, you'll realize they've got just as many wild -eyed liberals as we do.

It's a... I call it the honeymoon phase, you know? There is a fellow, some of you may know about this, there is a...

the pastor of Exile Presbyterian Church up in the Northwest, converted to Roman Catholicism, what, about six months ago, something like that?

And he went, he visited with Mike Horton. He talked to a number of people. I was the last person.

His church flew him to Phoenix. And we sat in my office for almost two hours and talked.

And I knew what he was going to do when he walked into my office. I knew. And he tried to make it sound like it was about solo scriptura, and he wanted to...

That's the big thing. Solo scriptura, I just can't... I can't substantiate it. I can't defend it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I knew that wasn't the case. And he's faulted me for this, but you know what? Someday I hope he's going to thank me for it.

I answered his questions in solo scriptura. I gave a positive defense of solo scriptura. And then I blew past that.

And I looked at him and I said, let me tell you something. You're playing with the gospel here. You're talking about committing apostasy.

You're talking about abandoning the gospel of grace. And if you're going to go here...

I looked him right in the eye and I said this. I said, if you're going to go here, I challenge you, if you're going to do it, go all the way and debate me on the

Marian dogmas. And he just laughed. I said, no, no, no, no. Don't be a half -papist.

If you're going to go all the way, be a full papist. Actually believe everything. Because I knew that the arguments he was using could never substantiate the idea of the bodily assumption of Mary and the

Immaculate Conception and all the rest of that stuff. Because anybody with any honest knowledge of the Bible and church history knows that's not a part of scripture or tradition in any way, shape, or form.

It cannot be substantiated. It has to be accepted solely on the basis of the authority of the Roman church.

And he knew at that point that he couldn't buy into that. And so I challenged him. I said, you're about to commit apostasy.

And you're talking about something that's extremely serious here. And I even asked him, this saddened me. I'll be honest with you.

This saddened me. When we got up to leave, I asked him a question. I said, has anyone that you've talked to, and he listed the scholars he had talked to, has anyone you've talked to been as passionate about what they've said as I have?

And he said, no. No. I don't understand that.

But what I do understand is if we have people in our churches who take the gospel for granted, there is a troubling text in 2

Thessalonians 2. If you don't love the truth, what happens?

God will cause you to love a lie. And it's dangerous, because we have people, they hear the truth over and over and over again, and they take it for granted.

And if you don't love it, God can cause you to love a lie. And people with great knowledge of, well, he didn't have a knowledge of church history.

He even admitted he found church history very boring, which explained a few things. But still, people with great knowledge will fall for these types of things.

And it's not just, look, I've met incredibly intelligent people who have become Mormons. And you lay out

Mormon belief, and you're like, what, space gods from Kolob, seriously? But I know some incredibly intelligent

LDS people. It's not just a matter of the intellect.

God made us mind and spirit. And I understand you've had some people you know who've

Yeah, no, I mean, you're touching on something that's very dear to us, because we've had a number of students who have converted to Catholicism after they left our school.

And I think some people would want to indict our commitment to Thomism for that. There may be something to that in some respects, as far as their proximity to Catholicism via Thomas Aquinas.

I've known presuppositionalists that burned effigies of Aquinas that became

Mormon Catholics. Something explains it, and it grieves us. In fact,

I was talking to Matt earlier, brainstorming. He was brainstorming about what we could do next year.

I say we, like I'm part of it. These guys are doing all the work. And they float the idea of us doing something on Catholicism and actually having some

Catholics come in to debate. And you would be probably one of the best people we could get to defend the truth of the

Gospel against some of those. It's the dividing line. It's what is the

Gospel, and what is our final source of authority. I mean, that's really what the issue is with Roman Catholicism.

And we sometimes play footsie. And look, we understand we are in a society where there are fewer and fewer of us and more and more of people who are against us.

And the Roman Catholics are fighting the HHS mandate, and they're standing strong on this or standing strong on that.

And people who don't know why they are not a Roman Catholic can very easily then fall into that situation.

I mean, how many people in our churches, how many people in this room are Protestants of conviction?

I mean, let me ask you a question. The man, that kindly little old 85 -year -old man in Rome, who just resigned because he's too old to do his job now.

And everybody goes, that's awful nice of him. I'm glad he thought to do that, all the rest of that stuff. Do you hear the titles he's being called?

Holy Father. You know who is that used of in the New Testament? The Holy Father.

And no one else. The Vicar of Christ. Who is the Vicar of Christ? The Spirit of God.

No one else. People bow and kiss his ring on the basis of his authority.

Christian consciences are bound to such doctrines as purgatory and indulgences.

And having to go to a priest and make confession and fear of undergoing satis passio in purgatory and all the rest of this stuff.

And it's just so easy for people to go, well, you know, it's just another way of viewing things. No, it's not.

No, it's not. Not to mention he looks like Palpatine. Now, in my defense, in my defense, that was his joke last night.

But in a different context. Is he always like this?

Okay. All right. I just. You didn't warn me about this. Or if you did,

I didn't understand what you were saying well enough to. Actually, it's more the emperor than Palpatine.

Very interesting. This is absolutely vital. Absolutely vital. Let me recommend a book, if I may.

Canon Revisited by the President of RTS Charlotte. Michael Kruger has.

I was telling him yesterday I was so thrilled when I read his book or as I explained to him, listened to his book while writing.

Those of you who know me know what that means. But because. What's the author's name again? Michael Kruger.

Kruger. He's the president of RTS here. He's the new president of RTS here in Charlotte. I was.

Canon Revisited. Canon Revisited. He's right now doing a series of blog articles on his blog.

Ten Things Every Christian Should Know About the Canon. This guy is brilliant. And excellent, excellent material.

I highly recommend it. But what you need to understand. I struggled with this.

When I first started listening to Jerry Matics and Scott Hahn and all these Roman Catholic apologists. I really struggled with this because what they were saying was.

You are dependent upon us for your knowledge of the canon. And therefore there is something outside of scripture.

It's the church. And therefore you need to embrace the authority of the church. And this is an argument that is being effectively used.

How did the reformers respond to that? And is that what the early church taught? Well, it wasn't, by the way.

But a lot of folks don't know much about early church history. And what they actually taught, especially on this subject. That's why

I would highly recommend a three -volume set of books called. Holy Scripture, the Pillar and Ground of Faith. By Bill Webster and David King.

Three volumes, 1 ,100 pages. It's modern. It's up to date. It interacts with Robert St.

Genes. And the current crop from Catholic Answers and all the rest of those folks. What's the name of it again? Holy Scripture, the

Pillar and Ground of the Truth, actually. That's actually a quote from Irenaeus. But anyway, here's very briefly.

The fundamental issue you must understand with the concept of sola scriptura.

We must define it correctly first. Because our Roman Catholic friends will not. Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith for the church.

It's not the sole rule of faith because we all have our confessions of faith.

Our statements of faith. And they trip us up really easily when we say that. It is the sole infallible rule of faith for the church.

Why? I don't believe that we need something external from Scripture for this. Because of the fact that that is based upon the teaching of the

Scripture itself. In regards to the nature of God's revelation. Paul's term is that Scripture is theanoustos.

It is God breathed. God cannot swear by anything outside of himself.

So he swears by himself. He is the ultimate authority. Therefore, he cannot appeal to an authority above him to swear.

Theanoustos is like the breath you feel when you hold your hand over your mouth as you speak. It is that intimately a part of God's very breath and revelation.

It is him speaking. Jesus said that. I remember the day when it struck me. We read so many texts of Scripture and we've heard them so many times they go whipping by us.

Remember when Jesus was arguing with the Sadducees? Remember what he said? They brought up the woman with the seven husbands and whose wife will she be in the resurrection and all the rest of that stuff.

Remember what he said? You are. First of all, he was not a postmodernist. You're wrong. That's just how he started. You are.

You do not understand the Scriptures nor the power of God. But then he says, have you not read what

God spoke to you saying? Did that ever catch you up? It didn't catch me up for most of my my adult life until about 15 years ago.

Have you not read what if I say have you not read? What's the natural fulfillment of that?

What I wrote to you. And if I say, did you not hear what

I spoke to you? But that's not what Jesus says. He says to these men, have you not read what

God spoke to you? He spoke that fourteen hundred years earlier. Jesus held men accountable to the scriptural revelation as if God had spoken it directly to them.

Paul didn't come up with something new when he said all Scripture is theanostos. It's God breathed. That's what Jesus taught.

And that's what Peter taught. When he said men spoke from God as they are carried along by the

Holy Spirit. The point is, even from Rome's perspective, and this is important, even from Rome's perspective, the only theanostos revelation we have is

Scripture. Tradition, small t, or even tradition in the sense of oral tradition, is not theanostos.

That's the official position. I've encountered Roman Catholics who have actually tried to argue that it was. But the official position is that the canon is closed, you can't have further revelation, and Scripture is inspired.

Now the problem is, of course, in Roman Catholic epistemological perspective, I argue we believe in sola scriptura, they believe in sola ecclesia.

Why? They get to define what Scripture is, the canon, and what it says, infallible interpretation.

What tradition is, and what tradition says. How can the magisterium be under the authority of Scripture and tradition when to even know what

Scripture is and what it says and what tradition is and what it says is dependent upon the magisterium. It's not possible. It's just not possible.

The ultimate authority is the church, and the last three dogmas she's defined prove that.

The immaculate conception, bodily assumption of Mary, and papal infallibility. Things that are clearly not a part of either of those sources of Scripture or tradition.

And so you have to, first of all, challenge them. We fail all the time as Protestants.

We don't challenge them to stand up and positively defend their position. We just automatically default into a defense of sola scriptura, and we don't put their position on the table and point out, you need to defend that.

We just don't do it. I don't know why we don't do it, but it just seems to be one of those issues. But the point is, the only thing that the church has in her possession that is theanoustos is

Scripture. If it's theanoustos, it's God speaking. There cannot be any higher authority.

There cannot be anything that can be joined to that. It cannot be subjugated to a higher authority. It is

God speaking. That's why so many Protestants have collapsed on this issue, because how many

Protestants really believe that anymore? You have to have the highest view of Scripture to believe in sola scriptura.

You have to have the highest view of Scripture to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. You have to have the highest view of Scripture to believe in the deity of Christ. Is it any wonder that liberalism has collapsed on all these issues?

And why the fight for the highest view of Scripture is the fundamental apologetic issue, and it will always remain that way?

It's really true. You know, if I might just hitchhike on this for just a second. When I was making reference earlier about how

I was worried about the attributes of God eroding among evangelicals, the integrity and inerrancy of Scripture is not a battle we've finally won among evangelicals.

The ICBI, the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy, fought a valiant battle several decades ago, but now the errantists are rearing their head.

And Gregory Beal's book The Erosion of Inerrancy in Contemporary Evangelicalism is such an important read.

So, I mean, I try to tell my students these battles are not won once for all.

We've got to be vigilant to show how it is the case that the Bible is inerrant because it is the very words of a

God who cannot err. It's not inerrant because we just don't find any errors in it. I mean, if I wrote a document out and it just didn't have any errors, it's not inerrant the way the

Bible is inerrant. It's a positive attribute, not just a lack of it. That's right. It's not just a lack of errors. It's an expression of God's perception.

And the other thing for the Roman Catholics, this is one of the reasons why I have a hard time getting

Roman Catholic opponents anymore. How far back does church history go for most Protestants today?

Billy Graham. I mean, let's be honest. For me, it's the shoe salesman that led

Billy Graham. Oh, there you go. OK. But the point is, church history is not their ground.

It's actually ours, but most of us don't know it well enough to be able to prove that. I'll give you an awesome example that encourages me.

Athanasius. What's the great term that's used of Athanasius? Anybody? Come on, church history folks.

It's not the… What? Contramundum. Exactly.

Athanasius Contramundum. What does that mean? Athanasius against the world. Why? Because after the

Council of Nicaea, for the next 40 years, Arianism reigned supreme.

Nobody thought the Council of Nicaea was some ecumenical council that solved everything. For the next 40 years, as Jerome would say in the next century, the world awoke to find itself

Arian. And Athanasius was the last one. And even the Bishop of Rome collapsed and signed the

Arianized Sirmium Creed. There were councils that were held that had more bishops at them than Nicaea had that condemned the

Nicene position. And so the next 40 years, the Arians are in control. And five times during that time,

Athanasius is kicked out of his church by Roman soldiers. He is told to recant. He is told to repent.

And he says, I will not. Why? Not because of the Roman pope.

He had already collapsed. Not because of the Council of Nicaea. He defended the deity of Christ from Scripture.

He said, Scripture is theanoustos and is sufficient for the proclamation of the truth.

And so I look at Athanasius and I go, you're telling me that that guy was a Roman Catholic? Council after council after council tells him to recant.

Bishop after bishop after bishop tells him he's wrong and he doesn't. We look back at him today and go, what a hero.

How was he supposed to know that back then? That fifth time he's run out the back door of his church while the

Roman soldiers are running in the front. How is he supposed to know he's right right then? Because of the scriptures, not because of some external authority.

No, it's the sole infallible rule of faith. So in other words, I can't figure out how to operate my iPad by being given direct instruction from Scripture.

I would say that the scriptural revelation of what you've described as reality, there's laws of logic that are involved.

It's amazing, little kids. There was this cute little three year old at the church we had in San Antonio the weekend before last.

I was showing her a picture I took over on my phone and she starts tapping on my phone and looking at all the rest of my pictures.

And she's three years old. I'm like, what in the world is going on here? It took me a while to figure out that. There is an ability on our part to recognize the differences here.

What we're talking about is what is revelation from God and what has God given to the church to guide her?

It's not the idea that this is, and this is a common misrepresentation of us. If you look at Carl Keating's book

Catholicism and Fundamentalism, one of the arguments he uses against Sola Scriptura is John chapter 21. If all the things that Jesus said and did were written down, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written as a result of that.

Well, that obviously shows Sola Scriptura isn't true. No, Sola Scriptura does not require us to know what color

Matthew's eyes were or what the apostolic menu was. How about the attributes of God? What?

You were giving me examples. You lost me. You totally lost me there. You just gave me several examples of things that Scripture doesn't give you.

Right. And I said, how about the attributes of God? Does it give you that? Yes. So what would you do with Dake's arguments about the fact that God walked in the cool of the garden?

How would you adjudicate figures of speech from literal statements about God when it describes

God numerous times in physical categories? I'm missing the connection between defining

Sola Scriptura and this. Are we transitioning back to where we were? No, I was just – all I was doing was picking up – you just made us – you gave me an example of several things.

Frank said we don't get all our knowledge about God, and you agreed, no, we don't get all our – I don't know how to do an iPad.

Well, I wouldn't call that knowledge. Let me answer your question. Gotcha. Frank said you don't get all your knowledge from the

Bible, and you agreed, and you started giving examples, but you gave examples that are not controversial. Nobody that I know of thinks that we learn how to do an iPad from the

Bible. Where it gets sticky is, well, what about things like principles of hermeneutics?

Do you get those from the Bible? What about the attributes of God? Do you get those from the Bible? Because those are more interesting things to try to make a position about than God – the

Bible doesn't tell me how to run an iPad. I agree it doesn't, but I think it also doesn't give you principles of hermeneutics.

And it can't, in and of itself, give you how to adjudicate metaphor from literal in terms of things like the attributes of God.

That has to come from some other source. So what I'm – the reason I'm bringing it up is not to just try to get back into the partisan debate we were having a while ago.

I'm trying to bolster our argument against the Roman Catholic because we put ourselves in a precarious position, not necessarily you, but Protestants that I know put themselves in the position of defining

Sola Scriptura in such a way that it seems to tacitly deny that there is – there are philosophical truths that we know from general revelation that are integral in us even understanding what

God told us in his Word. And that's where the Catholic thinks they found a chink in our armor.

And I think most Protestants are not prepared to be able to distinguish general revelation truths and their relevance to special revelation truths versus not.

Actually, their argument isn't in regards to things like the attributes of God.

Their argument is specifically in regards to doctrinal revelations because they have to. They have to attack the sufficiency of Scripture because of what?

Think of everything Rome has added. I mean you've got priests. There are no priests in the

New Testament other than Jesus. We're all kingdom of priests, but the idea of a celibate body of unmarried men that has specific sacramental authority to forgive sins?

No, it's not there. It's clearly not. You have the concept of papacy. You have the concept of purgatory. You have indulgences.

You have the entire sacramental system that Rome has developed. And then all of her Marian dogmas. They have to attack the sufficiency of Scripture and allow for the kind of doctrinal development, quote unquote, that basically says, well,

Paul said in 2 Thessalonians 2 .15, hold to the traditions which we delivered to you whether we delivered them to you by word of mouth or by letter.

Letter is Scripture. Word of mouth is oral tradition. So they would actually say,

I think, that most Roman Catholics, I think the official position would be that when it comes to the attributes of God, the

Scriptures are sufficient for them. It's these other things that are the result of the living magisterium of the church reflecting upon divine tradition that they would say is what we miss because we have basically bit the hand that feeds us.

Right, because the attributes of God are not going to distinguish a Protestant from a Catholic. Basically. That's right. I realize that.

I was just making a principle point about it. I'm trying to ferret out what I think Frank is trying to get at, that there is an indispensable role that our knowledge of reality, the way

God is and the way God has made the world, that is antecedent to us even knowing what

Scripture is and then what it means in some instances. That's all. So I would just qualify.

I think we have to be careful when we say it's our sole authority. Sole, infallible rule of faith.

Yes. See, rule of faith defines the realm in which its sufficiency lies. Yeah, but the attributes of God are part of the rule of faith,

I would argue. But they don't come – I'm sorry, go ahead. Absolutely. I'm sorry.

No, it's not. I mean Aquinas – Yeah, I didn't understand. I didn't hear the Islamic philosophy part. Aquinas actually repudiated the – let me answer your question.

The premier Islamic philosopher in the 13th century was Averroes. Yeah, but the

Arabic – it's not dependent on the Arabic philosophers. Because if anything, the Arabic philosophers were repudiated –

No, it's not. No, it's not. If anything, the 13th century – wait a minute, let me answer your question.

If anything, the 13th century Arabic philosophers and their predecessors were a repudiation of Aristotle because it was a

Neoplatonist interpretation of Aristotle. Aquinas stood strong against the

Averroes. I mean that's what really – that's what his pedigree was. So it's just the exact opposite.

It was a repudiation of much of what would be classified as Islamic philosophy. It wasn't – it not only wasn't dependent on it, it was a repudiation of it.

And with that – Let me ask you all one question as I'm putting my stuff together.

What verses in the Bible do Muslims use to demonstrate that Muhammad is prophesied in the

Bible? What? Deuteronomy 18 is one of them.

John 14 and 16, the Holy Spirit. They're monkeying with Pericles. Some of them end with the word

Pericles. Mahmoudim in Song of Solomon 5 .16.

Yep. Any others? Now how many of you knew that? Now obviously he's listening to my debates, that's not fair.

But you knew that because you've gotten beaten over the head at Speaker's Corner. Anybody else?

This is one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing. Is you and I are addressed in the

Qur 'an. Did you know that? You're addressed in the Qur 'an. A book of scripture of more than a billion people on this planet addresses you directly and most of us don't know what it says to us.

And the problem is the Muslims know about as much about the Qur 'an as you and I do.

And so you think we have much in the way of real communication going back and forth? Not really. And given what's going on in this world, do you think we need it?

Yeah, we do. We do. I hope tomorrow night, unfortunately it's going to be very, very brief, but I hope it's helpful and I hope you'll pray for that.