A Theological Discussion at Southern Evangelical Seminary

Testimony, Conversion, and Early Faith

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. And 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. So 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 born.

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 of those of you who aren't indigenous to this part of the country.

Perhaps you've used this cliche 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 that I ever 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, 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 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 happen to be just kind of a big chicken about life. I didn't really 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 these to the high school kids that 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 they 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.

College Skepticism, Inerrancy, and the Rise of Apologetics

So, 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 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, where are you going? I said, I'm going to Northeast.

He 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 because 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 loved 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 said, it's 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-papers-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 career 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 how-boys. 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 college student, he grew in the Lord really quickly and began to disciple me. And 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, you know, 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. 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.

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. 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 it 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. Studying theology. It's becoming intact.

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

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. James is over there going. 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.

Philosophy, Theology, and the Attributes of God

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 it's philosophy affects your view of the nature of language, and language is a relationship to reality.

That's hermeneutics. It affects your 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 in 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 we it came up last night. 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 I'm not 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 passibility and coreality 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, you know, 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. It 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. You're not a Bible scholar. 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, I 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, and 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 in the first place.

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 that 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'm being serious. 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 it 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 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 my age in 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, Myles Work and Wonder, Mormon Doctrine, Bruce O. McConkie.

I need to get these books. And no one told me to do this. No one had 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 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.

They were called records. They were made of vinyl, and you spin them around. You put a needle on it. It was just great. It was 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 of 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.

Apologetics, Theology, and the Need to Know What You Believe

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. We've got people like Frank Turrick 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, Four 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.