The Dividing Line, October 2, 2008

Let's talk with Andrew. Hi, Andrew, how are you? Doing well,

Dr. White, how about you? Pretty good. Okay, I don't know if you have time to deal with this or not right now, but I was calling,

I wanted to ask you, aside from the obvious of knowing the

Bible back and forth, I'm interested in getting into apologetics in some way. What kind of things should a person do to prepare themselves so that you don't go make a fool of yourself, you know, pick a fight with somebody, so to speak, make a fool of yourself because it turns out you don't know what you're talking about?

Well, first and foremost, I would strongly encourage you, if you have a desire to reach out to those who have been given a false gospel or a false faith or to glorify

Christ in defense of his truth, there is a tremendous danger of ego and pride in apologetics.

Yeah, particularly with me. Well, and I see that a lot of people who feel attracted to it, that's part of it.

And so I would very strongly encourage anyone who's thinking of doing that to take serious spiritual stock of why you want to do that.

I have young people come up to me after they see me at a date and they're just all excited and jazzed. Now I get into apologetics,

I do everything I can to throw cold water on them. And that might surprise people. But first of all, if I can dissuade you from doing it, then you weren't called to it in the first place.

Believe me, after 25 years of doing this, if you don't have the right reasons for doing it, you're not going to last in it for 25 years.

I can assure you of that. So but secondly, be a part of the church.

The vast majority of apologists I know of are not. And that is, I think, a grave danger.

If you have godly elders that you can go to and you can say, I have a desire to to glorify

Christ through the defense of his truth. Would you do you feel this would be a something that would be dangerous for me to do?

Or could you give me guidance on so forth? And for me, you need to be balanced in your teaching and being in the church is what's going to allow you to do that.

I think it's been one of my greatest advantages is that I'm not out going after one particular group.

I'm in a church. I have to teach with regularity. I have to teach people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

And that provides the balance that has become hopefully. And again, I thank people for all the stuff they sent in.

That's one of the things that's been mentioned a number of times is the balance that we show. There's there's a lot of apologetic material out there that is not balanced, that loses its footing.

And part of that reason is that many of those people are not a part of the church. They're not having to teach on the whole council of God there.

They're only focused upon one area and you lose your balance. You lose your exegetical balance. You lose your historical balance.

And so I really believe that being a part of the church. And I think I've mentioned this before on the program.

But back when we were distributing literature at the Easter pageant, the Mormon church or up in Salt Lake City, or even standing outside the district convention of Jehovah's Witnesses with signs or something like that, we would have people who would come up to us and ask to participate in that kind of apologetic outreach.

And we've pretty early on developed a rule. We would say what church you're a member of.

And if they were not a member of a local Bible believing church, we didn't allow them to do it because we felt we would be exposing their souls to danger in so doing.

And so we take this very, very seriously. There are not many ministries that you will hear do what we do when we mention our financial needs like we have right now.

What's the first thing we say? Support your church first. Do what's right before God for your church.

If you've got anything left over, well, if you feel what we're doing is important, then we need your assistance.

But we believe in the local church. We believe that's biblical. Hebrews 13, 17 tells you to be in subjection to those who have the leadership over you.

And if you don't know who those people are, then you're in rebellion against God. And you don't need to be pointing your fingers at somebody else when you yourself have a theological problem going on.

So you may be a little bit surprised at my answer so far, because none of it has been study this, get this, et cetera, et cetera.

It's all about the foundation, because everybody, pretty much anybody in an evangelical church can go out and buy some apologetics books and jump on their white horse and chase off after the

Mormon missionaries. It's not really all that difficult to do, but we've been doing this for 25 years now.

And as long as the Lord gives me life, that's what I'm going to be doing the rest of my life, too. And how can you do that?

You've got to have the foundation to start with. I was going to say, actually, I really appreciate that answer.

You guessed it, I wasn't expecting you to go that way. Well, it's important because,

Andrew, I could say to you, you've probably heard me say that the two classes that I took that were the most important were

Greek and church history. And knowing the biblical languages and knowing church history.

But you see, the danger that I see is that if you learn those things, Paul said, knowledge puffs up.

And there is nothing more detracting from giving a proper and true answer than to do so in arrogance.

Now, I recognize that there are many in our society, they look at even a biblical answer.

They look at how the Apostle Paul answered something and they say, oh, he was arrogant. So I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about false accusations of arrogance.

I'm talking about if the apologist can look in his own heart and he's going,

I got him there, boy, am I looking good. And only the apologist can answer that.

Asking, for instance, in a debate setting, asking a gotcha question just to make the guy look stupid.

Right, exactly. There are gotcha questions that are gotcha questions because the other guy just wasn't prepared to do a debate.

One of the illustrations I could give you is I have often counseled people when they are witnessing to, say, a

Mormon missionary or Jehovah's Witness. Oh, if I can interrupt you for a second. I tried that unprepared once and it just didn't go well.

It just didn't go well. No, I fully understand that. But I've said to people many times, you can be in a situation like that.

And you can see that you have put the other person in a position that they don't really have an answer to your question.

You have succeeded in making your point. And at that point you have a choice. There's this moment of uneasy silence.

And you can either press your advantage and force them to come up with an answer that they will then go to their grave believing no matter how stupid it is.

And you've shut down any further opportunity of conversation. Or you can at that point say, well, you know, if you haven't had an opportunity of looking at that, why don't you take a chance to look at it and let's get together and let's talk about it again.

In fact, can I give you another example? That way you've opened up the door to more conversation. You've given them room.

You've demonstrated that you're not in it just simply to run your sword through them and raise it in victory and so on and so forth.

But that takes discipline. That takes having the proper motivation for being involved in apologetics.

So you want to show somebody that you're more interested in getting to the truth than beating them.

Exactly. Exactly. And that, again, I think that comes from balance. And I think being in the church, teaching in the church, is what gives you that balance.

I'll put it this way. That's what's given me, I hope, that balance over time. And it helps to keep you humble because the church is sort of designed to do that.

So would you say then, and I'll ask you this one question and I'll let you go. I know you've got somebody else waiting.

I've been kind of getting into this church, the

Baptist church, pastored by John Piper. Oh yes, Bethlehem Baptist. Yeah, good preacher.

Now, would you say, because I'm also kind of interested in teaching, when I am more qualified to do that, would be a good plan of action to just get in there, start kind of soaking it up, kind of get involved in the church where openings seem to be, and just kind of develop and mature from there?

Well, I have great confidence that at Bethlehem Baptist, the elders would be individuals that you could approach.

Once you have become a member of the church and they have an opportunity of observing you over time, that's very, very important.

That you could approach them, you could express them your desires, and that they could then give you guidance as to the program of study and to bring you into it in a way that I think is appropriate.

I've always really flinched when people take new converts from Mormonism and they throw them out to the lions to start teaching on Mormonism.

You don't do that. And the elders there, I think, are going to be the kind of elders that are going to want to have observed your life and to give you godly counsel as to how to proceed from there and to go into your studies from there.

But just one last thing, because I do want to address this for other people who might have a similar question. When you do start your studies and you really are moving in that direction, there's something to remember.

And aside from the dangers of the arrogance and things like that, it is far more important to me that an apologist give a clear, accurate, insightful defense of the faith than they know everything there is to know about whatever group that they're talking to.

Part of the danger is to become such an expert on the minutia of a particular group that you're ministering to that you lose your balance again and spend more time on that than you do on the study of the

Bible and the application of the Bible and understanding of the Bible. I've said for years I'd rather have five people with me in Salt Lake City who know the

Christian faith and can give a reason for their faith, give a clear presentation of the gospel, than 50 people who can rip and shred

Joseph Smith, but when it comes to giving a meaningful presentation of the gospel, they're lost. They have no idea what they're doing.

So the emphasis should always be upon the truth, not upon the error. Know the truth well enough that you can define it in distinction from...

Exactly. All right, God bless. Bye. All right, excellent calls so far.